Surviving Arkadia

The following day I returned to the Cold Room. I had no trouble finding it. Nurse Trudy and Master Armstrong were waiting for me. They were at once pleased to see me and apologetic about the indelible trauma that had brought me there.

In answer to my many questions it turned out that Master Armstrong, Gretta to her friends, was a lady, and that Dwarves had the same number of pronouns as everyone else - three. Possibly because all gender neutral pronouns arrived in my brain as a singular they.

The same six children lay in the Cold Room. Looking through the thick glass of the viewing window I thought I could see more blankets with the red indicator mark on them. Barney seemed to be holding stable, with most of his blankets in the yellow but some of the others weren’t doing so well.

“How cold is it in there,” I said, and then realised that it was a stupid question because whatever temperature units they used would mean nothing to me. I have enough trouble with Fahrenheit.

“About minus forty,” said Gretta. And somehow I knew she meant minus forty degrees Celsius. As if the System wanted me to know that it absolutely could translate scientific units. Which was particularly funny given that minus forty is the same temperature on both scales. “We can get it lower than that but then we might kill some of the healthier patients. As it is we have to monitor them all constantly. If anyone’s fever breaks we don’t have long to get them out before the cold kills them.”

“How does the Cold Room work?” I said.

“It’s just a scaled up application of the same runic magic as the blankets,” said Gretta.

“Explain it to me like I woke up in my underwear in the woods a few weeks back with no knowledge of Arkadia,” I said.

Trudy stifled something that sounded dangerously like a giggle.

“I’m not much of a teacher,” said Gretta.

“That’s fine because I’m not planning on learning how to use them myself. I just want to understand the basics. I don’t know what I need to know in order to be useful.”

“Runic Magic is most commonly practised by Dwarves and it’s the magic that Dwarves are most likely to learn. It’s not universal though. There’s plenty of human Blacksmiths and Jewellers who work with Runes and plenty of Dwarf Alchemists and Witches. Runes are symbols, we used to carve them onto things but they can be printed or drawn or sewn in. They don’t do anything until they’re inscribed on the right kind of object and then empowered by a Rune-smith. But once they’re empowered it doesn’t take a lot of skill to use them. Most runic magic is concerned with the movement and concentration of energy.”

My heart sank, somewhat, when she said that. I was expecting the rest of the conversation to go in the direction of new age crystal bullshit.

“The classic Dwarven magic weapons like the Hammer of Smiting or the Molten Mace all work by simple runes. The Hammer of Smiting has runes on it that multiply kinetic energy so it hits much harder. The Molten Mace has a fire rune that draws in and multiplies heat energy and makes it hotter. Both of them have containment runes that bind them to keep their original shape. Ice Runes are tricky because they don’t add or multiply energy, they subtract. Ice Runes take the heat out of something. A lot of people find it confusing but you can’t add cold to anything. Cold is an absence of energy.”

So Runic Magic was less like crystal bullshit and more like engineering.

“What do you do with the waste heat?” I said.

“I thought this was all strange to you?” said Gretta.

“Runes are strange to me. Refrigeration I know a bit about.”

“I used a chain of runes to carry the heat energy away and the hospital uses it to heat water for bathing and washing laundry.

“So you don’t use the runes on the patients directly? You use it on the blankets and the blankets absorb the heat from the patients?” I said.

“That’s right,” said Nurse Trudy. “Those blankets would be dangerous to anyone who didn’t have the Fever. Wrapping yourself in one of those would be a one way ticket to hypothermia. Any child wrapped in those blankets would have died without them, and probably set their bed on fire in the process.”

“I’m starting to understand how you know it’s magical,” I said. “We have some nasty fevers back home but none of them will set a person on fire. Sorry, if this is a stupid question, but could you paint the ice rune onto the patient? Would that be more efficient?”

“It would,” said Gretta, “But it doesn’t work. Something about the Fever instantly overloads the Runes and burns them out.”

“Something inherent about the Fever or something deliberate?” I said.

“I don’t know,” said Nurse Trudy. “But I think now I have to show you something.”

#

The “something” turned out to be a windowsill in an empty ward. There were scratches in the wood. They could have been from an open window swinging in the breeze but something about them chilled me like I was in the Cold Room.

“We found scratches round some of the windows in Rotveil,” I said.

“I know,” said Nurse Trudy, “It was mentioned in the correspondence from Mistress Agnes but not in the minutes of the meeting at Uln. I thought maybe you’d forgotten about it by then?”

“We had.”

“Which suggests that it’s linked to the Fever in some way,” said Nurse Trudy. “These marks were found after the children in this ward recovered enough to go home. They weren’t there when the children were admitted because we did a full deep clean before we opened the ward and I oversaw it. I’m fairly sure they weren’t there during the worst of the Fever because I was in here all the time when the children were at their sickest and I think I would have noticed.”

“You said something about a violent aftermath to the Fever?” I said.

“Violent and unpredictable,” said Nurse Trudy.

“A lot of the scratches in Rotveil were on the outside of the buildings. If we can get this window open wide enough I can do a survey and see if there’s scratches at any of the other windows. It should be less disruptive to patient care than if you check all the windowsills on the inside. And if there’s no other scratches at all we can just chalk it up to a coincidence.”

Trudy pulled a notebook and a pencil from one of the pockets on her apron. “I don’t believe in coincidences,” she said as she passed them to me and opened the window.

#

From the outside it really didn’t look like a coincidence. There were scores and scratches in the wooden window frame, across the slates and even in the stonework. They looked fresh.

I drew a little map of the position of the window I’d gone through and then made a note of how extensive the scratches were.

I spent most of the rest of the day clambering all over the outside of the Fever Hospital mapping out which windows had scratches around them and how recent the scratch marks seemed.

I levelled climbing and Parkour again but what I mainly succeeded in was scaring the hell out of myself.

When I gave my notes to Nurse Trudy I scared the hell out of her too.

I went back to the City Archive, resolving to take the Mayor up on his offer. Whatever the dangers of delving beneath the surface of the city it couldn’t possibly be as scary as whatever had scored up the stone walls of the Fever Hospital.