The fourth day of the plague hit them like the bursting of a dam. A dozen were struck dead before noon. Dante wasn't able to see to them all himself. Every time the screams began, the column of citizens would break apart, families scattering to either side of the road, some running scores of yards into the woods before stopping to stare back at the latest afflicted.
"Some of you must be tempted right now to run," Dante announced to the people after the morning's twelfth death. "To flee from this horror and try to make your own way. I won't stop you. But I will remind you that there's very little to eat in a winter wood, and even less back home, because we took all there was with us.
"There's no guarantee this won't follow you wherever you go. If this is part of the gods' punishment, it won't be limited to just us. It will be happening everywhere. I can't promise you that we're going to find a way to stop it—but you can be certain the priests of Narashtovik have a much better chance of finding a cure than you will if you strike out on your own."
This drew some nods and a few scattered claps. Some would still leave, he knew. Fewer mouths to feed, he supposed.
Another set of screams erupted ten minutes later. With a sinking heart, he rode down the column toward the source. Gladdic had beaten him to it and was standing over a seizing girl not yet into her teenage years. Her head wrenched back. Green tendrils groped their way from her mouth and nose.
Gladdic threw his left hand high. Nether swirled from the girl's body and spiraled around his fingers. Instead of shaping it, he drew more and more of it to him, his features twisted with contempt.
The girl spasmed, slapping her hands against the ground. The worms seemed to be struck by the same affliction, jerking back and forth with none of their usual repellant grace. The clouds of nether flowing from the girl shrunk to streams, then wisps.
Her body sagged. But her chest was still rising and falling. The worms were drooping too, lashing weakly at Gladdic. Gladdic sneered down at them. Light flashed from the tips of his fingers and streaked into the girl's mouth. The worms thrashed, squealing as they did when they were burned.
Some of them dropped away from the girl's body and inched their way across the snow before shriveling to a stop. Others tried to squirm their way back inside her, but couldn't find purchase. They fell from her body one by one and from her mouth in clumps. Until none were left at all.
Gladdic faltered, sweat dripping from his scalp and cheeks. The worms were gone, but the girl was bleeding from her face and dozens of other holes they'd burrowed through her body. Dante jerked forward, but Gladdic snapped his hand to the side, covering her with nether. Dante sent the shadows to her anyway and found her interior was shot through with minute wounds. He mended flesh and veins whole as Gladdic did the same.
"What have you done?" Dante said.
Gladdic shot him an annoyed look. "I have cured her."
"Yeah, but how?"
"By doing what we had not been doing before. Rather than—"
The girl's eyes fluttered. She coughed, choking, and lifted her head, wiping at her face. Seeing the blood on her hand, she shrieked.
Gladdic sank to one knee. "Do not be afraid, child."
"I'm bleeding!"
He shook his head. "That is from your wounds, but your wounds are now gone. As is the disease that caused them. You are safe now."
She wiped her hand in the snow, then jerked it back from the shriveled and blackening strands there. Gladdic offered her his hand.
The girl stood and made as if to stamp on a pile of strands, then jerked back her foot. "What if it comes back?"
"I do not think that it will," Gladdic said. "Not for you. But if you have been cured once, you can be cured again."
Her family had been watching all this in stillness, but they could no longer contain themselves. They ran inward, the mother scooping up the girl while the father pumped Gladdic's hand up and down with both of his own. After several declarations of gratitude, he released Gladdic to go and see to his daughter, but their family was a large one, and one person after another came up to thank the old man.
"Yes, he was wonderful, wasn't he?" Dante said once all this had gone on for more than long enough. "You'll have to thank him later. We've got work to do."
Several more of them blurted their thanks. Two even grabbed at Gladdic's robes. Dante nearly had to wrestle Gladdic away from them.
"Tell me everything you did," Dante said. "Make it fast. We'll have another patient any minute."
"What I did was both simple and most difficult," Gladdic said. "We knew already that attacking the strands with nether does not destroy them. Instead there are signs that it invigorates the strands."
Dante blinked. "So you sucked all the nether out of the girl—and starved the worms of it!"
"More challenging than it sounds, to drain completely a living thing of its shadows. Indeed, I discovered I could not do this. Some fraction remained within her. Perhaps it was her trace, or perhaps those particles that remained were too small for me to apprehend or coerce."
"The nether's all around her. Even if you managed to suck every last drop out of her, it would still be leaking back into her through the air, the ground, even her clothes."
Gladdic nodded. "This treatment did not kill the strands. It merely placed us in stalemate. Yet the girl's body was still dying. I also needed a way to assault the strands directly."
"How'd you know how to do that?"
"Why do you believe that I did? Merely because it worked? I made a desperate guess. And flushed her throat and veins with ether."
"Guess or not, you may have just discovered the cure," Dante said. "The next time someone's afflicted, you're going to handle it. And you're going to show me how it's done."
3
They didn't have to wait long.
Word of Gladdic's miracle hadn't even made its way across the camp by the time the next set of wails alerted them to the case. Dante and Gladdic were mounted on horseback in anticipation and they took off at once. The rate of possessions had been so hectic they'd had to stop the march, and with families clustered together and separated from other such groups in fear, this left wide avenues down the camp, allowing them to gallop forth at full speed.
Dante's heart beat like he was the one running and the horse was riding him. There was a chance that Gladdic's cure had been a fluke. But he didn't think so. He thought they'd found a way to fight back against the strands. Now all they had to do was practice it and refine it. The end of the plague might be mere days away—or even hours.
The afflicted was a beardless but impressively sideburned man in his early sixties. He was writhing on the ground, but no worms were showing themselves yet. Gladdic swooped down from his horse and lifted his gnarled hand.
Nether whorled from the writhing man to Gladdic's outstretched fingers. Dante watched closely, cluing into every detail. The process of draining the man of shadows was even more difficult than Gladdic had made it sound. To a degree where Dante suspected the strands might be resisting the attempt.
As Gladdic struggled to draw the last quarter or so of nether that clung to the man's deep tissues and bones, worms slithered from his nostrils and veins. The spectators howled—the people's reaction to this sight had been so consistent that many were calling the affliction the Wailing Plague—and swayed back. Dante had meant to passively observe, but with the sideburned man's blood trickling into the snow, Dante spread his hands and grabbed at the nether within the victim.
He practically had to tear it loose. At last, it gave way, spilling out in a sudden flood. The worms convulsed in discomfort. Gladdic sent a glowing lozenge of ether down the man's throat. Several of the worms dropped free, thrashing weakly as they died.
But others were emerging from the man's body.
"Something's wrong," Dante said.
"How sharp of you to notice," Gladdic muttered.
"I mean besides his body being full of burrowing green worms. Last time, they all died almost right a
way."
Gladdic said nothing. Instead, he sent a second pulse of light down the man's throat. Dante watched as Gladdic broke the pulse apart and sent its pieces through the man's organs and muscles. A second bout of strands fell away, already withering, yet more and more were poking from his skin.
As Gladdic shaped a third attempt, Dante gathered the ether to himself, ready to send it in alongside Gladdic's. The victim gave a great spasm, drumming his heels against the frozen earth, then went as limp as melted butter.
His condition was obvious, but Dante confirmed what little nether remained within him had gone still.
He took the ether in his hand and hurled it into the trunk of a pine. "Gods damn it!"
Gladdic said nothing, calmly incinerating the body.
"What did you do different?" Dante said.
"Nothing."
"Really? Because last time, I recall that little girl hugging everyone afterwards. I don't think anyone here's going to want to hug a pile of burning cinders."
"You witnessed both treatments. If the second varied so greatly from the first, then surely you noticed for yourself whatever the difference might have been."
"If we don't get this right, do you have any idea how many people are—" Something shoved him roughly from the side.
"Pardon me for stumbling," Blays said. "I must be extremely drunk again." He dropped his voice. "Either that or you two are arguing about how we're all going to die while the people are listening to your every word and that poor fellow's corpse is still smoldering in front of you."
Dante felt himself redden. Dozens of citizens were standing in a wide circle around them. He'd been so consumed by their failure he'd blocked them out of mind.
"It worked once," Blays said. "It will work again. Unless you drive the people so mad with fear they rip you apart and sacrifice you to Taim in the meantime. Just keep trying, all right? We've gotten through worse. We'll get through this as well."
He was right. Not that Dante would admit as much. He had been hoping, naively, that Gladdic had solved the problem in one swoop. It was rarely that easy, of course. And if this was a scourge sent by the gods—and Dante didn't see how it could be anything else—it would be a miracle if they were able to find a way to defeat it completely.
They were given nearly an hour's reprieve between the death of the sideburned man and the next set of screams. The latest victim was a man in his mid-twenties whose hale build suggested that he worked his own farm. Gladdic and Dante went to work on him, drawing as much nether as they could out of him, then sending the ether down his throat.
This time, the worms fell away, and no more came forth to replace them. They patched up the holes studding the man's body and helped him to his feet.
Curing him gave Dante a surge of confidence that lasted all the way to the next victim, who died awfully despite all their efforts. The one after that died as well. Grim-faced panic stole over Dante's soul. Treating a single victim required a nontrivial amount of his strength. It was reducing the march to a crawl, too. All that while only saving a third of the afflicted? If that was a victory, it was a deeply bitter one.
Then they cured the next five possessions in a row. And eight of the ten after that. As their successes mounted, Dante and Gladdic tinkered with their process, teaching it to other priests as well. The whole thing kept Dante so busy that when his command of the nether grew shaky enough that he was forced to turn over treatments to his Council and their best priests, he was bewildered to find that the sun had set.
He went to his tent and plopped down in a chair. He hadn't asked for one, but a servant delivered a strong beer, which he practically snatched out of the man's hand.
"Congratulations, Gladdic," he said. "You saved three dozen people today."
"Another twenty-odd years of this," Blays said, "and your ledger might finally be back in the black."
Gladdic ignored this. "One in four are still perishing."
Dante shrugged. "If you'd told me this morning that by day's end you'd figure out a way to save three-quarters of the people possessed by the strands, I would have offered to name you double-king of Narashtovik if your prediction came true. I've already got our new strategy worked out. We'll run a rotation of priests mounted on horseback to respond to new possessions. The survivors of the treatment are still very weakened, enough to slow us down, so we'll stick them in the wagons until they're well enough to walk again. This is going to let us get back on the move tomorrow."
"Do not be so sure."
"What? If anything we'll get even better at fighting the strands as we go along."
"Assuming there are only dozens of cases to deal with tomorrow, and not hundreds—or thousands."
This was enough for Dante to switch his sipping from celebratory to brooding. He allowed himself a second mug and was right about to go collapse into well-earned slumber when a servant entered the tent and let him know that Priestess Yalla had requested to see him.
Dulled as his brain was, it took him a moment to remember who that was: one of the elders of Narashtovik's temple of Lia. He was tempted to deny her an audience, but since it was Lia, this probably had something to do with healing, and it would thus be good for the morale of the people if her order had full confidence in him. Who knew, maybe Lia was even watching them somehow, and this would curry favor with her. He told the servant to admit Priestess Yalla.
The man escorted her into the tent. Yalla was starting to get on in her years, but she wasn't completely venerable yet: her hair still had more black than gray in it, and she hadn't slowed down any. Her eyes and smile were kindly in the exact way you'd expect a devotee of Lia to be.
They greeted each other and Dante allowed for a small amount of chat before getting to the point. "I assume you're here about the strands? Did you have questions for me?"
"No questions," she said. "But I do have a request. Would you come and say a prayer to Lia with us?"
"What, right now?"
"If your responsibilities are too many…"
He pinched the bridge of his nose, knowing he'd regret staying up any later if things got any worse tomorrow. "I can spare a few minutes. Lia did give us her part of the spear, after all. Lead on."
He followed her out into the briskness of the night. It wasn't too late yet and the camp was beholden to a strange energy, one part giddy and one part queasy fear. Yalla wasn't saying anything and his mind started to wander. Gladdic hadn't been being pessimistic for its own sake. More and more people were being afflicted every day. They needed more than a cure that failed a quarter of the time. They needed to find where the green strands were coming from, and destroy the source.
Beside him, Yalla stumbled, uttering a short groan. Dante pulled away—expecting her to start writhing—then cursed himself and grabbed her arm to help her stay upright.
"Are you all right?" he said. "If you're feeling like—"
"I'm fine." She laughed, embarrassed. "It's not the Wailing Plague. It's the fast."
"You're doing your fast? In the middle of a march?"
"Lia makes no exceptions. This doesn't feel like the time to be defying her, don't you think?"
Dante glanced at the black sky. "That depends on whose side she's on."
"Lia has arranged the world so that things don't grow in winter. To be in accordance with her order, we must not grow in this season, either."
"You can't afford to leave your people weak right now. They'll need as much strength as possible if they're stricken by the strands."
"We have been fortunate so far. Not a single one of us has fallen ill. As long as we abide by Lia's edicts, it may be that we never will."
He had strong doubts of the wisdom of what they were doing, but he didn't utter them. Perhaps their faith would carry them through.
The goddess' followers were gathered between a hub of humble tents. Seeing Dante, they glanced at each other, murmuring in surprise. Apparently Yalla had been keeping them in the dark.
"Sorry I'm
late," she said. "But a guest will be helping me deliver our prayer tonight."
She began one of the core missives to Lia. Over the last couple of years of strife and calamity, Dante hadn't had the chance to keep up with the rites of the other temples, and he couldn't remember the words. He stood there like a fool: Yalla had brought him there to deliver comfort, and with his silence, he was telling these people he cared so little about their branch of the faith that he didn't even know their most basic prayers.
"For wild fruits grow of their own accord," Yalla went on. "But wild fruits are fit for wild men: for a people to grow into more, they must first cultivate the fruits that can nourish them."
Dante blinked. "The body is a land of its own," he said, matching her next words. "To reach health, it must be tended to as a farmer to his fields."
Together, they continued the prayer, a pledge to Lia that the people would maintain both their fields and their selves as long as Lia pledged to them that well-tended things would always be able to grow and reproduce. Dante took another look at the sky. Lia wouldn't break this promise, would she? Of all the gods, she'd always been the most faithful.
They finished; after a customary moment of silence, Yalla gave a slight nod. "Thank you for joining us, lord. Sickness and disease are a part of the cycle that has been ours to live out since the fall of Arawn's mill. But through Gladdic, and through you, Lia has shown that her promise to us still holds."
~
Six more died overnight. When the frail light of morning spread across the snows, Dante could see a few pairs of tracks leading off into the wilds. Silently, he repeated Lia's prayer for those who'd left.
After another meeting with the priests trained in fighting the strands, the column got back on its way. Late that morning, the forest gave way to low rolling hills. The air was clear and thin and they could at last see the blue slopes of Gallador Rift far away in the distance.
Dante was leading the way down a decline of yellow grass when the earth moved beneath them.
The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7) Page 3
