Ravel

The first lesson of the Black Physicians is this: the Stillness is not a disease but an absence. The Stillness is the stopping that comes when Dem does not flow. When time withdraws from a place, the body there waits. To heal it, you must call time back. Time flows fastest in rot. So the Black Physicians rot. They do it like fire, controlled and fast. Half the patients survive. The other half become soil for the flowers.

Ravel learned this lesson at twelve. He was in one of Olumre's swamp villages. The lesson came in a muffled voice from behind his master's beak mask. The mask filters Stilled dust. In the air of the Pale Belt, time hangs like ash. Lungs that breathe this air slow down. The mask Ravel wears today was his master's. His master died by his own method.

As an apprentice, Ravel was given a task. He would tend the Stilled children beneath the Mother Tree. Every day he sat beside the same child. She was a girl reaching for a butterfly. She had not moved for thirty years. Ravel sang lullabies to her. His master had said the Stilled could hear. The Stilled are people caught by the Stillness in the middle of a movement. No one took those words seriously. Ravel did.

One summer night when he was fourteen, he did something the Black Physicians forbid. He never told anyone what he did. The next morning the Root Circle announced a miracle. The Mother Tree had bloomed out of season, and the girl had woken. That same morning Ravel woke in a hut far from his village. His hands were veined. His back had bent. His voice had cracked. He did not look in a mirror. He put on the mask. He never took it off in front of anyone again.

Today he is forty-one by the calendar. His body, though, is sixty-one. No one knows the difference. The mask and the long, patched coat hide everything. He became the best of the Black Physicians, because he had nothing left to fear. Whenever the Stillness advanced, they called for him.

In 1238 AS he was called to Greenmere. AS means After Stillness; it is how Devran counts its years. In one night the Stillness had swallowed the forest by the lake. It had reached the village gate. Behind it lay the heart of Olumre. Ravel opened every flask on his belt. In one night the cloud of rot devoured the village, the forest and the Stillness. The Stillness stopped. By morning neither tree nor person remained at Greenmere. The Root Circle called him a murderer and exiled him from Olumre. The first hand in the vote came from the Circle's youngest healer. That healer was the girl who once reached for a butterfly. Ravel said nothing to her.

In exile he went to the Arena. His experiments need Dem, and only the Arena makes Dem. Dem is time in solid form in Devran. Ravel sends his winnings not to Olumre but to his own laboratory. That is why they call him a thief as well as a physician. He buys the carcasses of runaway Caught from a Falconer named Kestrel. The Caught are creatures trapped inside the Arena's loop. Ravel wants to learn how time flows inside a creature that escaped the Arena. At night he slips into Tavellin's Rust Prisons. There he draws blood from the slowed prisoners. The warden, Torvan, has caught him twice. Twice he let him go.

Ravel has a suspicion: the plague does not spread at random. It begins where people tap the most Dem-sap. It is as if someone, or something, is pulling back what was taken in excess. If so, the cure is not a medicine but a reckoning.

On the night of the Skip, Ravel was at the far end of the Arena. The Skip is the moment the Arena stopped for one heartbeat. When the world stood still, Ravel felt something. What he had given away years ago pulled back from his body for a moment. Then it let go again. By the opposite Weight, among pink flowers, stood a woman. The Weights are the two teams' base crystals. The woman had turned her head toward Ravel. Did he smile behind his mask for the first time, or did he weep? Ravel himself does not know.