THE PHYSICIAN’S TALE

THE PHYSICIAN’S TALE, by Jonathan Duckworth, artwork by Gary McClusky

 

ONE

 

JORGOS

Jorgos of Kandreva could barely move his fingers, partly from the unseasonable cold, partly from fear. The tropadoro’s lute was an onerous weight in his trembling arms. The three Blighted looked down on him, pallid faces split with horrid grins, eyes the dark red of arterial blood.

“Canst thou play the song or not, fancyman?” asked the tall one, their nominal leader. He prodded Jorgos in the chest, his finger like a spear.

The dead should not speak, let alone torment the living. What God would allow such travesties?

There were three of them, two men (if they could be called such) and a woman. They had caught the tropadoro on the road unawares. That they had not eaten him yet was little comfort; since the Great Blight began three moons ago, tales of the Blighted’s cruelty were well burnished—they loved to play with their food.

“Please, milord, I know not the song you desire,” Jorgos pled again. He could barely see out of his left eye, which was swollen and pounding with an echo of violence, blood ran from his nose. The Blighted woman gripped his shoulders from behind. Even through the fabric of his padded doublet he could feel the cold of her fingers, the sharpness of her nails.

“Let me eat one of his fingers,” the woman seethed.

The tall one, a heavyset fellow with the rough, unpolished look of a village bailiff, thumped her on the head with the same club that’d blackened Jorgos’s eye. “How could he play my special song without fingers?”

The task was impossible. The Blighted man had demanded a song from his childhood, one he could not recall by tune nor name. Already Jorgos had guessed wrong twice, and been thumped for his error. He had the feeling that the third failure would be met with something sharper than a club.

He was only aware that he had begun to cry like a child when the Blighted began to laugh about it, a horrible bleating laughter.

The laughter ceased at the same moment that Jorgos’s sensitive ears picked up the trundling, creaking wheels of an approaching wagon.

“Oho, what’s alurk?” called out the bailiff-looking Blighted man.

The wagon appeared behind a morose mule, and Jorgos’s heart sank when he saw only one rider holding the leads, and a small figure at that.

“Agreeable when meat trots itself to us,” said the second Blighted man.

The wagon stopped ten ells short of where Jorgos knelt. The rider’s face was obscured under a multicolored hood and behind the evening fog. “Let that man go,” said a young woman’s voice, in an accent from somewhere across the seas.

The bailiff stared at her, then looked to Jorgos with what might have been a knowing glance. “Sometimes you lot make it too easy for us,” he said. “Spoils the fun a bit.”

Jorgos only heard a single clink of armor, only a lone snap of a twig before the smaller of the Blighted men was cleaved in twain by a sweep of pale steel. The gore was bloodless, only black, sludgy ichor leaking and gray offal sliding out as the two halves of the body fell from one another.

A swordsman. A knight.

How such a large man armored in full plate could move so silently, so swiftly, Jorgos did not and would not understand. Nor could the Blighted. The bailiff made an honest effort to strike the knight with his club, but the arm holding the club was severed at the elbow. His head followed it to the ground soon after.

Jorgos, seeing his chance, tried to run, but the Blighted woman tackled him by his legs and brought him down. In the blur of incident that followed, he felt teeth bite into the flesh of his arm, and those teeth only bit down harder when the knight’s blade split the dead woman’s skull like a rotten gourd. In the end, Jorgos could not pry her from his arm, and the knight had to do it for him.

“You are safe,” intoned the knight, his voice flat.

Jorgos, staring at his torn sleeve, at the hot, startled blood gushing to the surface, could only cry out in dismay. He’d been bitten. The dead woman’s humors had mixed with his own, and so condemned him to the same fate as her.

The knight stood over Jorgos, watching wordlessly as he broke down and began to babble, first in coarse Edish and then in his native Lalanga. He might have made an even more piteous scene had a warm hand not caught him mid-spiral and touched his face. He looked up. A face, beautiful and soothing as gentle dusk, eyes like the dark honey harvested from wild bees. Under the hem of her colorful hood, her head was shaven smooth.

“You will not turn from a bite,” said the woman. “The Blight does not spread through humors or bad air.”

“And how do you know?”

“I have studied it. I am Berhane of Kor,” she said.

The lightning of recognition flashed across his brain. The greatest living physician, the famous surgeon of Zenabe; could it be possible? Berhane, the only surgeon to ever remove a vampiric symbiont without killing the host, Berhane the sage who brewed the serum that cured the deadly Mirshi Pox for good.

In astonishment, he lapsed briefly into Lalanga. “Deos mio, kel un volto—that is, what a strange turn of fortunes,” he exclaimed. “You are more youngly than I would expect from your reputation.” What a foolish thing to say. “What I mean is, it is my honor. Thank you. A thousand thanks. Jorgos of Kandreva is in your debt, Great Berhane.” He seized her hand and kissed it.

She favored him with a queer little smile. He put it down as embarrassment.

“Thank Sir Cadog,” she said. “He saved you.”

“I only uphold my vows,” the knight replied. The slits in his visor were so narrow, Jorgos couldn’t even glean a glimpse of what face hid behind them. His armor, though of good make was spattered with mud and a mixture of the red that men bleed and the blackness that leaked from the Blighted. He carried a shield, but its crest had been scraped away. His sword was not a knightly sword, but a vicious cleaver, an Alpish pattern that Alp smiths called storknivs (“big knives”). Inappropriate for a tourney, but well suited to hacking the limbs and heads off Blighted.

“Thank you, sir. Sir Cadog, was it? Sir Cadog of…?”

“Of nothing,” replied the knight.

And Jorgos would have to be content with that.

#

THE PHYSICIAN

The physician sat on the coach board as before, while the knight and their new traveling companion piled into the wagon’s bed, finding seats atop the heavy chests filled with Berhane of Kor’s writings; the important research that may have held the key to curing—or at least staunching—the spread of the Great Blight.

Along the ride to the inn, she kept sneaking glances at him. He was a demiverd, his skin green tinted but not the bright emerald hue of full-blooded Ijassians, rather the browning color of oak leaves at autumn’ advent. Quite handsome with his well-kept black beard; even the fresh bruises if anything only accentuated his charms. When he smiled, he showed his teeth, and what fine teeth. Full-blooded verds had long, sharp fangs—his were blunter, but still striking.

Great Berhane, he’d called her. What a farce. She wrung her hands around the leads and urged the mule to hasten.

He was speaking to her. She didn’t hear him at first; she asked him to repeat.

He repeated, “I said, for what cause would your estimable personage travel on such lonesome roads?”

There was an honest way to answer, but also a more honest way. She chose the first: “My wagon bears important research that may be vital to stemming the Blight. But I must find a ship, and so must reach Eastfen, the last safe port on the southern coast.”

“How fortunate that this world has a sage of your abilities,” he gushed, and she kept her eyes forward, for she could not bear to show her face.

#

JORGOS

They arrived late at the Hollows Edge Inn, and yet folk were still up and about, hot, savory winds radiated from the open door of the kitchen, the air thick with the aromas of sour beer and of meat unraveling in a stewpot with cabbage. Jorgos had not meant to go this way. He had been going north, away from the Ballyhole Hollows. But how could he part from his saviors? It didn’t matter which way they went—he’d be safer with them than alone.

A crude wooden Sidereal sigil—nine rays instead of the proper ten—had been affixed above the inn’s entrance, along with other religious charms; protection against the Blight. This was a welcome sight, for if the innkeeper could still believe these baubles would protect him, then the Blight had not found his inn yet.

The inn was not a large one, nor particularly well-lit. Two fireplaces created cones of rosy light, while candles on the serving counter and on the tables created pockets of indifferent illumination. The rest was obscure, and it seemed that many of the patrons preferred to linger in these dark spaces. A few kettle helmets spoke to the presence of deserters, (or would survivors be more apposite?) of the Royal Army recently routed by a host of Blighted at Roaryshire, from whence Jorgos himself had fled. These men were insensate, slumped upon the benches, too drunk or dispirited to even bother to find cots or chairs to sleep in. The rest were a motley bunch, the usual road merchants, a fat, prosperous looking fellow whose singed fingertips and stench of brimstone outed him as an alchemist, and a pair of monks in muddy habits, their faces sallow and miserable as they chewed on heels of dark bread dipped in beer soup. As they approached the counter the innkeep regarded them with eyes gray as if filmed with decades of fireplace smoke. He had the rough, sharp look of a hatchet.

Jorgos remarked a bright flash of copper in the side of his vision—a young redheaded girl sat at the end of the counter, nursing a tiny cup of stew, what local folk would call a “pauper’s ration.”

“Well, well,” said the innkeep, crossing his thick arms. “Two foreigners—one of them a swiving minstrel—and a knight what looks like he’s dunked himself in shit.”

Jorgos bristled at being called a minstrel, but held his tongue.

Berhane leaned across the counter. “Are we unwelcome here?”

He took in a deep breath through his nostrils. He spoke slowly, deliberately. “These are unwelcome times. Ill omens abound. Summer is cold as winter, the sun rises scarlet in the mornings and the moon rises like a murderer’s bloodied coin. Dead men stalk the roads and devour folk by the thousands, and the harvest fails as corn rots on the stalk. I hear talk even holy men have been foully translated into flesh-eaters, that even temples are despoiled and befouled. Yesterday, it rained salt; the corns big as rye seeds. But, mark ye me, come whatever may, this is a house of welcome. All what’s still alive is welcome. Now what will ye have?”

“Food, drink, shelter,” Berhane said. “And a guide to take us through the Hollows.”

“Ye mean to pass through the Hollows?” the innkeep asked.

The disbelief that bent his voice Jorgos felt as well. He was not from these parts, not even from this realm, but even so Jorgos knew of the terrors of the Ballyhole Hollows. Even before the Blight, those woods had been long benighted by bandits, robber knights, hags, feral sprites, and creatures of unreckoned taxonomy. But nothing was as bad as the lord of robber knights, Sir Ekbert of Toling, better known as Lord Ballyhole.

“I’m going to Eastfen, and the fastest way there is through the Hollows.”

“Straight lines on maps ain’t always straight when ye try to walk them,” the innkeep said.

A bright, girlish voice spoke up. “Oi! Pretty foreign lady—I can lead ye.”

Though her freckled, ruddy countenance, big eyes, and gap-toothed smile all portrayed innocence, there was a slyness to the girl’s posture and bearing. Her clothes were of good, sturdy make, but badly soiled and in need of cleaning. Her accent was unmistakable—the musical Cynish drawl. Folk of the Cynwrth Princedom across the River Yon always sounded as if they might break into song at any moment; naturally, Yorgos was well-disposed to them.

They all looked at the girl down the counter. The innkeep hot her a sour look, then waddled over before rapping her on the forehead with his knuckle.

“That’ll be all from you, little one,” he said. He turned back to Berhane and Jorgos. “Pay her no mind—just a ratty little orphan I can’t rid meself of.”

“What’s your name, child?” Berhane asked.

“Llewella. I’m ten-and-four.”

“If she’s ten-and-four, I’m Emperor Pertran,” Jorgos muttered. She looked twelve at oldest.

Llewella stuck her tongue out at him.

“Do you know the Hollows?” Berhane asked.

“I sure do, like the back of me hand!” And to make her point, Llewella flourished her hand, tattooed with what looked like a map of forest paths.

The innkeep growled. “Oi, don’t ye go swindling these stupid foreign folk.”

The innkeep was about to cuff the girl, but Berhane slammed a coinpurse down on the counter. “Pottage, if you please,” she said, firmly. “Three bowls—for myself, for my tropadoro, and for my new associate.”

“And a big beer!” Llewella cheered.

“A small beer for her,” Berhane countered.

The innkeep looked at the purse. His brow raised. “What about your knight?”

But Sir Cadog had left to go stare at the fireplace.

“Eating would require him to remove his helmet, which he has not done once in the week I’ve known him,” Berhane said. “Go on now, we’re hungry.”

“Swiving foreigners,” the innkeep said, and took the purse. He turned away but then stopped and leaned close to Berhane to whisper something, his eyes on the girl, who pretended not to pay attention to the little conference.

Berhane’s face was impassive when the innkeep turned away.

“What was that?” Jorgos asked her.

Instead of answering, she grabbed the tropadoro and gave his arm a squeeze. He looked at her, into her eyes, at her lips.

“You’d like to repay me, yes? For saving your life?”

“Err…”

“This place, its silence depresses me. Pick up that lute of yours and brighten the mood. Or are the strings for show?”

How he felt his face light up. “At once, dama mia.”

#

THE PHYSICIAN

The physician spoke to the child, who, as Jorgos had pointed out, was clearly not four-and-ten. She might not have even been eleven.

But she was clever. She understood that they meant to go to Eastfen, the last safe port on the southern coast, and she knew how to parlay her waifish looks to worm her way into the physician’s graces. As the food arrived, Llewella tore into her portion, making the physician’s own considerable hunger seem paltry.

“How do you know about the Hollows?” she asked the girl.

Llewella swallowed fast, and was hiccupping when she answered. “I grew up there. Mam and da kept a little farm in a clearing—good soil in the Hollows, they always spoke.”

“What happened to your parents?” she asked the girl.

“Mmm,” Llewella answered, with a mouth full of stew.

She decided to change the subject.

“Are you well taken care of here?”

She gulped down her stew. She glanced at the kitchen, where the innkeep had gone in to work, and frowned. “Old Hork is nice enough. Patient with me. But I miss Mam awful.”

The physician regretted asking, and turned to her food. The stew was good. Cabbage and sausage. It was even better when she seasoned it with a few Khottan peppercorns and some fireseeds she’d stored in a pocket in the sleeve of her gabi. But more nourishing than the food was the tropadoro’s playing.

At first, he seemed tentative, distracted, and none of the patrons paid his strumming heed. But that soon changed. Jordish music, whether Edish or Ijassian, was strange to the physician’s ear, but delightful in its own way. And there was an undeniable poetry to the Ijassian tongue with all its trilled consonants and elongated vowels. When Jorgos launched into full voice to sing of bounteous harvests and the succor of spring after winter, and of love unbridled by courtly stricture, his bottom fangs protruded, and he seemed even more handsome.

She mouthed the first verse’s final couplet to herself, which he sang so beautifully.

“Vedas luma, la luma de tis amoro?

Vedas luna, la luna de tis malkoro?”

Hast thou seen the light, the light of thine beloved?

Hast thou seen the moon, the moon that aches your heart?

After the second verse, a few of the customers began to clap and strike the tables with their fists. By the third verse, half the establishment was on its feet, dancing. While little Llewella stuffed her face on cabbage stew and Sir Cadog meditated before the fire, the physician began to augur her own immediate future. How she would sleep, and with whom.

*

While the tropadoro snores, his face pressed into her spine, the physician feels herself slip into the drain of dreaming.

In the dream, she is back home, back in Zenabe. In her parent’s home in the great city of Kon Daawa, and it must be late summer because rain lashes down from the roof and gushes from the copper gutters into the cobbled streets below. In this dream, the doorway to her room is a bright mouth of lamplight, and in the light a figure imposes itself. Herself.

“Mother,” she says.

And there is Mother, standing before as if alive. Beautiful as she remembers from childhood, when she was younger than the physician is now.

Mother smiles too wide. She spreads out her feet to stand in a wide stance, and lifts up the many colorful folds of her summer skirts, revealing a vast and tormented gash in the flesh of her inner thigh. And now, as the physician recoils, Mother offers her the torn chunk of flesh, the blood and meat juices steaming just like the rain on the hot cobbles. She desires nothing as much as she desires to eat of her mother’s flesh. When she takes the parcel of still hot flesh in her hands, it is like stone, and yet also yielding to her fingers’ press. When she takes it into the gates of her teeth, the flavor is an eruption of savory ecstasy. For a moment. And then a taste like rust, like corrosion blooms on her tongue, but she knows it’s too late, and the blood which has turned black dribbles down her numbed lips, and Mother smiles down, her mouth stretched too wide, her eyes nothing but portals of night, black windows.

 

TWO

 

JORGOS

While Berhane slept, Jorgos drove the wagon, Llewella nodding every so often to confirm they were on the right path. The Ballyhole Hollows was a forest, Jorgos supposed, in the same way the Blight was a plague. No other forest had ever filled Jorgos with such dread.

Every tree was the same as every other. Identical in height and span and shape, identical in their grim, agar-touched black rot, and all possessed the same exact hole at the same exact spot, only where that spot was changed depending on your own position, as if they were black, empty eyes following you.

But that wasn’t what troubled him. It was the silence. Even in sealed mausoleums he imagined there would be some sound—rats nibbling at cadavers, the draft leaking in through cracks, the soft shudder of masonry dreaming of itself. But here? Nothing. Only the sounds they brought with them: the creak of the wagon, the horse’s nickering, Berhane’s breathing, Llewella’s whistling, Sir Cadog’s clinking armor, and Jorgos’s own heartbeat.

And yet for all that silence, they were still taken unawares when the men came tramping out from a dense copse.

“Oi!” called out one of the fellows, dressed in a thick wool cloak and a Cynish knit cap. “Travelers! Who be ye?”

He was a big, ruddy fellow and he carried a bear spear. The other two men resembled him—brothers perhaps. One bore a shortbow, the other, with a comically long mustache, bore a rusty falchion.

Berhane had nodded off, but she roused at his voice. Llewella, who had been sitting on the driver’s board beside Jorgos, quietly climbed back into the wagon bed to sit with Sir Cadog.

“We are peaceful folk,” Jorgos called out. “And alive, as you can see.”

“Alive’s as may be, peaceful is less a given,” replied the big man with the spear. He and his brothers stopped at the edge of the road, and he leaned against his spear, squinting at Jorgos and then at the others in the wagon. Looking back, it seemed to Jorgos that Llewella was making herself as small as possible, hiding between Berhane and Sir Cadog.

“If you doubt our intentions—” Jorgos began.

The mustachioed man stepped forward, sheathing his falchion. “Forgive Celyn, he’s unfriendly in the best of times, and these ain’t the best times.”

The spearman spat and shrugged his beefy shoulders.

“I am Lewin. These are my brothers, Celyn and Goff.”

“Jorgos of Kandreva.”

“Well met, Jorgos. Have you seen a young fellow, four-and-ten winters old?”

“Fairhaired, poxy faced, stupid eyes ever agog—you’d know him at once,” said Celyn.

“Your brother?”

“My son,” grunted Celyn.

“We have seen no such person,” Berhane said, stretching in an almost catlike way as she sat up.

“Funny looking folk,” muttered Celyn.

Lewin patted his brother’s arm. “They look normal somewhere, brother-mine.” He then turned his attention back to Jorgos and Berhane. “If ye find such a lad, please bring him out of the Hollows. Don’t matter which side, anywhere’s safer than here.”

“What happened?” Jorgos asked.

Celyn spat again. “Few days ago, boy told me someone needed his help. He wouldn’t say who, nor what help they needed. I was deep in me cups, ye know, didn’t think to ask. That was last I saw him. And me, drunk and useless—damn it all. He walked from the farm. Found his scarf on a tree at the edge of the Hollows. Stupid damn boy. I’ll kill him if he ain’t dead.” Celyn’s strong voice trembled. Jorgos saw the lie in his words—if the boy emerged now, he would break and blubber with tears of relief.

Lewin patted Celyn’s arm. “There, there, brother. You’ll have chance to kill him, I’m sure. Now then, I must ask—what brings ye here? What good folk would traffic through the Hollows? These woods, there’s worse’n Blighted here. Lord Ballyhole for one.”

Lord Ballyhole—now there was a legend. An undying scoundrel and his band of ghouls and kobolds, waylaying travelers for over a century now, or so the story had it. Jorgos had sang a few picaresque ballads of the Lord of the Hollows, always popular in the company of outlaws who revered the robber knight.

“It’s the fastest way to Eastfen,” Berhane explained.

Goff grumbled something incomprehensible—he spoke in Cynish, a tongue outlawed by Royal edict.

Lewin grinned. “He speaks true. Goff says, A quick man arrives quick, a slow man slow, but a dead man never. Ye folk ought to have gone around.”

Berhane was unmoved. “It is to avoid those dead men you say never arrive that we are here. But we thank you for your advice.”

“And we’ll thank ye to keep a look out for a stupid boy,” Lewin said. “God be with ye.”

The men passed on across the road, and though the air was bright and clear and there was ample space between the trees where one might follow them, they soon vanished from sight. Only once they were gone did Llewella emerge from her hiding place.

“Are you all right, little one?” Jorgos asked.

“I don’t like strangers,” she said.

It was a quick thing, a little flinch—most folk would have missed it. But Jorgos knew, though he did not press, that she was lying about something.

#

How swiftly did daylight fail and night descend. Every day in this freakish, cold summer the days seemed to shrink, and that day as Jorgos and company drove through the Hollows, the light seemed to last no more than six hours before the sky turned red then bruised to an empyreal purple.

Berhane now sat on the coach board alongside Llewella. The girl seemed more effusive again, having overcome her bout with shyness. Strange, that.

As the light failed, the trees bothered Jorgos anew. How was it that so many trees could grow to identical configurations in such great number? Unless it was an illusion, conjured by some intelligence or by a caprice of nature, and there was but the one tree, duplicated in the thousands. The unreality of such a thought struck him, and the forest now with its unwholesome replication reminded him of a lecturer at the University of Telvinas who had opined that there were no forests anywhere in the world, only trees, and that it was the folly of men to see unities where only dissimilitudes and isolates existed.

Llewella climbed back from the coach board and perched herself on one of the traveling chests, coming to sit beside Sir Cadog, who had been silent for many hours.

What a strange fellow the knight was. Jorgos had begun to wonder if he was not a man at all but an automaton, like those constructed by the mad artificer Askolos of Inenga. It would explain why he had not eaten back in the inn.

“Master Jorgos?”

Llewella’s question shook him from his reveries.

“Yes?”

“Mistress Berhane told me all about her country. Did ye know in Zenabe they have talking cats? Only they don’t like ye knowing they can talk, so ye must sneak up and listen when they think they’re alone. How do ye like that?”

He had of course eavesdropped on the whole exchange, but it was always important to show enthusiasm for children. Children, after all, had been among his most loyal patrons when he performed on the streets in Gativo.

“Remarkable indeed,” he said. “You know, from whence I hail, on the isle of Kandreva, there are trees whose boughs sag from sweet fruit we call Suvenitas—little memories, for if you eat them, your mind swims with the memories of others who have also eaten of the tree’s fruit. And sometimes, the memories of the tree itself.”

“That’s silly. What can trees remember?”

He called her attention to the last light dying upon the tree tops to the left side of the path. “What it feels like to drink the sun, for one.”

Seeing he had her interested, he picked up his lute and began to pluck and strum. With each note he felt the oppressive atmosphere of the forest subside, as if around him he had erected a bubble of tranquility. And then it was pierced by a woman’s shriek.

It was not Berhane who had cried out. The sound was from somewhere distant.

It came again, and this time, Jorgos made out words: “—make them stop.”

His spine tingled.

The knight had risen from his slump and now sat up. “Someone is imperiled,” Sir Cagod said.

“We should keep driving,” Berhane said. “It’s not our concern, whoever, whatever it is.”

“She’s right,” Llewella said. “There’s nothing good comes from following screams in the Hollows.”

But Jorgos felt his stomach churn when the woman screamed again, and this time he knew where it was coming from. To the righthand side of the road—the dark, eastern horizon where the sunlight had long drained, a structure with the peaked silhouette of a temple rose from the dark of the woods, black against the blue twilight.

He felt something else, too—a powerful urge to follow the screams, to render aid.

Llewella grabbed his sleeve and tugged it, her eyes were full of beseeching. “Please, Mister Jorgos—don’t go. Tricksy’s only as good as stupid allows. Believe me, ye won’t be happy with whatever ye find.”

“They eat of my flesh!” shrieked the woman with unprecedented violence, such that it was as if she was howling into Jorgos’s ear, such he was surprised he did not feel her breath on him. He almost felt the scream inside his skull. He had to go—he had to follow the screams.

“Tricksy’s only as good as stupid allows,” Sir Cadog muttered to himself.

Jorgos jumped from the wagon. He had no weapon except the knife in his belt, which was more useful for paring nails than cutting throats.

“Wait!” Berhane called after him, and then he heard someone light—not the knight—leap out after him, perhaps Berhane, perhaps the girl.

Whoever it was, they didn’t catch him. He couldn’t hear them anymore, he could barely hear his own thoughts, as if they were submerged. He ran through the trees, which were closer together than they appeared, tearing at him with their branches, sticking out their roots to trip him, but he made it to the temple.

A crumbling ruin of blackened wood it was, with gray moss growing upon the rays of its tarnished silver star.

“Help me, help me please!” sobbed the voice from inside.

The temple’s double doors groaned as he pushed them open, and no sooner had he gained entry than he was assaulted by a fetid stench of rotting meat. Having run breathlessly, he now stood in the doorway, panting, regarding the long, darkened nave of the ruined temple before him. The pews had been smashed, the windows shattered, and where shafts of failing sunlight broke through the holes in the roof, shards of glass sparkled like embers.

At the very end of the nave lay an altar. A human figure rested its head against the altar’s plinth. A peasant woman in a white dress darkened by blood.

A hand grabbed Jorgos’s wrist from behind.

“Fool,” Berhane whispered. “What are you playing at? Being a hero?”

“I—” he stammered, gesturing toward the woman’s corpse. “I only thought…”

“We all heard it,” Berhane said. In the darkness the whites of her large eyes were very bright and intense. She looked even more lovely when she was furious with him. “But you’re the only one who followed it. Now come along, before—”

“Help!”

They both jumped from fright and surprise. The scream had come from where the body lay.

“Maybe it—maybe she’s not dead,” Jorgos said. “Maybe you can help her.”

“This feels wrong,” Berhane said, taking a step back.

Then came the sound of sobbing. “Please, oh don’t leave me. Don’t—don’t leave me like the others. God’s truth I need ye.”

Berhane still held Jorgos’s wrist, but he took a step forward. And Berhane moved with him. Together they crossed the aisle of splintered wood while glass crunched under their shoes.

In the shadows, the slumped figure continued to sob and whimper. The light slanting in through the holes in the ceiling turned from orange to red and finally a mournful indigo.

They came to stand over the woman, and only when they were a few ells away—almost close enough for Jorgos to think to nudge her foot with his shoe—did he see the woman’s face.

She was fresh—perhaps only a day or two killed. She had died with her eyes and mouth agape. Those eyes now stared at the cracks in the temple’s roof. A deep gash stared back redly from the ruin of her throat. Pieces of her limp arm, which rested against the altar’s plinth, were missing.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“Help me,” called the voice again, and this time it came from behind them.

They turned, but there was nothing there.

“Help me.” This time the voice seemed to come from behind the altar.

“Help me.” The words came from the ceiling itself.

And then, the voice changed, and Jorgos’ blood chilled for he recognized his own voice. “Help me.”

Jorgos turned his head to the left, toward the temple’s whisperbox where confession would have been heard. From out of the shadows emerged a pale figure.

She—it?—was white as death but vivid with black, startled veins like so many corpseworms wriggling under the skin. Her red eyes even now wept fresh trickles of black ichor, while her teeth were bared in a wild snarl. She was naked except for gore and blood which she had painted her breasts and loins with.

“Help me,” she said again in Jorgos’ voice, and then, in Berhane’s stolen whisper, “Fool.”

In the moment, all Jorgos could think was that it felt like a miscarriage of some cosmic rule that a Blighted could be a ventriloquist. More than that—that a Blighted could weave a spell, for even now he felt his mind clouding over.

Splintered wood clattered as human figures emerged from the gloom. Two other Blighted: a boy with half his face eaten off, and an old man armed with a crooked baling fork. They moved to block the temple’s entrance.

The ventriloquist pounced at Jorgos and Berhane.

Berhane had her traveling stave and struck the Blighted across her jaw, but the blow seemed to do little except slow her down. She cackled with delight, and when Berhane tried to strike again, she grabbed the stave and pulled. Berhane was overbalanced, and fell forward onto her face. Jorgos moved to her defense, but he paid for his clumsy gallantry, as the Blighted smote him with Berhane’s stave. He fell onto his hands and knees, splinters and shards scraping his palms, while his left arm went numb from the blow.

“Enough. Your violations are at an end.”

The knight’s voice seemed to radiate through the broken timbers and cracked plaster of the temple. At the end of the nave, near the entrance, Sir Cadog was approaching, his sword drawn. The two other Blighted spun around to face him, while the Blighted ventriloquist looked upon him with an expression of—what was it exactly? Blank confusion?

“Oi, what’s this?” she grumbled, sounding if anything annoyed by the interruption. “Ye’ve no right to—”

Sir Cadog broke into a sprint, and from where he lay on his side, Jorgos could scarcely believe a man of such size in full plate could move so quickly. He bashed the boy aside with his shield while parrying a clumsy thrust from the old man’s fork.

Jorgos seized on the ventriloquist’s distraction and swept her legs with his, toppling her. Berhane was on her in an instant. They struggled for control of the stave, but Jorgos, now totally free of her spell, sprung to his feet and stomped the heel of his traveling boot onto the ventriloquist’s jaw. Once, twice, thrice. And again, and again, each time the jaw and skull offered less resistance, each successive blow it felt more like he was stepping into a rotten gourd.

And then all was quiet. The other Blighted lay in pieces. Sir Cadog wiped his blade upon his tattered cloak, then sheathed it. “It is done,” he said.

Jorgos could not find his voice to thank the knight. His shoulder stung where he’d been struck, and he could barely breathe.

Berhane wrenched her stave free from the clammy hands that held it. “What were you thinking, bard?”

“I was ensorcelled,” he asserted. “And I shall forgive that you called me a bard just now.”

“Ensorcelled. What a convenient excuse for idiocy. Your head must be empty—you may sing of deeds of daring and gallantry, but we do not live in that world anymore, if ever we did. Next time you go off alone, I shan’t follow you.”

But she had followed him, foolishness or no, and behind her glare he could see the relief glittering at the edges of her eyes.

Back in the wagon on the road, Llewella was waiting, hands on her hips like a disappointed mother watching the children return from a summer storm.

#

Night seemed to lean against the little fire that Berhane had built. A gruel of buckwheat and field peas bubbled in a pot hung by an andiron over the fire. It was all they had. There was nothing to forage in the Hollows, which was probably why there were no birds there.

Jorgos felt useless. Llewella had gathered the kindling and Berhane had built the fire and filled the pot with water. The clearing they’d made camp in was a mossy gap in the Hollows, and the full moon in all its rosy, eerie glory hung above, its light collecting on the branches of the dead trees, dripping like unctuous sap and collecting as luminous puddles in places before evanescing back into gasps of light that soon faded. He would pen something to immortalize such a scene, except his poesy had abandoned him that night, still hiding from the memory of the Blighted woman and her putrid teeth.

The knight stood by himself, scanning the dark through the slits of his helm. When Jorgos came to stand beside him, he only gave the scantest of acknowledgement with a shrug.

“I am again in your debt, Sir Knight.”

“And what good is it, having you in my debt?”

Jorgos felt himself become even smaller, even more pathetic under such a chastening.

But the knight continued, turning to look at him. “Think not of debt. I would never have left you to die—my vows would not permit it.”

Moonlight struck his visor, and for a moment Jorgos fancied he saw the knight’s eyes, but because what he saw was impossible, he dismissed the glimpse as a hallucination. They were merely dark brown, he told himself.

Sir Cadog glanced back at the fire. “They are upset with you.”

“Was I a fool?”

“Yes,” the knight said, without hesitation. But then he continued, “But in a man’s turn on the stage of life he must tread many roles, and the fool is but one of these, and its ways are keen-close to that of the gallant. I cannot condemn you for foolishness born of virtue, and if we are to accept what the good physician asserts: that this world has been translated to something inhospitable to gallantry, then we should conclude that the world is already dead.”

Jorgos was taken aback. He had known few Edish knights, and those few he’d had dealings with had left with a dim view of their character, to say even less about their wisdom. Knights were venal creatures, transparent in their appetites and their conceits. And yet, this heretofore taciturn kabajero had just revealed a soul of a greater opacity than Jorgos would have credited.

“Well said, Sir Knight. How is it you travel with Berhane? I take you for a knight errant—did she hire you with coin?”

“She found me, she and her late mistress,” Sir Cadog said. “I have traveled with her since.”

Jorgos waited, thinking perhaps he would offer more. But nothing more came. It was only after he walked away that he realized Sir Cadog had referred to Berhane’s “late mistress.” By then the supper was ready, and Berhane was calling him to the fire.

Jorgos, Berhane, and Llewella ate in a miserable silence. It was not only their own silence, as the Hollows were also complicit in the tomblike hush, offering not even a creak of branches. The food was bland and shapeless, hot mush to be pushed through the lips and swallowed down like so much dirt shoveled to fill a hole. During this interminable meal he pondered the knight’s words, and decided he’d been right: to cringe from the shadows, to hold one’s breath as if a single false step might be one’s end, this was not life; it was merely borrowing oneself from death.

When he took up his lute, Berhane cut him an irked glance, and her look only darkened when he strummed the first note.

“What are you thinking? This isn’t an inn.”

“She’s right,” Llewella said, glancing to-and-fro at the trees. “There’s things alurk, things alistening.”

“If that’s true, they already know we’re here,” Jorgos said, and he stood. He plucked the simple opening bar of a time-worn ballad, “Erraré Conmi.”

Before he could move to the next bar, Berhane grabbed the neck of his lute. “Enough,” she hissed.

“Wait,” Llewella said, standing up now. “Let him play. I know this one—me Da used to whistle it.”

Jorgos looked to Berhane, one eyebrow cocked, but it was Llewella’s plaintive, beseeching stare that broke the physician’s resistance. His lute released, Jorgos played anew, and began to sing the old song about wandering.

“Ont kollinas j boskas esperar,

Kelki ont las bon ventas nos prendar…”

Llewella got up and began to dance, a preposterous, artless kind of swaying, but quite charming in its way.

“If you insist on being fools, you should at least dance the right way,” snapped Berhane. “You musn’t dance like that to a ballad.”

“Why not?” Llewella protested. “Dancing’s dancing, innit?”

The physician took the girl’s hands and began to guide her, showing the basic steps to an Ijassian courtly dance.

As the ballad gained momentum, Jorgos sang louder.

And in answer, the ground rumbled beneath their feet.

He stopped playing, and Berhane let go of Llewella. “Now you’ve done it, tropadoro.”

The knight strode forward, one hand on his swordhilt, for a few ells away, the soil was trembling, as if something were digging its way up.

“Behind me,” Sir Cadog said.

The soil broke, and out from a fresh hole in the ground emerged a long, furry face that terminated in a wet, pink, star-shaped snout with little feelers that fingered at the air. A rotund, velvet-furred body emerged, and two large spadelike claws scraped at the ground as the thing, mansized and vaguely man-shaped, dug its way free.

“Ahem…” the thing said, with a sharp, scratchy voice. “Speek yow laag-alp?”

Do you speak Low-Alpish?

Jorgos could hardly believe his eyes or his ears. It was a burrowman, a mole-fellow. He’d always thought them legends. And here it was, out on the surface, speaking in Low Alpish, the tongue of parley among many of the continent’s less sociable races.

Berhane said something awestruck in her native tongue.

“Ya, ik speek,” Jorgos said, slowly, carefully.

The mole-thing scratched its head with one of its claws and wrinkled its star-shaped nose. “Watvar ben yow neet meer speelen? Speel vider, zag me!” Why have you stopped playing?  Play on, says I!

While his new audience watched impatiently through two tiny, mostly-blind eyes, Jorgos’ fingers found their places again, and the song resumed.

The burrowman nodded its head side to side and thumped its stubby lower legs to the melody, while Berhane and Llewella resumed their slow, halting courtly dance. As he sang and played, the trees bent and shuddered, and other creatures began to emerge from the darkness, lured by the music.

First it was a wild sprite, a gnomish creature about as tall as a man’s knee, with the large, compound eyes and segmented limbs of an insect, and skin like waxy armor. Two tiny vestigial wings on its back buzzed and its chitinous fingers clicked as it mimicked Berhane and Llewella’s twirling.

A family of living rocks crawled out from the shadows on their tiny legs and perched at the edge of the campfire’s reach, content to listen.

Two kobolds, looking like very ugly, very hairy children and stinking like wet dogs marched into the clearing hand in hand, saluted the musician, and then proceeded to dance with one another such that not even the most critical of courtiers in Gativo could have found fault with their technique, form, or timing.

But most remarkable of all was the lanky, pale creature that leapt from the darkness and nearly extinguished the fire with the sudden cold wind that followed its arrival. It resembled the bastard offspring of a man and a marsh hare, long of limb and ear, covered in luxurious white fur with a billowing tuft around its breast. At the end of its forelimbs were large, humanlike hands. Its face was long and its eyes were the color of a starless night, and there was something noble and dignified in the way it swept its ears back, fell to one knee, and extended a hand to Berhane.

“Might I vouchsafe the honor of a dance, darkeyed maiden?” the creature asked her.

Llewella nudged Berhane forward. “Go on, he asked nicely enough,” she said.

Jorgos had stopped playing, which seemed to annoy the harelike creature.

“Tropadoro, if you please, our revelry is not done.”

Jorgos resumed his song, and as he did, Berhane accepted the creature’s offer, and soon they were dancing under the dazzling moon, the creature’s fur shimmering and wicking away the light that thickened like sap upon whatever it touched. The same evanescent glitter radiated from Berhane’s smooth head as her hood fell, and her breath rose in great clouds as she laughed. Compared to her inhuman swain, Berhane was rather clumsy, but the creature didn’t seem to mind and patiently slowed its steps to accommodate her.

As the song built to its crescendo, all gathered that had voices and knew the words, except for grim Sir Cadog, took up the chorus with Jorgos, for it was a famous one known throughout the continent, one sung at feasts and weddings and horse races and over tankards of ale and goblets of the finest wine, or even in a forest with sprites and kobolds:

“La la la, erraré sempre conmi,

Aj aj aj, seremos immortelli!”

Come wander with me always,

We will become immortal. 

And as the voices reached their peak, the earth shattered, and a great belch of dirt showered the clearing, snuffing out the campfire and sending all into a shrieking panic. Jorgos himself was thrown from his feet, and his lute spun from his hands and struck the ground with a twang more sickening than the sound of any broken bone could have been. From where he lay, Jorgos saw something slither from the ground, a black tentacle, slick with mucus and the heme of the moon. A greater bulk lay behind the tentacle, a shadowy presence whose obscurity the moonlight could not dissolve.

The kobolds were the first to run. One made it to the trees, the other did not, and could only howl as a black appendage ripped through the meat of its body and then dragged it into whatever maw hid in the shadows.

The sprite also made a run for it, and was so slow and ungainly he would have surely perished like the unfortunate kobold had Sir Cadog not intercepted the tentacle and cut its tip with his cleaver. A shower of black ichor sprayed from the cloven tendril, and where the vileness touched the earth, dark smoke belched from sizzling ground.

More tentacles shot up from the vortex of shadow that seemed to expand with each blink, a waxing miasma that choked all light. One tentacle snaked at Jorgos, but he was able to roll out of the way. Berhane, too, was able to dodge.

Llewella was not so lucky. The quickest, most slender of the tendrils aimed for her, and it found its mark, seizing her by one of her ankles and dragging her off her feet. She shrieked as she was dragged toward the darkness, and though Jorgos grabbed her hands and tried to anchor her, they inexorably slid toward the unliving shadow.

Sir Cadog charged forward, intent on cutting the tentacle, but was smote by a mighty blow from one of the larger stalks, which knocked him off his feet and sent him clattering across the clearing and into the truck of a tree.

Berhane hugged Jorgos from behind, trying to help pull him and Llewella free, but it was a losing battle.

All the other creatures had fled. All except one.

“Thy defilements are at end!”

Light a bolt of pale lightning, the hare-creature, the Leaper, struck at the darkness, kicking the shadowy bulk with both legs. As the blows landed, the moon seemed to brighten, and the darkness shrunk, and gouts of dark ichor squelched from where the Leaper had struck.

The tentacles swarmed the Leaper, but the great hare seemed untroubled, swiping them aside with its hands, then plunging its fists into whatever gelatinous corpus hid behind the miasma. When the fists emerged, dripping with dark mucilage, the tentacles fell slack. The thing, whatever it had been, collapsed, and quickly it shrunk. Only two blinks later, it was gone entirely, and only a vast fissure in the earth and Llewella’s wounded, bleeding ankle stood as evidence it had existed at all.

#

THE PHYSICIAN

The tropadoro shook her shoulders and yelled into her ear, as if the physician didn’t know what her own eyes revealed.

Nasty gashes in her ankle and her thigh, an artery ruptured, wounds that showed no signs of coagulation. Llewella would soon bleed out.

The girl lay on her back, face white as linen as she gazed up gormlessly at the pink moon that glittered in her irises. She held Jorgos’s hand while the physician tried to remember the very basic steps to staunching an open wound.

“You’re the greatest physician in the world, do something!” Jorgos implored.

But she wasn’t. Her hands trembled as she dug up a clod of dense soil and packed it into the larger of the two wounds.

Just like Berhane taught you, staunch it first with soil, you can clean it later, but the bleeding must be stopped.

She did the same for the laceration on the inner thigh. Next was to find the cleansing salve. She sent Jorgos to the wagon, where in a pouch she kept the concoctions and preparations Berhane made before she died, including a small bottle of a salve made from flocculated extract of callowroot mixed with grain spirits.

The little girl yowled like a wounded cat when the stinging salve touched her wounds, but she was brave, very brave, the poor thing.

“You’re very brave,” the physician said, first in her own language, and then, once she realized her error, again in Edish.

And she was brave again when the physician sewed the wounds shut, barely even squeaking when the needle wove through her tender flesh. Only after the wounds were sewed, did she remember that she had a tincture of numbing among her sundries, of which she administered one drop on the tip of her finger which she wiped across the girl’s lips, numbing her muscles and relaxing her mind, though she was yet conscious.

“What was that thing?” Jorgos asked.

“A cyst,” the Leaper replied. He was still among them, looming over the physician, his massive black eyes seeming to stare through the physician’s very essence. “A cyst grown from the world’s skin. Such blasphemies are yet more common by the day as this Great Blight defiles the land.”

The physician fell into a slump beside the injured girl. As Llewella managed to turn her head to look at her savior, a single tear ran from the corner of her eye.

“It’s my fault,” Jorgos said. “My music lured it here.”

“Nay,” the Leaper said. “It has been many a season since mortal music touched these woods, and thy song was a rare gift to the living creatures here, who have suffered just as men have from the Blight’s depredations.”

“Thank heaven you were here,” Jorgos said to the Leaper. “You and the knight. Sir Cadog, are you all right? Perhaps Great Berhane should tend to him.”

“I am aright,” Sir Cadog said. “She need not worry o’er me.”

Great Berhane. What a farce. Like sour bile, the lie began to torture her throat and make her queasy. She could stand it no more.

“I think my next song shall be an ode to the great healer who saved a girl’s life,” Jorgos declared. “An ode to Great Berhane.”

She could bear it no more—the lie had become poisonous.

“Great Berhane is dead,” the physician said. She meant to whisper it, but it came out full voice, and a silence followed after.

Jorgos was the first to speak. His eyebrows climbed high as he looked down on her. “What do you mean?”

She hesitated, but then decided there was no gain in further dissembling. “I mean she is dead. She died on the road, rent to shreds along with her guards by the Blighted. This was a moon ago. I was with her, for I was her assistant. I left her to die.”

It was said in many cultures, in both Edane and Zenabe among others, that the truth may set one free. She did not feel liberated; she felt like a heavy chain had fallen over her, and even now it dragged her down.

“I left the greatest physician this world has ever known to die. I saved myself. I took her wagon and rode away even as she called my name. Mizan. I heard her call to me.”

Jorgos knelt beside her. What was in those gentle eyes? Was it reproach, or simply confusion?

Like vomit whose flow once admitted could not be dammed, Mizan continued with her confession, so much like a good, faithful Siderealist in a whisper box. “When the Blight started, I followed her to Cynwrth, to the city of Cwffyd where it began. She thought she could cure it, like every other plague she’d contended with.”

“But the Blight is a disease of the spirit, not the body,” Sir Cadog said.

“So she discovered,” Mizan said. “Still she wanted to remain here, to help as best she could. She was kind and selfless, but also stubborn. Stubborn and slow. When the Blighted swarmed through Cwffyd’s eastern gate, the wagon had already been packed, everything except Berhane herself. She was in bed, suffering from a cough. I could have carried her, I suppose. Yes, I probably could have. But I could hear the screams, I could smell the slaughter in the streets. I lost my nerve, and I left without her. And so I heard her call to me, but I did not look back. At the eastern gate, the soldiers were letting the nobles and clergy through but no one else. That’s where the lie was born. Berhane might have still been alive when I claimed her name. What did they know? The soldiers knew not Berhane’s face, only her complexion, and one Zenabian was as good as any to them.”

“So they let you through,” Jorgos said.

Mizan blinked the tears from her eyes. The whole time she’d been stroking Llewella’s hair, while the girl looked up with hazy eyes, her face slack from the tincture. Now she looked up at Sir Cadog and the Leaper, both impossibly tall, both inscrutable. But Jorgos she could read—he regarded her without contempt, only understanding. Damn him.

She continued, “And since then, I have kept the lie. A foreigner in such times is always in danger, but a famous physician? Protected, celebrated.” She met Jorgos’s eyes. “Desired, even. Every time you called me Great Berhane, you may as well have forced a needle in my heart. I’m not great, I’m a coward.”

Sir Cadog shook his head. “To meet one’s end with imperfect courage—this is common. To condemn it in one, we should soon condemn the world entire.”

Jorgos laid a warm hand over her own. “I admired Berhane the physician,” he said. “So many of the songs of my trade extoll the virtues of murderers and thieves, but the songs of Berhane were always pure—what could be more noble than to heal?”

She watched him, expecting his condemnation, perhaps craving it.

“But I never knew Berhane,” he continued. His fingers closed around hers. “I know you. Mizan, was it? I know you, Mizan. Not for long, but what I have seen, I have admired. Look at the girl you’ve just tended—Berhane did not save her, you did.”

“Aye,” rasped Llewella. “Aye, t’was ye.”

The Leaper cleared his throat. “Ahem. I think it time I took my leave. Forgive me, but I’ve begun to feel distinctly voyeuristic intruding upon such intimacy.”

“Nay, why not travel with us?” Jorgos said. “We’d be much heartened to have you as a companion, goodly…whatever you are.”

The Leaper’s enormous black eyes narrowed and his whiskers twitched. “Whatever I am indeed, for I am ancient beyond thy ken, and thy kind had yet to descend from their sheltering trees when the name for my kin was already forgotten to the world’s tongue. I cannot go with thee, for whilst I may occasionally dance with mortals, I do not travel with them. Nothing personal, I simply cannot suffer the smell for long.

“But listen to me, all, for there is wisdom I need impart. Firstly, the physician’s confession is but the first lie thou shall unravel. Second, thou must make a nest in thine heart for loss, for it shall fly in as it please. Third, know when thy hour has tolled, and shirk not, for it shall not shirk from thee. Thy dreams will instruct thee—heed them well. In dreams we are naked, in dreams the Dark shall find us and embrace us with its cold touch. Am I understood?”

“…no, you are not understood,” Jorgos said at length.

“All the same,” the Leaper replied, with a very humanlike shrug, before bounding away with an inhuman leap that soon took him beyond all sight and reckoning.

As soon as he was gone, the clearing seemed to darken, as if he’d taken the moonlight with him. Above, the sky was black now except for those clouds passed over the red moon, smoldering like dying coals.

“What did any of that mean?” Jorgos asked. “The matter of dreams…”

“That one was a vastly old spirit of the land,” Sir Cadog said. “They never speak straight, but always true; even when they lie, they tell the world’s truth.”

Mizan understood the bit about dreams at least. Before her end, in the days before the Blight took Cwyffd, Berhane had had a theory borne from observing those patients who succumbed to the Blight and turned. It was through these observations she determined it could not have spread by humors or bad air. There was but one commonality in every case: complaints of lurid dreams in the days before.

Make a nest in thy heart for loss.

When they went to sleep in the queer hours before dawn, Jorgos held Mizan as one would a deserving lover. Not a coward and a liar.

#

Great Berhane smiles even as the Blighted tear strips of meat from her useless arms. She is an ancient woman, her eyes cataract pale and rimmed with dark pouches, her teeth almost all gone, and yet she smiles with the few she has.

“He might even love you,” the great physician sneers. “And the girl too. You saved her life. Isn’t it wonderful to heal?”

The Blighted are laughing, hooting as they gnaw at her wrinkled legs, scrawny and shriveled like last year’s tubers left too long in the cellar.

They have not noticed Mizan yet, even though Berhane speaks to her. Mizan will not reply, because they have not seen her yet, and this is her only protection. If they notice her, if they realize she’s right there…

“I trusted you,” Berhane says.

“I know,” Mizan can’t help but whisper.

One of the Blighted, a brawny fellow attired in knightly armor, with a black cloak and an ivory skull mask somehow less pale than the flesh face beneath it, snaps his head back and stares with those crimson eyes through where Mizan floats helplessly, anchored by the immobile logic of her dream. He does not see her, but he has heard her. Soon he is distracted by the vivid flesh close at hand, and he attacks Berhane’s foot, biting into the tough leathery meat of her heel.

Berhane’s old eyes roll back with an almost erotic satisfaction. “When you stop fighting, when you wake from the dream of being alive, you will know what I have seen, what we have felt—you will know the Cold Hand’s touch.”

Then Berhane reaches up to touch the skull-masked knight with an arm so mangled it should be limp. She gestures with the stump of a finger at where Mizan is, and the red eyes beneath the skull mask again fix on her.

Only now they see her. The Blighted all look up from their old, tough feast and behold something fresher, tenderer.

She must wake, right now, before they reach her. Oh heaven, please let her wake, please—

 

THREE

 

JORGOS

Somewhere in the silver, winking time before dawn, Jorgos dreamt that Llewella was speaking to him. She was crouched over him, while Mizan shuddered against his arms in her sleep.

“…it’s not right,” the little girl said in his dream. “What I done, what I’d do to ye, when ye’ve done naught but kindness. So I’ll go, and ye’ll be safe.”

He said something profound to her, or perhaps he said, “Mwap mupp,” for his mouth was muffled by Mizan’s cloak. Whatever the case, it was only a dream, so what did his answer matter?

“Don’t follow me, promise me that,” Llewella said, her little strong hand stroking his hair. How detailed the dream was, down to the stitching in the girl’s bared ankle, already tearing, the wound beginning to bleed again. “Go your way, and leave me mine.”

And then the dream ended, and he woke up to himself, to the dubious light of a rising sun.

“The girl is gone,” Sir Cadog announced. He sat upon a stump a few ells away from where Jorgos and Mizan lay—he seemed to have been watching them sleep.

Mizan bolted upright so quickly her head knocked into Jorgos and he bit his tongue. “What?! What do you mean she’s gone?”

“I mean she has left our camp,” Sir Cadog explained, infuriatingly calm, passionless. “I asked her where she meant to go, she only told me ‘home.’ Did I err not waking you?”

“Yes, you very much erred!” shouted Mizan, taking up her stave. “Which way did she leave?”

“Following her would be little recommended,” said Sir Cadog.

“Do you know which way she left?” Jorgos demanded, grasping the knight by his spaulders.

“Yes. But t’would be safer not to follow.”

They didn’t listen. She had taken a narrow path through the woods, so narrow they could not bring the wagon, and so they tied the horse to a tree, covered the wagon with its tarp, and took to their feet down the path.

Not too far along, Jorgos found a shock of thorns spackled with fresh blood, and Mizan said that Llewella must have been caught by it, and it might have opened her stitches. They followed her drips and drops of blood, smeared on branches and brambles, and it led them to a farm gone to seed and turned to a wild field, enclosed by the woods, and at that field’s center, a crumbling cottage beside a collapsed barn.

“Is this her home?” Jorgos wondered aloud, his voice hushed.

The daylight was anemic, the sun a rosy red as it hung bleary in a curtain of cirrus clouds, and its low slant on the horizon cast deep shadows from figures Jorgos first took to be scarecrows.

They were scarecrows. As Jorgos, Mizan, and Sir Cadog drew closer to the three staked figures, and as the shadows yielded their truth, Jorgos felt his legs become weak and his stomach qualmish from a mounting terror.

The largest of the “scarecrows” was ruddy faced and wore a knit Cynish cap. The one next to him was missing most of his face, but the long red whiskers of his distinctive mustache were still in evidence. The third brother, Goff, could only be identified by context as one of the trio they’d met on the path, for his face was completely stripped to the pinkish white bone of his skull. Each of them had been dispatched with their own weapon, Celyn skewered on his own spear, Lewin with his falchion sheathed into his spilled guts, and Goff with two of his arrows stuck into the sockets where eyes once took in the world.

All three of them were missing pieces of flesh—some morsels cut cleanly by knives, others gnawed from the bone.

“Sur kel enferno somos troparos?” Jorgos asked aloud. What Hell have we stumbled on?

In the field behind them, riding spurs and rings of mail clinked. They turned. A man in armor, a knight appeared before them, bearing a notched and well-worn longsword in his gauntleted hand. He was tall and robust, and a long black cloak trailed behind him, snagging on the brambles that grew high in the overgrown weeds. On his tabard was emblazoned a faded but still recognizable sigil: a winged sturgeon on an orange field.

The knight wore a skull mask in lieu of a visor on his helm, and through the eyeholes two cruel eyes the dark red of arterial blood stared back at Jorgos and the others.

“God in Heaven,” Jorgos declared, recognizing from the sigil and from the infamous mask that they had encountered Sir Ekbert of Toling—Lord Ballyhole himself. In life, a murderer of hundreds, and now, it seemed, made truly deathless by the Blight.

“God? I don’t believe He’s here,” Lord Ballyhole replied, holding his sword nonchalantly over his shoulder as he appraised the three of them.

“Get behind me,” Sir Cadog commanded.

“Oh my, thou art most confused, Sir Knight,” said Lord Ballyhole, his voice fizzing at the edges with incipient laughter. “Why not lift thy visor and show these sheep who and what they’ve been shepherded by?”

As he spoke, the fields rustled, and shapes emerged from the tall grass. Two, three, no four other Blighted. They were attired in the motley rags of desperate folk, highway robbers and beggars. Their mouths were smeared with old gore. They made a staggered ring around the trio, cutting off all paths of flight.

“Where is the girl?” Mizan said, her voice shaking. “What have you done with her?”

“You mean dear little Llewella?” Lord Ballyhole asked. “She’s fine—with her mother, in the house. I haven’t hurt her—after all, in her own way she did as I asked and brought me fresh meat. Well, that’s a fib—I haven’t hurt her much. But fie, if a father need punish his disobedient seed by nibbling off one of her fingers, well that’s his business, isn’t it? And she is yet my daughter—while she has use to me.”

Jorgos began to understand. The disparate pieces of a strange puzzle fell into place, but still something was missing. She had been leading them here all along, but why? Out of love or loyalty to her undead father? Nay, it had to be something else…

Lord Ballyhole filled the ensuant silence with his laughter, a rich, deep, cruel sound like pitch sloshing around a bucket. “Hast thou felt the Cold Hand yet, bald maiden? I can smell the Blight on thee. And thee, minstrel—I shall extract a song from thee before I extract the cords from thy throat and thy tongue from its harbor.”

Jorgos knew not what he meant about a “Cold Hand,” but the way Mizan shuddered suggested she knew.

Sir Cadog drew his sword with a harsh rasp of steel as it cleared its scabbard.

“How sporting,” Lord Ballyhole said, settling into a duelist’s stance. “Prithee, provide more diversion than those rustics we slaughtered.”

All the time, the other Blighted had been slowly cheating forward, like a noose closing. Jorgos reached for the little knife by his belt, but then realized he had a better weapon. Not without some gloom did he unsling the lute from his back and brandish it as a cudgel. A lute his cousin Zabine had gifted him, and that had been restrung in the famous shop of Giavelli & Korona after a regrettable misadventure in Soriba. To consider such a sacrifice was as painful as if he’d turned his own arm into a club, but there was no choice.

“You should flee,” Sir Cadog said. “I shall forestall them as long as possible.”

“No,” Mizan replied. “We fight together.”

“Quaint,” said Lord Ballyhole, and at his signal, the other Blighted flung themselves forward.

Sir Cadog’s cleaver severed the head of a Blighted bandit. Another of the brutes lunged with a partisan, but Sir Cadog parried the thrust aside. Meanwhile Jorgos swung the heavy end of his lute at the grubby, one-eyed woman who menaced him, but she ably dodged his essaying strike.

“Conserve your strength,” Mizan said. “They’ll try to tire us out.”

As she spoke, another of the undead bandits came at her with a heavy spiked club, and rather than try to parry it with her stave she sidestepped the charge, then swept the ugly brute’s legs out from under him. Jorgos then brought down the full weight of his lute on the bandit’s skull. On impact, he felt the blow reverberate through his wrists and the long bones of his arms, and he winced as he realized the instrument’s beautifully carved bowl had split, and even if it were to be repaired it would never make the same sound as it did before.

And as hard as he’d struck, it wasn’t enough. No sooner had Jorgos turned from the felled bandit than did a cold, clammy claw clamp around his ankle and dragged him down.

“Jorgos!” Mizan cried out, but she too let out a shriek as she was seized.

Jorgos kicked at the bandit’s face, knocking teeth loose from the grinning jaw, but still the hand would not release, its grip crushing, its jagged nails cutting through socks and into the flesh below.

More clammy hands pinned him by the wrists, and above gaped a salivating mouth whilst two crimson eyes regarded him with a hunger that could not even be called bestial. It was a young lad’s face, almost handsome in its way, pale and struck through with hideous black veins.

A pace away, Mizan howled with pain in the grasp of a lumbering bandit who was chewing on a piece of her neck he’d torn off with his teeth. “Wrong,” he said, spitting out the morsel. “Too close to the turn.” And with that he flung her down, and sprung at Sir Cadog, who was engaged in a clash of swords with Lord Ballyhole.

Mizan groaned where she lay in the grass, grasping her wounded neck. Jorgos could do nothing as the Blighted held him.

“Can’t we nibble him at least?” asked the young lad.

“No,” said the older bandit. “The lord will want first bite of this one.”

Sir Cadog did not see the assailant coming from behind, and so was taken unawares by a partisan thrust to his unarmored right calf. Such an injury would have lamed any man, and yet somehow Sir Cadog remained upright, and even paid his cowardly attacker a grievous blow with the cleaver, smiting the bandit and parting his head from his shoulders.

But Lord Ballyhole took full advantage of his distraction, and thrust his sword into Sir Cadog’s armpit, where there was no plate. And it was in that moment that Jorgos understood at last who and what they had been traveling with.

Sir Cadog did not fall. He dropped his cleaver, and grabbed hold of Lord Ballyhole’s arms that held the sword now embedded into his chest.

“Thou shall not walk from this battle,” Sir Cadog declared, and so locked with his foe slammed his head against Lord Ballyhole’s. Again and again, the helmets clashed, and with each successive blow, Sir Cadog seemed to grow taller and Lord Ballyhole shorter, until at last black the face beneath the warped skull mask was naught but a mess of putrescence, mashed, bruised flesh and black ichor.

“Ought we help him?” asked the young lad pinning Jorgos’s hands.

And in the next moment, the lad’s head was caved in as Mizan smote him from behind with the heavy club the Blighted bandit had dropped.

Jorgos saw his chance and kicked free of the bandit’s grasp, then with all his might struck against the bandit’s jaw, feeling it dislodge even as something—perhaps the ball of his heel—broke.

The bandit had no chance to recover, as Mizan battered him with the club, once, twice, thrice and done.

And then all was quiet, save Mizan’s ragged breathing and the pounding blood in Jorgos’s ears.

Sir Cadog fell to his knees, the sword still buried in his body, probably through his heart and lungs. Black ichor seeped through the grate of his visor. His breath did not fog, though it never had, Jorgos now realized.

“Go,” he said. “Find the child.”

“But Mizan,” Jorgos said.

The physician shook her head. She’d had a hand clamped over her gored throat, but now she let go, showing that the bleeding had stopped. That was not all. The blood was not as it should be. Not the bright carmine that should flow from living veins. It was darker, more viscid, almost a gel.

“I’m fine,” she said. “For now. We should find Llewella.”

Jorgos armed himself with a dagger he took from Lord Ballyhole’s corpse. He and Mizan went hand in hand toward the farmhouse while Sir Cadog remained on his knees, motionless, watching them. Mizan’s fingers were terribly cold. He’d have liked to pretend it was from fear or from the biting chill in the air.

#

As soon as they entered the cottage, the stench of death assailed Jorgos. A stink of meat on the turn, a fetor of old blood and excrement, an unctuous pall of decay that he knew would soon be invested in his hair and in the fibers of his clothes.

They did not speak, he and Mizan. Mizan cautiously pushed the door open, then they listened.

Nothing at first. It was not a large home. A modest cottage, perhaps four rooms, the largest of which was a kitchen in which they now stood, with an earthen oven and a large basin. Jorgos was stunned to find that the home of the infamous robber knight Sir Ekbert would be not only modest but charming. At least, it would have been before the cobwebs and dust and decay set in. The only sign that this had been a home to a robber knight and not any old farmer were the many strange trophies hung from iron nails upon the walls: men’s belts, ladies’ scarves, and many, many pairs of shoes.

Jorgos knew they were not alone not by any sound he heard but rather by its negation, for as he took one step over the threshold he could feel the silence deepening as one held her breath.

“Llewella?” he said, speaking softly.

A moment’s silence passed, and then, “Is that ye? Mister Jorgos?”

Moving cautiously, they followed the voice to a door that had been barricaded from without by a heavy cupboard. It took both Jorgos and Mizan putting all their strength and weight into the endeavor to shove it out of the way. Even before they opened the door, Jorgos knew they were at the source of the stench.

Inside the room, the house’s bedchamber, was a large, opulent four-posted hardwood frame bed with a goosedown cushion and fine linen sheets, a splendor marred only by large, old stains of blood, and the presence of a little girl curled up next to the shriveled and half-eaten carcass of a woman who must have been her mother. She was dressed in an exquisite cotehardie that her husband must have taken from the carriage of a baroness or a high-merchant’s wife. Even in death, Llewella’s mother’s hair was the same startling, bright copper as her daughter’s.

“Ye ought not have come,” Llewella said, frowning at them. “Ye ought to have gone on and left me.” She was missing a finger on her left hand, but she’d bandaged the nub herself with a scrap of mother’s cotehardie.

Mizan held out her arms. “Llewella, come away from there.”

“You’re hurt,” Llewella said, staring at Mizan’s mangled throat.

“It doesn’t matter. Come here, child.”

But Llewella seemed reluctant to move. “I don’t want to leave her.”

“She’s gone,” Jorgos said.

“I know that, I’m not stupid,” Llewella replied, and then she noticed his lute and her eyes began to water. “Oh…it’s broken. Did Da break it? He was always mean to folk, but before the Blight took him at least, well, he was never mean to us. I thought, maybe aside from all it he was still himself…”

“Never mind any of that. Come with us.”

As Mizan took a step forward, Llewella crawled closer to her mother, hugging the withered arm of the cadaver. “No. It’s not right. Ye ought to leave me. I’ve been wicked. I tricked folk like ye. For him. For Mam. He said she was alive. He said he’d keep her and me alive as long as I brought him new meat. And I, well I swallowed the lie like a fish swallows flies. He said she was alive… I heard her speak, I heard her voice from this room, telling me to do what Da said. But it couldn’t be her. Lookit her—she’s bones. But I heard her voice…”

Jorgos recalled with a shudder the Blighted ventriloquist, and wondered if she had been part of the undead robber knight’s band. It didn’t matter now. He didn’t care; he was tired and hurt, too tired to worry about anything but getting this girl to a safer place.

“Take my hand, Llewella,” Jorgos said.

And Mizan offered hers too. “And mine.”

Cautiously, Llewella relinquished her dead mother and took their hands, Jorgos’ first, then Mizan’s. “So cold,” the girl said when she felt Mizan.

#

THE PHYSICIAN

Like a strange little bloodied family, they walked out of the cottage of death together. Mizan thought she might be crying, but when she wiped the corner of her eye, it was not salty water but something more viscous, something red.

Out in the field, amid the inert carcasses of his brethren, Sir Cadog still remained on his knees, a partisan buried in one leg and a sword embedded under his left arm. He had removed his helmet, and as the weakening daylight broke through the clouds, his crimson eyes squinted as if pained by the radiance.

He had been a handsome man once, Mizan thought, with a proud jawline and an aquiline nose. Even now, the nobility of his visage was yet in evidence, despite the pallor, despite the black ichor leaking from his wounds.

“I fear I can no longer travel with you,” Sir Cadog announced. “This body is as ruined as the soul that abides within it.”

“What are you?” Llewella asked, giving breath to the question not far from Mizan’s own tongue.

“An aberration among the aberrant,” the knight replied. “I know not why I am different. In some ways I am not. Since I resolved myself to protect the physician, I have desired her flesh, just as even now there lurks within me the basest urge to devour you all, to crack the bones and tongue out the marrow, to ruminate upon the puddings in your skulls. But death did not release me from my knightly vows. If I recall nothing else, I recall those, and the auspice under which I swore them. God has turned from me, but I cannot turn from Him.”

“Sir knight,” Jorgos began, laying a hand over his heart. “Please, we will not survive without you.”

“You shall have to,” Sir Cadog replied. “You were never safe with me. Whatever cruel, frigid intelligence lurks behind this Blight, it is capricious, and I think it has been amused to leave me my restraint and my conscience, to make of me a cosmic farce. But who’s to say I shall not become like the others? Nay, leave me here and see to your own safety.”

A heavy lump formed in Mizan’s throat, half from sorrow for the damned knight’s lot, half rue for her own. He looked to her with those red eyes and seemed to understand.

“You will lose yourself when it takes you fully,” he said. “If you are like the others, you will keep your memories, but the attachments, the integuments of those allegiances and affections that make for a person, these will be lost. You will devour the girl and the tropadoro both, and you will enjoy it.”

Jorgos squeezed Mizan’s hand. “There’s another way. Surely. Great Berhane’s notes—surely she found something.”

Mizan could only shake her head. “I can’t read her notes. They are writ in a cypher only she knew. In any case, even before she died, the Blight had already defeated her.”

“I don’t understand,” Llewella said, looking between the three grownups. “What are ye saying? What’s happened?”

Jorgos opened his mouth, probably to offer some soothing lie, but Mizan cut him short. What was the point of trying to spare a girl who’d already seen and suffered so much?

“It’s in me,” she said. “What translated your father and so many others. I am one of the Blighted, or will be.”

Llewella’s eyes ran with salt and she wiped her face upon her arm, then looked first to Mizan and then to Jorgos, pleadingly. “But not ye? Surely not ye too.”

“No,” Sir Cadog answered, resolutely. “Not him. He has not given up hope, he has not faced his end with imperfect courage, and so he is protected. Hope and love—these things will not save you, child, but they will purchase time at least. So cling to them.”

Instead, Llewella threw herself at Mizan, hugging her around her legs. Mizan could do nothing except hug back.

Sir Cadog had one final request before they left him. It fell to Mizan to take up his own sword and use it to hew his head from his neck, sending him to whatever uncertain rest awaited the souls of the Blighted. She wondered, with no small flutter of dread, if the Blighted were still as yet hungry even after their final migration.

 

FOUR

 

THE PHYSICIAN

He told her a story and asked that she keep her eyes locked on his. He would have sung her a song, but his voice was a broken thing, his chords befouled by phlegm and his lungs freighted with sorrow.

The tropadoro told a story about a strange little family, made up of a foolish bard who insisted on putting on airs and pretending to some greatest by calling himself a “tropadoro,” and a clever little girl who did evil once but whose object was always love and loyalty to love’s subjects, and a physician who could have been greater than Berhane herself—nay, would be greater than Berhane, for she would be famous throughout the world for curing the Great Blight.

“And would they find a house to call their own?” Mizan asked, squeezing his hand with such desperate ferocity that her nails break his skin. The smell of his blood drives her wild, filling with something corrosive like lust, but of a different provenance more rooted in the bowels than in the loins.

“A beautiful little home,” Jorgos said.

“With a nice chimney what don’t spit the smoke back in our eyes,” Llewella added.

She lay under the stars, staring up at the bright wildness of that incalculable firmament with all its foreign stars and constellations whose names she had never known and would never learn. They were out of the Hollows now, and the sky was once again hospitable and free. A few ells away, the horse ate from its feed bag.

“And their love is enough to save them?” Mizan asked, closing her eyes.

Jorgos let go of her hand. She heard him gulp, heard him sniffle, then the crunch of his boots on the withered bracken that grew over the overgrown road. He was approaching the wagon, where they kept Sir Cadog’s sword.

“Is it?” she asked.

“Aye,” Llewella answered, and a small, warm hand touched Mizan’s clammy, feverish forehead. “That’s how stories always end, innit?”

“At least all the good ones that rhyme,” Jorgos said.

She heard the practice swing, the cleaver swooshing through the air. She sat up and lifted her head, making her neck as long as possible. Let it be clean. Let it be quick. Let her meet her end with perfect courage.

 

FIVE

 

JORGOS

He could barely move his fingers from the deep cold as the snow swirled down upon the dark road ahead, and his lute was cracked and made a broken sound just like his voice, but still he sang and played. He made music to keep the girl awake as she steered the wagon. The walls of Eastfen and its many burning torches loomed on the horizon, so close to the eye, yet he knew they had still many hours to drive. He sat on a blanket wrapped over one of Great Berhane’s many books. A learned soul might yet find some sense in her ciphered writings—surviving this far allowed him to dare hope some good might still come of their travails. But for now, all he could do was drive the wagon, and sing to the little girl huddled against him.

 

SIX

 

THE PHYSICIAN

Mizan dreams of the hills of Zenabe, as they are in the late autumn, dusty and scoured by cruel northerly winds. Of the skinny ochre trees clinging stubbornly to their last teardrop leaves. Of the lantern-keepers in their procession, a hundred cloaked widows and widowers peregrinating upon the bumpy spine of the country, up and down those hills, little lights floating across the blackened horizon. She glimpses her own soul in the papyrus and rush-stem cage of one of those lanterns, a flickering thing not convinced of its own existence, yet afraid to embrace whatever unbeing waits beyond the cessation of the dreaming that is being here at all. Hand in hand, bearing their lanterns upon poles, the keepers are unmade beyond the edge of her seeing, and she is alone under the vast brightdarkness of the Zenabian sky, without any hand to hold hers, without even the fog of her breath to tell her she exists.

 

________________________________________

Jonathan Louis Duckworth is a completely normal, entirely human person with the right number of heads and everything.  He received his MFA from Florida International University and his PhD from the University of North Texas.  He is the author of Have You Seen the Moon Tonight? & Other Rumors (JournalStone Publishing) and his work appears in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Vastarien, Pseudopod, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and elsewhere.  His is an active HWA member.