The Medusa Plague tdom-2

by Mary Kirchoff

  "Now I have this awful itch," Kirah moaned. "I really need a bath, after that fever from the flu." Her hand continued scraping back and forth on her right forearm all the while she spoke. But the scratching did nothing to relieve the itch, which only made Kirah attack the arm more ferociously.

  Within moments, she was nearly frantic. "This arm, it's driving me crazy. I've never itched like this before!"

  Guerrand glanced questioningly at Bram. Kirah surely must have heard the symptoms of the plague. Did she really have such faith in Lyim that she still didn't suspect his "cure"? Lyim had not been above using a magical charm on her. Or was she simply fooling herself out of fear?

  "Just lie back, Kirah," Bram soothed. "We'll get a rag and some warm water. It will make you feel better."

  Tears welled in Kirah's eyes and left light-colored streaks down her dirty cheeks. "Hurry, please," she pleaded, gouging ever more frantically at the raw arm.

  "What's happening?" she wailed, looking down the length of her arms. Kirah's head went from side to side in shocked, old-womanish gestures.

  "You have the plague, Kirah. You'll shed a layer or two of skin today," Bram explained as calmly as he was able.

  "I can't have the plague!" she howled, rubbing her arms at a furious rate against the roughness of the sheets. "Lyim gave me the cure!"

  "Lyim gave you the plague," Guerrand said harshly.

  "I don't believe you-I can't!" Kirah rubbed her limbs and thrashed against the bed, both men holding her to keep her on it.

  "It's true," said Bram. "I heard him boast of it, Kirah."

  Bram motioned Guerrand toward the wash basin for the wet rag. The older man had taken only a few steps when a piercing shriek spun him around in his tracks. Kirah was arching violently on the bed. Bram struggled to push her shoulders to the mattress. "Help me, Rand!" Bram cried. Kirah's right arm twitched horribly as she banged it over and over against the bed frame.

  Guerrand dashed back to the bed and tried to grab his sister's flailing limb. "Just hold her down so she can't hurt herself worse."

  Guerrand did as Bram asked and was surprised by the strength in Kirah's thin, fevered frame. Her arm struck him in the back several times, but Guerrand ignored it. A cry of anguish rent the air as the skin split along the entire length of Kirah's right forearm and hand, then slipped away in a hideous curl. She looked at the red, raw flesh beneath it with large, teary eyes. Her glance traveled to Guerrand, unable to deny the truth any longer. Kirah fell back against the soiled pillow, the need to scratch silenced for the moment.

  Why?" she asked in a hollow voice. "Why would he do this? I thought he cared about me."

  "He did care about you, Kirah," whispered Guerrand. "Just not as much as he hated me."

  Kirah cried out again, and Bram held her tightly. He shot an anxious look over his shoulder at his uncle. "Can't you come up with some spell to lessen her pain?

  Guerrand snapped from his stupor to recall a mixture he had once given Esme when she broke her leg. He found the prerequisite herbs in his pack and hastily concocted the mixture of crushed dried peppermint leaves and cream-colored meadowsweet flowers soaked in oil of clove. He leaned in, struggling against her thrashing, and placed the tincture under Kirah's tongue. Within moments, her struggles visibly, though briefly, lessened.

  "I'd like to try something else as well," Guerrand said pensively. "If this illness is magic-based, perhaps it can be dispelled."

  "Do it!" urged Bram, turning back to his aunt, whose legs had begun to split now.

  Guerrand reached into his pouch and withdrew a hardened leather scroll case. He popped off the lid and pulled out a heavy scroll. The spell of dispelling was a simple one to a mage of Guerrand's experience, and he had cast if from memory many times. But if this worked, he would need to cast it many more times, so he had brought along several such scrolls. Guerrand took a moment to compose himself and focus his mind, closing out Kirah's shrieks of pain. With eyes narrowed, he translated aloud the mystical symbols so precisely scribed on the parchment. As each was pronounced, it flared like a tiny wisp of paper set alight, to immediately swirl away above the scroll. Familiar magical symbols danced through his mind, organizing themselves in the proper pattern, and disappeared. Finally, Guerrand mumbled the words›f'"Delu solisar," to trigger the precisely crafted spell.

  Both men held their breath as they watched. Bram's eyes darted from Kirah's legs to her face, and back to her legs again, in a nervous cycle. Guerrand sat motionless.

  Finally, Bram whispered, "What's happening? Why can't I see anything?"

  "Because there's nothing to see," sighed Guerrand. "If the spell had worked, it's effect would have been apparent right away It failed."

  Without a word, Bram turned back to Kirah.

  When the skin was shed entirely from the first leg, she was so exhausted she lapsed into a shallow, fitful sleep. Both men knew the rest was only temporary, until her other leg began to shed. Bram joined his uncle by the cold hearth. "Is there nothing else you can try?"

  Guerrand shook his head. "Despite the simplicity of the process, most magic can be dispelled. Whatever this is, it goes beyond the realm of pure magic. A multitude of forces are at work creating this disease."

  "You can't even ease her pain more fully?" asked Bram, his voice far away, yet urgent.

  "I can keep administering the analgesic herbs, but I'm neither a physicker nor a priest. Mine are not healing spells. I don't even understand what I'm dealing with."

  "Then learn about it," charged Bram. "Walk around Thonvil and see its effects. You've got until sunset tomorrow night to come up with a cure. That's when Kirah's limbs will turn to snakes and her eyes to onyx."

  Guerrand nodded. "Of course."

  Bram saw the brief flash of guilt and self-doubt cloud his uncle's face. "These people will not be cured by your guilt, but by your wits and your sweat," he said. "Whatever decisions led Lyim to his actions, you are to blame for what happens here only if self-pity keeps you from working to cure what he caused."

  Guerrand regarded his nephew with a new respect. The mage resolved to do whatever he could, leave no magical concept untried, to keep his sister from turning to stone. Her next round of pain-racked screams began as her second leg began to shed its skin, reminding the mage that he had very little time.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Strangely, tbe sky on the afternoon of Nuindai, tbe twenty- ninth day of Mishamont, was clearer, warmer, brighter than Guerrand remembered for spring on the island of Northern Ergoth. Or perhaps it was because any amount of sunlight seemed glaring to the mage after the gloom of Bastion.

  Still, light seemed not to reach the streets where Guerrand walked in the silence of a dying village. No blessed breeze blew away the stench of shed skins left to rot wherever they fell. Guerrand looked all ways with his eyes but had difficulty concentrating over the pain in his heart.

  The mage felt certain any clue to the plague's cure lay with the symptoms themselves. He needed to see the plague and all its ramifications firsthand. His dread of witnessing such pain was lessened only by his determination to end it.

  Guerrand saw a few people trudging at a distance, dirty rags wrapped around their faces and feet, as if old linen could keep the sickness from invading their skin. Their heads they kept low, fearful that a polite meeting of eyes was invitation enough to the plague. The street and stoops were littered with the leavings of life, most of the shops closed, unswept, some of them boarded over. Bram had warned him of the village's growing dereliction, that some of the closures had occurred before the plague, but the warning did little to lessen the blow of seeing Thonvil so deserted. There was not even a dog or pig or chicken in sight, where once the street had daily seemed like a small spring fair.

  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, too
ls, 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. "Doduvasl"

  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 tbe CDedusA pUguc

  past the midpoint of his scalp, until only a narrow ring of 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 m
an, 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 tolook 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 grat- itude and embarrassment. "The promise of Rejik DiThon's second son has always been good enough forme."

  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.