It would kill him if he continued. But where were the choices?
He sent Anil-la and several of the others—full-collared wizards, including the redoubtable Wizard Tsering, who had never manifested powers but who had a mind for theory the match of any wizard in the Citadel—out among the city with heralds to cry the protocols. Since the victims—so long as speech did not desert them—reported awakening with the cough and fever, Hong-la hypothesized that whatever infected them came at night. He and Yongten-la recommended that everyone sleep indoors, windows barred, faces masked. Chimneys must be stuffed with rags and sealed as best as possible. Everyone who had the resources must sleep under netting and signs of ward.
Hong-la tried not to think too much of the slaves and indigents of Tsarepheth, who might be lucky to sleep under a scrap of wood and hide angled to keep off the rain.
No one of the Citadel and no one in the Black Palace had sickened yet, which made Hong-la fairly certain that the wards and prayer flags and incised stones, the ancient blessings and geomantic protections upon those strongholds held. Yongten-la freed himself and some of the elder wizards, ones who had found their power, from the duty of nursemaiding the sick. It did not take a wizard to blow cinnabar dust into a dying man’s lungs through a quill.
These wizards would pick their way among the sigil-incised boulders through which the Tsarethi crashed and tossed as it passed beneath the Citadel, renewing blessings. Some of them would finish and dedicate a new wardstone, a great jade boulder housed in the depths of the Citadel, and—eventually—roll it into the water as well, where its blessings could be tumbled downstream through the plague-wracked city and to the suffering lands of Rasa and Song and the Hundred-Times-Hundred Kingdoms of the Lotus below. That would take months, though, perhaps longer.
Yongten-la sent regular missives to the Bstangpo—the Emperor—recommending that a shaman and a wizard bless every dwelling under imperial edict and that sheltered housing be provided for the indigent. Emperor Songtsan issued commands, and inasmuch as possible these things were carried out … but so many were ill, and a wizard caring for the dying was not carving protective sigils upon doors and over windows.
In the meantime, mostly, the contagion raged. And mostly, Hong-la toiled, and waited for word from the emperor.
* * *
Though acolytes and women cleaned the rock shelf where the rukhs nested, the taint of ammonia still reached the heights of Ala-Din’s five towers. The twins and their master stood atop the nearest, the thumb of the fortress that had once been called the Hand on the Rock.
Centuries had truncated the name, though not the towers. Ala-Din meant only the Rock.
The twins had folded their hands in the sleeves of their coat. A hot, rustling wind scarfed their veils in long banners; below, the rukhs huddled in their nest. The female had just returned with a meal for her mate and offspring: two camels with necks broken, which she carried as a hawk might carry a shrew, served whole—along with whatever awful chunks the giant bird could regurgitate from her own breakfast. Of what creature those bits might be the mortal remains, the twins did not inquire.
Smaller birds swarmed the pile. They were eagle-sized or slightly larger, miniatures of the great rukhs with their white and scarlet crests and long necks: the grayer female and her brassier mate. The male’s chain rattled as he stretched for the first camel. As with most birds of prey, the female was larger. Her body partially blocked his from view, but as he fanned his wings and gulped the camel down whole, tossing his head—again like a hawk with a shrew—the twins saw the rule-straight edge of brassy pinions, the flash of a creamy belly. Steel scraped on stone when he moved—though he was chained and his wings were clipped, he fluttered vigorously, exercising.
The female fluffed and settled herself. While her family dined, she busied herself rearranging the stones and twigs of her nest: boulders and uprooted trees as thick as the twins’ thigh. She turned a rock as large as a sofa dreamily, with the edge of her recurved beak.
When al-Sepehr clucked, she lifted her head slowly and shot him an unmistakable glare.
“Come, my lovely,” said al-Sepehr, while the gray-gold wall of her hatred broke against him like the sea around a pillar. “As you love your family, it is time for you to fly for me again.”
* * *
When the summons came, it did not come from the Bstangpo. Hong-la in his exhaustion, hands dripping brown streamers of blood into the bowl of water he washed with, blinked in surprise at the messenger clad in imperial blues who had just prostrated himself before the wizard.
Exquisitely aware of his state of crusted filth and exhaustion, Hong-la nevertheless tried to attain—and project—the serene peace expected of a wizard. “Say that again?”