Müde

Müde is the Drowsy Duke Hospitalar of the Chantry of Tranquility, a hobgoblin, and the man who runs the hospital at Haudh-Gwenn. The office is the pair of Baku’s Drowsy Duchess of Faith, and the two hold an equal say, because nothing about the succession beneath the Slumbering Queen was ever formalized. The party call him the Duke.

Mikhail trained under both of them, and they taught him different things. Müde had the medicine: wounds, the body, the field, the ward. Baku had the mind and the spirit, which is counsel and night terrors, and not magic. He put that on the table himself the night Beltran died, pulling Mikhail by the arm into the critical-ward hallway and refusing to take the Valiant Few’s prayers and hopes for an answer. “I’m speaking to somebody who was trained underneath me.” He wanted the death confirmed, and got it.

It was Müde who gave two thirds of the Chantry’s beds and the whole of its priority to Beltran’s guard. It kept the doors open, and it is the reason Baku opened a second clinic in a poor quarter and did not tell him. He put the bargain to the full council and pressed as hard as he could without doing more damage than it was worth, and since Haudh-Gwenn does not vote in the open the way Loshev does, he cannot say who backed him. He does not dress up whose hand it came from: the thread the order is holding on by was handed to them by that filth Beltran.

Through the rising he locked the hospital to the critically injured only and put Mikhail on the door. There is standing training for it, and he recited it: aid to anyone who asks, but only the critical inside, because a wartime hospital is a known killing ground and a feigned scratch is how a murderer reaches a patient. No blood is shed indoors except from a wound that arrived with the man carrying it, or from necessary surgery. “That’s your fight. Keep it outside my door.” He was blunt about who would be coming through it. Whatever the party had thought of the mob before that day, it was now their rabble.

Since the Slumbering Queen was taken out of the city the whole place has shifted under him. The flock thinned, the skilled hands left, faith wavered, and in one week they took more avoidable amputations and left more wounds untreated than in the year before it. Mikhail told him, in her own chambers, what the reagent behind her miracles actually was: souls, burned as fuel and destroyed rather than merely spent. He did not flinch. Chantry doctrine holds that at death the mind goes into the dreaming and the soul persists there forever, and he would not presume to know what is granted or denied the dead. What he read in it was ancestors granting one last blessing to their descendants. “If you must sever a foot to save the leg, you sever the foot.” He came within a sentence of comparing Mikhail to Beltran, was warned off it cold, and granted the three of them standing priority at the hospital anyway, on the grounds that Isara had delivered them to mend something else, whether the curses of Idir or the corruption. He asked one thing back, and only one: is she alive. He was told yes and nothing further.

He holds the Chantry’s right to sit with the council in her absence. She cannot come back while the ooze exists, and the choice is not hers.