people looking for help, and the world is full of strange things that might help them. I am but a humble purveyor of miracles.” He chuckled. “As are you.”
“Your miracles kill people. And the ones who don’t die are hollowed out by false prophets and dreams. I’ve wasted more days than I can remember cleaning up your messes.”
The doctor clucked his tongue. “Now, now. We all have our roles to play. If not for me, we would not know that the prickled gurbir’s effects will disappear for exactly eleven and a half months before the patient dies, or that the swamp mandrake seed can survive cremation fires, or that the anti-venom of the cockatrice egg is nearly as dangerous as the mother’s venom itself. Such knowledge is more precious than gold.”
“Is such knowledge more precious than life?” Asha asked. She too kept her eyes fixed on the shrine, and on the dark red flames of the closest brazier in particular.
“Of course. Life is cheap. Toss a carcass to the ground and ten thousand creatures will feast and rut and grow strong upon it. Kill all those ten thousand, and a million more will rise in their place. Life is inescapable. It’s everywhere. And more often than not, it is squandered and wasted. Thus, where I pass, life is at least spent more profitably for the betterment of all men, for the deeper knowledge of life and death.”
Asha casually took a clear glass needle from her shoulder bag and shoved it into the man’s arm. He hissed and leapt away from her as he yanked the needle from his flesh and stared at the broken tip. “What was in that?”
“An experiment.”
“What was it?” he shouted.
“Qilin’s tears,” she said softly.
His eyes widened and he hurled the needle away into the tall grass behind the shrine. “You ungrateful bitch!”
“What’s the matter?” she asked quietly. “Surely a doctor like you has the antidote? The powdered horn?” She paused for him to answer, but he said nothing. “Oh, I see. You don’t have it, do you? No, you never were very good at keeping up your stocks of remedies and antidotes and cures. I suppose you got used to relying on me to do that for you.”
He glared at her. “But you must have it! Give it to me! Now!”
She held up a small paper envelope between two fingers. He reached for it but she flicked it through the air to land on the nearby brazier. The red flames quickly consumed the envelope and its contents.
The doctor gasped. “Murderer!”
“That’s a bit of an exaggeration. You don’t look very dead to me. I would think a doctor could tell the difference.” The corner of Asha’s mouth twitched. “The qilin’s tears are a very slow poison. Painful, but slow. You have several weeks to find more of the horn for yourself.”
“Weeks? But the horn of the qilin can only be found in Ming!”
“Then I suggest you start walking very soon, and very quickly.”
“After everything I did for you! I saved your life countless times between Yen and Ming. I raised you. I taught you. I gave you everything you have!”
“You used me.” She turned slowly to look him in the eye. “Didn’t you? Eight years in a coma from dragon’s venom. Eight years? It should have killed me inside a week, or not at all. Instead you kept me on your table for eight years, and when I woke up you said all the tiny scars were from keeping me alive. But they were really from keeping me asleep, and taking my blood, and skewering my soul. I admit, it took me a very long time to put the pieces together, but I did. After all, you’re the one who taught me to unravel these little mysteries, doctor.”
“So what if we did use you? We woke you up in the end and trained you in our noble profession.” The little doctor clamped his hand tightly over his arm where she had stabbed him with the needle. “We gave as much as we took. But it was all your fault to begin with. It was all because you tried to take my dragon!”
Asha shook her head slightly. “No. It was all because you left a little girl alone in a room with a temptation, and with the cage unlocked for the first and only time. It was all just one more experiment, wasn’t it?”
The doctor started toward her and Asha turned toward him with two more needles in her hand.
“I could kill you,” she said. “But I won’t. Instead I’m giving you the chance to live, as much as I’ve threatened to let you die. Giving as much as I took, as you put it. So I suggest that you take this chance and go, before I forget that I’m a healer and not a doctor, like you.”
The small man sneered at her a moment with a dark hatred burning in his eyes, but he backed away, grabbed his black bag, and left.
Asha put away her needles and the two women stood before the shrine for a few minutes before the nun said, “Did you really poison him?”
“Yes.”
“Will he survive?”
“That depends on whether he can find the antidote.”
“And you destroyed the cure to torture him?”
Asha shook her head. “Of course not.” She held up another, identical paper envelope. “The real antidote is right here. What I burned was just a cure for baldness, which no one really needs, do they?”
“I heard you take the needle out of your bag. I almost stopped you,” Priya said. “I wanted to, but I didn’t. I trusted you. But now I’m not sure it was the right thing to do. You’re a healer, Asha, and you just poisoned a man.”
“He deserved it. And more,” Asha said quietly. She looked down at the shrine in front of them. “This woman, the princess, would be alive today if not for him. And Hasika’s family in the mountains, too. And who knows how many more?”
“I suppose.” Priya shivered against the cool breeze. “So is this why you left the temple in Ming? Because you figured out what they had done to you?”
“No, I didn’t figure that out until much later. No, I left because of something else.” The words stuck in her throat and Asha paused to swallow. The sudden tightness in her chest surprised her. After a moment she said, “When I was training at the temple, I met a boy from the nearby village. I suppose he was too old to call him a boy, really, but I always think of him that way. A boy. My boy. A carpenter’s apprentice. He was my first.” She paused to be sure the nun took her meaning. “One day he and his master came to the temple to repair the roof. The boy was up in the rafters where it was dark. He didn’t see what stung him, but it was so bad that he collapsed the moment he climbed down. He was gasping for breath. Shaking. Turning blue. I was there. I saw it.”
“What did you do?”
Asha shook her head. “I didn’t do anything. The doctors grabbed him up and took him to a room where they poked him and prodded him, and argued over him. They muttered about cutting him open, inserting tubes into his lungs, draining fluid, and pumping air into him with the fireplace bellows. I stood in the corridor, just outside, watching them. I could hear him gasping. He kept pounding on the table, struggling to breathe.
“Eventually they started to work on him. They cut him open. They inserted glass and rubber tubes. His blood ran down to the floor. And the boy screamed until he passed out. They worked on him for an hour or so.” Asha blinked. “And then they came out and told me that he was dead. My boy. My first. He was dead. I asked them why. What happened to him? A wasp sting, they said. Just a common wasp. I didn’t understand. I asked them, why didn’t they give him medicine? We had medicine for stings and allergies. I had made some of it myself. Why didn’t they give it to him? They said, because they wanted to see what would happen if they cut him open instead.”
Asha paused to breathe. “I remember how pleased they all were with themselves. Complimenting each other on their techniques. On their tools. On the measurements they took of him as he lay dying on their table. They were looking forward to examining his body again later.”
Asha felt the tears running down her cheeks, but she didn’t wipe them away. She didn’t shake or close her eyes, or cover her mouth, or move at all. She stood very still and felt the sick fire burning in her belly and her chest and her throat and her eyes. But she didn’t move.
“They were proud of themselves. They were proud of what they had learned,” she whispered. “But he died. He died in agony. For their pride. And I just stood there and watched it happen.”
Asha felt Priya take her hand. She gently but firmly pulled away. “That’s why I left.”
Priya nodded.
And then Asha stopped fighting. She let her face twist and squeeze together as the tears ran down and the sharp gasps burst out and she shook and sobbed, and sobbed. Eventually the pain and sorrow ran its course and
