The Wrack

by John Bierce

  From his other eye, he simply watched the water rain down from the fountain into the pool. The images didn’t blur or blend. Rather, they somehow… overlapped, one image present atop another.

  However seers saw— Carlan, subscribed to none of the overblown theories touted by philosophers, and was content to admit he didn’t know— they weren’t truly seeing like they would from an eye. They weren’t perceiving light.

  It made perfect sense to Carlan that the vision from his two eyes wouldn’t blend, since he was perceiving two different worlds: the physical and the spiritual. That said, seers who had replaced both eyes with gems apparently didn’t have any visual blending between two different gems either, which was somewhat puzzling. It did occur when they used two gems of the same kind, though.

  That didn’t even get into the truly strange seers, those who had learned to hear or smell the spirit realm at the cost of those senses. There was nothing that wasn’t puzzling about them.

  It took less than a minute for him to fully resolve the internal structure of the fountain— and even to parse out the servant working the fountain’s pump, which largely just consisted of the servant walking in a circle and pushing the wheel inside his chamber. Citrine wasn’t great at seeing, but it made out bone just fine.

  Carlan spent a few minutes watching the servant walk in circles before a drunken noblewoman wearing a dress that was supposed to resemble armor interrupted him, clearly wanting some sort of reassurance that the Wrack wouldn’t be arriving in Lothain anytime soon.

  He offered her a few meaningless platitudes, but his heart wasn’t in it. Anyone with half a brain could tell the Wrack would be arriving soon— it had been slowly creeping south across the plain towards the capital, in its jerky, stop-and-go pattern. They still had no idea how it spread, but it hadn’t missed Carlan’s attention— or that of many others— that it moved at the speed a man might walk across the countryside, if he were in no hurry.

  It would be in Lothain in weeks at most, if not sooner. Much sooner.

  Some patterns were holding true, at least— it struck the nobility soonest and hardest, often decapitating the leadership of cities. Your odds of death rose with your personal wealth, at least in the first wave. A second wave of the disease usually struck around two to four weeks later, and that one usually hit the poorest members of society, though its victims were seemingly chosen much more at random than the first wave.

  It was, perhaps, ironic, that as the noblewoman left, relieved, Carlan thought that the king might actually be saving his own skin by sealing himself into the castle. They’d been locked up here for weeks— well past even the extraordinarily long dormancy period between catching the Wrack and it breaking you that the Moonsworn claimed it had. That, despite all the inconvenience and disastrous consequence for Lothain as a whole, Sigis’ cowardice might actually have worked.

  Then the screaming started.

  The instant the screams began, Carlan knew them for what they were. It wasn’t a scream of terror or surprise, but of pain, and he’d only heard its like in battlefield medical tents before. More screams started immediately after, but they were obvious as screams of panic.

  Carlan tossed his cup into the nearest potted plant, winning his bet with himself, and strode off towards the screaming.

  Drunken nobles rushed past him in terror, disrupting spirit flows and sending distracting ripples across the yellow-orange currents. One nearly shoved Carlan into the fountain pool, but he caught himself just in time. Another noble actually did trip and fall into the pool, startling the fish away from him.

  Part of Carlan had expected to find the king writhing on the ground— the Wrack seemed to have a sort of poetic viciousness to it, and striking down the king first in Lothain, like it had his son in Castle Morinth, would have been exactly the sort of thing the Wrack would delight in.

  But no. The king was cowering on his throne, curled up in its corner as though it would protect him. The screamer was a sweaty count by the name of… Heinrich, Carlan believed. He was a sycophant of little standing— the type Carlan avoided as much as possible. Were the situation less urgent, he was sure he could think of the man’s titles and descent, but he didn’t bother now.

  “You and you!” Carlan shouted. “Get over here and help me!”

  The two Carlan had pointed to— a foppish looking nobleman and a guard— hesitated for a moment, then rushed over and helped pin down the thrashing Heinrich.

  As the two men held down Heinrich, Carlan quickly checked to see whether it was indeed the Wrack, not that he had much doubt.

  Mild fever, screaming, delirium, muscle spasms— they were all there.

  Rather than scramble and try and switch to his peridot eye, Carlan tried looking at Heinrich through his citrine eye.

  He couldn’t make out much at first, but it didn’t take him long to find the distinctive patterns Benen and the few other healers they had reports from described. They looked odd, through a citrine eye, though that didn’t mean much when using the wrong gem.

  Heinrich spasmed hard enough to throw the two off him, shuddered, and went still. Carlan bent down to feel for a pulse.

  “That was fast,” he muttered. “I’d wager his heart was pushing failure to start with.”

  The nobleman gave him a shocked look, but then scrunched up his nose and scrambled back.

  Carlan rolled his eyes at that. Bowel release was a normal part of death, though this was a little on the fast side. He…

  Carlan paused and glared at the man’s jewel-silk pants. The obnoxiously expensive fabric was the one material a seer couldn’t see through, and for some ridiculous reason, Heinrich’s only genuine article of jewel-silk were his pants. He cursed, then began undoing Heinrich’s belt.

  “What are you doing?” the king demanded from his throne.

  Carlan pulled down the fat corpse’s pants.

  “His stool is solid, sire,” he said.

  “What does that matter?” the king asked, his voice hysterical.

  “Doesn’t it seem strange to you that diarrhea only seems to develop in the victims of the Wrack after all the screaming and writhing ends?” Carlan asked.

  “Are you trying to say this was the Wrack?” the King asked.

  “Of course it was,” Carlan replied, looking over the stool in the spirit realm. “What else could it have been? Do you know many illnesses that just show up uninvited out of the night and make people do that?”

  “We need to flee!” the king shouted. “We need to ride, to get out of the city.”

  “If we’ve been infected with the Wrack,” Carlan said, “we were infected a week and a half to three weeks ago, or somewhere thereabouts. There’s nothing we can do.”

  Carlan took off his hateful chicken mask and threw it off to the side. He pulled out his citrine eye, cleaned it off, and exchanged it for his peridot eye. Taking care to clean it— haste led to infection— he popped it in, and forced himself into the spirit realm.

  He frowned as he looked at the peculiar turbulence patterns of the Wrack in the green currents flowing through Heinrich’s corpse. They were by far the strongest in his liver, just as described.

  Carlan would wager that Heinrich wouldn’t be the only screa…

  Before he could finish that wager in his head, someone else in the ballroom collapsed and started screaming.

  The king whimpered, curling up smaller in his throne.

  Carlan ignored the new screamer, and turned his eye on the crowd.

  “You there,” he said. “Fetch the palace healers, if they’re not on their way already. You, dressed as a tree, run to the cloakroom— I left a medical satchel there, just in case. Fetch it for me.”

  He carefully ran his eye across the room, looking for any unusual turbulence coming from the base of anyone’s ribs. The liver was one of the largest organs, so he didn’t need to strain himself too hard.

  “You,” he said, pointing to the woman dressed as a falcon or some such nonsense. �
�Lay down on the ground, now. Someone fetch something to tie her wrists with.”

  “What?” she said, looking confused.

  “Better than hurting yourself falling. You’ve got the Wrack too,” Carlan said.

  The turbulence had started up in the currents flowing through her a few seconds ago, and she…

  She was running away. Lovely.

  Before she could get far, one of the guards grabbed her arm and pulled her back. Good man. Tough keeping your head in situations like this.

  Carlan spent the next minute or so watching her torso from just a few inches away as the guard held the woman.

  “I feel fine,” she said. “You must be mistaken. I demand you let me go immediately!”

  “It came out of nowhere,” Carlan muttered. “There was no sign of it in you just a couple minutes ago at all, and it just showed up. Not to mention how unusually close together it is with Heinrich and the other victims. Could something be triggering it? Something in the air? A stress response due to the screams?”

  Carlan stepped back as the woman started screaming. She thrashed so hard that she yanked out of the guard’s grip, giving him a broken nose in the process. Carlan could visibly see the Wrack flowing out of the woman’s liver in huge amounts into her body.

  Carlan stepped away from the two, and looked around for the next victim, only to spot trace ripples of the Wrack in the spirit current floating in front of him. He looked down at his own torso and frowned.

  “Bollocks”, Carlan said in a dignified tone of voice. He frantically pulled his journal and a stick of graphite from his side pouch and began writing down his observations.

  “Someone needs to make sure this note gets to Yusef the Moonsworn!” he shouted.

  He kept his peridot eye focused on his liver, watching the Wrack grow more intense.

  A terrible thought occurred to him, and he frantically jotted it down, then ripped the pages he’d just written out of his journal.

  “I need someone to transmit this via semaphore!” he shouted.

  He felt oddly warm, moreso than the weak fever at the beginning stages of the Wrack could account for.

  The guard with the broken nose stepped forwards and accepted the note and took off at a run.

  Carlan sighed, then carefully lay down on the ground. He noticed that the fountain had stopped.

  He had time for three deep breaths before the pain hit in a wave.

  In Lothain City, a siege was happening in reverse.

  In front of the palace gates, the city guards had spent much of the evening holding off a restless, irritable mob, angry at the sounds of music and festivities coming from the palace. It had come close to violence several times, and tensions between the guards and the mob had been high.

  The guards, most of them, hadn’t even wanted to be there. They hadn’t been allowed into the palace; they’d just been ordered there by their commanders earlier in the day to prevent trouble. There were usually a few angry souls outside the palace gates these days, but everyone was expecting trouble— somehow, despite a complete lack of movement in and out of the palace, the word of the masquerade had spread through the city like wildfire— most likely through the semaphore links between the palace and the city.

  Much of the mob had dissolved away immediately when the music ended and the screaming started, but some fast-thinking member of the crowd had shouted to bar the gates.

  The guards had joined right in.

  They piled carts, trash, and construction materials in front of the gates in huge mounds. The palace guards on the walls shouted at them to stop, but when they fired an arrow at the crowds, the city guards responded in kind, and the palace guards, already disheartened by the screaming from inside the palace, quickly withdrew.

  Perhaps if Sigis IV had maintained the palace siege engines, or had bothered to keep cauldrons of oil and firepits ready by the murder holes over the gate, they could have done something. As it was, when a crowd of desperate servants and nobles poured out of the palace and tried to unbar and push the gates open, they found them lodged shut.

  The gate was built to open outward, for a normal siege, where attackers meant to force it open. Now that worked against the residents of the palace, for the mob could easily keep the gates shut. With their access to the walltops, the nobles and palace guards normally would have easily cleared the palace gate of the mob and city guard.

  These were hardly normal circumstances, and within a couple of hours, their attempts to escape had ended, and the only sounds coming out were screams.

  The king sent a long series of angry semaphore messages, trying to force the city guard to open the gates, but those messages ceased before dawn, and what could have turned into a battle in the streets of Lothain simply… fizzled out.

  The Moonsworn didn’t even attempt to get access to the palace to help the stricken— only a small handful of them were let in even at the best of times, and the nobility’s suspicion of them had climbed ever higher as the Wrack advanced.

  Besides, they knew their efforts would be needed out in the city streets soon.

  Within a day, the screams weren’t just inside the palace.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Every Name That Ever Was

  Rupert and Ida followed Priest Otto through Swalben, and Ida prayed.

  Swalben was never quiet. The seabirds called from sunup to sundown. The wind blew, never ceasing, only shifting directions. The waves crashed against the rocks and piers, tide in, tide out, tide in, tide out.

  Once there were a thousand human noises to go along with those. The shouts of dockworkers and the laughs of drunken sailors. The bells that rang the hour every hour. The voices of eighty thousand souls who prayed and blasphemed on the steep and narrow streets of Swalben. But now there was only the one human sound in these grey, drizzling days, and it screamed, and it moaned, and it babbled, and the Wrack owned Swalben.

  And Ida prayed to the ancestors over and over and over again in her head, desperate to hear from them, but not because she needed advice or guidance or even comfort. She prayed just in the hope that they might speak to her, and their voices might drown out the screaming, even for a few moments.

  And the three of them, the last priest and the last two acolytes of the Church Eidola in the once-great port of Swalben in the once-great kingdom of Lothain, went house to house, street to street, racing to find the names of the dead.

  They found a house packed with a family who would rather die together than flee, and who wept with joy when Otto knocked on their door holding his book with the names of the dead.

  They found a sailor dead on the street, not even of the Wrack, but with a knife wound in his back, and no one knew him, but in the way of sailors, they found his name tattooed on his chest, surrounded by tattooed vines and wires, that the ancestors not think he was committing blasphemy. It was a false superstition, for nothing could keep tattooing the name of someone living from being blasphemy, but Otto didn’t even frown at the tattoo, only wrote it down.

  They found a beggar with blackened fingers and clenched muscles lying atop a drain, and none would admit to knowing him. Ida and Rupert both wept at the poor man’s lost name, and even Otto had to take a few deep breaths.

  They went house to house, street to street, and the names crept into Otto’s book one by one.

  They found a whole family, dead in their home, and it took them an hour to find someone in the neighborhood who could identify them all. No one else in that neighborhood had died.

  They found a corpse so bloated in her own home that they didn’t even know if she’d died of the Wrack, or how long she’d been there. They searched her house until they found some record of her name, and Ida felt like a filthy thief as she pawed through drawers and cupboards, and she wept in anger and didn’t look at Rupert or Otto.

  They stood on the steps of a house that reeked of death for what felt like hours, as Otto pleaded with the man on the other side to let them in— or at least tell them the
names of the dead, but the man only shouted back awful blasphemies in his rage and grief, and he would not let them in nor tell them the names of the dead. And Ida shook to hear those blasphemies and felt an awful shame when part of her hoped this awful man would have his name unrecorded too, and when they walked away, she saw that Rupert looked as angry as she did, but Otto just looked sad.

  They went house to house, street to street, and the names crept into Otto’s book three by three.

  They walked among the whores and slatterns and graceful men of the Winding Alley by the docks, which was as wide as any street and longer than most in Swalben. And Ida, who’d grown up among respectable merchant folk at the top of the city, felt shame and disgust at coming to this place her family had always warned her about. And at the end of a day spent in the Winding Alley, she felt shame and disgust only at herself, for the whores and slatterns and graceful men had taken them into the warmth of one of their brothels and set them up at a table and lined up patiently, giving them the names of their dead one by one, and they fed the priest and his acolytes, showing one another kindness that Ida hadn’t seen in the city since the Wrack had come. And Ida saw how gracious and kind Otto was to each and every one of them, as though they were kings and queens and scholars of note, and she promised herself she’d be as holy as him someday.

  They went from pier to pier, between the few ships that hadn’t fled Swalben, who had lost too many sailors to the Wrack to sail the stormy autumn seas, and Ida pressed in close to Rupert and Otto, afraid of these rough men, but Otto went honestly and patiently to each of the ships. He laughed and joked and shared drinks with the men, and Ida didn’t understand until she realized that this was how they mourned. She saw how they would all pretend not to see when tears came to the eyes of one of their number, and how even the roughest and vilest of them seemed afraid to go more than a few feet from the others. And she never forgot how Otto held a flask of vile sailor’s brew to a man’s lips whose fingers had been burnt by the Wrack and couldn’t grasp any longer.