“Is there anything I shouldn’t touch, sir?”
“Very possibly,” Ruso told him, “but none of us would know. Just don’t go near anything that isn’t a document. How long have you had that cough?”
“Four weeks and two days, sir.”
Having ascertained that the man had not tried figs boiled in hyssop, Ruso glanced at his pharmacist. “When the cough mixture’s made up, let him have some. Gracilis, you’re to take one spoonful every morning and one before you lie down at night.”
He had expected Nisus to get straight back to his table, but instead of returning his attention to the pale green and mauve of the dried hyssop under the scale, the pharmacist was watching as the new clerk glanced over each document before adding it to the correct pile on the barricades around him. Finally Nisus said, “Better than the last one, sir.”
Ruso, taken aback by this unsolicited opinion, ventured, “Can you remember any conversation you had with the last one?
“I told him to stop talking or I would kill somebody.”
Behind the flimsy rampart of administration, Gracilis’s eyes widened.
“I thought you didn’t threaten him?”
“I was measuring out mandrake, sir.”
“Ah,” said Ruso, explaining for the benefit of the alarmed clerk: “Medicinal in small quantities, dangerous in large ones. And did that stop him?”
“He went away, sir.”
Ruso said, “Perhaps he misunderstood.”
The pharmacist might have been considering this possibility, or he might have been staring into space and hoping Ruso would go away so he could get on with measuring out the hyssop.
Ruso tried, “Can you remember anything of what he said?”
Nisus pondered his reply and finally offered, “I wasn’t listening, sir.”
“Well, try to remember what you weren’t listening to.”
Nisus let a long breath out through his nose. The hyssop stirred gently in the bowl with the movement of air. Nisus looked as though he might be about to open his mouth to speak when Ruso’s ears were assaulted with another bout of coughing.
This was how it would be as they went into the winter: sniffly conversations punctuated by involuntary bursts of noise. As if talking to Nisus were not difficult enough. Finally the pharmacist answered, “Something about meeting somebody for a drink.”
“On his last day?”
Nisus shrugged. “On my last day, sir.”
“Yes, of course. Sorry. Did he say who?” Perhaps he would not send that letter to Albanus just yet.
“A man he’d seen somewhere else, sir.”
“Where?”
Nisus did not know.
“Anything else he said that you can remember?”
Nisus paused. “Nothing relevant, sir.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“ ‘Doctor Ruso is just as miserable as my uncle.’ ”
“That,” Ruso assured him, “is a compliment.”
“He wanted a transfer back to Magnis.” Nisus gave a sniff of disapproval. “Said Doctor Valens would be more fun.”
Ruso said, “Not if you have to work for him.”
Nisus, now positively chatty, ventured another unsolicited opinion. “I was expecting better, sir.”
“So was I,” Ruso agreed. “Anything else?”
“Something about recruitment, sir.”
“What, exactly?”
Nisus opened his mouth, thought for a moment, then closed it again. Anything else he might have considered saying was lost beneath the sound of Gracilis coughing, leaving Ruso free to wonder how he was going to trace a drinking companion with no name and no description. Whoever he was, the man hadn’t yet come forward despite all the appeals for information. Which might mean that he was no longer here—or, worse, that he was here but he didn’t want to be found.
Chapter 27
The hyssop had arrived not a moment too soon. A couple of the gate guards were pink-eyed and sniffing, and the watch captain’s voice had slid down several tones to an impressive growl. He too had heard the horn, and Ruso could tell from his expression that he knew what it meant. The guard had been put on alert, and remote work parties had been recalled, but so far nothing seemed to be happening. Certainly nothing that warranted Fabius putting in an appearance.
On the way back to the hospital Ruso reminded himself that there was a vast expanse of countryside out there within range of the horn, and the chances of anyone he knew being in the wrong part of it at the wrong moment were slim. Or they would have been, had the person not been Tilla.
Dodging an orderly carrying a stack of malodorous bedpans, he slipped into Pertinax’s room and closed the door behind him.