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“Your cervical spine. And the healing—such as it was—frankly, appalling. They put your bones back together like a child smashing puzzle pieces together. They damaged your seith channels in the process, and the deterioration set in from there. You would’ve been a candidate for a nodeplasty on the affected seith channels. But no. Instead, we’ve got this cack-handed mess to deal with. Talk to me about the numbness.”

“It’s mostly my hands,” said Osric. “It’s starting to go up my arms. Hasn’t had an impact on my dexterity, though.”

“Good,” said Fairhrim. “Your lovely colleagues haven’t noticed anything, then.”

“No. I’d be under watch if they had. We cull the weak.”

Fairhrim’s expression turned sanctimonious. “I don’t understand why one would dedicate one’s life to so cruel an Order.”

“Money,” said Osric.

Quite impressive, how Fairhrim could pack all her moral repugnance into a glance.

She wheeled away the Curie machine and swabbed Osric’s neck with some pungent liquid. He felt the cold burn of antiseptic.

“Phenol?” asked Osric.

“Hlutoform,” said Fairhrim. “A broad-spectrum bactericide, virucide, and fungicide. A colleague of mine developed it for use in her operating theatre. It’s used all over the Tiendoms now.”

She pulled a second machine from the sack of contraptions. “Franklin diffractor,” she explained. “It’ll let me examine your seith fibres.”

All her machines seemed to enjoy being aimed at vulnerable spots. This one made a sort of chuckling sound as Fairhrim pressed a tubelike protrusion to Osric’s bare chest. She attached other bits on long wires to his shoulders, his back, and his knees.

“Don’t move,” said Fairhrim again, as Osric felt himself about to be lanced at point-blank range by the giggling machine.

On the wall, the pictures of his bones were replaced by a shining network of lines, vaguely in the shape of a man.

Again Fairhrim studied the images in silence, interrupted only by her snapped “Stay still” when Osric dared take in too deep a breath.

And again, Osric found himself studying her as she studied him, looking for a sign that things were not All That Bad.

Fairhrim was quick to ruin it.

“It’s bad,” said Fairhrim. She pointed to lines that shimmered white. “Intact.” She then indicated lines speckled with black. “Damaged by seith degeneration, commonly known as seith rot.”

Many of the lines projected onto the wall were black, emanating from a cluster at the base of the figure’s neck. It was a sobering sight.

Fairhrim pressed some buttons on the diffractor, which brought the seith fibres into even sharper relief. She measured things with silver instruments and made notes in a chart. “The numbness you’re experiencing is called torpraxia. It’s what happens when decaying seith fibres interact with your nerves. It’s normally more pronounced in extremities.”

She ran her finger up and down Osric’s limbs, as well as his back and chest, and took note of where his numbness began and ended.

“Can’t you simply—simply push a bit of seith into those rotted lines? Like you do when you’re healing wounds?” asked Osric.

A stupid question, probably. Yes—confirmed by the look Fairhrim levelled at him.

She gathered together enough small words to explain it to him. “No. We cannot simplypush a bit of seithinto those lines. We are talking about one of the most delicate, and poorly understood, structures in the human body. Unlike in the nervous system, we’ve never managed to trigger the activation of latent circuits in a degenerating seith system, or the genesis of new channels. There is no plasticity—no regeneration. Grafting attempts fail. Transplants fail. What’s dead stays dead.”

Fairhrim traced a blackened line on the wall with a fingertip. “There have been hundreds of experimental studies and trials—by me, by my Order before me, by universities, by physickers and chirurgeons. All of them have failed. There is no clinically validated treatment for seith degeneration—only speculative hypotheses, including mine, which I very much regret having shared at this particular moment.” Irrelevantly, she added, “Lucky your tacn is on your left palm.”

Only walkers of the Dusken Paths had their tacn on their left palms; Osric therefore failed to see why this pleased Fairhrim among her otherwise dismal accounting. “Er—why?”

“Those lines are relatively untouched by the degeneration. It’s why you’re still able to use your seith. The fluctuations you mentioned will get worse, however.” Fairhrim pointed at a place near the figure’s armpit. “Your decline will accelerate once these nodes deteriorate.”

Osric stared at the figure projected on the wall, crisscrossed with its rotted black lines. Now he tasted sickness; now he tasted the bitterness of despair. He wanted to throw a knife into the figure’s head. He wanted to crash the stupid chuckling Franklin diffractor into the floor. He wanted to put a hand to Fairhrim’s throat and make her say what he wanted to hear, rather than these terse truths.

He didn’t want to die.

“Normally I’d hold your hand and say some gentle things about how difficult this must be to hear,” said Fairhrim, “but I’d rather not waste my breath making a Fyren feel better.”