Page 48 of Malady

“As I said, it passes on, so far as I understand it. What I consume is merely the essence, stripped of the identity it once carried. The rest sheds from it rather like water from a cloth, and continues to wherever such things are meant to go.”

“Goes where?”

“I do not know.”

“You have been eating souls for three hundred years and never once thought to follow one?”

“I have thought about it a great deal, Ophelia. Unfortunately, thinking has not brought me any closer to an answer.” I turn my glove over at the wrist, smoothing another crease in the leather. “There are places beyond this world. I have stood near enough to the edges of a few to know that much, though whether any of them resembles the Heaven your brother speaks of, I could not say.”

She falls quiet, her eyes fixed upon me.

I had expected her to be troubled by the prospect of an afterlife, perhaps even to ask whether I had encountered some unfortunate soul untethered from the flesh. Instead, her fingers tighten around the pestle.

“But if souls are real,” she murmurs, almost to herself. “That means something must have put them there.”

“I suppose⁠—”

“Which means He was there.” Her voice catches, and she looks away from me. “In the well. He heard every—” She presses the back of her wrist against her mouth, drawing a breath that does very little to steady her. “No. I will not hear this. I have spent my whole life⁠—”

“Ophelia Harrow. I have walked this earth for a very long time, and I have never once met him. Perhaps something made all of this. The world must have begun somewhere, and I have seen nothing to suggest it built itself. But if there is a maker, I have found little evidence that he concerns himself with what happens afterwards.”

Slowly, her wrist lowers from her mouth. “But you cannot say there isn’t one.”

“No. Nor can I say there is. I have seen a great many things in my time, Ophelia, and not one of them has offered me a satisfactory answer to that particular question.”

She lowers her gaze, studying the worn wooden counter.

For a little while, neither of us speaks. I can hear the wind worrying at the shutters, and somewhere beyond them a cart rattles over the uneven stones. Ophelia’s fingers have loosened around the pestle, though she makes no attempt to put it down.

“Then what do you believe?” she asks eventually.

“In nature, for the most part. It has the considerable advantage of existing whether one believes in it or not.” I nod towards the shelves behind her. “You take what grows from the earth and use it to sustain your patients. I take what is ending to sustain myself. The principle is not so terribly different, although I appreciate that you may find the comparison unpleasant.”

“I do.”

“I thought you might. Unfortunately, nature has never shown much concern for whether its arrangements offend us. You eat the hare, the hare eats the clover, and one day the worms will eat you. I merely occupy another place in the same rather unpleasant circle.”

“I am not a clover.” She glares at me, and for a moment I begin to hope that her indignation has displaced some of her earlier fear. Unfortunately, she has not finished with me. “And what about people who aren’t dying or sick at all?”

“What about them?”

“You’ve spent the last quarter of an hour insisting that you only take souls from people who are already at death’s door. Well, what exactly did you do to Billy Mercer? Because I checked your book, Doctor. His name wasn’t there.”

“William Mercer is not in my ledger because I have not touched his soul.”

She smacks the pestle against the counter. “Then. Where. Is. He?”

“I do not know.” I incline my head slightly. “But I know the sort of man he is. With Nell carrying another child, I believe the prospect of another squalling mouth and another winter spent ankle-deep in somebody else’s blood and filth proved more than his courage could stomach, and that he simply abandoned them.”

She studies her own boots for a moment before giving a reluctant nod. “Right. Fine. I can accept that you eat souls. Wonderful. But I haven’t forgotten about the teeth in your satchel, Iscairn. I’d very much like to know why you’re carrying them about with you.”

She glares at me through the loose strands of hair falling around her pale face, her chin raised as though interrogating a death-spirit is no more troublesome than haggling over a poultice. I like her immensely for it, though I rather wish she had chosen a subject I could discuss a little more freely. There are certain truths I can share without consequence, but the origins of several teeth in my satchel are best left undisclosed.

I release a slow breath behind my mask. “I am a physician, Ophelia.”

“I had noticed.”

“Then you might also have noticed that physicians occasionally remove teeth. When the flesh around a root becomes swollen and rotten, extraction is often the only sensible treatment.” I lift one shoulder. “A freshly removed tooth can be quite informative, particularly when split open to examine how far the decay has travelled through it.”