They were not part of an army any more. They were just a small group of people trying to find their way to safety through enemy territory and awful events.
“Where do we go now, sir?” Toadface asked.
Sardec came to a decision. “We need to head down onto the plains, see if we can find an apothecary or a wizard to help us.”
Toadface looked at him in disbelief but said nothing. Clearly he thought the same thing as Sardec. Alchemy and magic had not helped with the plague in the past. Why should it help now? Sardec gestured for the soldiers to start moving again.
He stopped for a moment in front of the shrine and drew the Elder Signs in the air over his breast. He prayed to the light to help them with a fervency that he had not done since he was a boy.
If the Light heard him, it gave no sign.
Looking out through the windows of their stolen coach, Rik studied the passing landscape. The style of the buildings had changed. Their roofs were flatter, and more of the peasant houses had turf walls and sometimes turf roofs as well. There were more blockhouses and often the villages were surrounded by wooden palisades, made from sharpened logs. Most of the villages seemed empty of young men, with only old peasants, women and children left behind.
Conscription, Tamara told them. Every able bodied serf had been pressed into service. Normally a certain percentage was exempt or could buy exemptions, but not this time. It was a mark of how seriously this war was being taken. This was to be the final conflict between East and West. Many of the peasants thought that the end of the world was upon them and that soon the Saints would come to judge humanity and send the deserving to the Light and the wicked to the Shadow.
Rik could understand how they could think that. The undead were everywhere, and more and more people were dying every day. Those that were not burned would often rise again and lope off into the West seeking to answer some dreadful summons. The plague was not sparing the Sardeans but so far it had only struck humans. He wondered if he would prove to be immune. That would be the true test of his Terrarch heritage.
He had heard so much of the suspicion of the Sardeans for outsiders that he was surprised how easy their progress had been. They were not challenged as they moved through the vast empty plains, and the few living souls that saw them tended to avoid them as much as they themselves tried to avoid other people. It was as if a whole nation shuddered with fear and shame, and sought to avoid the company of others for fear of its mark becoming visible on their brow.
There were things he saw that sometimes moved him to wonder: vast rivers crossed by wooden bridges along which monstrous barges sailed, doubtless bearing supplies to the armies marching West; ancient towns whose temple spires seemed like lances aimed at heaven. Sometimes the sound of distant hymns and bells drifted on the wind, ghostly reminders that there will still godly people in the world, even if their worship took a different form from the one in which he himself had been brought up in.
Once they came across a madman standing at a crossroads ranting at them and accusing them of being dead. He thought himself the only living man left in the world, and they ghosts come to torment him. From his ravings Rik worked out that the plague had struck here in Sardea and recently. Its effects had not been limited merely to Taloreans and Kharadreans. It was not some scourge of the Eastern God sent to scour the earth of heretics. It was something stranger and more vile, a disease used as a weapon by beings who did not care how many they killed, for whom mass death was only part of the process that would leave them in possession of a world, and able to remake it in their own image.
When Rik thought about that, he found hot searing hate in his heart. What sort of people would do this, he wondered? And the answer that came back was not reassuring; people so certain of their fitness to own the world that they would take any steps to make it so. In some ways such thinking was the logical extension of the doctrine that gave the Terrarchs the right to rule over humanity. People might choose to attribute such things to the Princes of Shadow and the power they served, but he knew that the possibility of such actions was bred into every Terrarch and quite possibly every human as well, if only they had the power.
As they travelled Tamara had continued to school him in the basics of the Shadowblood’s art, while Asea listened with a mixture of wariness and fascination. She had a professional’s interest in all forms of magic, and had most likely rarely had the chance to study something so far outside her range of proficiency. And Tamara was a good teacher; patient, calm and with a gift for expounding her points clearly.
Rik found her fascinating company, a charming, witty and intelligent woman with something haunted in her eyes and ferocious in her manner. There were times when he felt sure that this too was not just another mask, when he saw the cruelty that was in her when she spoke of the peasants and humans, or when she became again the giddy young Lady from the East. Perhaps it was simply that she had a multitude of people in her, that they were all facets of her personality which sparkled depending on which one was in the ascendant.
It was something he could sympathise with. The voices whispered within him, hungrily. The more he learned of shadow magic, the more they did that.
Sardec did not like the look of things. Some of the children were coughing and feverish. Rena looked pale and far more sweat beaded her forehead than even the hard route through the hills called for. Toadface too looked weak, shuffling along like an old man with the ague. A few other soldiers looked in a bad way. They’d been walking for days now and they did not seem to have made any progress.
“What do you think?” Sardec asked Weasel. He had taken him to one side, off the track so that no one could overhear their conversation. He knew what was on everyone’s mind, but no one was prepared to say it.
“Doesn’t look good, sir. Half the force is sickening and I don’t think it’s with the flux. They’re showing the symptoms of the plague. I would not be surprised if they broke out in spots soon. After that we might be burning a few corpses or else be looking at planting a few dead men.”
Sardec nodded grimly. That exactly agreed with his own assessment of the situation. He did not see that there was anything to be done about it. If Asea had been here, he would have asked her to try her magic, but she was not, and there was no sense in wishing otherwise.
“We’re running short of food as well, sir. The Barbarian and me are doing our best, but game is scarce and these hills are pretty barren. It would be hard enough to feed half-a-dozen of us on what we get let alone this whole crew. If we had some of the old Foragers with us we might do a bit better but some of the new lads are not so good at scrounging and the kids and the women are no use at all.”
“You’re not suggesting we abandon them, are you?” Weasel shrugged.
“It’s more of a choice between them starving quick or starving slow, in any case. Hunger will be like torture for them if we don’t get more supplies soon. There’s no way around it, sir.”
“You said there’s a town not too far from here.”
“The Barbarian spotted it when we were scouting this morning. Place looks dead and it would not surprise me to find corpses walking in the street. Parts of it are in ruins. Fire would be my guess. Don’t know whether it was put to the torch or it was an accident. The result’s the same in any case.”
Sardec weighed Weasel’s words and came to a decision. They needed to investigate the town. They might find food there and there was a remote possibility of finding a magician who might be able to help the sick. If Rena was coming down with the plague, Sardec was prepared to take any risk if there was any chance of saving her. He could not see what further purpose would be served by skulking in the hills anyway. It looked like the Sardean army had bypassed them.