Lung Fever

Overview

Lung fever is the winter's killer. A cough that should have passed instead goes deep, the chest fills, and within a few days the household is sitting up through the night to see whether the fever breaks. Every people that breathes air knows it, and every grandmother knows the crisis night. Grown and well-fed people mostly live through it; the old and the newborn very often do not.

Cause

A sickness too small to see settles in the lungs and fills them with heat and fluid. It rarely starts in a healthy chest. It follows the winter cough, a soaking and a chill, a long illness in bed, a wound fever, or simple age, when the chest is already weak and the body cannot clear what it breathes in.

Who It Strikes

All the breathing peoples take it. It is worst in the old, in infants, in the hungry, and in anyone lying long abed after a wound or a birth. Crowded winter rooms, where the cough passes freely, make more of it. Thaluren on land and Kavari breathe air too and are not spared. The Wrought, who do not breathe, never take it.

Signs and Course

It begins with a shaking chill, often in someone who already has a cough. Then comes a high fever, a pain in the side that stabs with each breath, and a cough that brings up rust-coloured or yellow phlegm. Breathing grows quick and shallow. The patient cannot lie flat, and the lips and nails may go dusky.

The crisis comes between the fifth and the seventh day. In a case that mends, the fever breaks all at once in a drenching sweat, the patient sleeps, and the breath slows; weakness and a cough last for weeks. In a case that worsens, the fever climbs, the patient becomes confused, the breath rattles, and the sickness reaches the blood. After that most die within a day or two.

Contagion

The fever itself seldom passes from one sick person to the next. What passes, by breath and close air, is the coughing sickness that brings it on, so one case in a house is often followed by another among its old and its young.

Treatment and Its Limits

Household care does the most: warmth, propping the patient upright, steam from a basin, broth and water, and a bitter tea of fever-bark (see Herbs). Rest matters, because a patient who rises too soon takes the fever again.

A Vital healer can ease a dangerous heat with Fever Ease, and a plague healer can keep the fever from reaching the blood with Sickness Gate, though gating contains the sickness and does not cure it. Both are paid for in someone's lifeforce, and both work best between members of one people. Breath Steady calms the panic of a patient fighting for air but clears nothing from the lungs. A priest's Cure Affliction can turn a case, if a priest can be found before the crisis.

Mortality

Most grown adults who are fed, warm, and nursed survive. Among the very old it kills perhaps one in three who take it, and among infants more. Many survivors keep a lasting shortness of breath, and some a cough that never quite goes.

Lore and Belief

Most peoples blame cold air in the chest: sleeping in a draught, wet clothes, a window left open at night. Households keep the crisis night with a lamp lit until the fever breaks, and many say that whoever is watching at the turn must not sleep, or the sick will slip away with them. The sweat of the breaking fever is welcomed as the sickness leaving, which is close to the truth.

In the Medieval Era

Lung fever is common in every winter and in the cold wet spring, wherever families crowd round one fire. Most cases are nursed at home with folk healers' teas and steam (see Medieval Ordinary Access Reference). Deeper magical care belongs to the town healers, the plague healers of the Red Mercy Hospices, and the priests, and it rarely reaches a village in time.

Where It Appears

• Vital Magic: Sickness Gate
• the Writers' Guide chapter The Schools of Magic