The followers of Nur did not believe in fate as such. The River of Nur sprang from an infinite amount of springs that flowed into an infinite amount of streams that were fed by an infinite amount of melted snow and ice and rain. If you could determine the provenance and the path of every single drop, then nothing about the river’s course would look like chance.

  This meant the only limitation to infinite knowledge were the limits of the human mind. And even that, the followers of Nur worked tirelessly to expand.

  So it was not by luck or fate that the letter was waiting at Pinadarya’s lodging when she returned, but rather the vagaries of land and river travel, weather and roads, and the fact that the letter had been to her previous address at the logging town before being forwarded to Heila.

  It was from Xiun, and was dated three weeks ago. It said:

  By now my channels have told me that the University will be asking you to investigate the wasting fever in the West. The quest for the holy pardon of Saint Celund is for her surviving knights to accompany that mission. I am now in the Alghun Mountains, where I have found Ehrban, in his childhood home. He has agreed to come along on the holy quest. As you well know, he has changed.

  Xiun did not say anything more on the topic, likely not wanting to burden Pinadarya with unwanted details about the man who had left her, and not wanting to assume that she still cared. She didn’t. Ehrban had made his choice, four years ago, and she had made hers, and that was all there was to it. Life had gone on. Hers had, anyway.

  She had paused just long enough at her lodgings to pick up her satchel with her instruments, skim through Xiun’s letter, and write a note of her own. Then she’d taken herself off to an eatery, to while the time while she waited for a reply.

  Four fried hand-pies later — filled with shredded green jackfruit in savoury gravy with green peas, carrot, and raisins, since being back in Heila did have some perks — a return note came. Pinadarya drained the last of her tea, wiped her mouth, went to wash her hands, and set off again, satchel over her shoulder.

  *

  The Order of Saint Zhuling was devoted to Khada, All-Mother, She of Creation-Destruction.

  While Khada’s dedicates were usually found in agriculture, Saint Zhuling’s applied the principles of cultivating the land and tending to forests and animals to people: tending to the health of cities and communities.

  Pinadarya dropped by the infirmary wing first, where the resident physician was expecting her and had permission to share Noble Servant Devindra’s health record. Pinadarya accepted a glass of chilled tea and a quiet seat in the courtyard to peruse this.

  As Doctor Amalla had indicated, Noble Servant Kaj Devindra was formerly of Saint Igbran, a little-known and rather secretive order dedicated to the mysteries of Nur. The medical details from the priest’s earlier years were sparse, as could perhaps be expected from someone living in the secluded abbey of an obscure order deep in the south-eastern moors, but there was mention that Devindra had already suffered from symptoms of butterfly affliction for years, starting from his teen years and worsening over the decades since.

  The first inscription by the physicians of Saint Zhuling dated four years ago, when Devindra had suffered a particularly bad exacerbation of his affliction, to the extent that he had transferred to Saint Zhuling and their city abbey to be closer to the care he needed.

  At the height of his illness, Devindra was reported to be unable to hold a pen or walk without assistance, and even then only a few steps at a time. He’d suffered from prolonged fevers and in this time also showed symptoms of inflammation around his heart and lungs, as well as infection of the lesions that characterised butterfly affliction.

  Pinadarya tapped the page in front of her thoughtfully. The dates of this exacerbation were all too familiar to her. It was right after the defeat of Barsland, in the weeks following the tattered army of Saint Celund’s return to Heila.

  If you could determine the provenance and the path of every single drop…

  She drained her tea and rang the bell for a novice to show her to Noble Servant Devindra’s rooms.

  *

  The living quarters of the resident priests and priestesses were situated at the back of the main buildings, amidst a garden ordered along the Zhibrenese principles of harmony, quietude, and balance. Pebbled pathways wound between slender clumps of bamboo and were flanked by dwarf species of conifers and large ferns. The murmur and babble of water filled the space between the tall stone walls like music.

  Noble Servant Kaj Devindra was sitting in a chair in front of sliding doors open to the garden. He was dressed in the black of Saint Zhuling. Next to him was a younger man in white, bearing a dedicate-sigil of Saint Igbran on his right hand.

  The priest rose to greet her. He was in his mid-forties, of average height for a Vallenese male, but made to look shorter by his slender built and slight tendency to hunch. His hair was medium-brown, curly, and just starting to thin around his crown. He wouldn’t conventionally be considered good-looking, but his eyes were beautiful, a bright clear-sky blue made striking by thick, dark lashes, warm and kind.

  “They told me that you’ll likewise be studying the wasting fever, Humble Scholar,” Devindra said after they’d introduced themselves. He smiled apologetically. “I’m looking forward to working with you. I’m just sorry that you’ll be burdened with me along the way.”

  “Tending to health is my vocation, Noble Servant, not a burden,” Pinadarya assured him, keeping her outburst in Doctor Ballaja’s office and her own thoughts on the matter to herself. “Now, as you’ve given your permission, I’ve already taken a look at your health record, but I would like to examine you myself as well.”

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  “Of course. We can, if you’d be so kind, uhm, let’s remove to the other room?” The other man detached himself silently from the wall to hover at Devindra’s elbow — in case assistance was needed, Pinadarya thought, noting the hesitance with which Devindra moved, as of someone used to pain.

  “This is Brother Kaleft,” Devindra explained. “He doesn’t speak. At least, I mean, he, won’t. To you, that is. Or to anyone else… Ahem. The initiates of Saint Igbran only speak to each other, you understand. A vow which no longer applies to me.” He gestured at his black robe, somewhat ruefully, Pinadarya thought.

  She waited until Brother Kaleft beckoned her into the inner room. It was spare but comfortable: a low bed, positioned so that an inhabitant could look out the wide window to an enclosed garden in the back; a prayer mat in front of the window; a simple chair and writing desk; a table cleared for her to put her satchel on.

  Noble Servant Devindra had stripped down to a pair of knee-length underpants and sat on the edge of the bed looking — yes — vaguely apologetic. It seemed to be his natural state of being.

  He appeared in reasonable health at the moment, the only sign of the butterfly affliction he suffered from the faint traces of darkened skin on his chest and neck where the telltale “wing pattern” lesions of the affliction had healed. The butterfly affliction was known and dreaded for the way it could lay dormant for weeks, months or even years, just for symptoms to flare again sometimes without any apparent cause. But for now, Pinadarya was pleased to note as she put away her auscultation bell, there was no sound of “fluttering” to his heart, he had no fever, and he experienced none of the tingling in his hands or feet that patients sometimes described as if insects, or indeed butterflies, were walking over it.

  After bidding Devindra lie down on his back, Pinadarya took out the rosewood case that held her luminary. It had been a gift of Ehrban, but it was of the highest quality, and Pinadarya did not let sentiment — positive or otherwise — dictate her in practical matters. Crafted by the physician-alchemist crafters of Saint Yeen, the luminary consisted of a shallow copper bowl, the size of Pinadarya’s two open hands together, into which a polished glass lens was set. Around the rim were insets of cinnabar and lapis lazuli for their alchemical properties, and within the lens the sigil of the Glass was inscribed in mercury, a thin swirl of gleaming silver that seemed to flow and change form depending on the angle it was viewed from.

  Every physician had one; and regularly consecrated it at the fount of their choice. Pinadarya’s still carried the ethem traces of the University fount — dense, staid, indomitable — as well as the founts in the mountains of Lebran, surrounded by lakes — quicker, more subtle, less yielding in a way that someone with a fanciful imagination might have termed ‘wild’. More recently the founts of the Thousand Isles and various other parts of the Empire lent their ethem to the layers of memory and experience retained in the material of the luminary. She would consecrate it again before leaving for Lebran; perhaps at the small fount of Saint Nezear in one of the oldest districts of the city, in the heart of what used to be one of the city’s first hospitals and now served only as shrine.

  She placed the luminary in the centre of Devindra’s chest before ensouling the sigil of the Illuminating Eye over it. The luminary helped her direct her own ethem, for greater accuracy and less insensible losses. It also magnified her ethem — and grounded it. When studying the state of a patient’s ethem, not only did a physician not want their own interference to skew the diagnosis, but especially for frail patients, direct contact with a physician’s ensouled ethem can affect the balance of their own and cause further damage.

  As she had expected from a sufferer of butterfly affliction, there were traces of chronic excess of heat-force and wetness in Devindra. These typically fluctuated as symptoms flared up and abated. Underlying that, the presence of excess sanguine ethem, what laymen referred to as light ethem. There was no consensus yet whether an imbalance favouring sanguine ethem was an effect or the cause of butterfly affliction, but it was a common condition in sufferers.

  While Devindra got dressed, Pinadarya added her own notes to his medical journal.

  “So, I’ll be providing symptomatic relief as the need arises,” she told him. They were sitting now in the back garden, which was cool and airy in the late afternoon. Brother Kaleft had brought tea, a delicate mix of jasmine and devilwood with a hint of rose hip. “And I noted that, four years ago, when your symptoms were particularly bad, your previous physician did balancing therapy to counter the excess sanguine ethem. We can do so again, although if you agree, I’d like that to be preventative rather than wait until you suffer a significant setback. As you know, there’s no consensus on what triggers the symptoms of butter affliction to flare, but it’s widely accepted that physical and emotional stress contribute. And given the journey we’re about to embark on, I’d rather be proactive.”

  Devindra inclined his head. “Thank you, Doctor.”

  Pinadarya thought of Doctor Ballaja’s rather tasteless mention of ‘research opportunities’, and asked: “Do you have any indication of what might have triggered the worst of your affliction, four years ago?”

  “Ah.” Devindra smiled weakly. “As you mentioned, yes, physical and emotional stress... You see, I was called to aid Saint Celund after their return from Ungberg — are you familiar with the circumstances?”

  There it was again. The second time Saint Celund came up in a context where they had no good reason to be.

  “I’m familiar with Saint Celund,” Pinadarya said. They’d be travelling together for the foreseeable future; it would not pay to withhold anything now. “Some of the knights are my good friends, some since childhood, and Captain Wagar — the former Captain Wagar — and I were soulbonded once.”

  Noble Servant Devindra’s normal apologetic expression took on an anxious cast. “Doctor, if I may…” He rubbed his hands together; the movement of someone used to having painful joints and trying to relieve them. “If you don’t mind — if it doesn’t, ah, violate confidentiality, but, you see, as you are a healer of the flesh, I took my vows to, ah, aid healing of the spirit… How is Captain Wagar?”

  “I do not know. We have not spoken in four years.” She held up a hand as Devindra opened his mouth on the beginnings of ‘I’m sorry’. “Don’t apologise. It was a mutual decision.” She looked down at the medical record in front of her. “Noble Servant, I don’t mean to offend, but why were you picked for this journey?”

  “Seeing as my, ah, health is less than ideal?” Noble Servant Devindra shrugged ruefully. “The position was put to the entire Order of Saint Zhuling, and I felt myself… called. My superiors agreed that my calling was a sign of the Goddess.”

  “I see,” Pinadarya said, although she didn’t.

  Devindra smiled, spreading his hands in a self-deprecating gesture. “I don’t suppose, with your scientific interests… I can understand if something as unquantifiable as a calling is incredible to you. But, I do not mean to presume, what about your vocation as physician? Or, perhaps, you can imagine that faced with a specific circumstance, you might feel, deep in your heart, or your soul, in a way that you cannot fully explain in language, that the Goddess is calling you to Her service?”

  Pinadarya started to gather up her notes and the medical journal. “I knew a man who used to wholeheartedly believe that the Goddess calls us to Her will, and I oftentimes envied him his pure conviction and the comfort it gave him. It all seemed very simple.”

  She stood to take her leave. “And then I saw how that faith broke him, in the end. So no, Noble Servant, I do not believe in callings.”

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