Shattered Pillars(8)

It was like no plague that Hong-la—who had once been a bondsman in the southern principalities and who was now a surgeon deemed skillful even among those legendary healers, the Wizards of Tsarepheth—had seen before. The news riding in advance of the illness had called it the Black Bloat, and some of the symptoms were similar. But Black Bloat it was not.

Whether it killed like the Black Bloat still remained to be seen.

Hong-la stroked the sun-warmed stone, feeling its age and substance with the layered awareness of a trained wizard. Generations of master stonemasons and master wizards had devoted their lives to the construction of the Citadel. They had built it from the exhumed bones of the earth, its foundations intertwined deep with those of the mountains whose flanks it bridged. And all the strength of their lives and knowledge and intention, and all the strength of those mountains, was still set in its blocks. That was strength a wizard could use.

In addition, the sacred river Tsarethi forged through channels beneath the Citadel, its stream bearing the blessings wrought by wizards down through all of Rasa—and several other kingdoms—until it reached the sea. This close to its headwaters, the Tsarethi still ran with distinct currents: some warm from the sulfurous hot springs that trickled from the roots of the volcano called the Cold Fire; some frigid with ice melt from the heights of the Steles of the Sky. There was power in that too—both in the sources and the mingling.

Hong-la opened himself to the stone and let the strength it contained trickle into the emptiness of his exhaustion. It started with a fingertip tickle, the sensation of running one’s hands across a boar’s-bristle brush. The feeling of pins and needles crept up his fingers joint by joint, pushing the bone-tired ache before it so a band of soreness ringed his wrists, then his forearms, then his upper arms. Behind the pain and the tingling came fresh strength, vitality, a sense of new life as seductive as water to a man worked dry.

It wanted to be a cataract, a wall of energy that could have slammed the Wizard Hong up against the walls of himself, splashed him aside and crushed him under its roil. To tap the reserves of the Citadel was not a thing done lightly: Tsarepheth’s was an antique and weighty strength, and sipping its flow was not unlike dipping into the flood with a drinking goblet without being swept away.

Hong-la constricted the eager push of energy to a thread and let the new strength push his elongated frame upright. His black wizard’s coat was limp with too-long wearing, stained with sweat and worse things. It hung on his already spare, square frame with new space against the ribs and underarms. The jade-paneled wizard’s collar had worn galls on his clavicles. His hands no longer ached with exhaustion, because the counterfeit strength of his borrowed vitality concealed it, but the skin was raw and peeling from constant bathing in antiseptic chemicals, which had begun to bleach out the cloth of his rolled-up sleeves. He knew he stank of those antiseptics, and also of old sweat and sickrooms, and he wished he had time to adjourn to the bathing chambers below and come back to his patients with a fresh body and fresh will.

Like sleep, it would have to wait.

His hands wanted to clench, to clutch at the wall and keep the flow of energy coming until it burst him like a blown-up bladder. It was so good simply not to be tired that it took all a wizard’s discipline to control the desire for more. The power, given its own devices, would use him as a conduit: he would blaze with it, burn like a candle, and it would flood through him to equalize from the great storage cell of the Citadel into the cold mountain air beyond. He’d incandesce before he died.

He pulled his hands away. The borrowed strength filled him like rough wine. He stepped back from the battlement, and as he turned—

He startled. A small man stood there, skinny rather than slender, perhaps half Hong-la’s weight even haggard as the surgeon had become. A gray moustache trailed down sunken cheeks to brush the chest of the old man’s plain black cotton coat. Though it was worn shiny at the elbows, it could not disguise his air of authority. Yet he had waited for Hong-la with silent patience.

“Yongten-la,” the Wizard Hong said, bowing carefully. The strength buzzing in him made him dizzy.

The master of Hong-la’s order needed no pretensions, no marks of ceremony to set him apart. Among those with the wit to recognize it, his learning cloaked him in all the majesty he could desire—and to those who could not recognize the truth of what he was, greatest wizard among the Wizards of Tsarepheth, it was just as well he pass unremarked.

Now he studied Hong-la’s countenance, and Hong-la knew what he saw: the too-bright eyes of recharged exhaustion, the healthy color like an ink wash over sallow fatigue, the cropped hair grown long enough to stick out in sweaty spikes around his ears and nape. Completing his inspection, Yongten-la frowned, but he nodded. “You’ll do.”