become sidetracked by the hospital tents, wanting to help. But as the sounds of a terrible birthing squealed up from the knot of doctors and something grotesque as a giant tadpole was dropped, sloshing and half-dead, into a bucket of bloody water, Taelin realized her error.
This was not what she had come here for.
Neither the patient nor its offspring survived and Taelin could hardly bear to think that this illness had spread south, beyond Sandren. She watched part of the autopsy; saw how the brain of the victim had suffered like its flesh. Several physicians gasped during the procedure. “I don’t know how he walked in here,” Baufent said. “See the decay? The cerebellum and basal ganglia are almost totally destroyed.”
“He?” asked Taelin.
Baufent looked up at her between the hunched shoulders of the other doctors around the table. Despite the birth, Baufent said, “Indeed.”
But the patient had walked. And so had others. Those that had not chewed off their tongues still whispered. The stories were garbled, about slippery creatures that had brought the plague to Sandren. Although they sounded preposterous, Dr. Baufent seemed to take them at face value. She assured Taelin that this had happened before.
“If you’re not going to bed, I could use your help.”
Taelin looked over her shoulder as if Sena might be there. She pondered going to bed. Then, reluctantly, she made the southern hand sign for yes and followed Baufent to the next gurney.
“Can you hand me that anesthesia inhaler?”
Taelin looked at the nearby tray. The funnel-shaped contraption was easy to sort out. She passed it to the doctor. As she did, the patient reached up and grabbed her wrist. Taelin cried out. Baufent jumped forward and tried to slap the hand away. But the patient looked up with deathly golden eyes and maintained its grip. “We came for you,” it said. Its eyes burned into Taelin’s face. “The flawless are coming.” Its other hand reached toward her chest. “Coming for you.”
Dr. Anselm appeared out of nowhere and wrestled with the patient’s hand. Finally its fingers loosened and Taelin felt her wrist come free.
“Get her out of here!” shouted Anselm. “She’s supposed to be under quarantine!”
Taelin stumbled backward as the scene cluttered with bodies. Baufent, coat covered with greasy salve and plague excretions and the sticky residue of her own sweat called out that it was her fault. She examined Taelin’s wrist. “It’s just a scratch.” But she doused Taelin’s entire arm with antiseptic. “You’ve had your shot. You’re going to be fine. Now get out of here.”
Heart still hammering, Taelin backed away, twisting at her necklace, bending the edges back and forth. Useless. She was in the wrong place.
For a while she stood in the darkness at the edge of the tent, watching the brilliant red smell-feasts suckle their meals. Scarlet oyster bodies with long tendrils wrapped the patients and undulated against them. Their sucking mouths worked against the toxins while Baufent supervised the operation.
She considered sneaking onto the
Finally, she went back to her cot. The unfinished game of cards seemed like it belonged to a different week. She tried to remember what day it was. Had it really only been yesterday morning that they had arrived in Sandren? It was hard to believe. She felt dizzy and lay down on her side. The thin blanket she had been given was too small to cover her feet.
She closed her eyes, listened to herself breathing. She hugged a tiny pillow to her chest for comfort and felt the demonifuge press against her breastbone. The place on her wrist, where the creature had grabbed her, itched. Taelin tried not to think about it. Nenuln would keep her safe.
CHAPTER
17
Dawn had barely broken on the fifteenth and Caliph knew that flying back to Isca was impossible. The batteries on the
The valves, the pumps, all of it was a mystery to Caliph. Even Alani was helpless. Most of the instructions were printed in High Malk.
Caliph sent for Sig.
The palace was in shambles. It smelled of death. The lord mayor, his bodyguards and staff, everyone who had once called Rosewind home, were piled in the rear courtyard. Caliph agreed with Alani that knowledge of the gruesome discovery be disseminated only on a need-to-know basis.
“I want to know who piled them up,” said Caliph. But memories of a terrifying night in Isca made it easy to conjecture. He had already made sense of this.
So had everyone else. Which was why none of his elite guards answered as he paced around a velvet divan that had been pushed back from where it had recently buttressed the palace’s main doors.
The Stonehavians sensed the danger, down in the moist fissures below the city. The things that had come up from underground. Caliph didn’t want to believe that it was true or that he had brought everyone here and run them nearly out of fuel.
All Caliph could do was hope that Sig arrived soon.
In the meantime he poked around the palace, looking through archways at darkened inner rooms where signs of further madness marred the walls and floors.
It became clear how behaviors must have changed so rapidly from the premeditated human greed of looting to more basic animal avarice. The patients in the tents certainly showed no interest in their appearance or in gathering treasures. Whatever had been stolen from these grand rooms must have soon after been scattered, thought Caliph, left in diverse locations as the thieves lost interest and slunk out of their new lairs, changed and hungry.
A chandelier on the floor of the three-story vestibule must have been too heavy to cart away. Its bent, curled shape snarled like a dead spider in a swatch of light that spilled from a doorway at the other end of the echoing room. Caliph overheard Alani’s men muttering. They wrestled with a map.
Sena had disappeared gods knew where. The conference had been delayed until tomorrow according to a note flown up by bird. Sig was on his way. Everything was in limbo.
Caliph called one of his men over. “Where are those books I gave you?”
“Right here, sir.”
Caliph took them and sat down in the patch of light. There was a bright blue note tucked into the pages that read start here.
I grew up along the Bainmum River, on the desert’s edge. It was perhaps because of that cruel climate that I wanted to save people from hurt. From sun and sand and raiders out of Eh’Osgaj Ogwog. That was the heart of my youth.
I woke thirty years later to find that I had paved the road to that goal with broken bodies, my philanthropy reflected in breastplate and helmet.
It seems impossible to connect me, the laughing curious child, with the bloody sword I have swung for so many years. I became a monster over decades through a slow regimen of self-rewards.
I know now that “rights” are unrelated to eating cuts of meat and drinking wine, to being served at my whim in the swiftest most accommodating manner. Still, I cannot help but dream of the great days, when all white men were our slaves and all that was beautiful was black like me: when choice was
