Other men and women tended to the fallen. But Wind knew from experience that, at least for those suffering from the poison –
(the sickness
the Plague)
– even cool cloths would further tear the skin and lead only to fresh agony. Little could be done except to hold the victims' hands. And when the hands were gone – melted away along with the other extremities – there was only the presence of the living to usher their friends into death.
She ran, and ran, and ran. She saw death, and dying, and pain.
She saw a lady on a bed. A scribe that Wind had worked with. One of her arms was gone, completely eaten away by the disease. But she managed to lift her head when she saw Wind.
"The Emperor?" she said – or maybe she only mouthed it. "Is he… well? Does… he… live?"
And then, as though fearing the response, the woman shuddered and died.
Wind ran. Ran.
She found only the dead. The dying surrounded by others whose eyes told a clear tale: they knew they were next. And feared the death less than the fact that, unlike these first, they would be doomed to die alone.
She ran outside, and found more dead. Some had been pulled into the lee of buildings, sheltered at least a bit from the windstorm that still surrounded the castle. Others lay where they had fallen. They all had agony etched on their faces – at least, the ones who had been lucky enough to die with faces.
Several lived. More – many more – had died.
Almost all of the still-living asked about the Emperor. Few of them understood her Signs, and she herself could not remember what it was she said to them. Kind lies or cruel truth? Most of the people reacted as though she had told them what they already knew. Some did not react at all, because the poison –
(The disease!)
– had stolen too much of their sight to make out what she Signed. Perhaps they did not even see who she was, just asking their most important question to whatever human soul they sensed nearby.
Wind turned. She started back to the castle. There was nothing she could do here. She could at least be with Cloud. With Malal.
She stopped at the entrance to the palace. A guard stood there, still at his post. He did not seem affected by the disease. Not yet. He nodded to her, and because he was not an Imperial Guard, his helm did not completely cover his face. She could see his eyes. Could see his determination to stand guard over the Emperor's home. To see out his duty to the last.
After their unknown coup, the Cursed Ones had discovered much evil in the government. Much corruption.
They had also discovered good, and good people.
Wind turned away from the guard. She walked back to those who suffered alone. Malal had others around him – people who would never leave him. She could go, because she knew others were there.
She would see to those in need, who had refused help in favor of a doomed Emperor.
Wind moved from person to person. She held hands, she knelt in the dirt next to those who were too wounded for anyone to touch. She stood next to the suffering, and lay beside the dying.
The wind swirled. The world did not see what they suffered.
A few times, she caught sight of something beyond the worthless gate to the outside world. She thought for a moment it might be people, and an irrational hope lit inside her.
But what could they help? They would only die if they came inside.
And in the next instant, she realized it wasn't anyone waiting to help, anyway. Just a quick, shadowed, glimpse of the spires that still stood outside the castle walls. The spikes that would kill all who fell away from Ansborn.
New fear stabbed at her. If this plague passed beyond the castle walls, Ansborn would die. There was nowhere to to flee. People would run to the other mountains – to Strength and Knowledge and Faith and even to Fear in their terror – but how long before the disease jumped those narrow chasms? Before someone stole across to visit a sick friend, then brought the disease back with them.
The winds swirled, and she was glad.
Everyone – nearly everyone – was sick now. She still moved around the castle, the palace, seeking those who would benefit from a moment with someone else. Finding fewer and fewer.
She wanted to go back to Malal's room. Not just to see him, but to find out if Cloud was still alive.
She didn't.
She knew if she did go, she would never leave. And she was needed here.
Besides, if Cloud had died, the windstorm would be gone.
She tried not to think of the obvious: that, if alive, he was likely dying. Holding onto his magic to the last, the same way the guard remained at his post until death claimed him.
Tragedy is seen as a curse by most – either inflicted upon them by an uncaring world, or, worse, inflicted upon them by "caring" Gods. But though tragedy is painful, and terrible, Wind suddenly realized it was not just a curse. It was a moment where people could prove they were worth the universe's notice. Where they could show others the kindness and love and strength that the Gods had apparently decided to withhold.
And do we not become Gods ourselves in that moment? At least in a way? Both the first Emperor Eka's First Rules and Commandments and the Gods' Book said something like this, but Wind had never really understood it until now.
A Strong – one of the few people who had not yet been touched by the disease – carried bodies from where they had fallen. He stretched them out in neat lines, and though the job was supremely grisly, he bore no sign of how awful it must be. Just reverence. He mouthed words that she could read – a repeated prayer to the Gods.
Another man – this one a Smith, also blessedly untouched –
(yet)
– used bare hands and his Gift to bend metal into shapes she did not recognize at first. Then she realized he was making dozens of signs of Faith.
Markers for graves – graves that would never be dug.
He saw her. Nodded. Kept working.
Someone touched her shoulder.
The touch was so shocking in this place where so few still walked that she jumped and spun the same way she might if surprised by an enemy.
It was Cloud. He smiled a wan smile, then she felt his breath explode out of him, hot on her cheek, as she grabbed him in an embrace tighter than any she had ever given.
She let go, and his eyes were happy to see her, and terribly sad at what was going on, and… something else.
"What is it?" she Signed. "Malal?"
He shook his head. "The Emperor still lives."
A happiness fluttered inside her breast, its wings clipped just as quickly as she realized Malal was still doomed, only now he remained in pain.
She forced her thoughts away from that. "Then what is it?" she Signed.
Cloud did not answer. His eyes – eyes which saw much, much more than he ever let on – roved over the castle grounds. The dead, the few living.
He walked, and she walked with him. Both in silence. Then, suddenly, he stopped.
"Do you see it?" he asked.
She looked around. She saw only the same things she had seen for hours.
Then she realized what had been hiding in the back of her mind for a while now. Those that still lived were in two conditions: either in their last moments, gasping through lungs that dissolved in their chests… or completely fine.
"Some of them are immune," she said. She looked at her brother. He looked as he always had, and she herself felt no pain, no places where the disease might have struck. "We're immune."
To her surprise, Cloud shook his head. "Not just that."
She looked around. Not many still moving, and that made her spirits drop. Even if there were some whom the disease could not touch… it was too few. If this pestilence spread to Ansborn, it looked like perhaps one in a few hundred might live. Fewer. One in a thousand. Here in the castle, she saw only the Strong she had seen before, the Smith, a woman kneeling beside a dying man. The last had her eyes closed, and Wind thought s
he was praying, then realized it was an Eye – probably soothing the dying man by giving him a last look at family or perhaps his home or –
The Smith and the Strong suddenly ran toward something. Wind moved toward them, leaving Cloud's hints behind for a moment. Something was happening, and from the looks on the Gifts' faces, it was something bad.
She reached it as they did. Her spirits sank. She had been hoping – foolishly, irrationally – that they had seen something that might mean hope. A way out of this.
It was only another dying man.
He looked familiar. Red hair, a scraggly shock of gray on one side of his head. What had once been a slim frame that was now eaten away to nearly nothing. Wind thought she might have seen him in the palace. Then she placed him: the Imperial Library. She had seen him there a few times when searching for Sword. The man had never paid her much mind. A quick nod, then returning to his never-ending task of maintaining and re-shelving the books.
The hands he had used for those tasks were mostly eaten away. Just a few fingers left on his right hand. And the rest of him looked just as bad. Only his head seemed untouched, and that fact made the rest of his wounds seem all the worse.
That wasn't what attracted her notice, though. She took all that in as background, focusing on the thing that had brought the Smith and the Strong running. A moment later the Eye came as well – the man she had been comforting must have gone the way of all the rest. Concern bordering on terror drew deep lines on her face.
Wind understood that. She felt the same.
The librarian was laughing.
It wasn't a laugh of madness, either. Not the hysteria of someone driven to insanity by unimaginable pain. He seemed….
Happy.
Wind looked at Cloud. Saw his own fear.
The red-haired man's hand flashed out. He grasped the Smith's arm with his remaining fingers. His eyes –glazed with impending death – suddenly focused. He looked at them all.
"It's begun," he said. He laughed again. "It's finally begun!"
His body shuddered, and Wind saw the Smith cry out and grab at the arm the librarian still held. To her shock, Wind saw bone coming out of his arm. The librarian – the small man with the red hair – had shattered his forearm in his bare hand.
A Strong?
She dismissed the thought as fast as it came. If he had been a Strong, the palace would not have employed him as a simple librarian. Besides, Strongs were wispy, almost ethereal. And though this man was hardly a large man, he was still too big to be one of those Gifts.
No. No Strong.
Then how did he do that?
The man who was a Strong was desperately trying to loose the red-haired man's grip from the Smith's arm. He had no luck, his bodily strength and the added power of his Gift seemingly useless against the wasted, three-fingered grasp of a dying man.
The red-haired man yanked the Smith close. His eyes had begun to melt in their sockets. But he stared straight at the Smith nonetheless and whispered something through a mouth filling with blood.
"You're all going to die."
He laughed again. Then the red-haired man shuddered once more. He mouthed two words.
And died.
The Smith finally yanked himself free. He stumbled backward in pain, cradling his badly broken arm. The Strong and the Eye went to him, trying to calm him enough that they could examine his wound.
And, watching them, Wind suddenly understood what Cloud had hinted at earlier. What he had seen before anyone else.
She looked at her brother. Signed.
"Gifts are immune."
He nodded. "So it would seem. Or at least, we are completely untouched by the disease this far." He shrugged. "Though we could just take longer to catch whatever it is."
He Signed the words distractedly, and he kept glancing at the red-haired man.
"What was that about?" he Signed.
Wind forgot sometimes that Cloud couldn't read lips like she could. He had always Signed to her, always spoken with others and relayed their words to her upon occasion. To have their roles reversed in this way was so strange her mind constantly rejected it.
She was avoiding his question. Letting her own thoughts distract her.
She glanced at the red-haired man, and heard his words in her mind. And more than that, she heard the two words he had mouthed as he died. Two words that meant nothing to her, but that for some reason filled her with dread.
"The Culling."
20
The words were difficult.
The concepts, though…. They threatened to send Brother Scieran spinning into a place so deep and so dark that, should he lose is grasp on the reality he knew for even an instant, should he tumble into that hole, he knew there would be no return.
He looked over. Father Inmil's and Mother Maci's exressions bore the mark of people threatened by the same madness. Once, Father Inmil looked up for a moment, looked away from the books he had been reading. He met Scieran's gaze.
His eyes were spectral.
He managed to whisper, "Gods," then returned to his reading.
Only Brother Luca seemed unperturbed. The thin, ghostly priest might as well have been reading a copy of Eka's Rules and Commandments: something well-known to the point of nearly being banal.
They all clustered around the stone table in the center of the room they had chosen as their workspace in the Archive. Glo-globes kept the light constant, and no one had moved for hours.
Hours? Or days?
It didn't matter. For the first time since being crushed by the Greater Gift known as Armor, Scieran felt no pain.
No pain of the body, at least. His mind, though… his mind was in agony.
Part of it was just the sheer mental exertion of what they were attempting. The Old Book that they had found in the secret space behind the wall sat between them all. It held the keys to the rest of the books – to the language of the Old Ones, the ones before the Ascension. One by one, Father Inmil, Mother Maci, and Scieran himself had noted figures that seemed familiar. They each disappeared into the Archive, to return with a book or a scroll where they remembered such a figure appearing before. Only Brother Luca never moved from the chamber, leaning close to the open pages of the book Sword had brought – the book they had taken to simply calling The Tree.
The secret book they found behind the wall – which they had also given a name, "The Key" – sat on the table between them, open to whatever page had last been used. At first it had been almost a fight to look at it: everyone wanted to look at it at the same time, to find a figure they remembered, to get the knowledge they needed. But as the hours wore on, the The Key was used less and less. No one had turned its pages in at least an hour now.
That was the thing that most surprised Scieran when they first realized it – or when Brother Luca did, since the man's mind seemed to operate on a different level than the rest: the Old Ones had not spoken – or even written – a language different from that of Ansborn. It was simply that the language had corrupted over the Turns. Changed from what it had been to what it now was, with time standing as a wall between the two. It was still hard to understand the writings – and would have been impossible without the book they discovered behind the wall – but it was possible.
Scieran rubbed his eyes and straightened a bit. Mother Maci was leaning back as well, old knuckles pushed into the small of her back, trying to ease kinks that had probably barked at her for Turns but were now screaming non-stop.
"What do you make of it?" Scieran's voice was low, quieter even than it had been the first time he participated in a Bestowal Ritual at the Grand Cathedral. Somehow this place had become… he struggled for the word in his mind.
Hallowed.
That was it. Sanctified. Made holy. But not in the same way the Cathedrals were. More like the holiness of a tomb. A place where the living found peace.
Or where, perhaps, some of the dead were restless.
Mother Maci shook her head. "I
don't understand most of it." Off his look, she said, "Not the letters or even the words – I'm getting the hang of those, I think. But there are ideas there that…." She shrugged. "I don't believe we have the knowledge to understand them now. Perhaps not ever."
"How so?"
"I get the feeling that they're beyond us. Like the people below long ago learned all we would ever know. I feel like a child trying to read a High Academic's treatise." She craned her head to look at what he was reading. "What about you?"
"The same."
"Me, too." Father Inmil had looked away from his own book. "Though I don't even think mine is a book of learning."
Scieran frowned. "What do you mean?"
Father Inmil snorted – a dry, crackling sound that echoed off the stone walls. "I mean I think I'm reading a story. Like Tales of To-To-Mo, though I don't think this one is a children's tale." He eyed the book with a mix of elation and irritation, then shoved it away from him. "I'm going to find another book to look at." He eyed his sister. "Can you understand what you're reading at all?"
"The slightest bit. I think it has something to do with breeding. The book talks about mating and childbearing of animals. But that's nearly all I can understand." She sighed. "I'll keep trying."
Scieran laughed lightly. "Sounds like you two understood far more than I. All I've gotten out of my book seems like nonsense. Something about the composition of the land below, and that it is a nation of other nations."
"What does that mean?" asked Mother Maci.
"If I knew that, perhaps we could –"
Brother Luca shouted. The noise stopped Father Inmil's words instantly, and everyone looked at the stooped figure.
The thin priest was always pale. But, Scieran thought, now he looked like a ghost that had itself seen something that terrified it in a very particular and very personal way. So white that snow would have looked like mud beside him.
He weaved, and grabbed the table to steady himself at the same time that Mother Maci put her arm around his waist.
"What is it?" Scieran nearly shouted the words. For most of his life he had been a soldier of the Faithful – a Knight of the Order of Chain and commander of those who would break lawbreakers, would punish those who took oaths in vain. The steel of a man of action had never left his voice, even if it had left his body.
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