A Plague of Angels

by Sheri S. Tepper

  The older woman shook her head. “It was issued by the Place of Power. It’s rather like the ones the name-changers and the book-burners carry. These … people are called walkers, the people from manland talk about them. I’ve not seen them before; they don’t frequent Artemisia much; but that is no doubt what they are.”

  She dusted her hands together, furrowing her brow. “I’d better get to town before they get there. I need to talk to Wide Mountain Mother about this.”

  She galloped away on one of the swift horses reserved for officers on urgent business. She left behind her a gatekeeper bursting with curiosity. Most days at the gate were boring enough that any exceptional happening made a welcome break in the routine. The gatekeeper hadn’t been told to be quiet about it, so with hints and whispers and dramatic shudders, she told everyone who came through about the two strangers and their pass.

  “So they said it was none of our business why they wanted her,” she murmured, as she shunted Abasio and Olly’s wagon off toward a small structure under the shade of several large trees. “Can you imagine?”

  “And they had a pass?” Olly asked, not needing to pretend interest.

  “They did. Not that they’d have needed one, if they’d wanted to come in regardless, for it’s clear they go where they will! Their pass was issued by the Place of Power, my watch captain said, and that’s a mystery, isn’t it? We get some of our machinery from the Place, west of us, though I’ve never been there myself. The book-burners come from there. But why should the Place of Power send beings like that wandering about? I tell you, it made me shiver just hearing them speak. Like when you wake in the night to hear—I don’t know. Some strange sound outside your window where no sound should be.”

  “Our dog often barks at such sounds,” rumbled Abasio, tossing a wicked glance in Coyote’s direction.

  “Dogs hear things we don’t!” cried the gatekeeper, looking directly at Coyote, who lay on the wagon seat looking perfectly doglike and servile. “So do cats, or even birds. Earthquakes, for instance. Animals hear things and they howl. I’ll tell you, these beings made me want to howl, as though I’d heard something horrid without knowing it.” She flapped her hand at them, miming her discomfiture, and pointed to the door of the small structure. “Now you go on in there. The Mankind Management officer will be with you in two pumps of a ram’s rump.”

  “Lamb’s tail,” said Abasio gravely, remembering his youth among the flocks. “It’s the lambs that shake their tails.”

  “Maybe in your country,” giggled the gate guard. “But our rams seem to do most of it here.”

  Then she was gone, and the two of them were left staring at each other in a small, bare room that smelled strongly of chemicals.

  The woman who joined them was lean, horsefaced, and pleasantly matter-of-fact. She explained the controls she could offer, the belts, the surgery, the implants, the escorts; she agreed that Abasio’s condition was worrisome, took samples of various body fluids, and went off to consider the matter. When she returned some time later, she looked thoughtful.

  “In one sense, you’re healthy,” she said to Abasio. “You have no sign of IDDIs, rare for a ganger—and I assume you were a ganger, from the scars you bear. You have no evidence of plague, which is more or less endemic in man-land. You are ailing, however, and we have no antidote to what’s ailing you. So far as we know, there is none. None, that is, except the drug you took in the first place, one available in the cities, which is no doubt where you got it.”

  “I didn’t take it,” said Abasio stiffly, giving up any pretense of hiding his history. “Someone gave it to me without my knowledge.”

  “Whichever,” she said. “More of it would make you feel quite your old self, for a time, but it would not be a good idea for the long run, as I’m sure you’ve figured out.”

  Abasio nodded dismally.

  “We have records of this stuff, but this is the first evidence we’ve had of it in circulation. By itself, it does not kill.”

  “I felt half-dead,” Abasio objected.

  “I know. You were debilitated by the dose given you, but you were not in danger.”

  “I don’t understand,” complained Olly.

  The woman explained: “There are a lot of sexually transmitted viruses floating around in manland. One particular group of these we call possum viruses, because they play dead. They don’t manifest for years, or even decades, if then. This allows the virus to permeate virtually an entire population. Then, given certain stimuli—Starlight is one—the viruses are jolted into life, into virulence. The stimulated virus can be transmitted sexually, also, and it is inevitably fatal. Though many victims die quickly, someone who is lightly infected and received a minimum dose of the drug might last some weeks, or even months during which they could be infecting others.”

  “So Abasio wasn’t infected?”

  “No, surprising for a ganger, he was not. He neither had the bug nor gave it to anyone. Even more surprising, considering how addictive the drug is.”

  Abasio said, “There are lots of addictives, and lots of people using them. Eventually, they all die.”

  The woman grinned without humor. “It’s that eventually that makes the difference to us, cityman. We’re not overly concerned about drugs that kill one off after five years, or ten. If one of our people gets taken with it, we have time to correct the matter, and we do. We always neuter addicts, and their children, if any, to make sure both the genetic inclination and the addiction itself is limited. If there’s any reason to think that may not work, we go further!” She nodded grimly. “However, we do worry about drugs like this Starlight. There’s no time to save a life when eventually can mean tomorrow!”

  Abasio grimaced, rubbing his forehead. Seemingly, he had had a lucky escape. Sybbis hadn’t been infected when Little Purp bought her. Little Purp had no sexually transmitted diseases, so Sybbis had acquired none. He, Abasio, wasn’t going to die. Eventually, he’d get over the effects of the drug. Eventually.

  The woman went on: “You’re young. You’re strong. Our people believe the effects will wear off. Since we don’t know how rapidly your body is getting rid of the stuff, it’s hard to say how long recovery will take.”

  She twiddled her fingers, considering. “While we’re rigorous in protecting the health of Artemisians, we’ve a certain reluctance to destroy lives in the process, and putting you under stress or dosing you with more drugs certainly won’t do you any good. Are you planning on going straight through our land?”

  The question was asked of Abasio, but it was Olly who answered. “I need to stop at the library in Artemisia. And we have a delivery for the Wide Mountain Clan.”

  The woman went on staring at Abasio, waiting until he met her gaze. “I’ll let you travel on a special pass specifying that in your present condition, you’re no threat to us.”

  Abasio tried not to be offended by this, without much success. He was offended. And embarrassed.

  The woman turned to Olly. “As for you, young woman, since you’re healthy and not sexually active, and since you’re going to the Wide Mountain Clan, I’ll give you a pass that far, and they can decide what to do with you from there.”

  “What did the person in the house say?” asked Coyote when they were in the wagon once more headed south.

  “She said they have a population that’s in balance with their environment; they intend to maintain it that way. She said they have no sexual diseases and don’t intend to let any in.”

  “How very sensible of them,” said Coyote, turning to dig his teeth into his flank and burrow there furiously.

  “You’re lucky she didn’t know about your fleas,” snarled Abasio. “She said we were healthy, more or less, but we didn’t think to have her check you as well. You may be harboring plague in those fleas of yours.”

  The Coyote, growling deep in his throat, did not reply as he continued his pursuit of whatever was biting him.

  The city of Artemisia, when they arriv
ed there after several hours’ travel, did not meet Abasio’s expectation of a city. On the ridges above the river a dozen or so large, complicated buildings faced one another with facades of shimmering tiles laid in swirling patterns as of flame or boiling cloud or the movement of blown leaves. The shallow stream in the valley was a mere wandering trickle, a silver glitter among braided flat banks of pinkish gravel, an endearing infant creek, dappled by sun and dwarfed both by living trees, golden in the autumn sun, and the huge sun-bleached carcasses of dead ones that lay on either side. These white hulks, so Coyote told them, came shuddering down the arroyo when spring floods sent a muddy fury rioting between the banks. Well above this line of debris, the low adobe buildings of the town sprawled like sand castles.

  Artemisia shone like gold and polished gemstone, all softly glittering. Nothing in it obtruded upon the sight. All was a whole, organic as a forest.

  “Who lives up there?” Olly wondered, pointing at the larger buildings on the ridges.

  Abasio did not reply. He was making a careful examination of their surroundings, both for any sign of the walkers and for a building that looked like a library. He had no very clear idea what a library should look like, but he expected something imposing, certainly something larger than anything he could see.

  Noticing Abasio’s confusion, a woman left a nearby group of chatting women and came toward them. “Can I help you find something?”

  “We would thank you for directions to the Clan of Wide Mountain,” said Olly.

  “Wide Mountain House is at the bottom of the hill, on the left of the plaza,” the woman directed. “Look for the sign of the thistle.” She returned to her group and the half-dozen women in it and whispered to the others as they stared after the wagon, heads together in intimate exchange.

  At the bottom of the hill the roadway opened into a gravelly clearing centered upon an open-sided, peak-roofed platform where a trio of musicians were plucking and strumming on guitars, a practice session that was frequently interrupted by one or the other of the participants. The clearing was bordered all around with courtyard walls and tall gates, some open, some closed. The sign of the thistle hung above a timbered archway that gave onto a stone-paved enclosure bright with potted flowers. Inside, Olly found an official with whom she was allowed to leave her packages.

  “Very nice work,” said the woman when she had unpacked the neckerchiefs onto the counter between them. She knotted one loosely about her throat, patting the knot and adjusting the folds. “Our old kerchiefs were faded to nothing, and any respect shown their wearers was purely from habit. What’s this other packet?”

  “Silk yardage, printed,” Olly replied. “Ordered through you.”

  The woman referred to a notebook, nodding. “Ordered by Fashimir Ander, yes. Good enough. There’s a trade group heading west this afternoon, and they can deliver it. Shall I pay you the balance, or shall I send it to the dyer?”

  Olly passed over the note Wilfer had given her. “Half the remainder to me,” she said. “Because it was my work. The other half sent to Wilfer Ponde, for his profit.”

  The woman unlocked a strongbox and rapidly stacked silver rats, passing the coins across the counter. “I’ll send a draft on our bankers in the Edge at Fantis. They will send the coin to Whitherby.”

  “You have a banker in the Edge?” asked Abasio curiously.

  “Indeed,” she replied, giving him a sharp look. “Surely you wouldn’t expect us to send coin through that gang-ridden and lawless realm?”

  Abasio remained impassive. He wouldn’t expect it, but then, he’d never considered how payment might take place across borders. Edges were evidently more complicated places than he had thought they were.

  “Anything else?” queried the woman, seeing Olly’s hesitation.

  “I—I was given a pass only this far by the woman at the gate. She said you could decide … what to do with me. And I need to visit the library of Artemisia.”

  “Now, why would you want to do that?” the woman asked, with an interested expression.

  Olly knotted her hands in her pockets. “I have—personal reasons.”

  “I see.” The woman arranged several items on the counter, lining them up, disarranging them, and lining them up again. “I’ll have to inquire.” She went swiftly out, and they heard her footsteps tapping away down a long, hard-surfaced corridor.

  “Of course she wants to know why,” Olly whispered to Abasio. “But I shouldn’t tell her who I really am, should I? Not with those creatures hunting me.”

  Abasio started to speak, then fell silent as footsteps approached. A large gray-haired woman came into the room and sat down to face them.

  “I’m the Wide Mountain Mother,” she said, staring at them with lively interest. “What business do you have with our library?”

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” said Abasio, shuffling his feet like a scolded schoolboy. “But my wife here—her folks died just a year or so ago, and her old aunty told her the rest of the family came from somewhere near the thrones. And neither of us ever heard of that place, so we thought there’d be something about it in your library, it being so famous. That’s why we brought your neck scarves ourselves, so we could ask about that.”

  Olly stared at him, wondering where this bumpkin had come from!

  “The thrones,” said the woman, leaning back to give him a long, level look. “Now, that’s interesting. The thrones are a part of our legends, but I had thought them entirely mythical. What do you know about them?”

  “Just that they were set up at the Place of Power,” said Olly.

  “This is the second time today someone has been concerned about the Place of Power,” the woman said. “At a meeting of the Group this morning, here came a border captain bursting in full of questions about passes issued by the Place of Power.”

  “Yes, ma’am, we heard about that at the gate, ma’am,” said Abasio bashfully.

  Olly kicked him on the ankle. He was overdoing it.

  “The holders of the passes were looking for a dark-haired girl about your age,” the woman said. “And though you claim to be married to this man, who pretends at being witless, showing more skill at it than he no doubt intends, the medical officer says you are a virgin yet.”

  Olly held her tongue. What could she say?

  The woman went on: “We trade with the Place of Power, as we do with the Edges, in manland. I see no problem in your going there with whoever next makes the trip westward. However, I cannot guarantee you will find any thrones.”

  Olly rubbed her forehead. “Since you’re not sure the thrones are at the Place of Power, I’d like to see if there’s any mention of them in the library.”

  “Well, as to that—I think you should talk with a librarian. She would know what books there are, what books have been preserved or remembered.”

  “You’re talking about the fifty-year rule?”

  “The fifty-year rule, yes. Works of opinion are often destroyed while works of fact are left undisturbed. Now, I’m sure at one time many books might have told all about the thrones, but it may be that those books no longer exist.”

  “But the librarian will know.”

  “The librarian.” The woman smiled. “Of course.”

  “How do I find—a librarian?”

  The gray-haired woman smiled again. “One of them happens to be my daughter Arakny. She’ll return from work shortly. If you’d like to drive down the little alleyway beside Wide Mountain House, you’ll find a place to camp above the stream. I’ll tell her where you are. As for your companion”—she smiled at Abasio—“I’ll send someone to show him about.”

  Olly started to leave, then turned back. “The pass,” she said. “The woman at the gate said—”

  “Leave it for now,” the older woman replied. “Arakny will sort it out.”

  She rose to show them out, watching as they crossed the courtyard and mounted the wagon seat once more.

  The younger clanswoman had returned to lean i
n the inner doorway, arms folded, brow furrowed, remarking, “Do you think she is the one?”

  “Which one, my dear? The one the walkers are looking for? I should think so, yes. The one your contact in the Place of Power mentioned might be coming this way? Possibly. The one our Seers have said will come, the key for the lock, the pivot on which the world balances? I wouldn’t presume to guess.”

  “I sneaked around front and looked in their wagon. There’s a coyote with them.”

  “A coyote? Ah. How very Artemisian! You think it means something?”

  “I don’t think anything. If I think too much, those walkers might come back here to ask me what I thought.”

  Wide Mountain Mother sighed. “Is there anything further on the walkers?”

  “They went through town this morning, shortly after we got the first report. They stopped several women and asked questions. The women who were questioned were examined within minutes. Their blood pressure was up. Adrenaline was up. Strong gut reactions, almost as though they had eaten something poisonous. The physicians say it’s a panic reaction, like the reaction primates have to snakes, purely instinctive, so far as they can tell, though they’re not ruling out subsonics or an unknown pheromone. We’d had enough advance warning to detail a dozen observers, men and women with different fields of experience, including Shabe.”

  “Why Shabe? She’s a painter.”

  “She’s a painter, yes, but she’s also the closest thing to an anatomist we had available. She says they walk too fast.”

  “Too fast?”

  “Like an engine, she says. With the wrong rhythm.”

  “You’re saying they’re not human, daughter?”

  “I’m only telling you what Shabe said. Shabe doesn’t think they’re people, and I don’t, either. The places where they stood for any length of time are burned bare. The soil stinks. And you no doubt remember what the captain said when she told the Group about them this morning.”

  “She said they scared her. She said they were perfectly polite and not at all overtly threatening, and yet she was so troubled by them, she was sick.”