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 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 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.
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. Tbe 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 all be over as soon as the moons rise. There's a comfort in knowing that."