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.