Kingdom Come: Chapter 17

In my sober moments, I told myself I’d picked up the Healing skill tree because it was fun and interesting. But if I was being honest with myself, a big part of my hunger to learn was because it made me feel like I could conquer disease, which was the only thing that had ever kicked my ass and gotten away with it. Healing skills also had the side benefit of making me popular, which was not something I’d ever been before. People don’t like to be sick or in pain very much. In a world without magical healing, these skills were always needed. If you had them, people tended to want you to stick around, and when you stuck around, they talked.

While Suri split for the barracks and Karalti for the kitchens, I hurried toward the Fort’s hospital: a squat, square, three-story building within a small courtyard to the north of the parade ground, lit by torches and a couple of barrel fires. As soon as I entered the courtyard, the metallic stench of rotten meat hit me, and I gagged. Yiiiikes. 

Even at night, there were a lot of sick people and a commotion going on just outside the door to the hospital. Two sick-looking Vlachian soldiers were screaming at a thin man in a bloody apron who was standing between them and the entryway. The doctor was screaming right back at them.

“I told you useless worms four times already - there are no more Cryptbane Potions!” The medic yelled. “I know you’re sick, but you’re in the line until we get more ingredients, and there’s nothing I can do about it!”

“Can’t you see he’s dying?!” The soldier shouted back, gesturing at his friend with both hand. “He’s dying! I’m dying! Are you going to let us be turned into one of those monsters!?”

“You’re not dying yet, you dolt! Grave Rot has a forty-eight hour incubation period, the battle was only two hours ago. If you don’t get back into the line, I’ll hack a limb off and give you a reason to be at the front!” The medic gestured angrily at the straggling queue waiting to receive help. Some of them were very badly off - gauze clamped over bloody missing eyes, broken limbs, burns and arrow wounds. “You’ll get the damn potions when we get our damn herbs!”

At that moment, a golden ring appeared behind the medic’s head, rotating in an eye-catching way: a side-quest marker.

“Excuse me, sorry to interrupt, but what herbs do you need?” I sidled up and inserted myself into the argument before the pleading soldier could get any more aggressive. All three men turned on me.

“Who the hell are you?” The medic demanded.

“Dragozin Hector. Count and wannabe Healer.” I replied with a salute. “What do you need?”

The medic blanched, then sketched a bow. “My apologies, your grace, I haven’t seen you around this shit-wagon of a fort before. And the answer to your question is everything. Bandages, beds, hands, herbs. Pardon my inquiry, but you are not Vlachian. Where do you hail from?”

“Tungaant,” I replied. “Theoretically.”

“Oh, thank the gods. If you’re half as good a healer as Vash, we need you. Desperately.” The wild-eyed medic grabbed me by the arm and began pulling as he turned and opened one of the hospital doors. “You two! Get back in line! No more pushing ahead!”

“But-!”

The heavy wooden door slammed behind us, locking us into an overcrowded, reeking room. Nurses, male and female, moved among the patients. They bound broken limbs, stuffed organs back into bellies, dosed and drained and stitched. They all looked as exhausted as the medic beside me.

“These are the victims from the last big assault, four days ago. We keep the urgent care patients here on the first floor,” he said bleakly. Then he seemed to remember himself. “My apologies, I didn’t introduce myself. I am Lazar, the head medic here.”

“Where’re you from?” I asked.

“Me? Karhad. I escaped with Commander Istvan Usoya from Egbolt Castle. And as you can see, we’re up to our eyeballs.” He gestured at the room. “Worst problem is the damned Grave Rot. That’s what those boys out there have - melancholic illness, attacks the blood and bone marrow. Second stage looks like leprosy. It kills you, and then you become one of them. The undead.”

Melancholic diseases were cold and dry. I nodded. “What do you need to cure it?”

“If you catch it early? Colloidal Gold, Bogbean, Swamp Rosemallow, and alcohol.” He rattled off the ingredients by heart. “It’s an expensive medicine. And if a man has progressed to the leprous stage, you have to add Stingcrab Blood and take the risk of an alchemical dose.”

“Wait. I have… exactly none of those things.” I checked my ingredients. “I can make you some Colloidal Gold, but I’m running low on Hydrochloric Acid. Teach me how to brew the potion, and I’ll make what I have. You can cure some people, at least.”

“Yes. Better than none.” Lazar sighed and looked up to the ceiling. 

[Lazar Kovács would like to send you: Recipe: Cryptbane Potion]

I accepted, and added it to the ever growing list of the bathtub drugs I was able to brew. “Thanks.” 

“There’s little point in thanking me. The ingredients for Cryptbane grow out in the Endlar, but who’s able to go out there?”

“We are,” I said. “Me, my dragon, and our companions. We’re setting out to find Vash Dorha in the morning..”

“His body, you mean. Still... if you are brave enough to go out there, I won’t refuse you.” Lazar concentrated again, and I got an alert.

New Side-Quest: A Rose on the Grave

Lazar, the Head Medic of Koronya Fort Hospital, is in desperate need of supplies for the potions used to heal his patients. Collect Bogbean, Swamp Rosemallow and Stingcrab Blood. 

Reward: EXP, Skill EXP, New Recipes, Renown (Myszno Defense Force).

“No worries, I’ll get those when I’m out there,” I said. “Are there any other herbs you need?”

Lazar shrugged. “All of them. Whatever you can bring us will help. We will pay.”

My first thought was ‘oooh, money’, but then I remembered - renown, in this quest, was way more valuable than cash. For now, though, I’d let him think I was that mercenary. “Sure. I’ll bring you back a bunch of them, and we’ll work it out from there. By the way, if I help you on your rounds, do you mind if I ask you a few questions about what we can expect out there in the swamp?”

“Information on the Endlar? I’m not the one to ask. Lieutenant Zlazlo would probably know the most of anyone here,” Lazar replied. “He’s Yanik, often jokes about being born in a bayou. Mind you, he’s terribly sick right now, and we have no idea what’s wrong with him. Nothing we’ve tried has worked. Good luck getting anything from him in the grip of the fever he’s been in the last couple days.”

Dammit: I’d used my Purify ability for the day, so there was no way to lay on hands and fix him. “Other Yanik soldiers would know about the swamp, too - right?”

“Maybe, maybe not.” The doctor was glancing anxiously at his patients now, straining to keep himself talking to me. “All Yanik will talk a big talk, but most of them are like Istvan, born and bred in cities or towns. Their parents or grandparents might have walked out of the swamp generations ago. They’ll know myths and stories, and what they saw of it when we marched from Karhad to the Prezyemi Line, but you’d have to search the ranks to find anyone with Zlazlo’s knowledge.”

“Right.” I sighed. “Thanks. I’ll go see him and do my best.”

The medic nodded, relieved. “He’s on the third floor. You’ll see his armor rack up there.”

I waded through the moaning bodies lying on beds and stretchers, and clumped up the wooden stairs to the third floor. It was neater up here, with fewer beds and enough space that they could be barely separated by thin, ragged curtains. There were boxes of herbs and medical supplies stacked up against one wall. My fingers twitched when I saw them. When one of the nurses went behind a curtain to attend to a patient, I stole over and had a look inside them.

An inventory panel jumped up:

Lobelia x 20

Water Mint x 50

Lotus Flower x 30

Blazing Star x 15

Iris x 20

Kings Grass x 10

Green Moss x 50

Hawthorn bark x 10

“Ooh. Fancy plants.” Tempted as I was, I didn’t take anything - just closed the window. If I needed anything to treat the Lieutenant, I’d know where to find them.

Several of the beds had armor hung out in front, but picking Zlazlo’s was easy enough. The Lieutenant’s armor looked like ghillie suit, made of sturdy leather and chain and stitched with lichen-like netting. The joints were padded, and the back of it had bones, bark and silk foliage sewn onto it.

“Zlazlo?” I called out.

There was a thin groan from behind the curtain.

I let myself in, and found pretty much what I’d expected. Zlazlo’s gray-brown skin was ashy and pale, his cheeks and neck flushed red, the covers over his body damp with sweat. His eyes were dark and bright with fever, and he slowly writhed on the bed, as if in agony. Like Istvan, he wore his hair long. Unlike Istvan, he had his hair styled into long clay-covered dreadlocks, and a number of bone and gold piercings through both ears. There was a bedpan beside his bed. It looked unusually gross: the stuff in it was green.

“Hey man - I’ve come to see if I can do anything for you.” I edged in closer. “My name’s Hector.”

“Uhhhhn.” Zlazlo’s eyes briefly fixed on mine, but there was no recognition or curiosity. He was too sick.

Just as I resolved to start examining him, my HUD jumped to life. A soft blue glow began to highlight areas of interest on his body. His forehead, neck, abdomen, elbow, a big red rash on his forearm... and his crotch. Lovely. Still, that was new.

“Uhh... okay.” I started by taking his temperature with my hand - 107, yikes. Then, on instinct, I felt the glands in his neck. They were swollen up like golf balls, and he flinched when I touched him. My Field Medicine-informed instincts told me that meant he was fighting an infection.

I took his pulse next. His heartbeat was irregular and quick. Frowning, I muttered an apology and put my ear to his chest, closed my eyes, and listened. His breathing was clear... but his heart sounded like it was flailing around in mud, sloshing and thudding out of rhythm.

“Ohhhh... get off...” Zlazlo flailed around weakly. “Gods, it hurts.”

“What hurts?” I sat up quickly as he writhed.

“Everything,” he moaned. His voice was slurred. “Head. Belly. Skin. Bones. Everything.”

I gently pressed around on his stomach. The upper stomach seemed okay, but as soon as I pushed below the navel, he yelped.

“Heart stuff is Sangine, gut stuff is Phlegmatic...” I muttered what Mashka had taught me in the past few weeks, looking him over. He had more than one rash. The patches were red and angry, which made them Choleric - dry and hot. His joints were hot and swollen, too, like someone with arthritis. Anything to do with bones and joints was a Melancholic thing. Just about the only thing he wasn’t doing was coughing. “Damn, man... no wonder the healers are having trouble with you. You’re like a big old grab-bag of bad humors.”

After a couple of minutes, I came up with a game plan. I went back out and grabbed Lobelia, Blazing Star, Lotus and Water Iris for the potions I intended to make later, then took out a Goldenseal Tincture. I pushed back the heavy clay-covered locks, propped Zlazlo’s head and poured the potion in his mouth. He spluttered a little, but a  meter appeared and his terrible fever began to subside. After a few seconds, the man shuddered and looked up at me.

“Who the hell are you?” He whispered, in thickly accented Vlachian.

“Hector. I’m trying to figure out how to cure you of whatever you’ve got,” I replied. “I don’t think this potion is going to fix you, but it will take away some of the fever. I need to know what you were doing before you got sick.”

Zlazlo’s mouth twitched. He wasn’t a very attractive man: narrow head, pinched features, shifty eyes. He was lean and fit, but scrawny compared to the other Yanik men I’d passed. “I was working.”

“Be specific, or you’re probably gonna die.”

He shivered. “I was not doing anything out of the ordinary, my friend. I returned from my last mission two weeks ago. I celebrated, I went to bed. Then I spent the last two weeks training soldiers here... no injuries, no nothing. We went out in the swamp to teach the Vlachii how to swim and hide in the marshes...”

Parasites, maybe? We were always having to deal with those in the jungle. I thought about it for a couple of seconds. Glanced at his bedpan. Squinted at it.

“Wait,” I said. “You were pissing green stuff?”

“Urrgh.” He covered his eyes.

“How long for?” I demanded.

“Why? One week, maybe week and a half,” He admitted. “Not long.”

When soldiers came back to base to ‘celebrate’, it usually meant a lot of drinking and fucking. My buddies had mostly been safe players, but we always knew at least one friend-of-a-friend with crabs or the clap. “Did you take up with a girl when you were back from the mission? Screw anyone?”

“Uhh... yeah. Girls.” He tried to nod, but his neck spasmed and he let out a small sob of pain.

“And you’ve been pissing this green shit since then? What about blood?”

“... Some.”

I crouched back on my heels and thought about it. I glanced down, where the blue aura was highlighting a… distinctly shaped region under the blanket covering his lap. “If you’re pissing Creme de Menthe out your dick, you have gonorrhea. I was a pimply virgin who barely made it through Basic, and I know this. Why didn’t you come in when it started, man?”

“Had it before,” he mumbled. “No problems then. It went away.”

“What? No, dude, gonorrhea doesn’t just go away.” I rolled my eyes. “No... you’ve had it for months, and you just gave it to those girls you fucked, you ass.”

This was the first time I’d had to deal with someone who had an advanced disease, but I had to trust in those points I’d invested in my skills. Gonhorrea was unfortunate, but it wasn’t a rare or specialized condition, like the Grave Rot illness the medic had told me about. If I was being offered this quest, it was probably within my means.

I thought back to what Mashka had said about the guy with the infected hand. Lance the wound, then apply the poultice, then the potions. No water until the end, because it would turn his blood to poison. I was willing to bet that the standard sequence for this kind of deep-seated infection was hot to cold, dry to moist. Treat the skin rash and fever, then his heart, then his joints, then the root of the infection, so to speak. But the healers here hadn’t been able to cure him... so it was possible that there were more steps in the pattern.

“Sex is pretty hot and pretty moist,” I muttered to myself. “It probably goes Choleric-Sanguine-Melancholic-Phlegmatic-Sanguine.”

“What?”

“Don’t worry about it.” I surveyed the colored zones of light on his body. As soon as I started thinking about how to treat the rash, a list of ingredients appeared: 

- Holy Basil

- Starberry

- Baking Soda

- Cotton or Linen Cloth

I recognized those: they were components of a Holy Basil Compress, used for treating skin infections. This must be one of the perks of Journeyman-level Herbalism. “Ooh, that’s nifty.”

Zlazlo looked up at me in desperation. “You! What are you muttering about? Can you help me or not?” 

I fixed him with my best serious doctor face. “Probably. But I might have to cut your dick off.” 

He made a strangled high-pitched sound and flinched away from me on the bed.

“Not really; just joking. Though I bet there’s some bath ladies who’d thank me if I did.” Chuckling, I pulled my Herbalism kit and began to brew and mash, breaking off to go and raid the ingredients out in the hallway when I needed them. At the end of fifteen minutes, I had an array of treatments lined up like shots: A Holy Basil Compress for the rash, another Goldenseal Tincture for the fever, a Hawthorn Potion for the heart issue, a Comfrey Decoction for his bones, and then finally a Concentrated Green Moss Tincture. “Okay: you’re going to drink all of these. The Comfrey Decoction absolutely contains materials designated as cancerous by the state of California, but it should fix your joint pain.”

“What?” He blinked up at me, doubly confused.

I slapped the Holy Basil Compress on his rash. “Shhh. Quiet time now.”

A new timer popped up on my HUD, counting down from 60 seconds. Another new thing. The area where the poultice was applied began to glow red - red for Choleric, I was willing to bet. I waited breathlessly to see what happened. When the timer hit 00:00, the man’s neck flared with a golden aura. Gold for Sanguine. Fumbling a little, I fed him the Hawthorn Potion. Another timer appeared, this time counting down from 01:30. I watched it, frowning, and was startled when another red glow appeared at 30 seconds in: this time, around his head.

“Urrrgh.” Zlaszlo sunk back into the pillow, flushed in the face. “What the hell did you just give me?”

“Hang on.” I felt his forehead: he was burning up again, temperature rising fast. The red aura pulsed. Racing against the clock, I mashed together the ingredients for a Goldenseal Tincture and brewed it like a bartender pouring a drink. I finished ten seconds before the timer was up and put it to his lips. “Drink.”

Zlaslo nodded stiffly, and quaffed the potion. The red glow disappeared just before the golden one did, and then his entire body glowed black. For a moment, I was freaked out - until I remembered the sequence. Black for Melancholy. I got the Comfrey Decoction and poured that down Zlazlo’s neck. At the first taste of the bitter, ashy brew, he coughed and tried to spit it out.

“No. Drink it like a man.” I pushed up under his chin and held his mouth closed, like when you give a dog a pill. He glared at me, ashy liquid bubbling at the corners of his mouth. “You fucked your way into this mess, and now you’re going to swallow your way out of it.”

Another timer appeared: a five minute timer. And so we waited. When it was up, his abdomen and groin began to glow blue. I fed him the Green Moss Tincture then, and waited anxiously as a 10 minute timer appeared. But he was looking better, if not weak and exhausted. 

“I’m going to give this regime to the healers here. I think you’re going to need multiple treatments,” I said. “Probably every day for a week or so. But your fever’s breaking, so that’s a plus.”

“Yes. I don’t hurt as badly as I did.” His voice was weak and rusty, and he grimaced as he shifted on the bed. “I thank you. Are you one of Vash’s men?”

“No. He’s... out on a mission,” I said. “In fact, I’m getting ready to join him out in the Endlar. I was told you know the swamp better than anyone here. Are you strong enough to answer some questions?”

The man gave a small nod. “Yes... anything for a cure. I feel like I barely avoided death just now. What do you want to know?”

I thought for a minute or two. “Let’s start with the monsters. What enemies can we expect out there?”

“Your worst enemy is disease. Don’t eat anything raw, and don’t drink from still water. Stingcrabs are your next biggest threat,” he said quickly. “All over the place. Be careful of those: they don’t do much damage, but they can paralyze even the strongest man with their venom. They wait until other beasts come, and then eat whatever is left. There are many different kinds of larger animals… giant crocodiles, titanoboas, giant dragonflies, wolves. Allosaurus are common in the heart of the swamp. They always hunt in packs, three to six individuals. In the south of the Endlar, you will find Tyrannosaurus, who can be solitary or in pairs.”

“Okay. What about stranged creatures?”

Zlazlo took a second to lick his dry lips. “Many. The Stranged creatures of the Endlar loathe fire, so keeping a burning brand with you is a good idea. The most common are the Bogmaq - the drowned dead, who lurk at the edge of bayous. The Demon has been summoning them to his aid, enslaving them into his army, and now they lurk ready to pull in scouts and soldiers. But the worst thing you may see there is the Aljulaki Samak.”

“The who-what now?”

The man’s brow furrowed. “The Vlachii call them Swamp Worms. Do you know of the giant sandworms that can be found in the desert?”

Visions of giant worms with mouths like black holes lined with teeth, plunging in and out of sand dunes came to mind. “I think so, yeah.”

“They are the sandworms of the swamp. I have seen one eat a hookwing and his rider the way you would eat a chicken wing,” he said urgently. “You must beware their traps. They produce a great deal of slime, and will fill entire ponds with it. They lair at the center of the slime, and if something walks in there, they do not walk out.”

The last timer ran down to zero, and the blue aura around Zlazlo’s abdomen faded. He shuddered - this time with relief.

[Congratulations! You have unlocked your first Advanced Craft. View your Skills menu for more details!]

[You have unlocked new knowledge: Endlar Swamp (D-grade)]

[You have gained 5 Skill EXP!]

My fingers twitched. An Advanced Craft? Fuck yeah. I held off pulling up the menu for now, though. I had some Skill EXP to spend, but I would have to thoroughly review the new Craft to see if I wanted to take it. I could only learn a maximum of fourteen advanced crafts. “ Aljulaki Samak, right. I’ll bear that in mind. How do you feel?”

“Better, but my huadiv still hurts.” He motioned down at his lap. “Do you know what is wrong with it?”

“Well, I’m not a... uhh... whatever a penis doctor is called, so your huadiv is just going to have to sit tight until a specialist comes around.” I slapped my hands down on my thighs and leaned in a little. “Now, I’ve got some questions about terrain...”