all their senses behind when they leave the world.”
“I’ve heard the Elenesians have a lot of knowledge,” Nate said neutrally. “In the West, they’re said to have refuges in almost every city.”
“The Elenesians?” Arkady snorted. Better than grunting. “We are but cogs in the plan of the divine—ha! You notice there’s no Elenesian refuge in Highfall. Elban’s father drove them right out. No interest in having the city swarmed with parasites. Hobbling around on crutches, begging for alms.” He snapped the satchel shut. “The Elenesians know things, all right, but they do not know when to quit, and that is the truth.”
“Will you need help?” Nate said, as if he couldn’t care less.
“Yes,” Arkady said, and Nate’s heart leapt. But the old man just pointed to the bench where Nate was working. “Finish those herbs and hang them to dry. When you’re done, do the same to the catchberry in the back. Tell anyone who sends for me that I’m busy in the House.”
Nate waited until the sound of the phaeton in the street had faded, and all he heard was the regular sepulchral silence of Limley Square: no shouted greetings, no merchants crying wares, no street musicians, no laughing children. He waited some more, until he heard Vertus’s quick footsteps down the stairs and out the front door, as the servingman went wherever he went when Arkady was gone. Then he put down his scissors and went out into the yard, which wasn’t quite as dank at midday, when the sun could reach down between the spires to touch the ground. He took a blue rag out of his pocket and tossed it over the slopman’s gate. He might have been cleaning something, hung the rag up to dry and forgotten about it.
It was a signal. Sometimes Nate put it out and nothing happened; sometimes, like now, the quiet tapping on the gate came so quickly that his patients had clearly been hiding in wait. Where they hid, he didn’t know, but he supposed that when you were from Brakeside—or even Marketside, which was slightly less dismal—you learned to disappear when necessary. A birdmonger with an infected tooth was easy to treat with a pair of pliers, and the eggs the man gave in payment were more than welcome. (Arkady didn’t like eggs. Nate did, and so did Vertus, and Nate still considered it worthwhile to try to keep on the servingman’s good side.) A pregnant woman seeking a tonic that would guarantee her a boy was a more difficult case. She was clearly within weeks of delivering; he explained several times that by now her baby was what it was, and even if such a tonic existed it would be too late to use it. She somehow took this as an admission that the tonic did exist, and he was refusing to give it to her. Nate could hear coughs and rustling in the alley and knew there were others waiting. Finally, he lost patience and told her she had to leave. He also told her she might give up hoping that the baby had inherited its father’s sex and pray, instead, that it had inherited his brain. She put her nose in the air and said, “Pray? I’m no country peasant, sir,” with such haughty conviction that he knew that was exactly what she was. After she was gone, he felt bad. She probably had her reasons for wanting a son. They might even be good ones.
It didn’t worry him that she’d gone off in a huff. There is a magus who will treat people from Brakeside was of more interest to anyone in Highfall than And he will not give me a magic potion, and most people were smart enough to realize that a magic potion was what the woman had asked for. Most of his secret patients, in fact, were quite clever; until he’d come along, they’d had nobody to treat them at all, so they’d learned to get by on what they had, which was experience, guesswork and passed-down knowledge. More often than not they introduced themselves by telling him what they’d already done, and although he occasionally hastened to warn them never to do those things again, usually the things they’d already tried were the things he would have suggested first, anyway.
He saw a boy who’d dislocated his shoulder working in one of the factories. Nate popped it back into place. Another man, a builder, had what was probably a concussion; Nate asked