The Medusa Plague

Chapter Nine

Lyim looked out across the awakening hillsides that sloped gently toward Thonvil, and he sighed with satisfaction. He had teleported to the eastern dirt road to give himself this view of the sleepy little burg. Despite its current run-down state, Thonvil's half-timbered buildings with thatched roofs looked warm and inviting against a backdrop of greening grasses and cornflower-blue sky.

It must have been a wonderful setting in which to grow up, Lyim thought, and not for the first time. Any place would have been better than the ugly and unyielding village of mud huts in which he'd lived on the Plains of Dust. The unfairness of the dichotomy was another entry on the ever-growing list of reasons to hate Guerrand DiThon.

The first time he'd had such envious thoughts was when, as an apprentice to Belize, Lyim had traveled to Thonvil on behalf of his friend Guerrand. That had ended in the disaster that was Lyim's hand. He'd come to Thonvil then to save Guerrand's family. Now he was here to destroy it. It seemed somehow fitting to Lyim, a closing of the circle.

Every hideous and pain-racked death occurring this spring in Thonvil was on Guerrand's head. Lyim had no doubt about that and felt no guilt. Death knells rang here two and three times a day because of Guerrand's unwillingness to bend the rules to help the friend who'd given his hand saving Guerrand's life.

Lyim adjusted the fingerless leather glove over his right hand and tucked it inside the overlong cuff on his coarse brown robe. It would not do, particularly considering the prevailing air of suspicion and fear, to advertise his profession by wearing his usual red mage's robe or allowing anyone to see his snake hand.

Lyim followed the road into the village. The mage kept his eyes averted and drew into himself so as not to attract notice as a stranger, a habit he had developed since the accident that had changed his hand. He could scarcely remember the days when he had sought the spotlight by both deed and dress. The man in the drab, dun robe had once worn the brightest, most flamboyant colors in the newest styles. He had once made it a goal to get to know the people in any small village he visited for more than a few days. Especially the ladies. Those days were far in Lyim's past.

Women still admired him, he had noticed with some small measure of pride. Lyim's handsome looks had changed little in nearly a decade, with no care paid to them. His hair was long, dark, and wavy, though he no longer took the time to fashion his signature top braid. The rigors of his life had kept his muscles toned and defined as only a strict regimen of exercise had before. Yes, women still looked at him with eager eyes, until they inevitably saw the snake that was his hand.

Lyim felt the creature shift annoyingly inside the thick leather glove. He gave an angry shake of his head and turned his stride toward the village green encircled by Thonvil's timbered buildings. Standing in the shadow of a tree, Lyim watched as two men dug a grave in the newly softened soil. He counted eleven fresh mounds of dirt in the square that until recent weeks had but two or three new additions each year. The plague was turning out to be as deadly as he'd hoped.

Lyim could scarcely believe the luck of overhearing the whispered conversation of a sailor who had recently returned to Palanthas from the Minotaur Islands. The sailor spoke with horror of fleeing Mithas when a new and vile pestilence had sprung up among the smattering of humans there. "The medusa plague," they were calling it, a disease whose arrival and spread they were blaming on the unclean living habits of the bovinelike minotaurs who inhabited the isles.

Lyim had been struck by the plague's similarity to his own situation, however different some of the symptoms. He had never shed skin, and he'd lived with the affliction for many years. But the snakes… it was too coincidental to ignore, and so he decided to travel to the islands northeast of the Blood Sea to see this disease for himself.

En route, he had briefly entertained the hope that unlocking the secret of the minotaur plague might provide some clue to curing his own affliction, but that died when he saw the first victim. The man's limbs had changed to three-headed snakes, not the single head that was his hand. What was more, the victims all turned to stone within three days and died, so Lyim realized there was no link to his own condition to be found here.

But he was a mage with a bitter grudge to settle, and the random pestilence in Mithas gave him another idea. A more delicious idea, in that it would allow him to cure his hand and get the revenge that he had longed for in the handful of months since Guerrand had refused to grant him entrance to Bastion.

Lyim spent two months among the brutish minotaurs, living in the most squalid conditions he'd endured since leaving the Plains of Dust. Most of the buildings on Mithas were of either mud or rough planking, with nothing better than a dirt path between them, even in the capital city of Lacynos. Despite horrid living conditions, the minotaurs were among the most honor-bound creatures Lyim had met in all his travels. They thought he was examining the stone bodies to find a magical cure. If they had known he was actually collecting the pestilence from the dead bodies and storing it in a specially prepared magical gem, they might have killed him, or worse.

Lyim saw spreading the plague in Thonvil as the perfect, triple-edged sword to use against Guerrand DiThon. As if inflicting an epidemic upon Guerrand's people weren't revenge enough, Lyim had added a curse to the pestilence so that Guerrand himself would appear responsible for the magical sickness. But the most useful of all the repercussions of the plague was that the news of its spread in Thonvil might very likely draw Guerrand from Bastion. Lyim would then have the opportunity to breach the stronghold more easily, gam entrance, and seek to reverse the process that had mutated his hand.

It had been a simple matter, under cover of a dark night less than a fortnight ago, to add the collected pestilence in the magical gem to the water in the village well. While monitoring the plague's progress was enjoyable. Lyim had returned this day primarily to discover whether news of the sickness had reached Guerrand.

The mage left the gravediggers in the square and sought the one person who was the likeliest to know: Guerrand's younger sister, Kirah. If anyone here still communicated with Guerrand, it would be she.

Lyim hiked the quarter league through unplanted fields toward the black and imposing stone castle perched on the Strait of Ergoth. Not usually of a mind to notice that spring had truly arrived, even Lyim could see that all patches of snow had disappeared into the earth, and the pale beige of winter was slowly turning to olive-green. The progress of the plague had put Lyim in an uncommonly good mood, and he launched into the uplifting last refrain from 'The Lark, the Rave, and the Owl," singing in an aggressive and undisciplined base:

Through night the seasons ride into the dark, The years surrender in the changing lights, The breath turns vacant on the dusk or dawn Between the abstract days and nights. For there is always corpselight in the fields And corposants above the slaughterhouse, And at deep noon the shadowy vallenwoods Are bright at the topmost boughs.

Lyim hadn't found much to sing about in recent years, though singing had been a favorite pastime of his since his days at the feet of bards in the smokey, decadent inns of his youth.

The brown-shrouded mage came to the last green, gentle slope that led to the portcullis on Castle DiThon's northern curtain wall. Staring up at the castle, blatant symbol of elitism, Lyim was struck again by the inequity between Guerrand's upbringing and his own. Cormac and Rietta DiThon had served as Guerrand's parents. Though nobly born, he knew from his own brief encounter with them that they were of no more noble spirit than his own poor parents. It was difficult to say of which pair that was a greater indictment.

Ardem Rhistadt and Dinayda Valurin were considered trash by the worst trash of Rowley-on-Torath. Lyim's parents had never married, in fact had done no more than pass each other in the dark one night, as was common with Dinayda's profession. Lyim was the result. Ardem Rhistadt had done no more than allow the child to take his name. Dinayda always maintained that she did the best she could, which was to let Lyim run wild, with the understanding that he always had a place to rest his head if he wanted it. Lyim didn't want it after the age of six. When he was ten, Lyim heard that his mother had died of one of the unspecified diseases that commonly killed women of her occupation.

By that time, Lyim's father had long since moved away from Rowley. That as good as made Lyim an orphan, but practically speaking nothing had changed. He was earning a few coins and some scraps of food as a general errand and clean-up boy at the local inn. It was there, one night in Lyim's twelfth year, that he saw something that would forever change the direction of his life.

A traveling sleight-of-hand artist-a charlatan trickster, really-was passing through Rowley. The magician, a tall, lanky man with a dirty yellow cape and hair, was earning coin by doing tricks for the patrons, such as making coins appear in their ears or under their tankards. Lyim was mesmerized; he'd never seen anything like this magic before, nor seen the power it held over the viewer.

Staying to clean up the inn long after the patrons had left, Lyim had opportunity to watch the magician count the evening's take; it was more money than the youth expected to earn in a lifetime. For one night's work! By Lyim's standards the magician was wealthy, even after he gave Mowe the innkeeper his due. The young boy knew in that moment that he had earned his last turnips from sweeping floors.

Lyim begged the magician to take him along as an unpaid servant, in exchange for teaching all he knew about magic. He quickly learned that Fabulous Fendock saved all his charisma and good humor for his performances. Off stage, what lessons he offered Lyim were impromptu and enigmatic, and more often than not they left the young man disgruntled and frustrated. But sometimes, when ale softened Fendock's mood, he could change radically, becoming ebullient, almost (but not quite) genial, and he would bring precious gifts of insight to the information-starved boy.

Lyim learned two truly useful things from Fendock. First, he learned that the man was a prestidigitator who played at performing simple cantrips, because true magic was a far more complex and powerful thing and was well beyond Fabulous Fendock's ability. In many ways it was unfortunate that Lyim proved to be a quick study, for Fendock punished the young boy for outdoing him in subtle and obvious ways.

The harshest and most far-reaching punishment came as a result of the other thing of value Lyim learned from this odd "apprenticeship": the name of a true wizard both revered and resented by Fendock. That lauded wizard's name was Belize.

One night, after the magician had drunk too much during a particularly well-received performance in Lantern on the East Road, he had pridefully shown Lyim his most prized possession: a spellbook written by the great mage Belize. Fendock's good mood caused him to confess with arrogance that he'd stolen the small tome from a patron some years back. He was in such a good mood, in fact, that he let young Lyim open the book, confident that the contents would be beyond the urchin's understanding. But Lyim's natural magical abilities had allowed him to read one or two of the words in the magical books before Fendock had furiously slammed the book shut and told him to never touch it again.

Lyim had seen the jealous look in the man's eyes, and he quickly realized that the magician didn't have the skill to read the book himself. Fendock was like a man who could appreciate fine music but was totally without skill to play it. Lyim's punishment for demonstrating that he possessed the ability Fendock lacked was the cessation of even the pretense of magical lessons.

When, on one dark night after a year of intolerable servitude, Lyim slipped away from Fabulous Fendock's wagon, he took with him Belize's writings. The young man reasoned that the magician could never utilize Belize's work properly and that he had served Fendock beyond what he had received in magical training.

"Never explain, never defend," had become Lyim's motto ever after. It was why he'd lied without remorse to Guerrand about getting the book from some elves. He had no shame about lying, but plenty concerning his blood and magical heritage.

Lyim came to the Castle DiThon's portcullis and was surprised to see it closed, as well as the vast double door behind it. He had never seen it so, even when the residents should have been expecting an attack from the family whose land Cormac DiThon had confiscated.

Puzzled, Lyim looked up to his right, to the guard tower. "Hallo? Who defends Castle DiThon this day?"

After a time, Lyim heard a squeaky voice that sounded vaguely familiar coming from the ramparts above and to his right. "What is it? Yes? We're not having any merchants from the village."

Squinting skyward, Lyim recognized the befuddled chamberlain who'd thought to dispatch an entire army of Knights of Solamnia with the announcement that he hadn't the authority to recognize their siege. The old man's face was even thinner and creased with more worry lines than when last Lyim had seen him, his eyes more milky with cataracts.

"Good chamberlain, I am no merchant with wares for sale. I am an old friend looking for Kirah DiThon," Lyim called up to the man in his most persuasive tones. "I heard there is plague in the village and was concerned for her welfare."

"Kirah is well, as far as I know," said the chamberlain, his tone eased.

"As far as you know?" repeated Lyim, puzzled. "Have you not seen her in the castle with your own eyes?"

"How would 1?" asked the chamberlain as if the answer were plain. "I see little enough with these eyes. Even still, Kirah has lived in the village since shortly after she refused to marry the husband of her mother's choosing."

"Where does she live?" he asked the chamberlain.

"Above the baker's, I've heard," said the old man. "He's just died of the sickness, if Gildee the cook has it right from the gossips."

But Lyim was already on his way back to the village.

When Kirah heard the knock at her door, she thought it must be Dilb with some wood for her fire. With Bram gone to parts unknown, the baker's son was the only one she would trust to enter her little room. Still taking no chances, Kirah opened the door slowly and slightly, then pressed her right eye to the crack. Her breath abruptly caught in her throat, and her heart skipped a painful beat.

It could not be him. After all these years, and all her wishes, it could not be Lyim. The world was too big a place, her dreams too inconsequential, for Lyim to arrive to help her twice in a lifetime. And yet there he stood on her stoop, beyond the crack in her door.

"Hello, Kirah," the mage said. "Is this how you welcome an old friend, peering at him like he's a robber in the night?"

Kirah primmed her mouth in superior fashion, then spoiled the effect by laughing girlishly. "Yes-I mean no! I mean, hello and come in!" she managed at last, flustered beyond all reason. Kirah opened the door with one hand and pulled closed her ragged wrap with the other, suddenly self-conscious. It had been so long since she'd been expected to behave like anything but a crazy hermit.

As Lyim walked into her room, Kirah noticed that something about him was different, yet she couldn't quite put her finger on it. It wasn't just the simple, oversized brown robe that seemed to engulf him, or the odd leather mittens, although they were uncharacteristic. His face and hair were essentially unchanged, no early gray at the temples. Maybe it was the eyes, she thought, looking for the sparkle of humor she remembered there and not finding it. Perhaps it was the man's stride, slower and more contained. His was no longer the strut of a peacock proud of his plumes.

Unlike Lyim, Kirah had never cared what she looked like. Until this minute, anyway, when a recent memory of her visage in a street puddle made her shiver. Her unwashed hair was dull gray instead of blonde, and flat against her head, as if she wore a cap. Kirah felt well enough, but her eyes and cheeks were sunken so that she appeared far older than her nineteen years. She looked beyond bony in the sacklike dress and wrap the baker's robust wife had given her some months ago when her previous raggedy shift had disintegrated at the shoulders.

Kirah made herself as small as possible in a reed- backed chair by the hearth. "Have you come to save the village again?" she asked more caustically than she'd meant. "There's a plague here."

"I know." Lyim removed his left mit and set it on the small table by the door, as if he had done so for years. "That is why I've come. I was hoping you'd know where Guerrand is."

She looked up, mildly surprised. "You've come to the wrong place, then," she said. "Guerrand came to see me just after we prevented the Berwick siege, but I haven't heard from him since."

"You sound as though you're still angry with him after all these years," observed Lyim.

Kirah thought about that briefly. "No, I don't suppose I am," she said at last. "We made our peace, Guerrand and I. He had to leave Thonvil." Kirah leaned forward in the chair to add her last meager log to the coals. Brushing off her hands, Kirah stood and took two chipped pottery mugs from the narrow mantle. "I can offer you rainwater tea, but I'm afraid I have nothing else. I get my meals after the baker's family below, and they're not coming regularly now, what with Glammis's death."

"Did you know him well?"

"Glammis?" She shrugged thin shoulders. "You know everyone in a village the size of Thonvil, even if you don't live above them. Glammis was kindly enough, a hardworking man with a wife and young son to support. I don't know how they'll get along without him." She dropped a pinch of tea leaves into one of the cups. "If they don't catch the disease themselves, that is."

Kirah poured heated rainwater from a kettle onto the brittle green leaves in both mugs. She stopped abruptly, her head cocked as she regarded Lyim. "It's funny that you should be looking for Guerrand now. Have you heard the rumors, too?"

"Too?" he repeated, taking in his left hand the hot mug she held out to him. He settled his bulk into the chair Kirah had vacated and took a tentative sip. "Who else is looking for him?"

Kirah whipped back dirty strands of hair from her face. "My nephew Bram left Thonvil in search of Guerrand because he thinks Rand may know something about curing this plague. I'm afraid my brother helped stir up Bram's suspicions, since Cormac believes everything that is wrong in and around Thonvil is Guerrand's fault. In the stupor that is his conscious state," Kirah said with great deliberateness, "Cormac has rewritten history to exonerate himself."

Lyim fidgeted in the chair. "What made Bram think Guerrand knows anything about it?"

"I haven't seen the pestilence myself," Kirah confessed, "but my nephew described it to me just before he left. Bram said that he had heard with his own ears what the gossips had been whispering: Just before death, the victims' snake limbs whisper Guerrand's name."

"Do you think it's possible Guerrand is responsible for it?" Lyim asked cautiously.

Again Kirah shrugged, a gesture seemingly as involuntary as breathing to her. "A month or more ago I w ouldn't have thought anyone I knew could even contract such a bizarre illness."

Lyim sipped, looking at her over the brim of his mug.

And what do you think now?"

Kirah moved to sit across from Lyim on the edge of her small bed. "This illness is odd enough to be magical m nature," she said slowly, "but I can't believe Guerrand had anything to do with it." Her face scrunched up pensively. "Why on Krynn would he want to do such a thing?"

Lyim set his empty cup down and wouldn't meet her eyes. "Do you think this nephew of yours, Bram, has any chance of returning with Guerrand?"

"I don't know. Frankly, he has more determination than experience."

Lyim frowned darkly. "Where did your nephew go, and when did he leave?"

"1 suggested he start by asking the wizards at Wayreth-" Kirah stopped suddenly. "Say, you're a mage, Lyim. If the pestilence is magical, can't you do something to stop it?" Her face brightened in hopeful understanding. "That's why you're here, isn't it?"

Lyim grimaced, wrestling with some decision. "I had hoped to spare you what I know about your brother, but-"

"What is it?" Kirah jumped to her feet and reached out imploringly for Lyim's arm, his right. The mage snatched away his gloved hand viciously before she could lay a finger to it. Stunned, she drew back and looked at him with pain in her pale eyes.

Lyim rubbed his face. "I believe Guerrand is responsible for this plague," he managed at last. "I knew it the second I stepped into the village and heard the details of the illness."

"But why?" gasped Kirah, shaking her head in disbelief.

Lyim's laugh was not kindly. "Guerrand and I have not been friends since-" he paused, considering, then pushed back his big right cuff and removed the tan leather mit from his hand. "Since this happened to my hand."

Not knowing what to expect, Kirah hung back apprehensively. She jumped in stunned horror when a long, single-headed snake with a gold diamond pattern on its head slithered forth where Lyim's hand should have been.

"I–I don't understand," she stuttered, unconsciously averting her eyes. "Are you saying Guerrand did that to you?"

His face red with shame, Lyim tucked the hissing creature back into its glove. "Not exactly," he said. 'In fairness, I'm forced to admit that my own master inflicted this upon me. But it was within Guerrand's power to help me cure it. He refused. I've been unable to cure it myself, but I did manage to find an antidote that enabled me to contain it to one hand."

Paler than death, Kirah dropped back onto the bed and shook her head with slow but unceasing regularity.

"If he has the power to cure it, Guerrand also has the power to create the disease," reasoned Lyim. When Kirah continued to shake her head mutely, he said, "I didn't want to believe it either."

"But why?" asked Kirah in a small voice. "Why would Guerrand want to inflict the same horrible pain on us?"

"Because he can?" Lyim postulated. "You don't know Guerrand anymore, Kirah. He's become a powerful and influential mage. Perhaps his impoverished roots are an embarrassment to him, I'm not really sure, but I fear his power has gone to his head. It happened to my master-the magic took him over." Lyim's dark, wavy hair brushed his shoulders as he shook his head sadly. "I tell you, you would not recognize your brother in the man who refused my simple request to cure my hand."

Kirah's eyes held a faraway look. "He promised me when he first left that if ever I needed help, he'd somehow know and come to me," she said numbly.

"Instead he sent me, rather than risk his position with his master," Lyim reminded her. "Apparently the seeds tor his selfishness had already been planted."

Lyim saw the firm set to her mouth. "Look, Kirah, I don't like to say these things, let alone believe them. But don't you think all the coincidences are a bit odd? My hand? The similarity of the plague's symptoms to the affliction Guerrand refused to cure in me? Why else would the snakes hiss his name? What but guilt or design could keep him away?"

Kirah bristled. "He probably hasn't heard of our troubles yet."

Lyim shook his head sadly. "You don't understand the powers of a mage if you believe that."

Kirah shook her head mutely. "I… can't… believe it. But maybe I don't know Guerrand anymore." Overcome, she pressed her face into her hands.

Lyim knelt by her on one knee, his hair falling to gently curl around his face as he lifted her tear-streaked chin with his good hand. "I've come to help you, Kirah."

Kirah tried to break the bond that held his eyes to hers, but the power that gripped her was as old as sorcery and far stronger. She could only manage a nod.

'Together, we can make Guerrand come forward and face what he has done," Lyim said smoothly. 'Together, we can end the suffering." He reached into his brown shroud and withdrew a flask. "This is the antidote I traveled to Mithas to secure. It prevents those with symptoms of the disease from dying, though it won't cure the mutations. And it keeps those without symptoms from contracting the illness. Guerrand will surely come forward when he realizes we've foiled his plot."

Still on one knee and holding Kirah's gaze, Lyim pressed the flask into her small hands. "I have just enough with me for you, Kirah," he intoned. "You must take it. For me."