The Red Plague Affair

Chapter Twenty-Nine One Word

It was a good thing she had not wasted her sorcerous force duelling with the absent Rudyard. She could not take her carriage, or even the smart new curricle, for Mikal was still at Ludovico’s bedside. Harthell the coachman paled at the thought of driving to the Collegia, though he was willing enough; no, she had told him, merely saddle the bay mare, properly, and be quick about it. None of the sidesaddle rubbish.

It meant she could not wear full mourning, but she suspected Eli would understand. And why mourn, when there was death aplenty lurking in the streets? Her least favourite riding habit, in a shade of brown most dowdy and with newly unfashionable mutton sleeves, at least had divided skirts. She could always turn it over to Catherine and Isobel for reworking; Catherine’s needle could no doubt change it into something exquisite.

None of her servants had so much as a cough. The likely reason, of course, was throbbing in Emma’s chest; a wyrm-heart Stone that granted life and immunity, extending out through the indenture collars. Such protection would not extend where it was most needed.

Mentaths did not indenture.

Wherever Llewellyn Gwynnfud, Earl Sellwyth, was, he was certainly sneering at her.

What would Llew say of this? But she could guess. And it would be nothing she could give credit to if she wished to retain her self-regard.

She gathered the reins, nodded to Harthell, and the bay clockhorse, shining and lovingly oiled, pranced restively. She was a fine creature, deep-chested and beautifully legged, her glossy hide seamlessly merging into russet metal and her hooves marvels of delicate filigreed power. Wilbur the spine-twisted stableboy darted forward to open the bailey gate, and the mare shot forward, hooves striking sparks from the cobbles. The gate clanged at her passage, rather like a mournful bell, and she was very glad Mikal had not come from Ludovico’s bedside.

The witchlight before her spat silvery sparks, but she need not have bothered with the warning of a sorcerer’s haste. Those on the streets, handkerchiefs clamped to their mouths, scattered as she cantered past, and the few carriages out and about in the Westron End were easily avoided. Those who could afford to stayed inside, those forced out of doors hurried furtively… and three of the scuttling pedestrians collapsed as she rode past, their limbs jerking in a deadly dance.

Morris, damn him, had wrought well.

Riding thus absorbed a great deal of her attention, but what remained circled the same few problems as a tongue would probe a sore tooth. They vied for her attention equally – Victrix, the Duchess and her hangman, the faceless sorcerer who had so generously left Morris’s notes and quite possibly injured Rudyard severely in the bargain, Clare’s flushed cheeks and sweating, fevered brow, Ludovico’s restless tossing, Mikal’s hypnotic swaying at the assassin’s bedside.

What am I to do? How may this be arranged satisfactorily?

For the first time in a very long while, Emma Bannon had precious little idea. Everything now depended on Clare… and on other factors she had little say in. For a sorceress used to resolving matters thoroughly, quietly, and above all, to her own liking, it was a d—d uncomfortable state of affairs.

Through moaning, fog-choked, eerily calm Londinium the sorceress rode, and she arrived at no conclusion.

As soon as the bay’s hooves touched down on the white pavers inside the Black Gate, Emma tasted the chaos and fear roiling through the Collegia’s sensitised fabric. The Great School shook, its white spires flushed with odd rainbow tints and its defences, invisible and barely visible, quivering with distress.

She took the most direct route to the Hall of Mending at a trot, and the Collegia servant who took her horse had a fever-bright glare and an oddly lumbering gait. Emma merely nodded and mounted the steps with a stride a trifle too free to be a lady’s, the great Doors opening creak-slowly. She nipped smartly between them, rather as if she were a student again…

… and plunged into a maelstrom.

The white pennants and hangings had been taken down, and the floor was splashed with scarlet. Cots lay in even rows, then jammed into corners, while Menders and their apprentices hurried from one to the next, seeking to dull the pain of sorcerers who lay twisting and screaming as their bodies warped under a double lash of disease and ætheric eruption. Bannon actually stepped back, almost blundering into a young apprentice who hissed “Mind yourself!” and scrambled away, his arms full of bloody rags.

The low sinuous altarstone throbbed as well, flushed with pink as its energies, collected over generations, were now plumbed to aid in Mending.

It did not look as if it was doing much good. As she hurried down the central aisle, looking for a particular set of broad crippled shoulders, a lean hieromancer in his traditional blue jacket thrashed off a narrow cot and screamed a high piercing note of pain, and his body disintegrated under a wave of twisting irrationality. His flesh parted with sick ripping sounds, and the blood that spilled out crystallised into what looked like rubies, gem-bright droplets that chimed as they hit the floor.

Good God. Emma did not halt, ducking the fine mist of fluid turned to stone and hurrying past as Menders converged, charms flashing valorously but ineffectively. Sweat had collected along Emma’s lower back, and she felt the death of the hieromancer, brushing her with soft-feathered fingers.

Her Discipline responded, the deeper fibres of her body and mind twitching. She shuddered, and just then caught sight of Thomas Coldfaith.

His regular ungainly walk, shuffling and pulling his recalcitrant clubbed foot, was even more painful; his twisted face florid with Morris’s plague and streaks of pinkish rheum streaking his scar-pocked cheeks. His wonderful eyes were bloodshot, and he appeared not to notice her. His Mender’s robe was grey, not white, not his usual jay’s-bright plumage, and spattered beside with all manner of fluids. He had just straightened from another cot, where a dead body lay slumped, twisting and jerking as it turned itself inside out and spattered the surrounding area with entrails and foul blackish, brackish semi-liquid.

She arrived before him with no memory of the intervening space, the feather-tickles all over her body most distracting despite her training’s tight reining.

Once or twice before, the Hall of Mending had been full of such suffering. Only then none of Emma’s Discipline had been alive to witness it, for those of the Endor had been killed as soon as certain… troubling signs… were noticed.

Menders, however, had ever been cosseted.

“Thomas.” She caught his arm, her gloved fingers slipping slightly against the slickness coating his robe. “You called for me.”

He blinked, bleary, and the red film over his irises and whites turned his gaze to a chilling blankness. “Em?”

“I am here.” The same dry rock in her throat. “Thomas…”

“And untouched. That is good.” A weary nod of his proud, misshapen head. “Though why I am surprised, I do not know.”

Her temper and conscience both pinched, but the sea of noise about them overwhelmed both. “There may be a cure. I can bring you to it.” Clare will help. He must be very far along now. Childish faith, perhaps, but she ignored such an estimation.

More blinking, and Coldfaith swayed, as if undecided.

Enough. She slipped her arm through his and began to urge him along. They can do without you, Thomas. We need a quiet corner, and I shall…

What was she contemplating? The weight in her chest was terrible. Even more dreadful was the shaking through his body, communicating to hers in a flood of loose-kneed, swimming dismay.

“Em.” Coldfaith halted. “I wished to see you, before I did what I must.”

All her gentle urging could not move him. She clasped his arm more tightly, set her heels, and pulled a little more firmly. “Come with me. Please.”

“No.” A terrible clarity bloomed in his dark gaze, behind the film of blood. “Emma.”

“Thomas – Tommy.” As if they were students again, young and bright and struggling. “Come.”

He freed himself of her grasp, gently but decidedly. “I wished to see you once more,” he repeated. “And to tell you I have not been kind to you. Before our Disciplines, Em, I had… thoughts.” He murmured something she could not quite catch, and as she leaned closer to him among the buffet of the crowd, he coughed. Bright red spattered along her shoulder, but she did not care. “I… I must tell you. Em. Yes, must tell Em…”

Another ripple through him, and she caught at his elbow again. A Mender hurrying behind her bumped against her skirt and hissed an imprecation, having little patience for the obstruction it represented. A sea of coughing rose through the Hall’s capacious entrance, more screams, and moaning.

Even though the Church held the ætherically talented as doomed to a purgatory at best and deep hellfire at worst, the sorcerers still called for God in extremis. Some of them even called for mothers they did not remember, for the Collegia was mother and father once a sorcerous child was taken.

None called for their fathers.

Thomas tacked away, slipping through her fingers with a feverish dexterity. He made for the pink-stained altar-stone, and as he did, a vast stillness descended upon the Hall.

Between one step and the next, Emma froze. She strained against air thick and hard as glass, drawing in a torturous lungful of stabbing air as Thomas reached the stone. He stood, his head down, for a long moment, and she knew what the silence and the difficulty in breathing meant.

Here in the Hall of his Discipline, Thomas Coldfaith was about to open the deepest gates of his sorcery. And Emma, an interloper with stinging eyes and a traitorous stone spike in her chest, was pinned as a butterfly on velvet, unable to act.

No. Thomas, no.

What had he meant to tell her?

He stretched his arms wide, rather as a tau-corpse would, and the silence became unbearable. The Hall’s light brightened, scouring Emma’s skull, nails through her sensitive eyes and her lungs refusing to work, a crushing upon throat and ribs and bones, her dress flapping and ruffling as streams of disturbed æther swirled past, whipping toward the hunchbacked sorcerer.

It was an act spoken of in whispers long after, how the greatest Mender of his generation opened the gates to his Discipline, becoming the throat Mending sang through. How several of the dying writhed before closing their eyes in peace, whatever hurtful blooming of the irrational wedded to the invisible vermin eating their flesh soothed away. How there was a shadow in the midst of the Hall of Mending’s brightness, but it fled as Coldfaith cried one Word, the contours of which echoed and rambled through the Hall’s nautilus-curved halls and inner recesses for decades afterwards, a Word like a name, full of longing and frustrated love, a depth of passion scarcely hinted at during a lifetime’s watching and waiting.

There was only one sorcerer who could have explained the mystery of that Word, but she did not. None would have listened to her talk of Mending, for it was not her Discipline, and in any case, how could she explain how she knew?

She knew, for it was her own name: a Word that expressed a thin nervous fire-proud girl with brown curls seen through the eyes of a misshapen boy. The Word rang and rumbled and echoed, and when the door of his Discipline closed, the Menders found one of their own before the now-dark and drained altarstone, bending and coughing great gouts of scarlet blood that stained the pale flooring and would not be scrubbed away by bleach, carbolic, or sorcery.

Mending, as always, had exacted a price. Thomas Coldfaith’s body twisted and shuddered as flesh transmuted itself to smoke-dark glass, particles grinding finer and finer until they shredded into dark vapour that streamed out through the vast open doors and dissipated over Londinium.

He failed, but not entirely. Afterwards, the sorcerous of the Empire did not die of irrationality. They simply, merely, died of the plague’s convulsions and boils. A small mercy, perhaps, but all the twisted King of Menders (for so he was afterward called) could grant.

And Emma Bannon, Sorceress Prime, left the Collegia grounds on her bay clockhorse. None remarked her presence there that day, and it was perhaps just as well.

For had they addressed her, she would have struck them down with a Prime’s vengeance. In each of her pupils the leprous green spark of her own Discipline had strengthened, and that fire would not extinguish easily.