There it was, the primary source of his pain. Urate crystals had built up in the joint of his big toe, built up until his body reacted to the intrusion and flooded the area with inflammation to fight the assault of the burgeoning crystal lattice. From that point, minute pieces of the crystals had spun off and propagated through his body, finding hospitable places to lodge and grow in other joints.
Too bad Dad wasn’t here to give advice. There were probably a dozen ways to attack this buildup of crystals, but I only had a few tools at my disposal.
Water magic works best inside the human body, and I could direct it like a choreographer. Infinitesimal jets of water removed the crystals from the joint, blasting them away like a power washer. Currents of water carried the sand-like particles away to be extruded through Manny’s pores. It wouldn’t do to clean up one joint and leave all those crystals in his body; they would just accumulate elsewhere.
In the real world, Manny was grunting faintly as the process continued. Mike turned on Manny’s stereo and put on some music to cover the noises. Good—it was going to get a lot louder soon.
It took a lot of magic to clean up the first joint, but I learned a lot in the process. I smoothed over his bones, reduced the inflammation, and revitalized the cartilage between the joints, as well as the synovium.
On to the next most affected joint, Manny’s left wrist. This went quicker, both because I had learned from the first joint and because the damage was less severe. Again and again, I removed urate crystals and revitalized joints throughout Manny’s body.
There was a lot of wear-and-tear damage to his spine and knees, damage I had come to recognize as one of the side effects of military life. I strengthened his vertebrae and repaired the disks between them, then revitalized his knees.
Next, I examined his kidneys. The buildup of urate crystals had damaged his kidneys, making them less efficient at filtering uric acid from his body. I couldn’t fix the underlying cause of his uric acid buildup, but I could flush all the crystals from his kidneys and help heal them.
Manny had a lot of scars, markers of a rough life. But I didn’t have any good spells to smooth out skin, so I left them alone.
It’s hard to track time in a healing trance, but I finally finished. One quick trip through the pool of Manny’s body to clean up any more traces of urate crystals, and it was done.
I blinked back to the real world and took a deep breath. Manny’s moans had petered out.
Mike turned the music down to background level.
I pulled my hands from Manny’s temples and patted him on the head. “Hey, Manny, it’s over. How do you feel?”
Manny just moaned and shook his head. He was covered in sweat and the chair was drenched. His face was thinner, and his lips were cracked. “I feel like shit.”
Mike laughed and shook his head. “You look like shit, too, and you smell like year-old piss. Are you sure this helped him, Luna?”
The rough SEAL humor revitalized Manny a bit. “Piss off, Mike.”
Manny levered himself to a sitting position but didn’t rise from the recliner.
“Smells like you pissed yourself,” said Mike.
“He’s severely dehydrated. The treatment forced him to sweat out the toxins. Please get him some water, Mike.”
Mike was back in a moment with a full glass of water, which Manny finished off in a second. Mike retrieved more water from the dispenser.
After four glasses of water, Manny looked a bit better.
“Do you feel any better, Manny?” I asked.
He closed his eyes for a moment, then blinked rapidly. He squeezed his fists a few times, as if comparing his unaffected right hand to his left.
“Wow! It doesn’t hurt anymore.”
“Try standing up,” I suggested.
With Mike and me on either side to assist, Manny gingerly rose from the chair. He rocked back and forth, then right to left, testing his legs.
While he was distracted, I used a razor-sharp claw to strip off the elastic bandages and tossed them into the seat of the recliner.
Manny took a deep breath and said, “I haven’t been completely pain-free in years.” Then he snorted and sniffed again. “You’re right, I do smell like year-old piss. I got to take a shower.”
He looked at his recliner. “That chair is ruined.”
“Sorry, Manny. It’s the toxins the poultice drew out. I can replace it for you,” I said.
“Hell, no. I’m glad to get rid of it. I spent most of the last year curled up in that damned chair because it was the only way I could rest. I’m going to burn the damned thing.”
Manny ran up the stairs and, in a few moments, the sound of splashing came from his shower.
He came back down in less than fifteen minutes, freshly showered and wearing clean clothes.
“Did you move the shower-head around?” he asked.
“No, why?”
“It just seemed lower than I remembered.”
Later, after we had moved the recliner outside into the small garden, we huddled around the kitchen table.
“You guys want coffee?” I asked.
Mike stood, but I waved him back. “I’ve got this. I know where everything is, and you make terrible coffee.”
Manny had a freestanding water dispenser, the kind with an inverted twenty-liter plastic bottle in the top.
I drew off a liter of water into the glass coffee carafe and used most of it to fill the coffee maker’s reservoir. A whispered spell heated the remaining water to a boil while I popped a filter into the basket and added coffee grounds.
Another spell upgraded the paper filter to ensure it would block all the impurities that ruin coffee. I poured
