Authors: Elizabeth Bear
He pulled his hands away. The borrowed strength filled him like rough wine. He stepped back from the battlement, and as he turned—
He startled. A small man stood there, skinny rather than slender, perhaps half Hong-la’s weight even haggard as the surgeon had become. A gray moustache trailed down sunken cheeks to brush the chest of the old man’s plain black cotton coat. Though it was worn shiny at the elbows, it could not disguise his air of authority. Yet he had waited for Hong-la with silent patience.
“Yongten-la,” the Wizard Hong said, bowing carefully. The strength buzzing in him made him dizzy.
The master of Hong-la’s order needed no pretensions, no marks of ceremony to set him apart. Among those with the wit to recognize it, his learning cloaked him in all the majesty he could desire—and to those who could not recognize the truth of what he was, greatest wizard among the Wizards of Tsarepheth, it was just as well he pass unremarked.
Now he studied Hong-la’s countenance, and Hong-la knew what he saw: the too-bright eyes of recharged exhaustion, the healthy color like an ink wash over sallow fatigue, the cropped hair grown long enough to stick out in sweaty spikes around his ears and nape. Completing his inspection, Yongten-la frowned, but he nodded. “You’ll do.”
“I’d better,” Hong-la replied. “You didn’t run for me yourself because you were out of novices.”
It got a tired smile, at least. Yongten-la turned; Hong-la fell in step beside him.
“You were on your way back to the wards?”
Hong-la inclined his head. “Will you accompany me, Old Master?”
“If it will not be an inconvenience,” said the Wizard Yongten, exactly as if he were merely someone’s curious uncle.
Whatever sound escaped Hong-la, it must have reflected his incredulity, because Yongten-la’s smile widened and grew crooked. “Very well,” Yongten-la said. “We will offer what comfort we can.”
“It won’t be long now,” Hong-la said. “Unless we discover something miraculous.”
They descended.
The great stairways of the Citadel were dished from the passage of thousands of feet and hundreds of years. The steps cupped Hong-la’s feet through the flexible soles of his split boots—he’d never gotten used to the Rasan toe-box, and so he had his shoes made specially in the eastern style—and the steps made him feel he was walking in the grasp of hard, unyielding hands.
The plague wards were not within the Citadel itself but under canopies at its base, where the waters of the wild Tsarethi would carry the taint of illness away and pound it against stones like soiled linens until the currents licked it clean. Hong-la and Yongten-la paused by the entrance, where a row of newly arrived patients rested on litters, awaiting triage. The wizards allowed the novices staffing the makeshift gates to drape them in protective canvas coats that could be boiled when they were shed and to wrap their feet in linen pouches. It wasn’t enough, Hong-la knew, but it was better than taking no precautions at all. What puzzled him was that quarantine and isolation seemed to be having no effect in slowing the spread of the plague. It was as if it actually
were
carried on the fog, or by evil spirits of the night air, as any superstitious merchant or noble might insist.
The disease that sickened the plague patients in these pavilioned wards always followed the same course, and the wizards who tended them were keeping them separated by its stage of progress. The outer wards—where most of the triage patients would soon be admitted, the worst-affected having already been found by the litter crews and brought into quarantine—were full of people well enough to sit up, whose breath rasped and wheezed through constricted air passages and whose bodies burned hot with the fervor of their life force fighting the pestilence.
They were tended by novices and a few of the less experienced wizards, but Hong-la made a point of moving among them as well—feeling the foreheads and palpating the auras of men and women in the first stages of the disease. It was possible—even likely—that if a clue toward successful treatment could be found, it might be found in those not yet sick unto death.
In this ward the novices had made an effort to separate tradesmen and minor nobility—anyone, even a prince, who sought the care of the wizards must come into quarantine—but there was still a certain amount of interpersonal friction. The patients felt well enough to squabble: here a prostitute who did not think she should be bedded beside a slave woman, here a farmer’s wife looked upon with scorn by the wife of a cobbler.
Hong-la and Yongten-la moved from pallet to pallet, crouching to examine the patients and rising up again. Hong-la found nothing new: in this early stage, the sick showed signs of weakening life processes—but something else, something contradictory. Over their chests, front and back, the aura of strength and health grew slowly stronger. Stronger, but blacker, so that Hong-la wondered if it was the life processes of the
infection
that made his fingertips tingle.
He’d tried drawing off that excess before, and the patients he’d attempted it with had rapidly worsened and begun to choke like asthmatics. So he did not attempt that now but instead stood and bent almost double to bring his head close to Yongten-la’s for a private consultation.
“It feels like a curse, not an illness,” said Yongten-la against his ear. “Something that draws the life processes of the patient to feed itself. I’d say it was worth looking inside, but … I have not your skill in surgery.”
“If it were the abdomen, and not the heart and lungs, I would look for a volunteer to let me open them,” said Hong-la. He had neutered enough female wizards in his life to be confident in poking around inside a living human belly. Surgery on the pump and bellows that sustained immediate life, however—
He shook his head.
“We are waiting for someone to die,” said Yongten-la.
No treatment had worked—not magic, not herbs, not fungus. Not the arts of manipulation of the life force at which the Wizards of Tsarepheth excelled.
Hong-la said, “We are waiting to perform an autopsy, yes.”
They stepped apart a hand’s breadth, moving toward the inner ward now.
“There’s a minor blessing of this illness,” Yongten-la said bitterly, his voice still far too low to carry. “It’s forced the Bstangpo to seek reconciliation.”
Hong-la was too tired to pretend shock at his master’s ruthlessness. The Bstangpo—the Emperor Songtsan—was not best pleased that the Citadel had chosen to protect the Wizard Samarkar—his sister, once-princess—when she had spirited away Payma, an imperial wife pregnant with the child of the emperor’s younger brother Tsansong, who was to be executed for treason. But Songtsan could not manage an outbreak on this scale without the wizards and their healing skills.
He had not so much come to them cap in hand as offered, magnanimously, not to arrest the Citadel’s litter-bearing novices and healing wizards on sight if they ventured out into the city to tend the sick and enforce quarantine. It was a first step, and Hong-la knew that a warming trend in political relations was easier to maintain once established than to create from scratch.
The air grew gray and chill. The sun was setting, and wizard-lit globes were brought from within the Citadel and hung about the pavilions by robed, hurrying servants. Hong-la was still contemplating what he might have said in response to Yongten-la when a novice—masked in gauze and gowned in that same boiled canvas—staggered up, clumsy in her linen foot shields. “Hong-la,” she said, bowing low.
Hong-la could see the thrust against her mask as she pushed out her tongue in a sign of respect. He would have to break her of that; it was unsafe when confronted with contagion. But even with the power of the Citadel humming numbingly in his fingertips, he was too tired to remonstrate with her now. She cast her eyes at Yongten-la’s feet but managed to restrain herself and address Hong-la here in his area of expertise, despite the daunting presence of the master.
That was good. It showed discipline.
“Wizard Hong,” she said. “Come, hurry. The tinker Pemba is—”
She hesitated.
“Dying?” Hong-la suggested.
“I did not presume to know his fate,” said the novice, whose name was Sengemo. Her eyes stayed determinedly fixed on the ground between the wizards. “But Master—I would hurry.”
“Lead us,” Hong-la said.
Hong-la suspected that Pemba had brought the illness to Tsarepheth with him. A traveling tradesman, he had been the very first person in the city to sicken; it seemed entirely too tidy that he should also be the first to pass. But that was this disease in all ways—unnaturally tidy, unnaturally uniform in its course and speed of progression.
The Wizards Hong and Yongten chased the hurrying novice as she wound through the wards of sicker women and men. These patients were not well enough to fuss overmuch about whom they had been set beside—or even notice—and merchants lay beside beggars, all whistling each breath out as if through reeds. Their arms and legs were swaddled, their chests bared to ease the painful heat that grew within. Some were dosed with poppy; some had chosen instead to bear the agony, or were far enough gone in delirium that wizards had made the difficult decision to husband scarce resources for those who would benefit more.
Black and violet shadows grew between their ribs, beneath the breasts of the women and across the pectoral muscles of the men. Hong-la thought that bruising was a sign of internal bleeding, perhaps the rupture or dissolution of the lung tissue. Once it began, the faces of the victims grew yellow-gray beneath the varied pigments of their skins, their lips and nail beds the color tale-tellers called blue, which was in truth a horrid bruised purple-gray. That fetid life process burned strongly near the hearts of these patients, while their own strength ebbed from their limbs and minds like that of a man who drowns.
The victims grew worse and worse, the course of the disease more and more advanced, until the wizards and their guiding novice reached the bedside of Pemba the tinker. Another wizard—Anil-la, who was young but skilled—had crouched there, one hand laid flat on Pemba’s sweat-slicked crown. A cup and pipette were set nearby: someone had been trickling honey water into the sick man’s mouth.
Hong-la hunkered beside Anil-la. The patient’s breath—or breathlessness—had moved beyond wheezing and into a teakettle whistle like nothing the wizard and surgeon had heard before. Pemba’s chest rose and fell like a bellows. When Hong-la laid a hand against his nostrils, he could feel the suck and push of air in the spaces between his fingers with each desperate gasp.
But the air he was finally moving seemed to do Pemba no good: his lips gleamed the color of pewter; his protruding tongue was like rotten meat. Hong-la pinched Pemba’s fingertips and poked his gums. Where Hong-la had pressed they whitened and stayed pale. Pemba’s lids lay nigh closed. Through the clotted lashes, Hong-la saw dull slits of eye. When he drew a lid back with his thumb, though, a tremor shook Pemba’s body, and his pupil contracted like a flinch. He was conscious, but too weak for want of air to curl a finger or blink an eye.
That moved Hong-la to more pity than anything else.
“Poppy,” he said, and Anil-la reached for a vial at his belt. He added a drop or two of tincture to that cup and stirred with the pipette. When he held the pipette over Pemba’s mouth and let the water flow in, it trickled back out the corners.
“Rub the tincture on his gums,” Hong-la said. The blood was flowing so poorly—Pemba’s pulse thready and so fast Hong-la could not count the individual heartbeats—it still might have no effect. But Hong-la could imagine, too vividly, the patient’s panic and distress and utter helplessness. He could not do nothing.
And so Hong-la told himself until, with the sound of cracking cartilage, Pemba’s breath stopped—just stopped, though Hong-la could see the contraction of his abdomen as his diaphragm struggled—and his throat began to swell.
Even the Wizard Yongten, standing aside to give the surgeons room to practice, made a noise of dismay.
Black blood and crimson blood—threaded through slick, shiny mucous with stinking strands of yellow-green pus or phlegm—welled up Pemba’s windpipe and slid gelatinously from the corners of his mouth, bubbling from a slack jaw as Anil-la snatched his hands back. Pemba thrashed, his body arching from feet to shoulders, hips lifted and arms flung limp at his sides. His jaw gaped—not drooping, now, but thrust wide by the force of the matter welling from his mouth as if from some spring in the Song hells of Hong-la’s childhood stories. The stench of putrescence made Hong-la’s mouth water and his belly clench.
Hong-la would have recoiled—his muscles shivered with the desire to scramble back—but he had seen the foulness of burst appendixes and suppurating wounds. This was not so much worse.
Not so much.
He grasped Pemba’s jaw in his left hand, levered a wooden wedge from his belt into the hinge of it, and dug with frantic claws into the rising tide of slime. Ropes of mucus broke around his fingers, stretching and slick—until he brushed something hard and moving—
rattling
—in Pemba’s distended throat. He grabbed for it as he would grab the slick skull of a half-born child, trying to find a place to hook a fingertip—
It slid into his palms. Black, glistening. Draped in membranous webs of mucus and blood and stinking phlegm. A jointed, chitinous thing that blinked slime-veiled eyes and snapped ragged needle teeth at Hong-la’s face.
He should have held it. He should have grasped its ankles and swung it against the tentpole, against a nearby stone. He should have crushed its skull, the glaring yellow eyes it turned on him, and dissected the remains.
He recoiled, tumbling backward. It kicked off from his palms, needlepoint talons pinpricking his hands—and launched itself into the air and was gone.
What welled from the sides of Pemba’s wedged jaw now was clean blood, thick and dark from lack of air. As Hong-la rolled to his knees, holding his pus-smeared hands wide, he watched the tide stem to a trickle, then fail.
Mercifully, Pemba was dead when the second demonspawn followed its clutchmate into the sky.