This wasn't one of the symptoms he'd expected.
Tuberculosis patients usually had a low-grade fever. Some didn't develop a fever at all, or showed no noticeable symptoms. But this fever—the one that had left Professor Brimmer hesitant and at a loss for words during their discussion—had arisen without any obvious cause, creeping up unnoticed while Kraft was focused on the examination.
"Your Grace, can you hear me?" Kraft held up two fingers and moved them from side to side in front of the Duke's eyes. The range of his eye movements was narrow, and they were trembling uncontrollably, drifting about as if some unpredictable sensory stimulus were acting on his vestibular system, sending signals that made it impossible for his eyes to adjust to the right position.
"..." Words formed behind his lips but broke apart before they could escape, dissolving into meaningless syllables in a jumbled order that couldn't be reconstructed, like an unsettling, garbled spell.
Without a thermometer, Kraft placed a hand on the patient's forehead to estimate his temperature. The fever had come on fiercely, but by touch it was still in the moderate range—not high enough to cause such rapid impairment of consciousness and function, and the symptoms shouldn't have appeared in sync like this.
That overturned Kraft's first impression. The impaired consciousness wasn't caused by the fever; the two symptoms were concurrent.
Wilbert and Fernand showed no sign of panic or surprise at the change. Clearly, this wasn't the first time it had happened, and the episodes were self-limiting. Kraft pressed two fingers to the man's wrist. The pulse was rapid and weak, like a failing respiratory system trying to compensate by increasing the rate of its contractions.
It was a foolish strategy. Once all reserves were exhausted, the body would quickly pass from compensation