crossed arms. Chess had crept across to him, to tug at him piteously. He crouched, whimpering wordlessly before Vandien. The morning sun colored his hair between blond and grey. It fell forward over his bowed shoulders, baring a slender neck as brown as wild honey. Vandien looked at the solid wall and shook his head in bewilderment. His brain rattled sharply inside his skull; the first stabs of an Alys-inspired headache jabbed him.
He eased himself down to untangle Chess from his cloak. Any sudden movement or violent activity would trigger a truly memorable headache. He knew he should turn his efforts to finding Ki. But he couldn't just leave these two here. 'We'll go to the next Gate and circle around,' he promised them.
As he unhooked each of Chess's small hands, they fell unresisting to the dusty street. He continued to whimper as if he wished to cling to Vandien but found the effort beyond his strength. His high-pitched keening and the deeper sobs of his mother pierced Vandien's brain like arrows. 'What has happened to the Gate? Will they open it again?' he asked them gently. There was only the rising and falling of the boy's wailing as a reply. Vandien felt needles at the back of his eyeballs. 'Chess, stop that, please. I can't help you if you won't talk to me.'
More keening. Vandien reached for the thin shoulders, repressed just in time a violent urge to shake the child into silence. He looked down in pain and consternation at the small head bowed before him. His eyes widened and his own throbbing head was forgotten.
Small watery pink blisters were rising on the back of his exposed neck, popping up even as Vandien watched. His belly tightened and he started to back away from whatever unsuspected disease this was. Where the hair parted on the boy's skull, more blisters were popping up in a neat row like seedlings after a rain. Chess's eyes were screwed tight shut in pain as he raised his face to Vandien. The skin of his small brown face was pure still, but as soon as the morning sunlight touched it, the blisters began to swell.
'The light! The hot light!' Vandien looked at the mother struggling to rise. 'How can it be endured? We shall die here!'
She lifted her once proud head and staggered a few steps closer to Vandien. Her eyes were squinted to slits. He saw the blisters rise on her nose and high cheeks as she groped toward him. She fell to her knees, her hands seeking blindly before her. The green of her airy garments began to brown and crumple in the morning light like leaves seared in a desert wind. Pink blisters popped on her exposed hands and arms.
He did not understand why, but he comprehended the need. With a sudden movement that brought demons to dance in his skull, he whipped the cloak from his own back and floated it down over the woman. It covered most of her, and as soon as she sensed its protection she drew her arms and legs neath its shelter. 'Chess!' Her agonized moan came from beneath the garment.
The child at his feet whimpered in reply but didn't move. The brown ragged garment from the inn covered most of his body. He had the sense to crouch with his arms and legs drawn up beneath him and his face averted from the sky. The cloak would not cover both of them. Vandien was tugging off his shirt when he heard the scuff of a footstep behind him.
He twirled, wincing at the pain this cost him. A portly man, the worse for his night's revelry, regarded the group with a carefully uncurious eye. As Vandien rounded on him, he became even more disinterested; his careful walk proclaimed that the woman huddled under the cloak and the child that whimpered and scrabbled at Vandien were invisible. A true city dweller, he gave them only an oblique glance that never reached Vandien's eyes. Vandien knew the courtesy of the city forbade him to look at the stranger or express any need, but his splitting headache and the peril of the young boy before him banished politeness. He dragged himself free of Chess, to clutch at the man's sleeve. 'I need your cloak, man! The child is burning up!'
The man opened his bloodshot eyes a trifle wider. He belched, and pulled his arm free of Vandien's frantic grip, even though the tug nearly cost him his balance. He staggered a few steps sideways, drew himself up gravely, and shot Vandien a haughty and disdainful look. But as he shrugged his cloak back even about himself, his eyes took in the blisters on the child's exposed arms. With a speed surprising in one so large, he ripped the cloak from his back and dashed it down into the street.
'My thanks for your mercies.' Vandien stooped to take up the cloak.
The man's mouth opened wider than Vandien supposed it could. His eyes were distended and suddenly sober. 'Pox!' The word blared from his mouth like a blast from a hunting horn. 'Pox bringers!' he screeched again.
Vandien flung the cloak about Chess as aroused citizens began to stir. A door slammed somewhere. Heads began to pop out of doors in the side street. A young woman stepped from a door near the corner. She halted at the sight of Vandien with the bundled child in his arms and the body huddled under a cloak beside him.
'Pox bringers!' She took up the cry lustily and the man made it a chorus. Stooping to the street, she grabbed a loose stone. Vandien flung up his arm to shield his face, but the fist-sized rock bounced instead off the woman. It brought a sharper cry from under the cloak. The streets were filling with people awakened by the cries of 'Pox bringers!' Head and heart pounding, Vandien stooped beneath his burden of the child to seize the mother by her arm and drag her erect. The cloak fell away from her face as she came up; the stone throwing woman gave a shriek of horror. The blisters were rupturing. A watery flow shone on the woman's face and dripped from her chin. Screaming with pain, she dragged the cloak over her face again.
And then they were running, with stones skipping and bouncing past them. Vandien received a solid thunk from one that hit between his shoulders, but no more flew true after that. Mentally, he cursed the gods for his luck, and in the same breath thanked them that his pursuers were city bred and poor in the skills of aiming and throwing.
Chess jolted in his arms as he tried to keep a hand free to guide the woman along. The cloak blinded her and the pain crippled her. Their run was little more than a hurried hobble; they had no chance of outdistancing their pursuers. His rapier was in the wagon with Ki ; but he had no hand free to draw it in any case. He had only his belt knife against a fear-crazed crowd.
He glanced back to check their numbers. But though they shook fists and hurled stones, they had given up the chase. Perhaps they only wished to harry the pox bringers out of their area; perhaps they feared getting closer and becoming contaminated. Vandien realized now why the man had parted with the cloak. And he had thanked him.
'I cannot go much farther.' Chess's mother panted from under the cloak. Vandien cast about for shelter. But no inn would take in two marked with oozing blisters, even if Vandien had possessed sufficient coin. It was early yet, and few folk were about; but they could not rely on that for long. As soon as they were seen, they would be stoned again. He steered them down an alley. He half dragged them past the windowless backs of squat mud brick dwellings. He was staggering under his double burden, uncertain of what type of shelter he was seeking.
They scuttled across a street that interrupted the alley, and back into the shelter of the next alley. This one appeared a little more run down. Dry yellow grass grew against the backs of the houses, new green sprouts pushing up in their shade. Another street was crossed, and Vandien found himself in an alley where the weeds and trash choked the footpath. He gave the woman what trodden surface there was, himself hopping over the tufty grasses, bits of broken furnishings and crumbling piles of rain-melted mud bricks. Chess was silent and limp in his arms.
A wooden porch jutted into the alley, clinging haplessly to the crumbling wall of a fallen-in house. But as Vandien cautiously skirted it, he realized it was not a porch. Chicken feathers and dung crushed the floor. A splintered wooden door hung crookedly on sagging leather hinges. There were no windows nor any door into the abandoned house it clung to. The dung cracked dryly under his feet as he dragged his charges into this dubious shelter. As soon as he halted, the woman sank down onto the floor. Mercifully, she became silent. He deposited his motionless bundle beside her and turned back to the door. It looked as if few folk passed this way, but it would be a bad place to be cornered. It couldn't be helped. He dragged at the door and it scraped toward him, to wedge tight half a handspan from being closed. It could not be tugged farther. His stubborn efforts only wrenched the doorframe and threatened to pull it loose entirely. It would have to do. Vandien sat down wearily on the filthy floor. The dryness of dust, old dung and chicken feathers tortured his mouth and throat. He lowered his throbbing head into his hands, and wondered unhappily how yesterday's pleasures had gone so wrong. Dust motes danced in the narrow wedge of light that slipped through the door's crack. The random sounds of an awakening city came distantly to his ears.
He lifted a corner of the cloak that covered Chess. The boy's breath was light and shallow, his eyes still squeezed shut. His face was not as badly blistered as his arms. But when Vandien lifted the cloth higher for a
