‘No, sir …’
‘This type of chigger whose larvae are gnawing everyone’s flesh? I understand they can be asphyxiated through the application of a compress.’
‘Yes, sir …’
‘The hookworm is worse now? The ringworm numbers? Surely not the tapeworms! Bad for morale, those. Especially when they’re
vomited
up during communal meals. Or is it that worm that you have to pull out of the flesh of the leg? One specimen was as long as the fellow carrying it was tall, if I remember correctly.’
‘Fascinating, I’m sure. If I may, sir …’
‘Yes? What is it?’
‘I suggest very strongly that you come and see for yourself …’
Golan turned to the crowd of officers and staff waiting outside the awning. He gestured to them with both arms. ‘Seeing as I have nothing more pressing to attend to?’
The ranking surgeon’s tongue emerged to lick his cracked lips. He swayed, something even more desperate, yet firmly suppressed, pinching his gaze. ‘Please … sir. It is really … quite … pressing.’
Golan clasped his hands at his back. ‘Oh, very well!’ He glowered at the importuning surgeon. ‘Only out of scholarly interest, mind you.’
The patient was a young lad on a table alone in a private tent. He was perhaps in his teens – it was hard for Golan to tell exactly, as early illnesses or starvation can blunt an individual’s development. Skinny, emaciated even, he was one of the labourers. A grimed rag wrapped his loins, but other than that he was naked. He appeared to be drugged into unconsciousness. Leather straps held his ankles and wrists. A leather gag covered his mouth. Golan raised his brows at the restraints.
‘He would have killed himself from the pain,’ the surgeon explained.
‘Pain?’
By way of answer, the surgeon indicated that Golan should more closely examine the lad’s body. Frowning, Golan leaned closer. After a moment, what he discerned all over the lad’s limbs and torso made even him, a trained Thaumaturg, flinch away.
Things
writhed just beneath the lad’s skin. Long worm-like lengths twisted and squirmed all up and down his legs, arms, stomach and chest.
‘What is this?’ Golan breathed, impressed. Even a touch fearful.
The ranking surgeon’s expression was flat and dull, as if the man had been driven beyond all feeling, all empathy. ‘They are as you suggested. A form of worm infestation. Similar, I believe, to the infamous Ganari-worm that has been eradicated from our lands, only a far more virulent offshoot. Unlike its cousins, this one does not spare its hosts. These worms are consuming the lad from the inside out.’
At that moment Golan wanted nothing more than to flee the tent.
He
even felt his stomach tightening in nausea – a feeling he’d thought squeezed from him long ago. Pride in his position, however, demanded that he display nothing. Thus he simply nodded in what he hoped resembled scholarly appreciation of an interesting phenomenon. He clasped his hands at his back. ‘They were in the water, then?’ he asked, his voice a touch hoarse and faint.
‘I believe so. As far as I can establish, this lad was among those who assembled the rafts. He and his coworkers spent a great deal of time standing in the water.’
Golan’s throat choked almost closed, and he grasped the table edge behind him to keep from falling.
All the labourers. And the soldiers. Had they not all taken it in turns to wade in to help?
The surgeon was studying Golan closely, a bloodied hand raised to help. He appeared to understand that his commander now grasped the severity of the situation and nodded, grimly. ‘Indeed.’
‘We must find the infected. Isolate them.’
The surgeon’s face remained bleak. ‘I would think it more of a mercy if you would order the yakshaka to—’ The man gaped, his gaze fixed beyond Golan, his eyes growing huge.
Golan heard wet things slipping and slithering to the ground behind him. The tiny hairs of his arms stood up straight and icy fingers traced their nails up his spine. His training took hold immediately and he turned, steadily, having withdrawn into Thaumaturg calmness of mind.
The youth’s body was a horror of thousands of wriggling worms, all writhing free of his flesh from every inch of skin. They even emerged squirming and questing blindly from his eyes, ears, mouth and nostrils. They slithered free to tumble and fall and snake off under the lips of the tent.
Golan heard the surgeon fall insensate behind him. Coolly, he raised a hand and the sagging shape of bones and limp skin amid its forest of twisting parasites burst into sizzling blue and white flames. It was the least he could do for the lad, though, in truth, it was more like housecleaning.
He turned to the prone form of the surgeon, used his toe to flick aside a few of the worms nosing his body. ‘Get up, man,’ he urged. ‘We’ve work to do. We must segregate the infected. Come.’
The surgeon groaned, flailing. Golan nudged him with his toe. ‘Come, man. We—’
Golan broke off, for distantly, across the encampment, here and there, rose shrill screams of agony and uncomprehending terror – the shrieks of those being eaten alive from within.
* * *
In the quiet of the gloomy chamber Osserc blinked rapidly, coming to himself. He peered about quickly, a touch panicked. All was as before: the monkey creature lay asleep at the table, its head down, snoring contentedly, drool dripping from its open mouth. Across the gouged slats of the tabletop, Gothos still sat immobile. His knotted hands lay flat before him. His roped iron-grey hair hung like moss to his shoulders. It was as if the Jaghut was carved from granite.
He’d been thinking of his youth among the Tiste and the halls of his father’s hold. All so different from now. So much lost. It was all he could do to hold on to even a fraction of it. He’d always been of the mind that one must look back to know how to proceed. Yet now this creature sitting opposite seemed to be suggesting that holding on to the past – being guided by the past – was wrong. A self-limiting trap.
Odd to hear such things coming from a Jaghut, of all creatures. Though they always did have a pragmatic streak. For his part he never truly understood them. Perhaps there can be no true understanding between the races. A downturned smile pulled at his lips. The historical record attests that such relations hold little promise for understanding.
Very well. The lesson is to be guided by the past without being trapped by it. A pithy homily. Why be guided by lessons of the past? For wisdom, of course. Ah. Here we approach the meat of the matter. Wisdom.
Not something usually associated with his name.
Anomander, now, that was another thing. Wise beyond his years, everyone thought him. The wisdom of Anomander. Whereas Osserc … well, few mentioned wisdom and Osserc in the same breath.
What, then, had he gathered? Knowledge. A great deal of knowledge. He had wandered the very shores of creation. Tasted the blood of the Eleint. Plumbed the depths of the Abyss itself. Studied the verges of the Realms. He had questioned the Azathanai repeatedly – though he came away with little to show for it. And now he had even investigated the Azath. Few could boast of as thorough an interrogation of the underlying truths of existence.
Yet what had all this study and probing and ruthless examination taught him? He considered his hands on the table before him. He turned them over to inspect the lined palms.
Only his appalling ignorance.
He might have assembled a truly impressive archive of facts,
yet
one area remained a dark chasm before him. Self-knowledge. The sort of exploration that inflicted true pain. Was this why he’d so … studiously … avoided it? And how then could he be puzzled as to why he did not understand anyone else when he did not know himself? Some would argue that was plainly obvious.
He remembered, then, the time L’oric had been trapped within the shrinking fragment of a shattered realm. He’d had to rescue the fool. Then, he’d felt only anger at the lad’s stupidity, resentment at the intrusion and embarrassment that one of his should have been so careless. Of course he’d communicated none of this to L’oric.
Now, reflecting back, it struck him that what the lad had been doing was in fact emulating him. That, if anyone was to blame, it was he for bringing into being such exploratory recklessness and pushing of boundaries. For his utter neglect and lack of guidance.
Osserc felt a hot sharp stabbing in his chest and his breath came short and tight. He clutched the wooden slats as if he would fall. Across the table Gothos’ gaze, hidden deep within his curtain of hair, shifted, glittering like sunken wells.
If this be the price of self-knowledge I want none of it. It is just too much … Not the errors of the forefathers revisited. Not that. Too painful by far
.
So – is the judgement that I have learned nothing? That I stand now as an even poorer example than my own poor father? Perhaps so. Perhaps so
.
The eternal question then, that we return to once again, is how to proceed from this datum
…
The head of the monkey creature, the Nacht, popped up from the table. Blinking, it peered about suspiciously. Across the table Gothos’ hands drew in closer to his body. The talon-like nails raked lines in the wood.
‘What is it?’ Osserc asked. His voice sounded shockingly loud in the silence.
The Jaghut turned his head to the hall leading to the front door. ‘Something …’
Osserc then heard a sound. It appeared to be coming from the front – a scratching and tearing noise. It was oddly dim, or muted. He stood away from the table and headed up the hall. The sound, whatever it might be, was coming from outside. Osserc regarded the barrier of the thick planks of the front door, the beaten iron handle. He turned back to peer up the hall; Gothos had stood as well and now regarded him, his arms crossed.
Osserc gestured to the door. ‘Shall I?’
The Jaghut shrugged eloquently. ‘It is not up to me.’
Very well
. He tried the door: it opened, creaking loudly. Outside it was an overcast night. It had been raining. The glow of the moon and the Visitor behind the massed clouds gleamed from the wet slates of the walkway. Mist obscured the surrounding stone buildings. The sea broke surging against the nearby shore.
A ragged human figure lay on the ground. A trail of churned-up dirt lay behind it. The trail ended at the steaming heap of a disturbed burial barrow.
Osserc called up the hall: ‘Something’s escaping. Or tried.’
Gothos approached. He peered out past Osserc’s shoulder. ‘Indeed?’
While they stood watching, the figure thrust out an arm ahead of itself to grasp a fistful of grass and dirt to pull, heaving itself one agonizing hand’s-breadth along. It looked like a man, but stick-thin, in rags and caked in dirt.
‘Know you it, or him?’
Gothos scratched his chin with a thick yellowed nail. His upthrusting Jaghut tusk-like teeth, so close now, appeared to bear the scars of once having been capped. ‘One of the more recently interred.’
‘How is it he’s got this far? Is the House weakening?’
Gothos shook his head. ‘No … Not in this case.’
The jangle of metal announced someone jogging down the street. He appeared from the mist as an iron-grey shape in heavy banded armour. A battered helmet boasting wide cheek-guards completely obscured his face. He looked quite formidable, barrel-chested, with a confident rolling bear-like gait. Osserc was mildly surprised to see such a martial figure here on this small backwater island. The soldier, or guard, took up a post near the low wall surrounding the House’s grounds – the point that the crawling escapee appeared to be making for.
Osserc and Gothos continued to watch while the escapee made his agonizingly slow way towards the wall. Osserc noted that although the many roots writhing like mats across the yard grasped at him they seemed unable to retain their grip as he slipped onward through their hold.
‘I admire his … persistence,’ Gothos murmured. ‘But he is called …’
‘Called?’ Osserc asked, but the Jaghut did not respond.
The wretched figure made the wall and, by scrabbling at the piled fieldstones, pulled himself upright. He was wearing tattered dirt-caked rich silks that might have once been black. Thin baldrics that
might
once have held weapons criss-crossed his back. His hair was black, touched by grey. He was a slim, aristocratic-looking fellow.
The moment he straightened the soldier ran him through. The broad heavy blade of the soldier’s longsword emerged from the man’s back then was withdrawn, scraping on bone.
The escapee did not so much as flinch. He remained standing. Shaking his head, he gave a long low chuckle that sounded quite crazed.
‘Let him go,’ Gothos called. ‘The House has no hold over him.’
‘How in the name o’ Togg could that be?’ the soldier answered in a rough, parade-ground bark.
The figure had thrown a leg over the wall; the soldier shield-bashed him to tumble back on to the ground where he lay laughing a high giggle as if the situation was hilarious.
‘Let him go, Temper,’ Gothos called once more, sounding bored. ‘You cannot stop him.’
‘Wait a damned minute,’ the soldier, Temper, growled. He pointed an armoured finger. ‘I know this bastard. It’s Cowl! There’s no way I’m lettin’ this ghoul free in
my
town!’