Perhaps Adlain was right, and there was sorcery at work. Perhaps the Doctor had an invisible bodyguard who could leave egg-sized bumps on the heads of knaves and slip unnoticed behind us into the dungeon to butcher the butchers and release the Doctor from her manacles. It almost seems like the only rational answer, yet it is the most fanciful of all.
Or perhaps I did sleep, swoon, or become unconscious or whatever you like to call it. Perhaps my certainty is misplaced.
What more is there to tell? Let me see.
Duke Ulresile died, in hiding, in Brotechen province, a few months after the Doctor left us. It was a simple cut from a broken plate, they say, which led to blood poisoning. Duke Quettil died soon afterwards, too, from a wasting disease which affected all the extremities and turned them necrotic. Doctor Skelim was unable to do anything.
I became a doctor.
King Quience ruled another forty years, in exceptionally good health until the very end.
He left only daughters, so now we have a queen. I find this less troubling than I would have thought.
Lately they have taken to calling the Queen’s late father Quience the Good, or sometimes Quience the Great. I dare say one or other will have been settled on by the time anybody comes to read this.
I was his personal physician for the last fifteen years, and the Doctor’s training and my own discoveries made me, by all accounts, the best in the land. Perhaps, indeed, one of the best in the world, for when, partly due to the ambassadorship of gaan Kuduhn, more frequent and reliable links with the archipelagic republic of Drezen were established, we discovered that while our antipodean cousins rivalled and indeed even exceeded us in many ways, they were not quite so advanced in medicine, or indeed anything else, as the Doctor had implied.
Gaan Kuduhn came to live amongst us and became something of a father to me. Later he became a good friend and spent a decade as ambassador to Haspidus. A generous, resourceful and determined man, he confessed to me once that there was only one thing he had ever set his wits to that he had failed to accomplish, and that was trying to track down the Doctor, or indeed hunt down exactly where she had come from.
We could not ask her, for she disappeared.
One night in the sea of Osk, the Plough of the Seas was running before the wind past a line of small, uninhabited islands, bound for Cuskery. Then the glowing green apparition that mariners call chain-fire began to play about the rigging of the ship. All were at first amazed, but then they became in fear of their lives, for not only was the chain-fire brighter and more intense than anything the sailors could recall seeing in the past, but the wind increased suddenly and threatened to tear the sails, bring down the masts or even turn the great galleon over entirely.
The chain-fire disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived, and the wind fell back to the strong and steady force it had been before. By and by, all but those on watch returned to their cabins. One of the other passengers remarked they had not been able to wake the Doctor to come to see the display in the first place, though nobody thought much of this — the Doctor had been invited to dine with the vessel’s captain that evening, but had sent a note declining the invitation, citing an indisposition due to special circumstances.
By the next morning it was realised she was gone. Her door was locked from the inside and had to be forced. The scuttles were screwed open for ventilation, but were too small for her to have squeezed through. Apparently all her belongings, or at any rate the great majority of them, were still there in the cabin. They were packed up and were supposed to be sent on to Drezen, but unsurprisingly they disappeared during the passage.
Gaan Kuduhn, hearing all this, like I, nearly a year later, became fixed upon letting her family know what had happened to her and what good she had done in Haspidus, but for all his enquiries on the island of Napthilia and in the city of Pressel, including some which he made himself on a visit there, and despite the numerous occasions when he seemed on the very brink of discovering her nearest ones, he was always frustrated, and never did find anybody who had actually met or known the woman we knew as Doctor Vosill. Still, I think that was one of the few things that irked him on his death bed, and there was, in balance, an extraordinarily influential and productive life to look back on.
The old Guard Commander Adlain suffered badly towards the end of his allotment of seasons. I think what consumed him was something like the growing disease that had taken the slaver Tunch, all those years earlier.
I was able to alleviate the pain but in the end it became too much for him. My old master told me, he swore truly, that indeed, as I had always suspected, he had been the officer who had rescued me from the wreck of my home and the dead arms of my parents in the smoking ruins of the city of Derla, but that he had taken me to the orphanage in a fit of guilt, for it had been he who had killed my mother and father and burned their house. Now, he said, from the clawing depths of his agony, I would want to kill him.
I chose not to believe him, but I did what I could to hasten his end, which came, peacefully, less than a bell later. His mind must have been going, of course, for if I had believed for a moment what he had told me, I think I would have been tempted to have left him to suffer.
Also before he died Adlain begged me, knowing he was on his death bed, to tell him what had really happened in the torture chamber that evening. He tried to joke that if Quience had not turned the questioning chamber into a wine cellar shortly after the Doctor left us, he might have been tempted to have me interrogated there, just to discover the truth. I think he was joking. It saddened me to have to tell him that I had already, in my reports to him, told him everything that had occurred to the limit of my recollection and descriptive ability.
I have no idea whether he believed me or not.
And so I am old now, and will lie on my own death bed before a few more years are out. The Kingdom is at peace, we prosper, and there is even what the Doctor would, I think, have called Progress. To me fell the immense privilege of being the first Principal of the Medical University of Haspide. I also shouldered the happy duty of being the third President of the Royal College of Physicians, and later served as a city counsellor, when I was in charge of the committee overseeing the construction of the King’s Charitable Hospital and the Infirmary For The Freed. I am proud that one of such lowly birth was able to serve his King and his people in so many different ways during a time of such improvement.
There are still wars, naturally, though not recently in the vicinity of Haspidus. Even yet the three so-called Empires dispute, though with little result save to leave the rest of the world free from Imperial tyranny and so able to thrive in its own various ways. Our navy seems to fight sea battles every now and again, but as they are usually far away and we are as a rule victorious it is as if they do not really count as warfare. Going further back, the barons of Ladenscion had to be taught that who helps them resist one ruler might take it ill when they attempt to forgo all rule. There was civil war in Tassasen, of course, following the death of the Regicide UrLeyn, and King YetAmidous proved a poor leader, though young King Lattens (well, he is not so young any more, I admit, but he still seems young to me) made good most of the ill, and rules well, if quietly, to this day. I am told he is something of a scholar, which is no bad thing in a king, providing it is not taken to excess.
But that was a long time ago. All of this was.
The tale of the concubine Perrund, which forms the counterpoint to my own, and which I have included here with almost no amendment save where her taste foundered occasionally on the skerries of overly ornate prose, I searched out myself, after reading a version in the form of a play which I discovered in another bibliophile’s library here in Haspide.