Chapter 51
***
After deciding to take out one of the Three Sacred Relics.
After that, life went on as usual.
On weekdays I saw patients at the clinic, occasionally gave Eri a blood transfusion, sometimes attended my master's lessons, and almost every evening secretly prepared dinner.
Repetitive, but rewarding days.
And so winter passed.
When patients with heads split open by icicles falling from the eaves started showing up at the clinic, I finally began to feel that spring had arrived.
In the meantime, my birthday had come and gone.
Sixteen.
The age Father had mentioned.
— “When you turn sixteen, you either help your parents with their work, or make a name for yourself fighting outside the Wall.”
Back then, I had chosen to help Father with his work, and Father had promised to call for me once he was sure the situation was safe.
And my first day of work was decided one morning when the first spring rain had just started to fall, at breakfast.
That morning, Freya was sitting beside me, yawning with sleep still lingering.
Freya was bringing unsalted bread to her mouth.
She was eating bread without butter lately because she said she was trying to lose weight.
That must taste absolutely awful.
“Julian.”
Across from her, Father said as he buttered his bread.
“Yes, Father.”
“Something came up today, and I’m taking you with me.”
His hand never stopped spreading butter on the bread.
“What kind of incident is it?”
“Between last winter and this spring, five newborns in noble families have died. The incidents occurred in two count houses and three viscount houses.”
The sound of Freya chewing stopped.
When I looked over, Freya was staring at Father with all traces of sleep gone from her eyes.
Father took a bite of his buttered bread and a sip of coffee before continuing.
“According to the parents’ testimony, the dead children all had one thing in common. At first they cried uncontrollably, then started vomiting, and soon their entire bodies went limp and began to tremble.”
“Couldn’t it just be a simple illness?”
“That would make five cases with the same symptoms far too strange. More importantly, those five families are all in the same faction as Prince August.”
Oh. Right away, it started to smell fishy.
In this age, a noble child dying?
That could happen.
Five children dying in a row around the same time?
If an epidemic was going around, that could happen rarely.
But for it to happen to nobles from the same faction absolutely couldn’t be a coincidence.
In most cases like this, it would be reasonable to suspect the opposing faction of placing a curse.
Now that I thought about it, this sounded like a really huge-scale incident.
Is this actually safe?
Won’t we be the ones in danger if we go poking around for no reason?
“It hasn’t been confirmed whether it’s a curse yet. But the court is only hearing what it wants to hear. They’ve already painted it as a factional struggle, haven’t they? That’s why I’m being dispatched.”
“Don’t you belong to any faction, Father?”
“No.”
Father calmly finished breakfast by sipping the rest of his coffee.
“An inspector is also being dispatched. Since a royal faction is involved, they’re not going to leave this to a single magistrate.”
Inspector.
The moment I heard that, I felt relieved.
An inspector is a post that investigates noble corruption.
At this time, an inspector’s role also includes keeping the struggle for the throne from getting too heated.
In other words, the fact that an inspector was being dispatched to this case was practically the emperor’s warning not to cross the line any further.
“With the inspector being sent this time, I was certain the case was safe. So starting today, you’ll come to work with me.”
“Understood, Father. Then I’ll prepare the medicine.”
I got up from my seat and headed to my room to pack my house-call bag.
IV fluids, an emergency trauma kit, heparin, diluted cocaine...
I packed anything else I could think of that might come in handy as well.
After gathering the medicines, I left the study and ran into Eri at the end of the hallway.
“Be careful, Teacher.”
If she’d been her usual self, I might have taken her along.
But I couldn’t forget the purpose of this outing.
I was going along as Father’s child.
In a situation like this, bringing Eri along was far too likely to cause problems.
“I’ll be back, Eri.”
I brushed back Eri’s red hair once and headed down the stairs.
Father was already in his coat, standing at the entrance.
When the butler opened the door, a carriage was waiting outside.
But instead of the head butler standing beside the carriage as usual, someone else was there.
‘That person was....’
Father’s aide.
His name was Heinz.
I’d seen his face before when he occasionally came to visit Father for work.
Heinz, waiting by the carriage, looked terrible, to put it mildly.
“Magistrate Hendel.”
Heinz lowered his head and handed over a sealed document envelope.
“An urgent report came in at dawn today.”
“What happened?”
“It’s the sixth.”
Father’s hand paused for a moment as he pulled the documents out of the envelope.
But he kept his expression neutral and took out the documents to check the contents.
It took him less than ten seconds to skim the papers inside.
“The symptoms are... identical. Was it the same faction again by any chance?”
“Yes. It’s the Belheim count family in Prince August’s faction.”
“When did the incident occur?”
“An hour ago.”
“Then is the baby still alive?”
“...It is still alive.”
Father folded the papers and tucked them into his inner coat pocket.
And then he turned his head back toward me over his shoulder.
“You heard that, Julian.”
I nodded without hesitation.
“If we hurry, we can save the baby.”
“Understood. Let’s go at once.”
*
The Count Belheim estate was a little over ten minutes away from our house by carriage.
As we sped between the street trees of Sanctum Hill, I put my house-call bag on my lap and checked the medicines once more.
‘Let’s see... based on the baby’s symptoms....’
I spent a few minutes preparing in the carriage.
Before long, the carriage came to a stop.
When the gate opened, a garden with a fresh green hue came into view.
A well-kept garden, something rarely seen within these walls.
Even though our house has plenty of money, there’s no one who really likes gardens, so we don’t have one like this....
Ah, what am I even thinking about right now?
I tore my eyes away from the garden and looked toward the entrance.
People were gathered in front of the entrance.
Two servants, one maid, and a healer priest in black clerical robes.
Every single one of them looked unwell.
Father got out first.
When he held up his magistrate’s seal, the servants opened a path.
“Where is the child?”
“On the second floor, Magistrate. His wife is holding the child.”
“Lead the way.”
“But that child...”
The adults’ gazes all turned to me at once.
Father brushed aside those suspicious looks.
“He’s a renowned healer. We don’t have time to explain, so just lead the way.”
“Understood, sir.”
Father followed the servant and strode up the stairs.
I went after him.
From the open room at the end of the second-floor hallway, crying could be heard.
It was far too mature a sound to be a child’s cry.
It was the kind of crying commonly heard at the Limbus Pit Clinic from mothers who had lost their babies.
When I entered the room where the crying was coming from, I saw a woman sitting on the bed.
A woman who looked barely over twenty was sobbing.
A limp baby was cradled in her arms.
I quickly examined the baby’s condition.
‘It isn’t a tonic-clonic seizure. But it isn’t an absence seizure either.’
I quickly crossed off the list of seizure-causing diseases in my head.
What the child was showing now was repeated intermittent tonic stiffening.
The whole body would stiffen like a board, relax for a few seconds, then stiffen again; the mechanism was different from a seizure.
‘Check for horizontal nystagmus too.’
The eyes were half-closed, the eyeballs trembling slightly from side to side.
That meant there was a problem with the cerebellum or the brainstem.
Intermittent tonic convulsions, horizontal nystagmus, dilated pupils, hypertonia.
Differential diagnoses began spilling out in my head one after another.
Hypocalcemia?
Common in newborns, but the nystagmus isn't this pronounced.
Intracranial hemorrhage?
Possible if the birth had been difficult, but at two months old, the likelihood was far too low.
A congenital metabolic disorder?
If this were a single case, I could suspect that.
But unless all six families were the Habsburg royal house, there was no way they’d all have the same genetic disease at the same time.
What was left was....
‘Exogenous.’
And naturally, the substance that could cause those symptoms came to mind.
‘If that was it....’
I definitely came here to treat the child.
And I’d somehow ended up deducing the culprit too.
Honestly, if I wanted, I could probably open a deduction show right here.
But right now, the urgent thing was saving the child.
‘First, stop the convulsions.’
While a convulsion is ongoing, the body begins consuming an enormous amount of oxygen.
As a result, breathing can’t keep up with that rate of consumption, and if that continues, the brain ends up starved of oxygen.
And I probably don’t need to explain what happens to a brain deprived of oxygen.
I took my eyes off the child and looked at the woman holding the baby.
“Please let me examine the child.”
The woman raised her head.
Her bloodshot eyes looked up at me.
The man standing behind her, probably the Count of Belheim, blocked me.
He glared at Father rather than at me and said,
“Who is this child, Magistrate?”
“My son. He’s also a healer.”
“A healer? At that age?”
Suspicious eyes were fixed on my face.
I didn’t respond to that gaze.
Strictly speaking, I wasn’t a healer, but there was no reason to reveal that here.
The count’s gaze sharpened a little at my silence.
“Three healer priests had performed purification rites, and it was useless.”
“Because it wasn’t a curse.”
My answer made the room go quiet.
The count’s expression sharpened, but I didn’t care.
“How can you be so certain it wasn’t a curse?”
“Then let me ask you this in return. What kind of curse causes symptoms like this in a baby?”
“...I’m not very familiar with black magic.”
“There’s nothing more irresponsible than lumping vague ignorance together under the label of a curse. Can a hunter catch prey by drawing his bow in a fog where he can’t even see the target?”
The count stared at me as though he meant to bore straight through me.
“Then are you saying you can see beyond that fog?”
“I’m human, so I can’t. But diagnosis is, in the end, a matter of repeatedly shooting arrows at the target most likely to be hit. I have a rough idea where the best target is.”
The count fell silent.
After a brief silence, he spoke again.
“...Please take care of my first child.”
The count stepped aside.
In that gap, the child’s body stiffened again.
In the wife’s arms, the tiny back arched like a bow.
I didn’t wait any longer.
“Madam. You need to lay the child down.”
The woman’s fingers were tightly gripping the baby’s clothes.
It was a scene all too common in the pediatric emergency room and at Limbus Pit.
It wasn’t that they didn’t trust the doctor.
They were afraid that the warmth they felt now might be the last.
I knew the words I could say for mothers like that.
“Please don’t worry. It’s nothing serious.”
The woman’s eyes wavered.
Of course, I knew my words were contradictory too.
If it wasn’t a serious illness, then how could babies with similar symptoms have died?
But just seeing a doctor remain calm like this usually gave patients a great deal of relief.
And this time was no different.
After hesitating for a moment, the woman handed the baby over to me.
I took the baby and laid it on the bed.
At twelve, I’d still struggled just to move a baby by myself.
By sixteen, I could do it alone with no problem.
Thanks to that, I could now perform one more procedure.
‘Judging from the weight... around two months old. Four kilos or so.’
Recheck the seizure pattern before treatment.
Tonic phase, ten seconds. Relaxation phase, five seconds. Eye tremors still ongoing. Skin pale, but no cyanosis yet.
No head trauma. Breathing is still holding.
‘There’s time.’
I immediately opened my medical bag and took out one medicine bottle.
Inside were transparent crystals.
It was an anticonvulsant I’d accidentally made while trying to create an anesthetic before.
When I opened the cap, its distinctively irritating smell stabbed at my nose.
‘As expected. Good thing I brought this along when I heard it was a seizure.’
I took out a vial of distilled water, a syringe, and a thin rubber tube from my medical bag.
I scooped up the crystals with the tip of the syringe and dissolved them in the distilled water.
The transparent crystals slowly dissolved in the water.
“What are you doing, Julian?”
I didn’t answer Father.
Instead, I checked the concentration of the solution by eye.
Weight, four kilos.
Considering rectal absorption, calculate the proper dose.
…The math should be right, right?
Tsk. I’m not a pediatrician, so I’m not good at this sort of thing.
But there was no one who could confirm whether this was right.
In the end, I left it to the power of this mistaken-identity nonsense, filled the syringe with the solution, and connected it to the rubber tube.
Then I lifted the baby’s lower body.
“Wait, what...”
The count took a step forward.
Before the count could stop me, I applied lubricant to the end of the rubber tube and gently inserted it into the baby’s rectum.
The room froze.
Everyone except me had their mouths hanging open.
In the middle of those stares, I pressed down on the syringe plunger.
“The child will be fine in five minutes.”
I said, pointing at the clock mounted on the wall.
While doing that, I started searching for a vein.
They were baby veins, already tiny and faint.
On top of that, with the convulsions, it wasn’t an easy task.
But at Limbus Pit, there were plenty of babies in even worse condition than this, so it wasn't all that difficult either.
And so, after securing an IV line and starting fluids in just five minutes,
I touched the baby’s forehead with the back of my hand.
It was a motion to check the temperature as well.
That was when it happened.
The five fingers that had been stark white and clenched until just moments ago slowly unfurled and grabbed my finger.
Along with that, the baby’s breathing started to return.
The baby’s convulsions stopped.
“The convulsions...!”
“Oh my God....”
Only after I checked the other reflexes by feeling the baby’s body did I turn back to the count and his wife.
“Your baby is safe now. Ah, but I asked that too late. What’s your baby’s name?”
I turned to face the count and his wife and smiled.
The count and his wife froze.
After a moment, the count answered, his voice trembling slightly.
“...Tina. Tina Belheim.”
“Tina. That’s a lovely name.”
Behind the count and his wife, Father was nodding with a proud expression on his face.