Al-Sepehr shrugged. “Offer him a marriage,” he said. “That should satisfy him for a while.”
“And if I must go through with it?”
“Then that makes you his queen, does it not?” Al-Sepehr paused, and smiled suddenly. “It’s not as if you shall be married long.”
Shahruz—or perhaps Saadet—must have caught his change of mood. They flinched, and one of them said, unhappily, “Master?”
“Actually,” he said, savoring the simple elegance of the idea that had come to him so suddenly, inspiration a gift of the Scholar-God, “you can run an errand for me along the way.”
“Shall we speak to the rukh, Master?”
“Yes,” said he. “Let us speak with the rukh, my Shahruz.”
* * *
After the first death and … hatching, others followed. At first a few, scattered, like the plink of mustard seeds popping in a covered pan. But then, like those seeds, more followed—drifts and spates, crescendos and finales. And Hong-la could do nothing.
He and Yongten-la both immediately, hopelessly thought of killing the victims, to spare them—at least—the suffering of the spawn’s emergence. But then the third victim, a city whore with two fingers amputated for thieving, survived the hatching—horribly, Hong-la thought, more horribly than if she had died—and the wizards realized that if the emergence was survivable, granting mercy to the infected was untenable.
Hong-la thought perhaps they could poison the demons in the lungs, and started those most recently infected on a course of inhaled caustic vapors. Not kind, and he wondered if—even if it worked—he was merely condemning any possible survivors to a death by sepsis as the spawn rotted inside their lungs. He was certainly condemning them to scarred lungs and invalidity.
To other victims, the Wizard Hong fed poisons, as he would to treat any parasite. Arsenic, quicksilver—in limited quantities, that might poison the spawn and preserve the host. Cinnabar powdered and blown into the lungs of those who could still manage to inhale. He tried tracheotomy, opening a gap in the victim’s throat for the demons to squeeze through in the hopes that it would be more likely to preserve life if they did not have to force their way up through the base of the skull and the jaw. He instructed wizards and lay surgeons both to save the doses of poppy and whiskey to the very end, so at least the sufferers need not be wholly sensible when the beasts were ripping their way free.
It was Anil-la who came up with the idea of channeling fire into the spawn while they still lay within the lungs of their victims. But these subjects died as well: delicate lung tissue could not stand exposure to the controlled heat that the wizards brought to bear on the monsters gestating within them. Those who endured a day or two, coughing up burned husks and shreds of twisted demon flesh, eventually drowned in the fluids of their own insulted lungs.
Yongten-la devised a means for trapping the demons as they emerged: an apparatus strapped over the patients’ face, giving the spawn no route of escape except to crawl through a narrow tube into a glass jar, which could then be corked—the demons died of suffocation, just like any beast—or filled with boiling water or spirits of wine.
Some of the trapped ones pissed fire, which ran back down the apparatus and peeled the flesh from the face of one—Hong-la thanked his ancestors—already-dead sufferer. After that, he rigged up a flexible tube that could be forced into a U-bend once the demon has passed the halfway point.
Days passed, nights, sharping to nightmare. As one horror piled upon another, Hong-la kept expecting to awaken. The plague—or infestation—was too precise a hideousness to seem credible, even when he stood in the reek of unburned bodies and suppurating wounds and the burned-hair acridness that was the smell—alive or dead—of the demonspawn.
Hong-la and Yongten-la kept a few demonspawn alive for research. The hunched, gaunt little things sat balefully in their jade cages, wings twisted, the mottled, membranous skin over their torsos stretching to tautness and collapsing in hollows between starveling ribs with every desperate, air-thirsty breath.
“They’re starving for air,” Yongten-la said as he sealed a particularly bruise-colored yellow-and-purple one into the carved stone cage. Originally intended for songbirds, they were a snug fit around the demonspawn. Hong-la did not feel too bad for them.
In his blood-and-phlegm-crusted smock, Hong-la kept working to stem the flow of blood from this latest victim. He thought this one might live—speechless, tongue torn and voice box crushed, jaw unhinged by the fury of the spawn’s emergence.
Hong-la’s hands moved as if of their own will. He had not slept in days. The energy he drew from the Citadel was a constant blurry buzz in his veins, in his head. He could feel his heart skipping beats occasionally, or accelerating beyond any safe level. His own breath came pained and sore, as if somebody had been scrubbing his lungs out. It was secondhand exposure to the caustics, despite the mask he now wore habitually—but it was also exhaustion, and the price for wearing his body and soul down to the warp and relying on the Citadel to keep him on his feet.