Curing The Incurable

Father Gustav had eleven men laid out in the infirmary and no argument to make about any of them.

“They are being stricken by some type of toxin that we have never before seen,” he said. “Whatever it is that these Nerubians hold within their venom glands is lethal and incurable. So far we’ve only been able to slow down the poison flowing through the victim’s bodies.”

Slow it down. He said it without dressing it up, which I respected, and which did nothing for the man nearest the door.

The cure had to come out of the venom. There is no other place to get it. So the work was to go northwest into the valley, kill the things that had done this, and cut the glands out of them while they were still warm enough to be worth anything. Ten of them, and every one taken off a corpse that had put a man on a cot behind me.

It is not the strangest errand I have run in Northrend. It may be the most honest. Everything up here is made out of the thing it is meant to fix.

“I will begin the tests on these samples immediately,” Gustav said. “It is my hope that a cure will be found soon.”

I have not had much use for hope in a year. But he was going to sit up all night with those glands and eleven men who could not thank him yet, and I have never once done anything that useful with despair.

Gustav had his samples, but the things crawling up out of the ground west of camp were not slowing down for anyone’s research, and holding that line became Defending The Vanguard.