Shattered Pillars(9)

“I’d better,” Hong-la replied. “You didn’t run for me yourself because you were out of novices.”

It got a tired smile, at least. Yongten-la turned; Hong-la fell in step beside him.

“You were on your way back to the wards?”

Hong-la inclined his head. “Will you accompany me, Old Master?”

“If it will not be an inconvenience,” said the Wizard Yongten, exactly as if he were merely someone’s curious uncle.

Whatever sound escaped Hong-la, it must have reflected his incredulity, because Yongten-la’s smile widened and grew crooked. “Very well,” Yongten-la said. “We will offer what comfort we can.”

“It won’t be long now,” Hong-la said. “Unless we discover something miraculous.”

They descended.

The great stairways of the Citadel were dished from the passage of thousands of feet and hundreds of years. The steps cupped Hong-la’s feet through the flexible soles of his split boots—he’d never gotten used to the Rasan toe-box, and so he had his shoes made specially in the eastern style—and the steps made him feel he was walking in the grasp of hard, unyielding hands.

The plague wards were not within the Citadel itself but under canopies at its base, where the waters of the wild Tsarethi would carry the taint of illness away and pound it against stones like soiled linens until the currents licked it clean. Hong-la and Yongten-la paused by the entrance, where a row of newly arrived patients rested on litters, awaiting triage. The wizards allowed the novices staffing the makeshift gates to drape them in protective canvas coats that could be boiled when they were shed and to wrap their feet in linen pouches. It wasn’t enough, Hong-la knew, but it was better than taking no precautions at all. What puzzled him was that quarantine and isolation seemed to be having no effect in slowing the spread of the plague. It was as if it actually were carried on the fog, or by evil spirits of the night air, as any superstitious merchant or noble might insist.

The disease that sickened the plague patients in these pavilioned wards always followed the same course, and the wizards who tended them were keeping them separated by its stage of progress. The outer wards—where most of the triage patients would soon be admitted, the worst-affected having already been found by the litter crews and brought into quarantine—were full of people well enough to sit up, whose breath rasped and wheezed through constricted air passages and whose bodies burned hot with the fervor of their life force fighting the pestilence.

They were tended by novices and a few of the less experienced wizards, but Hong-la made a point of moving among them as well—feeling the foreheads and palpating the auras of men and women in the first stages of the disease. It was possible—even likely—that if a clue toward successful treatment could be found, it might be found in those not yet sick unto death.

In this ward the novices had made an effort to separate tradesmen and minor nobility—anyone, even a prince, who sought the care of the wizards must come into quarantine—but there was still a certain amount of interpersonal friction. The patients felt well enough to squabble: here a prostitute who did not think she should be bedded beside a slave woman, here a farmer’s wife looked upon with scorn by the wife of a cobbler.

Hong-la and Yongten-la moved from pallet to pallet, crouching to examine the patients and rising up again. Hong-la found nothing new: in this early stage, the sick showed signs of weakening life processes—but something else, something contradictory. Over their chests, front and back, the aura of strength and health grew slowly stronger. Stronger, but blacker, so that Hong-la wondered if it was the life processes of the infection that made his fingertips tingle.

He’d tried drawing off that excess before, and the patients he’d attempted it with had rapidly worsened and begun to choke like asthmatics. So he did not attempt that now but instead stood and bent almost double to bring his head close to Yongten-la’s for a private consultation.

“It feels like a curse, not an illness,” said Yongten-la against his ear. “Something that draws the life processes of the patient to feed itself. I’d say it was worth looking inside, but … I have not your skill in surgery.”

“If it were the abdomen, and not the heart and lungs, I would look for a volunteer to let me open them,” said Hong-la. He had neutered enough female wizards in his life to be confident in poking around inside a living human belly. Surgery on the pump and bellows that sustained immediate life, however—

He shook his head.

“We are waiting for someone to die,” said Yongten-la.