Hand-shaped amulets hung at every door flap, staring at him with their lifeless glass eyes; and beside them hung glowing bottles painted with the face a crowned, bearded man: King Solomon, and in his mouth, behind the glass, squirmed luminescent worms. Their wriggling made the Messah’s wine-belly sick, but they were not the worst of it. The tents themselves wreaked of urine, spice, animals, and decay—and that was those whose flaps were closed. There was one among the pavilions which stood agape. It sighed with the wind, its breath of sweaty cloth and acrid pitch. In its threshold, a tattered hag, faceless and formless under hair and dirty smock. She glared at him evilly, fanning herself with a palm of woven grass.
“The Messah has come,” the old woman grunted, almost unintelligible, so thick was her accent. “It is told, the Messah will come.”
Adam gushed at once, “You speak Messaii? Help me, please. My friend is sick, she needs medicine!”
“Come, then.” uttered the hag as she retreated inside her tent. The pastor’s son followed from the desert cool into a miserable swelter, a dim and dingy room illumed by a single lamp—the glint of half a hundred jars flickering in reflection. Their contents: blood-red roots, dried grasses, the shrunken heads of cats and hounds, powdered elephant tusks, human hands and teeth and eyes, wilted petals, and hashish mounds. At the center sat the hag glowering with malevolence, her body skeletal in the light, her skin like ancient parchment. From her toothless maw she hawked a wad of herbs into a brass coffer.
“You’re an apothecary, right?” Adam blurted. His heart swelled, “I didn’t know if—can you make the medicine? Magdalynn, my friend, she’s sick.”
The old woman snorted. “It is too late for medicine. I smell death, the Black Devil,” rapped the syllables like the skittering of a spider or the scurrying of rat feet on the sheets of a sleeping child.
The Messah shuddered and uncovered the girl to make sure she was still breathing. She was, but only faintly, and bulges were forming under her arms and on her thighs. And the hag did not lie, the girl was swathed in the rank of decay. Adam covered her again, unwanting to see, then he begged the old woman—noticed her eying his purse. “Please, I’ll pay whatever you want. Is there anything you can do?”
Blood red gums grinned at him. “Yes, but the cost is much.”
“Anything.”
“Fifty,” the hag said.
Adam counted out his coin, uncertain how much what he had was worth. “Fifty demidrakes?” he asked.
“No, stupid Messah. Fifty drakes. Three hundred demidrakes.”
“Three hundred,” he repeated, unwilling to believe his ears. If his count was correct, between Hassan’s payment and what he got from Yasmine, he had just more than a quarter but only one day to make up the rest. So he showed her the contents of his purse. “This is all I have.”
“Not enough.”
The Messah knelt, bowed his head to the floor, cradling the girl, the ground warm as the blood in his veins. “God, I’m begging you. Please! It’s all I have.”
The old woman glanced at her lamp grumbled, in Tsaazaari at first, then in Messaii, “There is a thing, but it will not save her. Maybe she will last the day. You leave me this,” she pointed to the purse. “I give you medicine. Tomorrow, you come back and pay the rest.”
“And you can save her?”
The hag plucked a necklace from the bosom of her smock. On it were keys and charms and silvered vials—one of these she broke free and traded to Adam. Immediately, he removed the cork and fed the cure to Magdalynn. But the liquid poured murky, caustic, and viscous. The girl gagged and choked more than she swallowed. “Good,” the old woman said. “Now go and get the rest. Thirty-eight drakes, Messah. At most she lasts one more day.”
One more day, he thought, over and over after departing the apothecary, his concentration on nothing but this mantra as he waited for his companions to appear at the southern entry. It was dawn when they arrived, Ba’al and Adnihilo. The half-blood seemed glad to see him. The bishop said nothing, and neither did Adam aside from asking the location of their camp. He wanted somewhere safe to hide Magdalynn while he did what he needed to do. Adnihilo pointed him to a ridge in the sand. The camp laid between there and a range of dunes, out of view from the watchmen on the towers, about half an hour’s march east. It took the Messah twice that long to find it concealed by the shifting hills and sandy winds. Good, he thought, finally coming upon their paltry tents. He laid Magdalynn in under the protection of the canvas shade, pilfered water from a skin his friends
