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, 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."
Ox CDcdusa plague
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.