The Wrack

by John Bierce

  But now, she bore no hope for that at all. Galicanta, even at full strength, could hardly hold off the Sunsworn Empire alone, and Galicanta was a shambles, half the nation overtaken with the Wrack. With the crippled condition of the Teringian semaphore network, the Empress would not be able to send for aid from the other Eidola nations. Even if they could, Raquella doubted there were soldiers or supplies to send.

  The Sunsworn Empire might finally achieve its dream of conquering Teringia. A broken, plague-ridden Teringia, but she doubted that mattered to the Sunsworn Emperor. She’d spent years restraining her criticism of the man even in her own head, but in truth, she knew the man cared far more about increasing his own power and glory over any higher concerns.

  She gave a brief prayer to the Moonsworn Goddess that Amazahd, the son of the Emperor, by all accounts a far more pious man, might ascend to the throne atop the Ziggurat of the Sun sooner than later.

  Raquella bore no hope of that, however. Whether the Sunsworn conquered Galicanta or were miraculously rebuffed, she knew that the Wrack would cross to Oyansur in the chaos of war, and the Emperor was dooming uncounted thousands to painful death, and more again to being cripples. There was nothing Raquella could do, save for…

  Her whole train of thought came to a halt, and she paused in the middle of the street she had been walking down. The Moonsworn clerks and palace scribes that had been following her stopped as well, confused. All traces of her maudlin, cynical reflections on war had vanished from her mind.

  Snakes. Sherra had been ranting about snakes. Sherra might be mad, but she was anything but stupid.

  Raquella turned in an abrupt about-face, and began to stride back towards the Moonsworn infirmaries as quickly as she could.

  She was pretty sure she knew exactly why Sherra had been ranting about snakes.

  Then, at the edge of her hearing, Raquella heard it. It was faint, and far in the distance across the great city, but it was there.

  Screaming.

  The Wrack had arrived in Ladreis.

  Raquella didn’t stop walking, even as those around her paled in fear.

  She needed to speak to Sherra.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  A Chorus of Screams

  Half a hundred interruptions forced their way into Raquella’s path as she tried to get back to interrogate Sherra.

  Some were those reporting back to her on tasks she’d assigned them, and even in her impatience, she didn’t begrudge them yet. The vast majority, however, had heard the screamer, who seemed to be located in the opulent manors below the palace, and merely seemed to want reassurance. So, of course, they invented business to approach her on.

  Regardless of who was trying to speak to her, Raquella just kept walking, forcing everyone to keep up with her.

  Several of those who interrupted her she sent out to try and find out exactly who had caught the Wrack. She could still hear the screamer in the distance, but even knowing what part of the city they were in didn’t help too much, for sound echoed strangely in the city, and there were no simple, straight-line streets. The closest thing to it was the switchbacking Imperial Way, that led from the Imperial Palace atop Ladreis’ highest hill down to the docks.

  Other than the screams, Ladreis seemed utterly silent.

  She reached the Moonsworn infirmaries to find out that Sherra was gone— she’d dragged her attendants and the Empress’s Pride’s guards off towards the Wrack sufferer.

  Raquella was moderately confident the madwoman wouldn’t try to escape into the city on her own again. A medical puzzle was one of the few things that could truly hold her attention, to the point where Sherra’s keepers could hardly get her to eat or sleep until she’d solved it.

  Like all inhabitants of Ladreis, Raquella had massively overdeveloped legs from roaming up and down the steep alleys and winding staircases of the city. Her lungs were equally impressive for her age. Even so, it had been years since she’d pushed either so hard. Raquella’s legs were killing her, and she had trouble catching her breath, but she set out to find Sherra and the screamer anyhow, not giving the slightest allowance to her weakness.

  The first screamer had been continuing off and on for nearly an hour by the time Raquella reached the wealthy neighborhood where they were from. The buildings were larger than below, but not by much, and the streets were no less convoluted, stair-filled, or steep. The plazas with their fountains were a bit more ostentatious in their carvings, but the steep hills and immense population of Ladreis governed the use of space with an iron fist, and only the Empress in her palace could defy it.

  Still, though the houses were not much larger, they were each inhabited by only a single family, while the buildings below often housed as many as ten families apiece, with multiple generations inhabiting a single room. Some of the biggest families in the slums had to sleep in shifts.

  If there were a single unoccupied building in all of Ladreis, it would genuinely shock Raquella.

  The voice of the screamer echoed throughout those twisty alleys and winding staircases, until Raquella could hardly tell where it came from. She selected a plaza that seemed close to the sound, and sent out her attendants and clerks to find Sherra.

  The instant Raquella sat down on the edge of the ornately carved fountain basin to rest, a second victim started screaming nearby.

  Raquella cursed. There’d been some reports of isolated cases of the Wrack emerging as much as a couple of days before the initial, primary wave burst forth, and she’d hoped this would be one such, but with two in the same wealthy neighborhood, it seemed unlikely.

  She sat, and massaged her miserable legs, and she waited. The terrified nobles of the neighborhood sometimes peeked out at her from behind their shutters, but none approached nor left their homes.

  A messenger from the Empress reached her as she waited on the fountain, informing her that no less than three cases had appeared behind the thick walls of the palace, including one of the Empress’s grandchildren, and that they should return with the emerald to seek a way to save her grandchild.

  She sent the message back that the emerald was with the first victim in the city below, and she would send messengers to have it and its bearer sent to the palace as swiftly as she could, and she waited for her attendants to find Sherra.

  And waited. And waited. It likely wasn’t that long, in truth, for the shadows barely shifted, but it felt like an eternity to Raquella. A third screamer began in earshot, and then as one of her attendants returned to her at a sprint, a fourth.

  “I found her,” the woman gasped. “This way.”

  She made the attendant drink from a waterskin, then followed her through the winding alleys, up a particularly steep stone staircase where she could touch the steps above her without bending over or even leaning forward at all, and into a tiny plaza with no fountain, no great view of the city, and but three doors upon it. Several other attendants found them along the way and followed in their wake.

  The attendant led her into the left-most of the doors, and Raquella found herself in a dark, musty house, crammed with sculptures, busts, and books. The kitchen was the only room well lit and well cleaned that Raquella saw as she was led upstairs.

  The screaming grew louder and louder as she climbed the stairs until she could not even make out the voice of the attendant leading her upwards.

  She found herself, finally, in a great bedroom that took up nearly the entirety of the top floor. An immensely fat woman writhed and thrashed in the bed, and her screams were extraordinarily loud. She was young and hale seeming, other than her great weight.

  Sherra and her escorts all stood about the room. Only Sherra looked at ease, carefully maneuvering about the bed to examine the woman from every angle.

  None of the emerald’s guards were present.

  Raquella couldn’t help noticing the room’s great balcony. For all the rest of the house’s cramped feel and poor location, she’d seldom seen a better view than off the balcony, and it didn’t surp
rise her that the woman could be heard from so far. Between the location and the sheer power of the woman’s voice, well, it would be astonishing if there were many in the city who couldn’t hear the screams.

  She gestured to grab Sherra’s attention. When the madwoman noticed Raquella over the screams, she smiled, both eyes glittering green. She gestured at her escorts, who moved over to the victim and began trying to get tincture of the poppy into the woman.

  Raquella followed Sherra out of the room, down the stairs, and out of the house entirely. Raquella’s attendants followed the two of them. The screaming was still hideously loud, but you could at least hear others speaking out here.

  In the daylight, she looked at Sherra, and realized to her shock that her green gem-eye was peridot, not emerald. Which, if she didn’t have the emerald, explained why the guards were not with her.

  Which was better than the alternatives, to be sure.

  “That woman was a singer,” Sherra said.

  “Where is the emerald?” Raquella asked.

  “I didn’t need it,” Sherra said. “An interesting bauble, but the Wrack can be seen easily enough in its victims before the screaming. I gave it and its guards to… one of the Dedicated? One of the Patient? Not really sure. Do you think that woman is a good singer? She certainly was loud enough.”

  Raquella sighed, and sent a couple of attendants to spread the word, and have the emerald sent up to the palace to examine the Empress’s grandchild.

  “How have the rest of us missed it?” Raquella asked. “Is it having two gem eyes that allowed you to see it? Was it the depth perception, being able to use peridot and emerald at once? Was it your nose?”

  Sherra laughed. It was a happy, genuinely amused laugh, not one of the madwoman’s more terrifying laughs. Anyone who spent much time around Sherra quickly learned to identify the worst ones, but she had a great deal of others, as well. A great deal about Sherra’s mental state could be carried through her laughter.

  “I didn’t need the emerald. The other seers all saw it. They just didn’t recognize it,” Sherra said, in a voice close to singing.

  “Is it because they only saw the venom, and not the snake itself?” Raquella asked, following her hunch.

  Her remaining attendants gave her quizzical looks, but Sherra burst into delighted laughter, even more joyful her previous laugh.

  “You’re not even a seer, and you understand!” Sherra said, clapping. “You know about the snakes!”

  Raquella cursed.

  They were all idiots. They’d been idiots all this damn time.

  So many Moonsworn had thought the Lothaini healer who treated Prince Arnulf of Lothain a fool for thinking the Wrack a poison at first, rather than illness, but he’d never been a fool.

  Arnulf had been poisoned. Not by a man, but by the Wrack itself.

  “How,” the Empress asked, “can something be both poison and plague?”

  Raquella ran her hand through her hair, as Moonsworn healers stared at her with equal incomprehension. Only Sherra wasn’t looking at her, and that’s because the mad blind seer was idly dancing about the hall, as though she were attending a ball no-one else could see, with only the screaming of the palace’s Wrack victims for musical accompaniment.

  They weren’t in the Voice of the Empire— that great hall and wonder of engineering atop the palace. That wasn’t to say that the audience chamber they were in wasn’t grand. Lofty columns ran down the walls, and the acoustics of the place were perfectly built to echo the voice of the Empress from her throne.

  In any other palace it would be a marvel. Here, it was the next thing to intimate.

  “The plague produces the poison, your Imperial Highness.” Raquella said. “We’ve known for some time that when one is infected with the Wrack, it can take as long as three weeks or as little as one and a half before it leaves dormancy and enters the delirium phase.”

  “Before they become a screamer, you mean,” Empress Phillipa interrupted.

  “Yes, your Imperial Highness,” Raquella said.

  The Empress seemed to look off through the palace walls towards one of the screamers, then gestured towards Raquella to continue.

  “Poisons and venoms are unliving things, Empress. They are often produced by living things, but they are not themselves living. Plagues, and most other illnesses, however, are living things that invade your body. Thus far, we’ve all been mistaking the poison or venom— we’re not sure which it is yet— for the plague itself, hence why we’ve been unable to spot it before they enter… before they become a screamer. Once Sherra here made that connection and realize that what we’d identified as the Wrack was just the poison or venom it produced— and pointed out the true form of the Wrack to us— we were able to identify it swiftly.”

  Sherra paused her dancing just long enough to wave cheerfully at the Empress.

  “How,” the Empress asked, “could you simply miss seeing some foreign creature dwelling in people’s bodies?”

  Raquella tried to keep her nervousness off her face at the Empress’s displeased tone, but she was sure the Empress could see it without much difficulty.

  “I’m not a seer myself,” Raquella began.

  “The fact that you have two eyes rather gave that away,” the Empress said.

  “I… yes, Empress,” Raquella said. She took a deep breath and continued. “From what I understand, there are countless tiny creatures living within everyone, and most of them are completely harmless. Seers are trained to ignore most of them, lest their vision be otherwise overwhelmed. The true form of the Wrack seems to have been missed— it’s considerably larger than most of these little creatures that live within the blood, but size isn’t always a particularly useful predictor of whether something will be especially visible in the Go… in the spirit realm.”

  Best to use the Eidol terminology around the Empress, Raquella thought.

  “So are your seers able to see the true culprit now?” the Empress asked.

  “Sherra here can,” Raquella said, “and she’s already shown a couple other seers. Give it a day or two, they’ll teach everyone else.”

  “Do I have the Wrack?” the Empress asked, her face utterly flat.

  Raquella froze, then turned to Sherra. She was the only healer here who could identify the Wrack so far.

  Sherra turned to face Raquella and smiled, her gemstone eyes glittering.

  “Let’s find out!” the madwoman said, and started striding towards the Empress.

  “Guards,” Raquella said. “Grab her. Don’t let her approach the Empress with her arms free.”

  The guards wouldn’t normally obey her order, but they were swift to respond to any threat to the Empress. They weren’t gentle about it, but Sherra hardly seemed to notice them grabbing her by the arms. She didn’t think Sherra would do anything to hurt the Empress, since the old woman likely counted as a patient to Sherra’s strange mind.

  It was too much of a risk to take, though, since an attack on the Empress would likely mean the violent end of the Moonsworn in Galicanta.

  “You’ll need to take her within three strides of the Empress for her to check,” Raquella said. “She probably won’t try anything, but it’s difficult to tell when one of her impulses will seize her. And mind she doesn’t get into biting range.”

  The guards didn’t seem comforted at this, but at a gesture from the Empress, they brought the blind seer to the stairs leading to her throne.

  Sherra leaned forwards towards the Empress, her crystalline eyes meeting the Empress’s living eyes, and Raquella couldn’t say which were harder. Finally, Sherra broke eye contact with the Empress and ran her eyes over the woman’s torso and limbs.

  “Move me a bit to the left and down one step,” Sherra told the guards without looking away.

  They looked uncomfortable, but escorted Sherra there, her arms still firmly in their grasp behind her back.

  The silence stretched on uncomfortably long before Sherra shook her head an
d looked back at Raquella.

  “No Wrack for the Empress. She’s too skinny, though. Not good for her.” She turned back to the Empress. “Little old ladies shouldn’t be so skinny. First breeze will blow you right away. You should eat more.”

  Empress Phillipa’s face was utterly expressionless as the guards dragged Sherra back away from her. Raquella, however, openly sighed in relief. None of the Empress’s children or grandchildren seemed up to the challenge of ruling Galicanta just yet, especially not in a crisis. And with the combination of the Wrack and the looming possibility of war…

  Part of Raquella had been convinced the Empress would be among the first to fall to the Wrack, because just about every other ruler whose path the contagion had crossed had died of it. She’d had nightmares that the empress would collapse into convulsions atop the Voice of the Empire, and that the whole city would be serenaded by her screams until the convulsions threw the Empress off her throne and to her death among the wires below her.

  Raquella had never been so happy to be wrong.

  “So does this mean we can stop the Wrack?” the Empress asked.

  Raquella winced. “It’s a step in the right direction, Empress, but we’re not there yet. We still don’t understand how the Wrack is spreading, exactly. Every sign seems to point to it spreading through water, but if that were the case, it would have spread across Teringia entirely differently— and likely much faster. It also doesn’t explain why it’s almost always the wealthy and powerful who catch it first. I’m sorry, Empress.”

  Her hands were shaking a bit, and she clutched them together. Being around the Empress was nerve-wracking, and never got any easier.

  The Empress sighed. “Moonsworn, I’ve ruled long enough to know I can’t command the tides. I don’t demand miracles from you, nor will I punish you for not producing them. We fight a war against the Wrack, and no proper war is won in a single battle alone. You’ve won a battle today, and even if it isn’t a decisive one, that’s to be praised.”