Guerrand's head snapped left at the sound of a wagon in the street. It was a trundling green thing pulled by an old, sway-backed horse. Two people sat upon the seat: one a young boy, the other of an age with Guerrand and vaguely familiar. Both jumped to the dirt road and clambered around the wagon. Removing one side, they began to unceremoniously shove one of the heavy, stone bodies piled in the cart to the soft, greening ground of the square.
'Hey, ain't we supposed to take these to the field on the north edge of town?' posed the younger of the two, who could be no more than ten years of age. 'No more room here, and no one to dig holes for 'em anyway.'
The father straightened his spine above the stone- stiff bodies in the wagon and rubbed his lower back. 'Who cares where they go, boy? Dead's dead,' he pronounced. 'The plague wouldn't a took 'em if they was good people, anyway. Not like us.' He thumped his chest. 'You 'n me been spared, boy, so's we get the pick of the houses they don't burn. You make sure everything valuable was off 'em?'
The boy nodded, patting a pouch at his waist.
Horrified by what he was witnessing, Guerrand tried to place the face and voice that seemed so familiar. Suddenly it came to him.
'Wint?' Guerrand called to the man, recalling him as the younger of the bullies he had chased from this very square for stoning a woman they claimed was a witch.
The man swung around in surprise at the sound of any voice. Thin lips drew back in recognition, exposing big box teeth. 'You!' he gasped. Wint hooked his thumbs through his belt and cocked one scrawny hip in an effort to portray indifference. 'They said you was dead, but I heard it whispered you brought this plague on us.'
Guerrand looked at him levelly. 'Then I'd be afraid, if I were you.'
The belligerent man squinted at Guerrand, an evil grin stretching the sparse whiskers on his hawkish face. 'You got no power here anymore, DiThon,' he snarled. 'Yer brother and sister are crazy, the whole lot up there'-he tossed his head in the direction of Castle DiThon-'they're as poor as us common folk and sealed up like mice in a tomb.'
Guerrand had so little regard for the man that he couldn't bring himself to be angry.
'Got nothin' to say, without yer brother the lord to protect you, eh?' the man taunted, looking with eager pride to see if his son was impressed with his bravado.
'You're still a bully and a blowhard, I see,' Guerrand observed with sigh. 'Apparently you haven't the courage or brains to succeed, so you wait in shadows to feed off the work of others.' Guerrand fished around in his pack of components, found his sole caterpillar cocoon, then raised his robed arms. 'Perhaps it's time you saw the world through the eyes of the rat you are.'
Wint's chest had puffed out indignantly, and his hands curled into fists. But when Guerrand raised his arms, the man drew back slightly, looking both confused and more than a little worried. 'Whatcha doin' there? I'm warning you, stop it!'
'What's the matter, Wint? No one to protect you from the witch?' Guerrand asked. Wint's face became a mask of horror as Guerrand continued the circle he'd begun with his arms. 'Doduvasl'
Blue and green light sparked like the hottest fire above the wagon, and where Wint had stood was now a squealing brown rat. The creature's whiskered face sniffed at the edge of the wagon, then it leaped to the ground and skittered across the road, heading for the shadows between buildings. Wint's young son took one frightened look at Guerrand, jumped from the wagon, and scrambled after his father.
The mage looked upon the faces of stone in the wagon; a youngish woman, man, and an elderly matron who resembled the man in the nose and set of the eyes. They must have been the last of a family, which was why the three were being buried by strangers.
Wint aside, so much had changed since last Guerrand was in Thonvil. He began to walk, and before long his feet led him down the twisted side streets to one in particular he had traveled many times in his youth. He tripped over something squishy. Looking down, he saw the bloated body of a dead rat. The sight propelled him on even faster.
Guerrand rounded the last corner, where the rays of the sun never reached. Wilor the silversmith's storefront came into view. Though the shutters were closed, the silversmith shop wasn't boarded up like so many of the other stores around it. Guerrand recalled briefly that his father's old adventuring crony had threatened to retire those many years ago, when Guerrand had come to retrieve a trinket for Ingrid Berwick, and to talk of his brother Quinn's casket cover.
Suddenly the mage had a nostalgic eagerness to talk to the old silversmith. Perhaps Wilor knew something about the plague that might help Guerrand.
He well remembered the metalsmith's heavy door bearing its silver unicorn; it set the stall apart from the much more practical doors of the other merchants and signified Wilor's trade. Guerrand knocked tentatively on the door, then more loudly when no one answered. When still no one came, he looked over both shoulders before tugging at the ornate door and slipping inside.
Eleven anvils were silent in the modest shop, the small furnace cold. There was none of the usual haze hanging among the exposed rafters, no glowing bits of metal anywhere. Cold, black rods lay next to many of the anvils, a testament that they had been still for some time. A crucible of tarnished silver lay clamped in a long pair of tongs, waiting for a smith's practiced hammer.
Guerrand stood remembering the last time he'd been here. It had been the second time he'd met Belize, when his life had taken such a dramatic turn. His memories of that mad wizard were not pleasant, and he turned them away. He was about to leave entirely, convinced that Wilor and his heirs had moved on, leaving everything in midproject, when he heard a low but unmistakable groaning coming from somewhere beyond the room. He followed the noise to the back of the shop, where a heavy woolen curtain hung from hooks in the ceiling.
'Hello?' Guerrand called tentatively through a crack in the curtain. 'Is anyone here?'
'Just,' came a man's adenoidal rasp. 'Who's there?'
'A… friend,' Guerrand said, unsure if he wanted whoever was behind the curtain to know him or not.
'Come back only if you've a strong stomach.'
The warning gave Guerrand pause for a moment before he pushed his way past the opening in the scratchy curtain, his lower lip clamped between his teeth expectantly. His first breath beyond it was half- choked by the stench of rotting flesh he recognized too well from Kirah's room. The mage blinked away the tears that instantly welled due to the smell.
The silversmith lay on a dirty mound of linen- covered hay in the corner of a dark room, lit in thin, muted streaks by a small window in back. The man's thick, grizzled forearms that had always reminded Guerrand of roasted meat were now six writhing snake heads. He could see that snakes also writhed beneath the blanket that covered Wilor from the waist down. The once-powerful man was shrunken and pale and crippled, and clearly would never again practice his beautiful craft.
'Guerrand DiThon, as I barely live and breath,' the smith said with difficulty, surprise and pleasure evident on the pale, sunken face that the mage remembered as round and jolly. 'I hadn't expected yours to be the last face I behold before Habbakuk takes me home, but I can think of none I'd rather see.'
'I–I'm sorry to find you thus, Wilor,' was all Guerrand could think to say. Wilor had been a short, sturdy man of immense strength from his vigorous life. His teeth were gone save one. The smith's hairline had receded even farther in the last decade and was now tbe CDedusA pUguc
past the midpoint of his scalp, until only a narrow ring of salt-and-pepper hair remained.
'How is the second son of Rejik DiThon?' the smith asked, as if over shepherd's pie at the Red Goose Inn. Wilor eyed Guerrand's red robes with obvious interest.
'Well enough, Wilor,' said Guerrand. What could he do but shrug his shoulders, apologizing for his healthy presence at death's grim door?
'Ah, well, I have been better,' said the man, trying hard but not succeeding at a self-deprecating chuckle. Instead, Wilor was caught up in a choking cough that slowly subsided.
Guerrand could think of no delicate way to ask the questions that burned in his throat. 'Marthe? Your sons?' he queried, looking hopefully about the dim storeroom.
Wilor didn't blink. 'All dead. The boys went first, about a week ago. I wish I could have spared Marthe seeing that.' His bald pate rocked from side to side. 'After watching them, I considered sparing us both this, but-' He sighed from his soul. 'It turns out I was too much a coward to do anything about it.'
Wilor looked, unblinking, toward the window, to the sky. 'Then Marthe caught the chill, and I had to stay for
