Tancred MarSevrin thrashed and thrashed, fighting with all his might. He was too weak, though, and his struggles soon began to weaken, his cries grew silent. Finally he slumped, defeated, his wild, fearful eyes staring at nothing. His legs kicked one last time, then were still.
Cathan kept his hand over the dead man’s mouth, counting slowly to ten and fighting the urge to scream. Finally, knowing it was done, he pulled back and stood above the bed, staring at the body. He ran a shaky hand over his face, then reached down and closed Tancred’s eyes. Sucking in a shuddering breath, he drew a blanket over the pinched face.
“Farewell, brother,” he whispered.
The bedchamber was plain, stone below and thatch above, a closed, wooden door leading to the front room. A second blanket hung over the lone window, drenching the room in shadows. The furnishings were spare: a straw bed and two wooden stools, a foot chest with no lock, a clay chamber pot crusted with filth. The only ornament was a sacred triangle of white ceramic hanging on the east wall. No one had changed the rushes on the earthen floor in some time, and their sweet smell had long since yielded to the sour reek of sickness.
Cathan looked down at the shrouded corpse, feeling hollow. When the tears came, he let them flow.
The Longosai was a terrible way to die. It began as an innocent-looking rash on the hands and feet, but that hannlessness didn’t last long. It steadily worsened, erupting into weeping sores that crawled up arms and legs and blossomed on swollen groins and throats, wasting away the flesh and turning its victims into skeletons wrapped in loose folds of corrupted skin. As the end came on, so did madness, bringing a wild sheen to the eyes of the dying and bloody froth to their lips. Death soon followed.
The plague had missed the village of Luciel as it raged across Taol, somehow leaving it untouched all winter while ravaging the hamlets nearby. Oveth, Fliran, even Espadica only two leagues away had all succumbed, but when the snows finally began to melt, Luciel remained intact. The townsfolk had sighed, thanking the gods they had survived such a harsh season… then, on the third day of spring, they’d begun to die.
Drelise had been the first victim. A priestess of Mishakal the Healing Hand, she had been an old woman-the winter just past her ninetieth-and her goddess hadn’t been able to spare her from the Creep’s killing touch. Both her apprentices soon followed, leaving the village with no one to mix balms and poultices, or bleed the dying to purify their flesh. A week later, twenty folk were dead; after another, the toll had risen to a hundred. Soon blue mourning cloths hung by the doors of nearly every house in Luciel’s valley, and more than a few stood as empty as old skulls, derelict and silent.
Before the Longosai, the MarSevrin clan had numbered five. Utham, its head, was a weaver, his wife Luska a midwife. Tancred, the eldest of their children, had been twenty-two, a quick-fingered lad set to inherit his father’s loom. Cathan, four years his junior, seemed his brother’s twin, sharing his shaggy brown hair and clever eyes. Wentha, their younger sister, was a pretty, golden-haired girl who had just begun to catch the fancies of the village’s young men. The MarSevrins had been happy, content to live in a land that, though sometimes hard, lay nonetheless beneath Paladine’s blessing.
Luska had been one of the first twenty victims. Utham had followed a few days later. Cathan himself developed the telltale rash a few days later, but he had fought it off, as some did, and it had left only a few pockmarks on his skin when it waned. Tancred hadn’t been so lucky: For the past ten days, Cathan had tended to him, bringing his brother water to drink, porridge to eat, and bowls to puke in, while his life ebbed away.
Cathan had woken at dawn that morning, curled up on the floor by the bedside, to find Tancred staring at him. He’d looked a stranger-once tall and strong, he was as thin as one of Wentha’s old twig-dolls, his face gaunt and sallow. His bloodshot eyes had gleamed unpleasantly as he raised a bony hand to beckon Cathan near.
“Brother,” he’d rasped, sounding like a whetstone on rusted iron. Cathan gave him a swallow of water, most of which dribbled down his chin. “How is Wentha?”
“She’s well,” Cathan had said, his throat thick with tears. Their sister, though devastated by the loss of their parents and Tancred’s decline, had yet to show any sign of the plague. She lived across town now, with Fendrilla, an old woman who had lost both her daughters to the Creep.
Reaching out, Tancred had taken Cathan’s hand. His once iron-firm grip had been sweaty and feeble, and his eyes shone like embers. Cathan had seen that look in his mother’s eyes and then his father’s. He’d known that, before long, Tancred would begin to rave. He’d known, too, what he had to do and had wondered if he could carry through with it.
“Promise me,” Tancred had hissed, his breath stinking. “Swear you’ll not die like this. Neither of you.”
Coldness twisting his guts, Cathan had looked away.
“Swear!”
Cathan had squeezed his eyes shut, grinding his teeth to keep the sobs at bay. Finally, he’d managed a nod, Tancred had smiled, a horrible rictus filmed with blood.
“Very well, then,” he’d said and settled back to wait.
They’d made the pact together, as they stood by the pyre where their parents had burned. They knew what the Longosai did in its last days and had sworn that neither they nor Wentha would suffer so. Cathan kept his word: as Tancred lay still before him, he had covered his brother’s face and smothered him. It was merciful, but that didn’t stop the tears from coursing down his face as he looked down on the unmoving form in the bed, so wretchedly small after the Creep’s ravages.
Later, he would find a wagon and haul Tancred to the pyres at the edge of town, as he had his mother and father. By nightfall, his brother would be ashes, gone. How much longer, he wondered, before I follow him?
He turned and looked across the room, at Paladine’s sign on the wall. He’d prayed before it every day, at the proper times-dawn, midday, sunset, even midnight-while Tancred lay wheezing behind him, his life draining away. He’d begged the god to spare his brother’s life, to drive off the disease. Now, his mouth hardening, he strode over to it, tore it down, and flung it across the chamber. It smashed against the gray stone, shards pattering down among the dirty rushes.
“Damn you, Paladine,” he spat and stormed out of the room.
A fortnight later, Cathan crouched in a gully as cold rain dripped down from the branches of pines above. Shivering, he drew his brown cloak about him, but it was already soaked through, along with the stained tunic he wore underneath. A cough tickled his throat, and he fought it back with a grimace.
Another man stirred beside him in the ditch, turning a hooded head his way. Within the cowl, a smile lit a plain face, beneath a downy blond moustache.
“You look,” Embric Sharpspurs whispered, “like you’d rather be some place else.”
Cathan coughed shaking his head ruefully. “Wouldn’t you?”
The gully was one of many that cut through the stony ground, deep amid Taol’s hills. The land around them was gray and barren, rocky crags fringed with scrub bushes and oaks not yet come into spring leaf. The clouds above were low and leaden, giving off a maddening drizzle so fine it was almost mist. Thunder muttered somewhere far away.
Embric shrugged. “Could be worse,” he said, his mouth crooking into an almost-grin. “Could be sleeting.”
Cathan shook his head and was opening his mouth to reply when a hand touched his shoulder. He twisted, reaching for the long dagger he wore on his belt. He had the knife halfway out of its sheath when he stopped, meeting the gray, flinty gaze of an older man.