The Medusa Plague

by Mary Kirchoff

  Three mud huts, their roofs and timbers burned, huddled at the edge of the village. Guerrand looked over them, to where a thick, black flame licked the light blue sky. He vaguely remembered Bram saying Herus had advised the burning of clothing, tools, even the homes of plague victims in a futile attempt to stop the spread of what he didn’t know at the time was a magical illness.

  Guerrand’s head snapped left at the sound of a wagon in the street. It was a trundling green thing pulled by an old, sway-backed horse. Two people sat upon the seat: one a young boy, the other of an age with Guerrand and vaguely familiar. Both jumped to the dirt road and clambered around the wagon. Removing one side, they began to unceremoniously shove one of the heavy, stone bodies piled in the cart to the soft, greening ground of the square.

  “Hey, ain’t we supposed to take these to the field on the north edge of town?” posed the younger of the two, who could be no more than ten years of age. “No more room here, and no one to dig holes for ’em anyway.”

  The father straightened his spine above the stone-stiff bodies in the wagon and rubbed his lower back. “Who cares where they go, boy? Dead’s dead,” he pronounced. “The plague wouldn’t a took ’em if they was good people, anyway. Not like us.” He thumped his chest. “You ’n me been spared, boy, so’s we get the pick of the houses they don’t burn. You make sure everything valuable was off ’em?”

  The boy nodded, patting a pouch at his waist.

  Horrified by what he was witnessing, Guerrand tried to place the face and voice that seemed so familiar. Suddenly it came to him.

  “Wint?” Guerrand called to the man, recalling him as the younger of the bullies he had chased from this very square for stoning a woman they claimed was a witch.

  The man swung around in surprise at the sound of any voice. Thin lips drew back in recognition, exposing big box teeth. “You!” he gasped. Wint hooked his thumbs through his belt and cocked one scrawny hip in an effort to portray indifference. “They said you was dead, but I heard it whispered you brought this plague on us.”

  Guerrand looked at him levelly. “Then I’d be afraid, if I were you.”

  The belligerent man squinted at Guerrand, an evil grin stretching the sparse whiskers on his hawkish face. “You got no power here anymore, DiThon,” he snarled. “Yer brother and sister are crazy, the whole lot up there”—he tossed his head in the direction of Castle DiThon—“they’re as poor as us common folk and sealed up like mice in a tomb.”

  Guerrand had so little regard for the man that he couldn’t bring himself to be angry.

  “Got nothin’ to say, without yer brother the lord to protect you, eh?” the man taunted, looking with eager pride to see if his son was impressed with his bravado.

  “You’re still a bully and a blowhard, I see,” Guerrand observed with sigh. “Apparently you haven’t the courage or brains to succeed, so you wait in shadows to feed off the work of others.” Guerrand fished around in his pack of components, found his sole caterpillar cocoon, then raised his robed arms. “Perhaps it’s time you saw the world through the eyes of the rat you are.”

  Wint’s chest had puffed out indignantly, and his hands curled into fists. But when Guerrand raised his arms, the man drew back slightly, looking both confused and more than a little worried. “Whatcha doin’ there? I’m warning you, stop it!”

  “What’s the matter, Wint? No one to protect you from the witch?” Guerrand asked. Wint’s face became a mask of horror as Guerrand continued the circle he’d begun with his arms. “Doduvas!”

  Blue and green light sparked like the hottest fire above the wagon, and where Wint had stood was now a squealing brown rat. The creature’s whiskered face sniffed at the edge of the wagon, then it leaped to the ground and skittered across the road, heading for the shadows between buildings. Wint’s young son took one frightened look at Guerrand, jumped from the wagon, and scrambled after his father.

  The mage looked upon the faces of stone in the wagon; a youngish woman, man, and an elderly matron who resembled the man in the nose and set of the eyes. They must have been the last of a family, which was why the three were being buried by strangers.

  Wint aside, so much had changed since last Guerrand was in Thonvil. He began to walk, and before long his feet led him down the twisted side streets to one in particular he had traveled many times in his youth. He tripped over something squishy. Looking down, he saw the bloated body of a dead rat. The sight propelled him on even faster.

  Guerrand rounded the last corner, where the rays of the sun never reached. Wilor the silversmith’s storefront came into view. Though the shutters were closed, the silversmith shop wasn’t boarded up like so many of the other stores around it. Guerrand recalled briefly that his father’s old adventuring crony had threatened to retire those many years ago, when Guerrand had come to retrieve a trinket for Ingrid Berwick, and to talk of his brother Quinn’s casket cover.

  Suddenly the mage had a nostalgic eagerness to talk to the old silversmith. Perhaps Wilor knew something about the plague that might help Guerrand.

  He well remembered the metalsmith’s heavy door bearing its silver unicorn; it set the stall apart from the much more practical doors of the other merchants and signified Wilor’s trade. Guerrand knocked tentatively on the door, then more loudly when no one answered. When still no one came, he looked over both shoulders before tugging at the ornate door and slipping inside.

  Eleven anvils were silent in the modest shop, the small furnace cold. There was none of the usual haze hanging among the exposed rafters, no glowing bits of metal anywhere. Cold, black rods lay next to many of the anvils, a testament that they had been still for some time. A crucible of tarnished silver lay clamped in a long pair of tongs, waiting for a smith’s practiced hammer.

  Guerrand stood remembering the last time he’d been here. It had been the second time he’d met Belize, when his life had taken such a dramatic turn. His memories of that mad wizard were not pleasant, and he turned them away. He was about to leave entirely, convinced that Wilor and his heirs had moved on, leaving everything in midproject, when he heard a low but unmistakable groaning coming from somewhere beyond the room. He followed the noise to the back of the shop, where a heavy woolen curtain hung from hooks in the ceiling.

  “Hello?” Guerrand called tentatively through a crack in the curtain. “Is anyone here?”

  “Just,” came a man’s adenoidal rasp. “Who’s there?”

  “A … friend,” Guerrand said, unsure if he wanted whoever was behind the curtain to know him or not.

  “Come back only if you’ve a strong stomach.”

  The warning gave Guerrand pause for a moment before he pushed his way past the opening in the scratchy curtain, his lower lip clamped between his teeth expectantly. His first breath beyond it was half-choked by the stench of rotting flesh he recognized too well from Kirah’s room. The mage blinked away the tears that instantly welled due to the smell.

  The silversmith lay on a dirty mound of linen-covered hay in the corner of a dark room, lit in thin, muted streaks by a small window in back. The man’s thick, grizzled forearms that had always reminded Guerrand of roasted meat were now six writhing snake heads. He could see that snakes also writhed beneath the blanket that covered Wilor from the waist down. The once-powerful man was shrunken and pale and crippled, and clearly would never again practice his beautiful craft.

  “Guerrand DiThon, as I barely live and breath,” the smith said with difficulty, surprise and pleasure evident on the pale, sunken face that the mage remembered as round and jolly. “I hadn’t expected yours to be the last face I behold before Habbakuk takes me home, but I can think of none I’d rather see.”

  “I-I’m sorry to find you thus, Wilor,” was all Guerrand could think to say. Wilor had been a short, sturdy man of immense strength from his vigorous life. His teeth were gone save one. The smith’s hairline had receded even farther in the last decade and was now past the midpoint of his scalp, until only a narrow ring o
f salt-and-pepper hair remained.

  “How is the second son of Rejik DiThon?” the smith asked, as if over shepherd’s pie at the Red Goose Inn. Wilor eyed Guerrand’s red robes with obvious interest.

  “Well enough, Wilor,” said Guerrand. What could he do but shrug his shoulders, apologizing for his healthy presence at death’s grim door?

  “Ah, well, I have been better,” said the man, trying hard but not succeeding at a self-deprecating chuckle. Instead, Wilor was caught up in a choking cough that slowly subsided.

  Guerrand could think of no delicate way to ask the questions that burned in his throat. “Marthe? Your sons?” he queried, looking hopefully about the dim storeroom.

  Wilor didn’t blink. “All dead. The boys went first, about a week ago. I wish I could have spared Marthe seeing that.” His bald pate rocked from side to side. “After watching them, I considered sparing us both this, but—” He sighed from his soul. “It turns out I was too much a coward to do anything about it.”

  Wilor looked, unblinking, toward the window, to the sky. “Then Marthe caught the chill, and I had to stay for her.” His eyes sank shut briefly, as if willing the courage for the words. “She went two nights ago. By then it was too late for me. I didn’t tell Marthe, but I got the fever that afternoon and barely had the strength to bury her.” Wilor bit down on his lip until it bled and a tear rolled down one wan cheek. “At least Marthe wasn’t alone in the end. She got a proper laying to rest next to her sons in the field she tilled for years out back, instead of being squeezed into the green. It’s all that matters now.”

  “I’ll stay with you, Wilor.”

  The silversmith turned his head with great effort to look directly at Guerrand. “You’d do that?”

  Guerrand nodded heavily. “I promise to stay as long as you need me, until the Blue Phoenix comes to take you home,” he vowed, invoking the Ergothian name of the god he knew the adventuring friends, Wilor and Rejik, had revered. Guerrand gained an odd sense of strength and purpose from repeating a secret promise he’d made as a seven-year-old at the deathbed of his own father.

  The smith’s expression contained an odd mix of gratitude and embarrassment. “The promise of Rejik DiThon’s second son has always been good enough for me.”

  Guerrand gave him a grateful smile, then stood awkwardly, unsure what to do now, unable even to hold the dying man’s hand. He ordered his reluctant feet forward to close the distance between them so that Wilor wouldn’t need to strain so to speak. Suddenly the snakes hissed and snapped toward the mage. Cursing the vipers, Wilor struggled to hold them down to the bed of straw. Their tongues lashed and flickered, as if they had heard the man’s sadness and were laughing. One of the heads lashed away from the rest and snatched a small, fright-eyed mouse from the shadows of the floor and swallowed the thing in one gulp.

  Guerrand drew back and maintained a four-foot remove from the sick man so as not to excite the snakes again. He stared, as if mesmerized by the intricate diamond patterns behind the dark and beady eyes on their heads. Each little, slithering head recalled to Guerrand the memory of the mage who had caused this.

  He circumnavigated the bed of straw to prop open both the grease-streaked window and door to let some fresher air into the sickroom. “Is there much pain, Wilor?”

  Wilor seemed to realize Guerrand was not just making idle conversation. He leaned forward and considered his bizarre new appendages. “Some, mostly when I try to control them. The change was excruciating, I’ll admit, but now the snakes are more inconvenient than hurtful. I can’t use my hands or feet to do anything. It’s a good thing nothing itches anymore.” He fell back against the straw, winded. “But it’ll all be over as soon as the moons rise. There’s a comfort in knowing that.”

  Guerrand only nodded; his repartee was not at its best today. He had often played attendant to the minor ailments of folks in Harrowdown, listening to their dilemmas and suggesting solutions both magical and not. Though this was no minor ailment, Guerrand pulled up a stool and called those long-used skills to his side.

  “I’m a mage now, Wilor,” Guerrand informed him softly.

  “I figured that out from the robes,” said the silversmith, and his glance held a covert amusement.

  Guerrand reddened. “I don’t know what your views on magic are,” he continued somewhat hesitantly, “but I’m hoping to use my skills to find a cure. Kirah’s got the plague now.” Guerrand heard his own hollow voice in the quiet of the death room. “She just finished shedding the skin from her arms and legs.”

  Wilor bobbed his head sadly. “You’ve seen too much death in your life, Guerrand DiThon.” The silversmith stunned Guerrand with his next words. “Use me to find the cure.”

  “I don’t know that I can help you, Wilor,” he said awkwardly.

  “I’m not asking you to,” Wilor nearly snapped. “Have I given you the impression I’m afraid to die?” The mage had to shake his head. “I don’t wish to live without my Marthe”—he looked down at himself—“like this.”

  Wilor scowled when he saw Guerrand hesitate with a look of pity the mage couldn’t disguise. “Don’t waste time,” declared the smith, looking at the slant of the light. “I’m unsure how much of that I have left.”

  Guerrand rummaged around in the pack he’d carried with him on his first trip from Thonvil and withdrew his much-used spellbook. Hundreds of pages had been filled with his illegible scribbling since the handful he’d painstakingly inked in secret corners of the castle and upon a potato wagon outside Wayreth.

  He looked up, his lips pursed in thought. “I’m unclear about what starts the disease in some people and not others,” he admitted. “Kirah said she drank something that caused the onset of the illness. Do you recall drinking anything unusual?”

  Wilor creased his brow momentarily. “Just water and ale.”

  Guerrand scowled his frustration. “I’ll bet Lyim tainted the village water, but it would help if I knew if the disease was magical in nature or simply transmitted by magic.” He snapped his fingers as an easy enchantment came to mind. The mage muttered the oft-spoken words that would reveal the presence of magic in Wilor’s body. He frowned when that, too, revealed no glowing emanations, nothing.

  Or did it? Guerrand hastily flipped open his spellbook again, found the entry for dispelling, and traced his finger down the column of his own writing:

  Other-planar creatures are not necessarily magical. Multiple types of magic, or strong local magical emanations, may confuse or conceal weaker radiations.

  Guerrand slammed the book shut. The plague could still be magical in nature, despite his spell. He knew no more than he did before.

  “You’re getting as frustrated as some of the villagers,” said Wilor. “They’ve come up with the craziest notions about a cure. Several tried chopping the snakes off, but they only grow back. I know of one who begged his son to poison his snake hand.”

  “What happened?” Guerrand asked.

  “The man got violently ill from the poison,” admitted Wilor, “and he still died at sunset on the third day.

  “Fear is a powerful force,” Wilor continued. “Shortly after the first outbreak, a group of villagers went on a rampage and killed all the snakes they could find, at Herus’s suggestion. When that didn’t work, they moved on to other animals.”

  Wilor’s lips pursed with concern. “I’m afraid that those who don’t die of the plague will suffer a lingering death of starvation.” Abruptly, Wilor’s face contorted in pain.

  Guerrand shifted uneasily at the sight of Wilor’s agony. “I know my spells haven’t proven very impressive, but I could give you an herbal analgesic that might ease the pain.”

  Wilor absently nodded his approval. Guerrand quickly combined the mixture of crushed dried peppermint leaves and meadowsweet flowers soaked in oil of clove he had used to help Kirah. Resolutely ignoring the snakes, the mage quickly leaned in and placed the tincture under Wilor’s tongue before the man could change his mind.
<
br />   Almost immediately, Wilor’s eyes took on a peaceful look, far away in time and place. “Your father would have been proud of your being a mage,” he said distantly. “Rejik was more than a little interested in the art himself after he married your mother.”

  Guerrand’s heart skipped a beat at the unexpected revelation. “I always suspected Father had more than a passing interest, from the volumes in his library.”

  “Zena wasn’t a blue-blood like your father or his first wife,” Wilor went on, as if Guerrand hadn’t spoken, “but Rejik followed his heart, despite pressure to marry someone from his own class.”

  Guerrand knew this part of the story too well; it was the root of his conflict with his brother Cormac. Cormac’s mother, of old Ergothian stock, had died of Baliforian influenza when Cormac was but eight. Ten years later, Rejik remarried a woman just two years older than his son. Zena DiThon’s family had settled in Northern Ergoth just after the Cataclysm (some three hundred years before), but prejudice was rampant among the nobility. People not of the old, darker-skinned stock that had lived in Ergoth proper, before the Cataclysm split the region into two islands, were considered newcomers.

  The smith’s head shook. “You suffered for their union as much, if not more, than they—you and Quinn and Kirah. Especially after Rejik died. Between you and me,” Wilor whispered, leaning forward conspiratorially, though no one was around to hear what had long stopped mattering to town folk anyway, “Zena was twice the woman Cormac’s mother was, blue blood be damned.”

  Wilor fell back against the rustling straw, an odd smile lighting his face. “You get your magical skill from Zena, you know,” he confided. “Her gypsy blood runs in your veins. She was a pale-skinned, sprightly miss with hair like Solinari’s light, and just as enchanting. ‘One with the magic of the earth,’ was how Rejik described Zena. He was bewitched by her every day of their marriage.”

  “I … never knew any of that,” breathed Guerrand. “Father refused to talk about Mother after she died.”