Mathieu's journey across the city was a pilgrimage of pain and terror.
Every step was an agony, his crushed hand sending waves of nausea up his arm, but the true horror was the corruption spreading from it.
The coldness was rising, a tide of death that seemed to be freezing his blood.
The black veins were more pronounced now, a hideous network visible even in the faint light of the gas lanterns. He clutched the note the young Leo had given him to his chest, Catherine's words his only talisman against the despair that threatened to overwhelm him.
Help is coming. I am watching over you. He repeated these words like a prayer, clinging to the promise of his Oracle, his goddess.
He finally found the address on a respectable but dark street in the artisans' district, a discreet brass plaque reading simply:
"Dr. Aris Thorne, Physician." The house was clean, quiet, and seemed perfectly ordinary.
But when Mathieu knocked on the door with his good fingers, he felt a chill that had nothing to do with his wound. The air around the house was sterile, strangely devoid of the city's living smell.
The door was opened by a man of about forty, tall, thin, and impeccably elegant. He wore a pristine white linen shirt and metal-rimmed glasses.
His blond hair was cut short, and his face would have been handsome if it weren't completely devoid of emotion. His eyes were a pale blue, as cold and analytical as a deep-sea fish. This was Doctor Aris Thorne.
"I received a message," Thorne said simply, his voice calm and precise. He looked Mathieu up and down, his gaze stopping on the clerk's injured hand and sweating face. "Come in. Quickly."
Mathieu stumbled inside, and Thorne closed the door behind him.
The entryway was that of a well-to-do physician, but the strong smell of antiseptic and chemicals was mingled with another, fainter but more unsettling scent: an odor of raw meat and damp earth.
"On the table," Thorne ordered.
Mathieu lay down on a metal examination table, shivering with cold and fear. Thorne wasted no time with questions. He took Mathieu's injured hand, his long, cold fingers palpating it with clinical precision.
"Interesting," he murmured to himself.
Through her tenuous link with Mathieu, Catherine observed the scene. She saw Doctor Thorne's threads, a fascinating mixture.
A bright gray thread of pure medical skill. A dirty gold thread, snarled with avarice. And most importantly, a sickly green thread, the color of abnormal growth and decay.
The Pathway of Desecration.
This was him.
Thorne did not merely examine the wound. He closed his eyes, and Catherine felt her own psychic vision brush up against another. Thorne was reading the wound, not with threads, but in another, more visceral way.
He was sensing the corrupted biology, the foreign essence that had been implanted within it.
"The imprint of an adept of Pride," Thorne declared, opening his eyes.
"A Sequence 8, perhaps 7. It's effective. This is not a poison; it is an imposition. A seal of domination that seeks to debase your very essence, to rewrite it into something… simpler. In a word, a beast. Within a week, your mind would have begun to crumble. Within a month, you would have been walking on all fours and barking at the moon."
Mathieu let out a whimper of pure terror.
"Fortunately for you," Thorne continued, unperturbed,
"the corruption of Pride is rigid and predictable. My art, on the other hand, is far more flexible."
He turned to a cabinet filled with strange jars and instruments.
The treatment was nothing like Mathieu could have imagined. Thorne did not clean the wound. Instead, he took a jar containing oily black leeches and applied several to the dark veins on Mathieu's arm. The creatures immediately began to pulse, sucking not blood, but the grayish corruption itself.
Then, he prepared a poultice. Catherine, watching, recognized some of the herbs, but others were things she had never seen, pale fungi and mosses that almost seemed to twitch.
He mixed it all with a paste that smelled like the fresh earth of a grave. He applied the mixture to the crushed hand. Mathieu's pain intensified for a moment, then morphed into a sensation of intense cold, as if the venom of Pride and the remedy of Desecration were doing battle in his flesh.
For an hour, Thorne worked in silence, replacing the leeches gorged with corruption, reapplying the poultice. Finally, the black veins stopped spreading.
The sickly color of the skin began to recede, giving way to a violent but normal-looking bruise.
"I have halted the progression," Thorne announced, cleaning his instruments.
"The corruption has been purged. However, the bones in your hand are shattered, and the essence of the curse has touched your soul. You will heal, but you will never be quite the same. A scar will remain. Not on your skin, but on your being."
He bandaged Mathieu's hand with clean gauze.
"The initial payment was generous," he said, turning around. He was holding the second note, the one Catherine had written to Mathieu. He read it, then looked up and stared fixedly at an empty corner of the room, as if he knew exactly where Catherine's point of view was located.
"Your 'instrument' will live… for now," Thorne said to the empty air. His tone was calm, but laden with a new meaning.
"The gold coin is an appreciated down payment. But my services, especially when they involve cleaning up the messes left by high-ranking adepts, require a more… personal form of payment."
He carefully folded Catherine's note and slipped it into his pocket.
"The knowledge you possess, Oracle… the nature of your vision… that is far more valuable than gold. The next time you require my services, the price will be information. An exchange between adepts. When you are ready to bargain in earnest, you know where to find me."
Catherine, in her library, severed the contact, her heart pounding.
She had saved her pawn. But in doing so, she hadn't just hired an underworld doctor. She had just sat down at a new poker table, opposite an intelligent and ambitious player who had immediately seen her cards and just raised the stakes.