Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show Read Online Free

She flipped through the pages, pretending to read each one. “What’s this?”
    “A gift, from the Empress,” Al-Ashmar said.
    “What does it teach?”
    Al-Ashmar smiled. It was a retelling of several fables from his homeland—four of them, all simple tales of the spirits of the southern lands and how they helped or harmed wayward travelers.
    “Nothing,” he finally said. “Now off to bed.”
    Mia ignored him, as she often did on his first warning. “What’s this?”
    Al-Ashmar snatched the book away and stared at the scribbles Mia had been looking at. He hadn’t noticed it earlier. He’d had too much to do, and since it had seemed so innocuous, he’d left it until he had more time to sift through its pages. On the last page were the words save her written in an appalling, jittery hand. The letters were oversized as well, as if writing any smaller either was impossible or would have rendered the final text unreadable.
    The Empress, surely. But why? Save who?
    And from what?
    Mia dropped from her stool and fought next to him for a view. “Enough, Mia. To bed.”
    After tucking the children in for the night, Al-Ashmar stayed up, nursing the tonic and thinking. Save her . Save Bela? But that made no sense. He had already been summoned, had already been directed to heal the Empress’s cat. Why write a note for that?
    Then again, there was no logical reason that the cat would have the worm. Coincidence was too unlikely. So it had to have been intentional. But who would dare infect the Empress’s cat? Did the Empress fear that the next attempt would be bolder? Was something afoot even now?
    Bela, after all, was the Empress’s ninth cat—her last—and when she died, so would the Empress, and her closest servants with her. That might explain Djazir’s tense mood, might even explain Rabiah’s sullenness. But it wouldn’t explain the smile on the Empress’s lips. For whatever reason, it seemed most logical that the Empress had arranged this.
    Al-Ashmar paged through the tale in which the jagged words had been written. It was a tale of a child that had wandered too far and was destined to die alone in the mountains. But then a legendary shepherd found her and brought her to live with him—him and his eighty-nine children, others who’d been found wandering in the same manner.
    Hours later, Al-Ashmar added the clove juice and a honey-ginger elixir to the tonic and left it to steep. After his mind struggled through a thousand dead-end possibilities, Father Sleep finally found him.
     
    The following day, Al-Ashmar was led to the Empress’s garden. Strands of wispy clouds marked the blue sky as a pleasant breeze rattled the palm leaves. Bela sat at the foot of the Empress’s throne, which had been moved from inside the cold and empty room. The cat lapped at the cream laced with the tonic.
    Odd, Al-Ashmar thought. Cats usually detested the remedy no matter how carefully it was hidden. Al-Ashmar’s other patients, however, were not so pliant. Nearby, Rabiah took a deep breath and downed the last of her phial. The eunuchs, thank goodness, had swallowed theirs at a word from Rabiah.
    “Bela will need two more doses today,” Al-Ashmar said, “and three more tomorrow.”
    Djazir stared at his half-empty phial, a look of complete disgust on his face.
    “Please,” Al-Ashmar said to Djazir, “I know it is distasteful, but you need to drink the entire phial.”
    “I will drink it, physic, but we will not subject the Empress to such a thing.”
    Al-Ashmar hid his eyes from Djazir. “Of course you know best, but if the Empress has the worm, the effects will only worsen.”
    The Empress spoke to Rabiah. Al-Ashmar, listening more closely than the day before, could still understand not a single word.
    “Of course, Exalted,” Rabiah said, and she retrieved the phial meant for the Empress.
    Djazir gritted his jaw as Rabiah tilted the phial into the Empress’s mouth. The Empress’s eyes watered, and she coughed,