The Keep of Fire (26 page)

It was dusk by the time they reached the farm. At first Grace thought it must be deserted. Heavy wood shutters covered the windows, and there was no light beneath the door. Then she noticed the smoke oozing from the daub-and-wattle chimney. She glanced at Durge. He nodded, nudged Blackalock’s flanks, and rode up to the farmhouse while the others waited at a distance.

Grace watched as Durge dismounted and knocked on the door. He knocked again, then a third time, and looked ready to knock the rickety plank in when the door opened a crack. She could not see who stood on the other side, but the knight took a step back. Why? Was he startled? She watched Durge speak for a few moments more, then the door shut. He climbed onto his sooty charger and pounded back toward the others.

What is it?
Grace started to ask as he thundered to a halt, but the knight spoke first.

“Plague,” he said, his weathered face grim.

The others cast startled looks at the knight. Grace rolled the word over in her mind.
Plague
. Was that the reason for the destruction of the village? She had heard that, during the time of the Black Death in Europe, entire villages had been torched to prevent the spread of bubonic plague.

Grace nudged Shandis forward. “How many in the house are ill?”

“Just one from what I could gather,” Durge said.
“An old woman answered the door. It’s her husband that’s sick.”

“What are the symptoms?”

“I don’t know. All she said was that he’s burning up.”

That wasn’t good enough. Fever was a symptom of countless pathogens, and plague was too generic a word to be helpful. There could be a dozen different pandemic diseases on this world, all as bad as bubonic plague—or worse. There was only one way to find out what she was dealing with.

Before Durge could reach out to grab Shandis’s reins, Grace urged the palfrey into a gallop.

“Grace!” She heard the shout behind her, although she didn’t know if it was Aryn or Lirith. She caught a dark blur out of the corner of her eye and knew Durge was riding after her. He would be too late. She reined Shandis to a stop in front of the farmhouse and moved to the door.

Durge was faster than she had thought. Clods of dirt struck her as Blackalock skidded to a halt two paces away. Durge leaped from the saddle, chain mail ringing, and laid a hand on her arm.

“My lady, this is madness. You cannot go in there.”

A strange sensation welled up in Grace’s chest as she gazed at Durge’s hand on her arm. It was not anger. It was too icy for that, too distant. The only way she could understand the feeling was to give words to it.

How dare you touch our person?

She did not speak them, but her look must have communicated the words all the same. The knight snatched his hand back, his expression one of astonishment. Grace turned and pushed through the door. It was dim inside. The air was sharp with smoke and rank with the wet scent of illness.

“My lady,” a voice rasped, “you must not enter here.”

Grace searched, then picked out the form of the woman outlined by the sputtering light of a fire. She huddled beside a crude cot, barefoot and wearing rags. Something on the bed writhed and moaned.

For the first time, a shard of uncertainty pierced her doctor’s confidence. Grace ignored it. This wasn’t just duty. It was need. Dimly she was aware of Durge standing in the open doorway, the hem of his cloak pressed over his mouth and nose.

“It’s all right.” Grace’s voice wavered. She cleared her throat and spoke again. “I’m a healer.”

The woman pawed at her matted hair. Despite Durge’s description she was not much older than Grace. Just worn and battered by life on this world.

“You cannot help him,” the woman said. “You cannot help any of them now. It’s too late. Too late.”

“Let me see,” Grace said.

She approached the bed. The moans grew louder, the stench of smoke thicker. The figure coiled and uncoiled beneath a filthy blanket. Grace stared, oddly reminded of a moth wriggling inside its cocoon, undergoing metamorphosis, its body dissolving and reforming. It seemed wondrous, but it had to be agony as well. She reached for the blanket.

“No, my lady!” the woman hissed. “Do not touch him!”

Grace hesitated, then glanced at the other. “Why? Is that how it’s transmitted?” But it was a stupid question. The woman couldn’t understand the concept of disease vectors.

“It’s the Burning Plague, my lady. He’ll be like the others soon. He’ll join them when the others come again.”

“Others? How many others have this plague?”

The woman made a limp gesture toward the door. “All of them. It took all of them. It will take you, too,
if you don’t go. I’m the only one left. Me and Yaren. Oh, Yaren!”

The woman hugged thin arms around scabby knees and rocked back and forth on the floor, sobbing now as Grace stared. There was something wrong about this. The woman’s words didn’t make sense. If the plague took the others, how could they come again? She steeled her will, reached for the blanket, and pulled it back.

Grace clasped a hand to her mouth but could not stifle her gasp. The man on the bed was only vaguely human. His skin was blistered and oozed yellow fluid, as if every inch of his body had been severely burned. The gas of decay that rose from him was so thick Grace’s head swam for lack of oxygen. In places his burned skin had peeled off his body in strips, and that had exposed not naked muscle but something else: something that looked as hard, smooth, and black as polished obsidian.

“What’s happening to him?” Grace whispered, struggling for comprehension.

The man opened his eyes. One was beautiful and blue in the bubbled ruin of his face. The other was completely black—without white, without iris.

A shriek split the air of the hovel. The woman leaped to her feet, her face wild with terror.
“Krondrim!”
she screamed. “The Burnt Ones!”

She hurtled away from the bed and nearly knocked down Durge as she pushed past him, through the door, and into gray twilight beyond. The knight gazed at Grace with wide eyes. She tried to swallow, but her mouth was a desert. She forced herself to turn back around.

The man on the bed was still and quiet now. He watched her with his perfect blue eye. Then, impossibly, his ragged lips moved. Dark fluid dribbled down his chin. Despite her revulsion, Grace bent close to
hear his words. As she did, she could feel the heat radiating from him.

“Kill me,” he whispered.

Grace shuddered. His blue eye flickered toward the fireplace. Grace followed it, then saw the sharp iron poker that leaned against the stones. She glanced back at him and opened her mouth, but she could not speak.

“Please.” The words were as dry as ashes. “While you still can. Kill me.”

Grace started to shake her head. She couldn’t do it. It was against everything she was, everything she stood for as a doctor. She started to rise. Then she saw a wisp of smoke coil up from the blanket that covered his body. It was burning.

He’ll be like the others soon.…

His one human eye locked on her face. An ocean of terror flooded the blue orb, while the other was as flat and empty as space. There was only one treatment left for him.

“Please.…”

Grace clenched her teeth, then reached for the poker.

It grew warmer as they journeyed east.

Shortly after dawn the heat began to creep from the moist, sun-warmed ground until Grace could see it hanging on the air like gold mist, throbbing in time to the drone of insects. Evaporative cooling was impossible, given the humidity, but her sweat glands did not know this and continued to produce great, useless floods of salt water, until her eyes stung and her riding gown was heavy and sodden.

The dampness was the result of their proximity to
the river, Grace knew, as well as the density of the vegetation; eastern Calavan was far more wild and overgrown than the heart of the Dominion, which had been tilled for centuries. Here, slender conifers stretched skyward even as entangling vines throttled them and pulled them back to the forest floor. In all, Grace had not been in a place so rank with life since medical school in North Carolina. There all objects had had the uncanny power to mold instantaneously. She kept checking her dress for the first blotchy, telltale signs.

Last night, the travelers had ridden in silence from the farmhouse near the ruins of Tarafel. Grace spoke to no one of what she had done inside, and Durge had not seen her actions. However, she knew she would never forget the weight of the iron poker in her hand, or the resistance she had met when she pressed the tip against the man’s obsidian flesh and found it far too hard to penetrate. Then a glint of sapphire had caught her eye, and she had known there was only one soft place left on his body.

His scream was short, dry, and horrible. Durge rushed to her, but by then the blanket was on fire, and flames licked up the tinder-dry walls of the hovel. The two burst out the front door, and by the time they reached the others the entire farmhouse was an inferno. What had become of Yaren’s wife they did not know. The others saw her stumble out of the farmhouse moments before Grace and Durge, then run in the opposite direction, disappearing into trees and gloom.

Darkness fell, and the six spent a miserable night huddled inside the only structure in sight still standing—a rickety shed that, in its most recent incarnation, had housed chickens. They did not sleep, and they set out again at first light, only too glad to be away from the place.

The sun was just rising when they discovered what
had become of Yaren’s wife. It was Durge who found her body, crumpled in a shallow stream at the bottom of a ravine. Evidently she had not seen the edge in the dark as she fled. Or had she seen it after all? Grace remembered the woman’s terrified scream and shuddered. Kalleth and Meridar dismounted and scrambled into the ravine. The knights pulled her body onto the bank and covered it with a cairn of stones. Then the party continued on its way.

As they rode through the heat that day, Grace tried to comprehend what had happened. What sort of disease was this Burning Plague? Was the agent virus or bacillus? Was it airborne or transmitted by fluid? However, she knew these were useless questions, that this was no disease like she had ever dealt with at Denver Memorial. Despite his grotesque appearance, Yaren hadn’t been dying. All her instincts as a healer told her that. But if medicine couldn’t offer an answer, perhaps biology still could. A caterpillar could undergo metamorphosis inside its cocoon—why not a man?

But if that’s the case, then what was he becoming?

Even as she asked herself the question, an answer followed.

Krondrim. The Burnt Ones
.

She could still hear the woman’s shriek. But what did it mean? She asked the others if they had ever heard these words, but no one had. Only one thing was for certain. Whatever these
krondrim
were, Yaren’s wife had been afraid of them enough to run into the dark and, whether intentionally or not, fling her body off a cliff. As they rode, Grace tried not to think of what else the woman had said.

 … when the others come again …

She still had her mission—and Travis—to concern her.

That night they camped in a hollow beneath a stand of trees, for they had not seen a village all day,
and Durge said they would be fortunate to reach another by the end of the next. They ate a meager meal, less for lack of foodstuffs than for lack of will to build a fire, then the women made beds on the ground while the knights took turns standing watch some distance away.

Grace lay atop her blanket on the lumpy ground, eyes open long into the still, hot night, watching as meteors shot across the sky. She had never seen so many falling stars in her life. For a time she played a game, counting her heartbeats after seeing a meteor. However, she never got to more than eight or ten before another bright needle of light pierced the black veil above. The last thing she remembered was the new, red star rising above a ragged line of treetops, casting its own crimson gauze upon the world.

She woke to damp, gray light, clammy and shivering. At first she feared fever and clamped a hand to her forehead, but her temp was not elevated. It was a combination of sunburn and the chilly predawn dew, that was all. She climbed stiff and aching from her makeshift bed to find Lirith and the knights already awake, then moved to rouse Aryn from a sound sleep. After displaying a temporary horror at the burnt village, the young baroness had grown cheerful again yesterday. Even the prospect of camping in the open had not daunted her.

As the group broke bread, Grace mentioned the meteor shower. “Is it usual for there to be so many shooting stars in Lirdath?” she asked Durge.

It was Kalleth who answered. “No,” the knight said in a sharp voice, “it is not.”

The lump of bread Grace had been chewing stuck in her throat. She glanced up and, although it was dim against the horizon, could just make out a crimson spark sinking in the sky. Was the red star connected to the meteors?

And what about the Burning Plague, Grace? Is that related to the star as well?

She dismissed the question. Coincidence was not causation, and right now she had no evidence that suggested the Burning Plague was related to anything. For all she knew it was an isolated incident, and not a pandemic at all. She packed the breakfast things while the others broke camp, and together they set out just as a chorus of insects greeted the dawn.

It was midday when they came upon the charred remains of a small group of houses. Grace did not see them at first. She had dropped back a bit, lost in thoughts about the burnt man in Tarafel. Just ahead, Lirith and Aryn spoke in low voices, then the young woman laughed: a cool sound.

Grace jerked her head up as Aryn’s laughter fell short. At first she feared some sort of sudden attack, like the bear. Then she reached the top of the slope up which they rode and gazed down into the valley along with the baroness and the witch. Durge was already riding among the ruins. Around him were the blackened stone foundations of several houses.