Wednesday, August 10, 2005

We started moving again, a jarring lurch, then a creaking and groaning of ancient machinery yoked to a palpable sigh of relief, and for an instant I thought we were going backward. It was just a trick of the mind, however, a deficiency of the senses conceived purely to distract.

“So who’s this doctor?” I pressed, wondering how Muse could possibly have so many connections.

“If anyone can cure me,” Muse replied confidently, “it’s this guy.”

“Yeah?”

“We go way back,” she fondly recalled. “He was considered the best physician in all nine boroughs. People–”

“Does he have a name?” I interrupted, peeved and a little jealous.

“I was about to get to that,” she said impatiently. “He had a real name, but one day he invented a small green pill that could cure anything. It made him famous, so much so that people began calling him Doc Caplet.”

“I’ve heard of him. He dropped off the map all of a sudden. Are we getting some of this wonderdrug for you?”

“No,” Muse continued, “because he destroyed every last pill. There was a patient who came to him one morning, and this woman had the Beryl Rot. Those caplets killed her. To this day he still won’t say what happened.”

I shot her a skeptical look.

“Are you sure we can trust this guy? He doesn’t sound all that useful.”

“Wrong. He was brilliant. He’s still brilliant,” she shot back. “More importantly, he’s the only one who knows about my condition.”

“If this is the only way,” I conceded, “then it’s the only way. How do we find him?”

“There’s a hamlet in the Plains. We need to go to an inn there, ‘The Modest Rube.’ His office is upstairs.”