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His heart was pounding and he was tripping over his feet. It had been a long time since Caedmon had tried to use ikke bewege more than twice in an hour. And now it looked like he might have to use it a third time just to get to the wall. He could see the battlements from the grubby alley where he was sitting, but two white-robed soldiers were standing only twenty feet away, gossiping about the ladies of the evening they had known and betting which of them would be the first to succumb to the plague. Every time their conversation seemed to flag, and Caedmon thought they might move on and continue their nightly rounds, they remembered one more tedious joke, or another sure cure for the plague, which someone had heard from a friend of a friend. And then the conversation continued. Caedmon listened, gritting his teeth and trying to decide exactly how much magysk power he had at the moment. And which would take more power: transporting himself to the wall, or knocking out both the guards?
Just when he was starting to think that he might have to try the latter option, one of the soldiers said that he knew a man who would sell them tobacco and ale at that hour, and they moved off, into the night. Caedmon took one last look around to make sure there was no one watching him from the darkened windows along the alley, and then he closed his eyes. He concentrated on the wall, picturing its exact shape. He had helped rebuild that particular section of the city defenses, and he knew the wall was more than twenty feet thick at the base. That was too far. He wasn’t going to make it in a single jump. That was a bit discouraging; he had been the one who had set the time at 10:00. In his mind’s eye, he saw the other three standing around at the crossroads and talking about how you really couldn’t blame Caedmon for being late, since he was so old.
He pictured the road on the near side of the wall and whispered the words, “ikke bewege.” There was an odd, uncomfortable feeling like being drawn through the neck of a bottle, and then he was standing right up against the cold, black stone of the city wall. Or rather, he was leaning, collapsing against it. That last jump had nearly exhausted his stores of magy. So he retreated to the darkened portico of a nearby house and waited for his power to return. Once he was sitting, however, he started to fall asleep, and so, despite the danger of being seen, he took to walking up and down the street to keep himself awake.
Had this been easier when he was younger? It was hard to say. He hadn’t made any scientific measurements of how far he could transport himself or how long it took between each jump. But he flattered himself that he was just about as powerful as he had ever been. No, what made him feel old and useless wasn’t the transport spells. It was what he had learned in their brief, angry interview with the duke. Much though it pained Caedmon to admit it, the duke had a point. His grace was a power-hungry warlord, to be sure. His wife was a dangerous fanatic, and their closest advisor, the fake “doctor,” was a charlatan. But they weren’t necessarily wrong about the state of the country. “I have spent centuries saving Myrcia over and over again,” he thought glumly. “Why can a country never stay saved?”
A half hour later, as the great chimes of the distant cathedral, and all the bells of the city’s churches, were ringing 9:00, Caedmon finally felt strong enough to try another jump. He walked straight up to the wall and pressed himself against it, as if to shorten that awful distance and give himself every possible advantage. Then he closed his eyes, whispered a prayer, and pictured himself on the other side of the wall, before whispering the magysk words. And then he was through, standing on the edge of the open countryside outside the city.
Pallavi would be somewhere off to the south, if she had followed their plan. And Ellard and Stasya would be nearer the river. Caedmon wandered in that direction, skirting the edge of the new burial ground. The high mounds steamed and smoked, and everywhere the air was filled with the stench of rotting and burned flesh. Nothing grew here now, and Caedmon slogged on through a maze of smoking pits, greasy ash, stinking mud, glowing piles of white lime, and fetid, standing water. “I could perhaps,” he thought to himself, “have chosen my point of egress from the city more carefully.”
Twice he had to duck behind mounds of earth to dodge patrols of white-robed soldiers. But the men seemed preoccupied, moving through the fields of death almost at a jog, willing themselves to get away from the contagion before it could catch them. Caedmon continued on, and when he finally found the end of the plague pits, and the dark, cold river, he saw hundreds and hundreds of people camped there. Some had ragged blankets for tents. Some had scrabbled together some sort of lean-to with branches and scavenged lumber. Others had no shelter at all. He skirted the camp, aghast at the misery and filled with pity for these people.
He remembered what the duke had said about the Duke of Keelshire, “who had his soldiers drive the sick and starving out of Keelweard and made them all come to my lands, instead.” These were those unfortunate exiles, no doubt. Caedmon looked at their haphazard camp, packed closely together. He thought about all those people sharing the same water from the river, no doubt taking little care where they drank from and where they relieved themselves. “Oh, Earstien,” he thought, horrified. “They are all going to die. And Duke Rodgar and his wife know it damn well.”
Perhaps the kindest thing would have been to let loose a fireball on the whole camp and put the lot of them out of their misery, but Caedmon could never have brought himself to do that. These people were children of Earstien. More than that, they were Myrcians. How dare that pompous, blond, polo-playing shit sit on the throne of his betters and condemn these people to death? Not for the first time in his life, Caedmon gave serious consideration to how much magy it would take to obliterate the Bocburg from the face of the earth. But there was nothing to be done. He had to get to the crossroad. But first, before he jogged away, he said a prayer for the exiles.
When he finally reached the crossroads, he found it deserted. “Ha! First one here,” he thought. “Not bad for an old man.” He found a dry spot under a tree and sat down to wait. He couldn’t stop thinking about the Keelshire exiles, and about the duke’s plans to carve a new kingdom out of Myrcia. The Duke of Keelshire couldn’t be much better than Rodgar, if he had driven those people out. But he would also likely be the first target of Rodgar’s armies. Caedmon decided that, since the journey to Leornian had turned out to be a waste of their time, he and the other three hillichmagnars should go to Keelweard, instead. “Perhaps the duke there will prove more amenable,” he thought. He realized that he was grasping at straws a bit, but he was not quite ready yet to give up his dream of reconciling Diernemynster and Myrcia.
After a while, he started to get worried about the other three. True, he had not heard the bells of the city ring 10:00 yet, but he could not believe that he was so much faster than the others. Pallavi had chosen a slightly longer route out of the city than anyone else, so it was understandable that she might take a little more time. But Caedmon knew that Ellard could travel vast distances using the ikke bewege spell. He had seen the boy go more than a mile and back in less than a minute, just on a dare. Perhaps the additional burden of Stasya was slowing him down, or perhaps.... Suddenly Caedmon’s head was filled with the most alarming thoughts, making him question the wisdom of leaving the two young people together.
Caedmon was on his feet in an instant, and he started walking down the main road to the city gate. This was roughly the direction Ellard had said he would be coming with the girl, passing on the far side of the plague pits from where Caedmon had come. As he walked, a light, misting rain began to fall, cutting off his view of the city and covering all the sounds in the world except the squelching of his own feet on the muddy road. He was about to give up and go back to the crossroads, when his jaw ached, and he felt magy. It was unmistakably Ellard’s; he would have known it anywhere. When he walked in the direction of the spell, he found himself among the plague pits again, passing the older, covered ones, and approaching the newest one, part of which was still open. Ten yards away, even over the sound of the rain, he heard Ellard’s voice.
“Yes, pull on that bit there. Like that. No, try it again. That’s it. Now I’m going to slide this in here.”
Immediately, Caedmon muttered a cloaking spell, so that Ellard would not feel his magy, and then he crawled up the pile of dirt so that he could look down and see what they were up to. And when he did, he had to clench his teeth to keep from screaming in disgust.
Whatever he had imagined Ellard and Stasya to be doing, he could never have pictured this. Stasya was down at the bottom of the pit, standing knee deep in fetid, slimy, muddy water between the half-burned corpses.
Ellard was on the far side of the pit, holding open a small knapsack. “I think a sample of brain tissue might be interesting, too,” he said. With one hand, he pointed at the nearest dead body, and the poor plague victim’s skull popped open instantly, like the stopper coming out of a barrel of wine. Ellard took a small, tin box from his pocket and levitated it to Stasya. She took it and, using her bare fingers, she filled it with bits of half-rotten brain from the cracked skull. Then she levitated the tin back to Ellard, who caught it gracefully in the knapsack without touching it.
Caedmon crawled away, fighting now to overcome his urge to vomit. What on earth would possess a girl like Stasya to do something like that? It was a frightful risk to take. But of course, she had lived through the plague, and everyone said that if you survived it once, you were immune forever. Even so, rooting around in the bodies of the dead like that was disrespectful, not to mention disgusting. Why would she and Ellard be gathering samples of those infected bodies?
Once he had stopped wanting to gag, and he was able to think about it more clearly, the answer pretty quickly presented itself. Ellard had mentioned wanting to figure out what caused the plague. And the greatest physicians were all of the opinion that one could learn something about the causes of a disease by studying the body of someone who had died of it. The trouble with plague, of course, was that it was so terribly infectious that anyone who attempted to make a serious scientific study of the bodies of its victims invariably caught it and died within a few days. Caedmon remembered, just off the top of his head, the names of three physicians in Sahasra Deva and the Empire who had expired that way.
But Ellard now had a secret weapon in his attempts to find the cause of the plague. He had an assistant and partner in his research who could not be infected. It was really quite clever, though the memory of the girl down in the midst of those bodies still made Caedmon feel a bit ill.
“But why the secrecy?” he said to himself. “I would have thought he would trust me to tell me what he was doing.” Except that recently, Caedmon had not acted as if he trusted Ellard. “He no longer feels as if he can confide in me,” Caedmon thought sadly. He would have gone around the mound of earth, announced himself, and spoken openly to the young hillichmagnars about what they were doing, but the thought that he had lost Ellard’s trust made him feel very old and alone, so he left as quietly as he had come and went back to the crossroads. “Until he and Stasya choose to tell me about what they are doing,” he thought, “I will remain silent, as if I never saw anything at all.” At the very least, they never needed to know that he had been sneaking around, watching them in secret.
A few minutes later, Pallavi arrived, and in order to distract himself from his gloomy thoughts, he told her about his plan to go to Keelweard. “Sounds sensible,” she agreed. “Where are Ellard and Stasya?” She walked past him and started down the road to the pits.
“Oh, they’ll be along shortly,” he assured her, and then they sat down together under the tree to plan their route to Keelweard.