No Cure For Curiosity [Finished]

[Bee]

She gave a small shrug. "It's moderately easy to sound out. The alphabet itself is not terribly different from the modern tongue, and Lowlander is not high on the list of difficult languages."

Well, not to her, anyway, but then she had the experience of studying a good deal of languages and having them for comparison. She didn't know how the language would look to someone who hadn't spent frustrating hours pouring over Middle Highlander and could honestly say that nothing could possibly be as bad as that. Except, perhaps, for--no, she wasn't going to hop on that train. She concentrated on the task at hand.

She let him step fully in front of the book to examine the pages for himself. She wasn't sure if helping him sound out a couple of syllables was going to count as reading, but she was going to help where she could.

[Bee]

The first word was clumsy on his tongue, and first sentence he needed help getting through--after he had the general sound of the vowels and word formation, it got a little easier, but everything was slow and awkward coming out.

He had no idea what he was reading, though the Esterberry beside him was making an extremely unpleasant face while he talked. He was sure it was some combination of the writing--horror stories, as she told him--and his pronunciation. He imagined there was quite a lot that would get this woman in a snit. He couldn't conceive of living his life that way--it must be exhausting, getting riled up everytime someone said "consolidate" instead of "console."

He didn't have time to brood, however. He got through a paragraph before the print was suddenly a lot closer to his face.

The book hit him hard. He staggered backwards, clawing at his face, whimpering. It burned. Like it was melting his face off. It melted your face off.

The girl was screeching out some kind of panicked babble but he hardly heard her. His face was melting.

[Bee]

Phaedra took about ten seconds to shriek in girlish fright before her brain started working again--something was happening to his fur, it was turning brown. Worse, something was happening to his skin. Something singularly terrible. She saw the first little swirl of purple. She nearly puked.

She needed to get some kind of doctor. One who could keep quiet and would accept an emerging--she couldn't bring herself to think it yet.

She ran through the small list of medical students she knew. They didn't cross paths often. Her kind tended to view theirs as jocks with god-complexes and theirs tended to view hers as "soft science" ninnies. Nevertheless, she knew a couple.

But how to get them without leaving Ezra? She needed--oh bugger, well, she could always use the damn code machine. She ran to it, and hurriedly connected to the hospital--there were limited connections one could make with it, and she had always thought that would be one of the more important ones.

She clicked out a quick message. With a little luck, her help would soon arrive. She looked back at Ezra.

It wasn't looking good.

[Bee]

The pain was horrific, and it didn't stop. It shot through his muscles, his organs, his very bones--something burning and twisting and tearing, destroying and remaking tissue. He whimpered and thrashed. Something was trying to touch him and make soothing noises and he kicked at it until it went away.

Finally, after an eternity, it stopped. He lay on the floor, exhausted, twitching. His eyes were wide open. He could not shut them.

There was a person next to the girl, now, dressed in white with a large bag. He looked horrified. So did the girl. He didn't have the energy to open his mouth and ask them what was so terrible. He knew it was him (what else could have happened but something awful, with pain so terrible?), he just didn't know what.

Strange, to fall asleep with one's eyes open, but he managed.

[Bee]

The doctor stared at the creature Ezra had become for a long moment, then looked at Phaedra, then back at Ezra again. Phaedra felt a deep pull of annoyance. Finn was a damn doctor, he should be doing some bloody doctor things right now. But she supposed that might be unfair. After all, she was as stunned as he was.

The unconscious weasel was no longer a Torquehelm, except for the front leg. Everything else was...well, it was a terrible sight. The skin was drooping off everywhere. The back leg was hanging on by a few threads. Sores oozed and bubbled all over his ruined skin.

Phaedra ran into her lavatory and vomited. A few seconds later, when she had fully composed herself, she went back to the room, where Finn was kneeling and examining the--the Lowlander.

"I don't even know...where to begin."

"How about a thorough physical examination?"

Finn glared at her. "I'm terribly sorry, I thought I was the one with the medical license."

"You should act like it then." She sighed. "I'm sorry. I'm a little..."

"Bitch," Finn supplied, with a small note of cheer. Phaedra stared at him blankly. Finn turned back to Ezra and opened his bag.

[Bee]

Ezra woke to pain almost as terrible as the initial bout. Someone was poking at him. He yelped and kicked at it.

The doctor was looming over him, and the glider-girl was a couple feet off, watching intently, fascination and disgust written in the lines of her face.

"You're awake," said the man, apparently a little disappointed. It probably would be easier to keep prodding at him when he wasn't conscious to feel pain and fight back. Ezra didn't care. He had the sudden, overhwelming, sick desire to know what was making every brush against his skin hurt so badly. But he could hardly move. His limbs felt heavy and awkward.

The chain dropped easily out of his mouth, and for the first time in his life, he felt no immediate compulsion to put it back in. He said, "Let me see--what happened?"

[Bee]

Phaedra almost felt like vomiting again. She took a couple of deep breaths. There we go. Push the bile back down. She didn't need to ruin her carpet. Yes, yes, the carpet was the important thing. No unsightly stains on the carpet. The Lowlander was dripping pus on her carpet.

She said, "You really--you don't want to see that."

She knew as the words escaped her mouth that she was really only making the situation worse, probably both increasing the weasel's dread and his desire to see what had happened to him, so Phaedra nodded and left the room, headed back to the lavatory.

She stood on the sink and dismounted the large hanging mirror, and then took it to the room. She held it in front of him. Finn stepped aside, to Ezra could get a full view.

"Well that's--I'm so, so sorry."

[Bee]

And there it was. Ezra looked at it almost despondently, like he was seeing an entirely different person. It was a weasel in the mirror, with his same basic shape, and the same dark purple forearm, and the same chain, but the thing in the mirror wasn't him. He wasn't a sloppy sack of rotting skin and bones.

Except he was. His brain tried to summon anger, horror, resentment, anything, in quick succession, but everything shut down. He looked at himself with utter, perfect apathy. He didn't move.

The doctor tried to stich parts of him up, to bandage things, and he said something about operating on his leg, but as the hours passed, nothing worked. The stitches wouldn't hold the skin together. The bandages were soaked through with pus and blood.

Hours morphed into days. He was still as vile as he was at the beginning.

[Bee]

Nothing was working, nothing was helping Ezra. She couldn't even look at the book to see if there was anything else written, anything that would help--when she looked at it again, it was nothing more than a pile of dust with a rotting flap of skin on top of it.

She suspected whatever magic it held was disbursed into the ether as well, because she no longer felt that something was watching her, waiting for her to do something. It was just a pile of dust. Still, just in case, she scooped it into a container, and the skin into a little baggie of its own--she labeled them, and placed them in her storage room of rare finds. Maybe some day she could find someone who could look at it and figure out what had happened.

"We need to get him to a hospital," said Finn. "Maybe some of my colleagues can do something I can't."

[Bee]

"No," Ezra said, his voice a rasp, but firm. "I want to go."

He felt, with absolute, sinking certainty, that nothing was going to be able to fix this. No number of doctors, no number of treatments--after all, run-of-the-mill Lowlanders walked the dirt with incurable rot, some worse than others, and so far, nothing had been able to help them. What made the doctor think that he and his friends could come up with something that would assist some magically-enabled rot?

Except...something flashed across his memory. Freakshow, ages ago, had mentioned her. A healer of some great talent. His sister.

Maybe. Maybe magic could combat magic. This was no ordinary rot, after all.

He couldn't stay here, in any event, to be poked and prodded.

He needed to go to...the Court of Clubs. He needed to find...what had been her name...

Elyse. Yes.