It was here that Tsering brought Ashra, or—as Tsering was already thinking of her—Ata Ashra: the Wizard Ashra. Hong-la was at work here, looking less gray-faced for his enforced rest but not significantly less weary or frightened. He bent over a small wardstone with a hand lens. Tsering, having spent hours at the same work, could not locate any hope in herself that this time he would find the flaw.
He was surrounded by Anil-la and several other junior wizards, all bent over magnifiers or wax tablets to which necropsy specimens lay pinned. Anil-la, wearing a face shield and a butcher’s apron, was using glass blades to vivisect a quivering demonspawn. Glass, Tsering knew, for its sharpness … and because the spawn’s fluids would dissolve mere metal.
A flayed human body lay on one of the dissection tables, flesh red and raw. The whole corpse had been pared like a persimmon and the head lay against the table with unnatural flatness. Another, beside it, had been opened from collarbone to belly button, the ribs sectioned, the flesh peeled back in layers. One lung had been opened, and Tsering could see evidence of bruising in the swollen flesh. She suspected that the spawn pinned to Anil-la’s dissection board had found its origins there.
Reassured though she was as to the strength of Ata Ashra’s will and purpose, Tsering had nevertheless warned her of what she would find here, and what it meant. She had told Ashra that she could not be allowed within the Citadel itself, and why—and now she paused at the edge of the work space to let the Aezin woman take it in.
Ashra pressed a fist against her chest. Tsering heard the whistle of her breath going out, saw her nostrils flare with effort as she drew another in. Hong-la winched his great height up from where he had hunched over his workbench and hooked them toward him with a bony hand.
“Hong-la,” Tsering said, and made her decision. In Uthman, she continued, “This is Ata Ashra, from the Qersnyk train. She has some ideas on how we can fight the plague.”
Ashra gave her a sidelong glance. “It was my father who was the wizard, Tsering-la. I have not studied architecture or music, and what I know of tactics I learned from my husband and father-in-law, not in a college of wizardry.”
Tsering had heard of the great Aezin universities and the scholars they trained. She opened her mouth to reply, but Hong-la beat her.
“If you have some insight into the infestation, you’re wizard enough for me.” He cocked his head. “Forgive my forwardness, Ata Ashra, but … I detect a hesitation in your breathing.”
Her small smile tightened. “I am infected, yes. These are examples of the organism?”
Both Hong-la and Tsering-la turned at her gesture. Ashra might be facing her own horrific death—but her face and posture revealed curiosity and intensity of focus. She paced from glass bell to glass bell, leaning close to each cage. The skirts of her sleeveless fleece coat tapped at her ankles as the spawns’ heads swiveled to follow her. Tsering expected them to break out into one of their choruses of poisonous prophecy, but they only stared. One mantled its wings like a threatened owl; one hissed with a flickering tongue and spat. Viscous, transparent, rust-colored venom smoked against the bars of the cage and trickled in strings down the glass.
Ashra straightened and turned her back on the beasts. “I assume the emergence is similarly hideous?”
“You’ve lost no one so far?” Hong-la asked.
“The first infections came only a few days ago.” She wet her lips. “How long is the…”
“Incubation?”
“Gestation period?”
When the others hesitated, it was Anil-la who took a strengthening breath and said, “Without treatment? Fourteen days. Precisely.”
Ashra nodded. “Not long enough, then. But I can at least get you started.”
Anil-la glanced at his seniors as if seeking permission to go on. Hong-la tipped his head in acquiescence. Anil-la continued, “We believe some weakness has sundered the magical protections that kept demons from Tsarepheth.”
“If the Khagan’s rule can be said to metaphysically shelter the Qersnyk lands…” Ashra winced. “Well, that’s in disarray. Has there been trouble in your royal family?”
The silence that greeted her—and Anil-la’s frustrated scowl—must have been answer enough, because she hastened to change the subject. “Have you considered killing the spawn when the infection is new?”
“More than considered it.” Hong-la came to her, his spine curling like a fern as he brought his face closer to her level. “But the patients died of gangrene and poisoned blood, from the creatures rotting inside them. We have a simple that can help—a mold—but it’s better packed in wounds than consumed, and even having the patients inhale the spores was insufficient.”