The Lascar's Dagger (48 page)

“The fishing village near Utmeer?”

He nodded. “Dortgren. Three already dead before I arrived. Too many more followed them to the grave.” He swallowed at the memory.
The children, dear Va, why
…
?
“The sick
all
die. And all I could do was watch.” In a fit of exasperated impotence, he slapped his palm down on the table. “Not anyone’s prayer nor a witchery healer’s skills makes one whit of difference.”

She clicked her tongue in sympathy as she stooped to pick up a sheet of paper that had drifted to the floor.

Sighing, he took it from her. “Sorry.” He unrolled one of the charts on the table, anchoring it with his dagger and his purse to stop it rolling up again. He pointed at one of the lake areas. “The last place I visited was this village. Barge folk, bordering a mere at the centre of the south-western barge network. Twenty-three people died there six months ago, all barge-owners and their bargees, men, women, children. In the month prior to the outbreak, one or another of the dead had been to every corner of that network. And yet no one else contracted the disease outside the village. There hasn’t been a single case of Horned Death on
any
of those barge routes. So how is the disease carried? It’s the same for almost all outbreaks. It’s confined to a small area, usually people who are related or neighbours.”

“You didn’t find
anything
in common?”

“Apart from the fact that everyone who had it died? No. Except…”

She looked at him in hope, as though she thought he was capable of producing a miracle.

“The usual silly talk about devil-kin. When I ask about twins, though, nobody has anything tangible to say. Most are adamant that none of the affected families have twins. And yet still they believe it.” He sighed. “I’ve scoured the country looking for some commonality, something that will explain these outbreaks, some reason that they never seem to spread very far, some reason that each outbreak comes to an end quite quickly.

“Here, look at the map.” He tapped the chart with a finger. “I’ve marked every one of the twenty-four outbreaks for the past five years. Can you see
anything
any of these places could have in common? Because I can’t. Villages and towns, coastal and inland, settlements in the marshes, and on the northern downs, and the high country on the northern border. Farmers, fishermen, noblemen, bargees, shopkeepers, peat-cutters, miners. Men, women, children, wealthy, poor, sinners and saints, drunks and clerics. Shrine-keepers here in Lowmeer seem to be immune as yet – while shrine-keepers were the ones most affected in Ardrone’s lone outbreak.”

She bent over the chart, looking at his latest additions. He watched as her eyes widened and her pink cheeks faded to ashen. She gave him a stricken look and then sat down heavily in the nearest chair. She opened her mouth to speak, then changed her mind. He was silent, sick to the stomach, both desiring and dreading answers.

Her plump cheeks working with suppressed emotion, she said, “Forgive me, witan. I think I need to talk to the Prelate about this first.”

“You’ve seen a pattern,” he said flatly.

“Not – not exactly. But those towns and villages … Oh, Va. They are all familiar to me.” She levered herself up clumsily. “I’ll talk to Prelate Loach.” She left without another word.

Half an hour later, the Prelate arrived in the library flustered and frowning, Witan Shanny puffing behind, trembling like an oak leaf in a breeze. Loach was elderly, and thin with the scrawny fragility of the aged. He carried a ledger with him under one arm and slapped it down in front of Saker, saying, “In her letter, the Pontifect said I was to trust you, which is why I’m going to let you see this. Take a look while I consider this chart of yours.”

Saker took the ledger, placed it on the other end of the table and began to turn the pages. There was no title, no indication of the significance of what it contained. Each page was divided into columns. The left-hand one was a list of dates: the first entry now fifty years in the past; the last entry was only several weeks ago. The other columns were names, of people and of towns.

Raising his gaze to stare at Prelate Loach, he found the man had already straightened up to look at him. “What is this list?” Saker asked quietly.

Instead of answering, Loach said, “The Basalt Throne and the Throne’s assassins, known as the Dire Sweepers, have been killing twins in Lowmeer for generations. And why? Because they believe that one in every pair of twins is a servant of A’Va.”

“As a witan with faith in Va’s power, I cannot think there is any truth in such a notion.”

“Which is why many of us Lowmian clerics have been trying to rescue twins for fifty years, by secretly spiriting away one – or even both – of the babies at birth and giving them to another family to raise.”

“We missed many,” Shanny whispered. “But our emphasis on secrecy has kept us safe. We find out about twin births by working closely with selected midwives. Of course, there have been rumours…”

Loach nodded. “The list in the ledger contains the names of towns and villages either where twins were born, or where one was placed with a local family. The birth family and the recipient family are all listed. The dates are the birth dates of the twins. In other words, Mynster Rampion, what you are looking at are all places connected in some way to twins
not
drowned at birth.” He pointed to Saker’s charts. “Every single town you’ve marked as having had an outbreak of the Horned Death is in that ledger.”

Utterly appalled, Saker didn’t know what to say. Pustules ’n’ pox, for a moment he didn’t even know what to
think
.

“Of course,” Loach muttered, “there are many villages mentioned in the ledger that have had no pestilence.” A breathless pause later, he added, “Yet. I am sure you realise that if these lists were leaked, everyone involved, be they twins or midwives or families, would die at the hands of the Dire Sweepers.”

Saker nodded, but it was another implication that churned his thoughts into a whirlpool of horror.
Dear Va, Lowmian clerics have been rescuing twins believing in their innocence, and all along
…
?

No, he couldn’t think that. It couldn’t be true.

No one spoke.

Devil-kin were
real
?

No, please not that. It was a savage superstition. An excuse for the murder of babies. A stinking, miserable lie that had brought untold misery to people for generations.

“We thought we were doing the right thing,” the Prelate said in strangled tones. “We thought we were saving babies.”

“We
were
,” Shanny said. “We were. Only one in every set is…” Her voice trailed away.

Saker heard the words she didn’t say:
… is a devil-kin. And one is innocent
. Which would account for the villages that had no Horned Death; they’d been blessed with innocent children.

No, please don’t make this true. Don’t make it true that to save an innocent baby, you must let a devil-kin free into the world.

“And in so doing, we killed how many other blameless people by loosing the Horned Death in their midst?” Loach asked, echoing his thought. “Shanny, we promised those good, pious folk that they were taking in an innocent babe. But it seems half the time we were giving them a child that would grow up to murder them horribly with a disease! We were planting a devil-kin in their households. We were giving A’Va a way to attack them in their own homes.” He looked at Saker. “You wanted to know how this pestilence is spread? Well, now you know. The devil-kin are responsible.”

Shanny clapped her hands over her mouth, as if that was the only way she could stop herself from screaming at the horror of their mistake. Prelate Loach looked at the ledger. “We need to compare the details in that” – he pointed at the book – “with your information.”

Saker nodded, knowing what he was asking. They had to compare the names in the ledger with his own list of the dead. They had to find out how many of the twins were still alive. They had to find out just how ghastly the whole mess was. They had to be
sure
…

He had no idea how it would be possible to repair the damage. Or how the clerics could cope with the guilt.

The tears were already streaming down Shanny’s cheeks. “Dear Va,” she asked, “what have we done?”

No,
Saker thought.
That’s not the question to ask. The question is, how do we stop A’Va? Or maybe: how do we find out
why
this happened?

Ardrone had no problem with twins. Nor had any of the Principalities. Why, then, did Lowmeer?

Bleary-eyed, Saker met Loach’s grim gaze. They’d exchanged all the information they had.

Yet all any of them had now was more questions.

It’s like walking in wet farmyard muck. You think your footing is secure, but it never is. You can fall any moment, and end up in the filth, without being sure how you got there.

They still sat around the library table, in the gloom now, for the single lighted candle and the coals in the fireplace did little to dispel the bleak dark of a foggy night.

“It’s not just a Lowmian problem any more,” Loach said. “After all, Ardrone has the Horned Plague too now.”

Rage gripped him just thinking about that. “Pox on’t, Loach, I want to know how a baby can become evil,
without
choice. This is a travesty of Va-Faith! If a person has no choice from birth about the nature of the path they choose through life, and the sort of afterlife they will have, what kind of world is it?”

To Saker’s distress, Loach started weeping. To give the Prelate a chance to compose himself, he turned back to the ledger, studying the figures. Dortgren village was mentioned as having a childless couple named Juyrons who’d taken in a male baby thirteen years earlier. Saker winced, remembering. Hannels. He’d been angry, shouting that he wasn’t supposed to die. He’d cursed Va…

A devil-kin.

He slumped in his chair.

He’d returned to the village after the Dire Sweepers had sailed away. Hannels’ body was in the ruins of the burned house, with his mother’s. One of the other villagers had remarked that the boy had recently become a problem to his parents, refusing to help his father, refusing to enter the local Oak shrine, fighting with other village lads.

But if the lad was a devil-kin, why did he contract the Horned Death? Saker had seen the horns … He’d suffered just as much as everyone else.

“The programme to save twins ends as of now,” Loach said suddenly, stonily grim. “I will contact all the midwives and clerics and shrine-keepers involved, and tell them it is our duty to report to the Throne the birth of all twins. If midwives do not drown twins at birth, the law will do it for them.”

Saker looked away, unable to condemn or to approve. Who was he to tell Lowmians to take the risk of further outbreaks of the Horned Death? What if the next outbreak emulated the one in Ardrone and killed shrine-keepers, thus striking at the Lowmian heart of Va-Faith as well?

A dilemma like this was an abomination. No solution sat well with him, none. And always there was the idea that he was missing something, something important. A piece of the puzzle that wasn’t there yet.

“What are we going to do?” Shanny asked. Her hands had started shaking when she realised what Saker’s charts meant and the trembling had never gone away. “I mean, about – about…” But she couldn’t form the words.

Saker knew what she was trying to ask: what about the twins they had saved who were still living? He glanced at the Prelate, but Loach was silent, so he said slowly, “What happens here, in Lowmeer, it’s not my decision.”

“I fear it is mine,” Loach said. “Mine and Prime Mulhafen’s and the Pontifect’s.” When Saker glanced at him, the thought came that the man had aged twenty years.

Shanny finally found her tongue. “Are we to go out and kill those we saved because they might at some future date prove to be a devil-kin? In every single infected village Saker visited, the twin
died
. He died along with his family and neighbours. Why would he cause the Horned Death if it would kill him too?”

Loach turned his devastated gaze on her. “The only thing all outbreaks appear to have in common is a twin.”

“But not all villages that had a twin also had the Horned Death,” Saker pointed out, waving at the ledger.

“We have no
proof
of anything.” Shanny was sobbing as she spoke.

“We need to gather more information from each affected village,” the Prelate said, “but we have a problem right now that can’t wait. There are still pairs of twins out there, both still alive. There could well be more deaths in more places because of one of them. There is no way we can tell who is the devil-kin twin and who the innocent one! It is a terrible thing that I contemplate, and I will pray deeply about it before making a decision, but I suspect that all the surviving twins will have to die.”

Shanny shook her head violently. “No, you can’t do that. You
can’t
ask that of us!”

“I wouldn’t ask it of you,” Loach replied gently, “or any cleric. I would just tell the Regal’s men where to find them.”

I would have agreed with Shanny before I saw what the Horned Death can do. Now, I’m not so sure
…

She was almost hysterical, so he intervened. “There is one thing I’ve noticed from the information we have. The twin involved in a Horned Death outbreak is always somewhere between ten and eighteen years old. Never younger, never older. I don’t think you have to act at all yet on younger sets of twins, or on any who are already men and women. You have time to investigate, time perhaps to find a solution.”

“And then we’ll be sure?” Shanny asked. For once her voice was unpleasantly high-pitched and squeaky. “How can we ever be sure just by looking at someone whether they are devil-kin or some innocent child?”

“And how can we be sure that one of those living pairs of twins are not about to kill their families and their neighbours?” Loach asked in turn, his voice harsh in his pain.

“And, it seems, themselves,” Saker added drily. There was something they were not understanding here. “Correlation of the kind we have is not proof
that
anyone
is a devil-kin.”