Those things had not changed—and those alone.
Gray ash lay like drifts of dirty snow across the road, across the high white arch of the Wreaking—that impossible bridge that spanned the impossible gulf where the headwaters of the Tsarethi tumbled from the glaciers of the Island-in-the-Mists—across the flanks of the mountains. It looked as soft as snow, but where Tsering wiped it from her cheek incautiously it drew blood and stung. She thought of it sifting down inside her boots, the mischief it could work with every step, and shuddered.
The Qersnyk refugees camped beyond the Wreaking had made no attempt to cross; they had merely stopped before the guarded bridge and waited. They had no more protection from the ash than their tents, and they would not huddle inside those when there was work to be done. As Tsering moved toward the bridge with her entourage, she saw people—mostly women and children—dusting the backs of livestock, hauling water, sweeping the ground and creating makeshift shelters where animals could eat clean fodder untainted by ash.
Her approach triggered a sudden bustle as one child—boy or girl, she could not tell—looked up from grooming and took off running back into the encampment. He (or she) vanished between tents while Tsering was cresting the Wreaking.
She paused at the bowed height of the bridge, like a vast white rib, and took a moment to enjoy the view of the river surging far below. She was stalling to give the Qersnyk leader time to prepare, but it was still valuable to fold her arms and lean on the waist-high wall, organizing her own thoughts.
After a stir among the tents, she straightened again and continued on.
She was met at the bottom of the bridge by two women. One was so old that her age had become indeterminate. She was a withered apple doll of a person, hunched in thick robes despite the summer’s warmth. She leaned on a stick, but for all that she had moved nimbly across.
The other emissary was a surprise, physically speaking: a younger woman, but not young, compact and sturdy-seeming with motherly hips and the brown skin and broad nose of the Aezin nation. She rested one hand in the crook of the older woman’s arm, though neither of them seemed to need the support.
She lifted her head as Tsering-la approached, and said in the Uthman tongue, “I don’t suppose you speak Qersnyk?”
“I brought a translator,” Tsering answered, gesturing to the novice on her left. They had stopped well back, and she made no move to close the distance. “But I am comfortable in this language. I am the Wizard Tsering. You have reached Tsarepheth, the white-and-scarlet Citadel. You may camp here, but you may not enter. There is plague within.”
“This is Tsareg Altantsetseg,” the Aezin woman said. There was a whistle on her breathing that sent a chill of unease across Tsering’s chest. “She does not speak your tongue, or this one either. But I will translate for her.” She paused, and did so—accurately, from the little Tsering could follow.
“What is your name?” Tsering asked in the pause that followed.
“I am Ashra,” said the Aezin woman. Her teeth flashed when she spoke. They were banded like old ivory, shades of brown and bone. “This plague—”
Ashra looked at Tsareg Altantsetseg. She said something in Qersnyk. The old woman responded.
Ashra placed a hand upon her chest as if easing pressure within. Tsering felt the sickening drop of an unpleasant suspicion confirmed.
“We know it,” Ashra said. “Some dozen or more have sickened, since we came into the mountains. Our shaman-rememberers and surgeons have no physic for it. We had hoped, with the fame of the Wizards of Tsarepheth—”
Tsering knew from the other women’s expressions that she had failed to keep her dismay from coloring their own. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We have studied the course of the disease…”
She could not continue. But if she had expected Ashra to let the silence stretch into awkwardness while Tsering struggled to express some futile sympathy, the Aezin woman surprised her.
“I see,” Ashra said, queenly and unperturbed. “Then it is rather as I expected. My father was a wizard in Aezin, Tsering-la, and I know something of his strategies. Perhaps we can work together?”
Tsering found herself smiling in unwilling sympathy. Ashra’s dignity and charisma were hard to resist. “That … might buy you asylum. If you can prove your expertise.”
Ashra glanced at the clan-mother beside her. She said a few words. Tsareg Altantsetseg considered them—and nodded.
“Show me to a laboratory,” Ashra said. “I will prove what I know.”
* * *
The Wizards Anil and Hong had caused a sort of field shelter to be built near the tent city of the infirmary. It was a structure such as might have housed the blacksmith’s forge and anvils on a military campaign. Open-sided, though tapestries had now been hung to keep the worst of the falling ash at bay, it was made of lashed timbers sunk in the earth and braced. The turf where it was erected had been peeled back and used to roof the structure, and within it were dissection slabs, a kiln, crucibles and chemicals, sand tables, alembics, flasks, mirrors (silver, brass, and glass), and glassware of more mysterious purpose and provenance. Mortars, pestles, racks of scalpels, tongs and forceps. Quicksilver, oil of vitriol, the fine dust of powdered sapphires, blocks of white salt and violet. And from their cages—each within a crystal dome that had been created open at the top to permit stale air to exchange with fresh—half a dozen demonspawn stared out with baleful intent.