by John Bierce
I paid special interest to the fog-catchers, of course— they were brilliant devices, and they had evolved much since their early, primitive, hung-net like form. The village was always purchasing new fabrics to experiment with, and they had long since discovered better shapes to build in. The youngest fog-catchers were curious, box-like sculptures of cloth, where the collected water would slowly seep down into the barrel below. I was told they were built like this to catch the fog from any direction.
Antegada was too small and remote for a semaphore branch to be built out to it, so we heard no news of the Wrack for some time. When finally a ship arrived to share the news, it was a fleeing Geredaini ship, which stayed only long enough to resupply before resuming its southerly flight.
And I missed it. I had ventured out with the mayor and a group of villagers to inspect a potential site for a new daughter village, for Antegada had begun to grow cramped. The mayor was filled to the brim with dreams and plans of a great chain of cities, all given life by fog catchers, turning the Barren Coast into a verdant place of beauty.
I will mock that pompous man and those over-proud villagers for many things, but I will not mock them for that dream, for it is a wondrous thing.
When we returned, some days later, it was to panic and confusion. The tales of the Wrack had the village in an uproar, and the villagers were truly convinced the world was ending, and that the Days of Hunger had come.
And, despite every bit of reason I could offer them, every bit of caution, those thick-skulled villagers closed themselves off and began chasing away every ship, in an effort to keep the Wrack from them.
Leaving me trapped in that ancestor-forsaken village for a year and a half, and unable to observe or document the most important events of our time.
What follows is a long-winded, vicious, scatological assault on the characters, ancestry, and other traits of the villagers. We can safely assume that the usually fair-minded Johannes exaggerated many of their negative traits, as he did in every instance where he felt cooped up and trapped in a place— Johannes’ wanderlust was legendary, and his grudges eternal.
The self-imposed quarantine of Antegada was successful, in a manner of speaking. No cases of the Wrack occurred there, but that almost certainly would have been true regardless— given what we know now of the disease’s transmission— there were no reasonable vectors for the plague to arrive in Antegada.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
All Maps Lie
The irony of what Anton was about to do was not lost on him. He hadn’t left the inside of the dockmaster’s records depot for weeks, if not months, and he was choosing to leave in the midst of a city convulsed by the Wrack.
He hadn’t needed to leave it, in truth. He had a little cot in one corner, there was a comfortable little garderobe that drained straight into the pipes that led into the harbor, dock employees brought him his meals, and he was even allowed to use the little bath-house next door. He didn’t even need to go outside for that last— there was a little service door between the buildings.
Anton was rather fond of his quiet little life. He didn’t have to interact with people more than absolutely necessary, and he didn’t have to see the sky.
And now he was about to do both.
In truth, he would have probably needed to leave soon anyways. No one had brought him his meals in days. There were ship’s biscuits and dried fruit and such in the various desks in the depot, but he’d already consumed most of them.
Part of him felt a vague disapproval that his coworkers would let the Wrack keep them away from their work. Even with the vastly reduced number of ships visiting the Ladreis harbor the last few months, there was never a shortage of work.
Anton clutched his satchel full of papers closer to him, and pulled his broad brimmed hat closer over his face.
The thin-limbed, nervous clerk must have stood by the thick oaken door of the records depot for most of an hour before he finally moved to open it. The instant he did, screams from Wrack victims echoed in through the door, and the little man flinched and began edging backward.
Then he took a deep breath, and set foot out the door.
The Wrack had only been in Ladreis a week, and it had already broken the city.
Huge tracts of the slums had burnt to the ground, and still smoldered. The rest of the city, built of stone rather than driftwood, had been left largely unscathed by the flames, but it had fared little better.
As Anton strode trembling through the streets, he found himself stepping around bodies, some fresh, and all with fingers blackened. None of the screams were close by him, but he winced each time they started anew, nonetheless.
And he kept his eyes on the ground, so they wouldn’t look up at the sky.
It was easier, heading up towards the palace. Going downhill, back towards the docks, was far more difficult, to say the least. It was easy to look up just a few degrees and suddenly have your gaze overlooking the vast, empty, demanding space over the city. To see the great empty void that was the sky, have it twist and pull on the world around you, have it steal your balance out from under you, and know that if you weren’t cautious it would yank you right up. And even if you fled indoors, it would be aware of you, and you would be able to feel it looking for you and waiting for hours and hours, even through thick stone walls.
Anton realized he’d come to a halt, trembling, and he forced himself to start walking uphill again. Rats skittered out of his way only briefly, then returned to their business on the streets unchallenged.
There were ways to get back down to his lovely windowless records depot without spotting the great void looming over the city or out above the ocean. Narrow, twisting alleys where the buildings ran high enough that one would have to crane their neck all the way back to see the sky. Staircases that cut underneath other buildings. There were only a couple of open spaces on Anton’s safe route, and if he was careful, and moved slow, he could cross them without seeing the sky or the open boulevards or making eye contact with anyone.
He’d made a map of his route. Anton was good at maps. Maps made sense to Anton. Maps were right, and proper, and had no sky to them.
Maps were all lies, but they were useful lies. Lies by omission.
But they were lies that told the truth. You lied and lied with them to pry away unnecessary truths— truths that would only obscure and confuse the important truths that you really wanted out of a map, because the real world was a mess of too many things. It was too crowded. Lie with a map, make those things go away, the world weighed on you less and you could begin to comprehend it by only seeing what you needed to see.
It reminded him of the way seers talked about what they did. They didn’t try to see more, they cut away all the unnecessary bits, just like a map did. He rather imagined he could have enjoyed being a seer, save for the fact that the descriptions of the spirit realm made it seem like an even more vicious void than the sky.
Anton didn’t think his map that kept away the sky would work anymore, anyhow. It cut through the edge of the slums, and the fire had turned them from a wonderfully claustrophilic warren to just more open space, a chunk of the sky forcing itself down upon the city.
It didn’t matter, though. He needed to get to the palace. He needed to find the Moonsworn. He needed to show them his maps, because his maps could tell them the most important lie of all.
Anton stepped gingerly around another body, accidentally meeting its eyes. He snapped his own away immediately, but then he looked back and realized that the dreadful pressure he always saw in the eyes of others wasn’t in the open eyes of the corpse at his feet.
He stared at the corpse for a few moments, shuddered, and stumbled up the street, keeping his head down.
It took Anton hours to reach the palace, only to find that when he did, the guards wouldn’t let him in.
He thought it was hours. Anton didn’t know. He never much was one for keeping track of time. He slept when tired and ate when hungry, for time wa
s just another lie like maps. You only really needed it when dealing with other people.
Anton’s only real interest in it was putting it on maps. Time fit better on maps than in clocks or on sundials, though people always seemed to think him mad for saying it.
He wasn’t mad, though. Just… broken. He couldn’t ever seem to understand other people, couldn’t connect with them. He’d met actual madmen, though. He wasn’t one of them. That dreadful pressure behind everyone’s eyes was there tenfold with the truly mad.
He was just broken.
But he was good with maps. And he was good with numbers because you could always put numbers on a map. They wanted to be on maps. They were happy there.
There wasn’t a map to get past the guards, though, and the city kept screaming behind him, and he could feel himself slipping towards that lurking counterpart to the sky inside him that led deeper rather than up and pulled at him every day. That abyss inside him that would pull him in but wouldn’t allow him to bring his words or his numbers or even his maps and just leave him shaking and trembling and rocking and…
Anton took a deep breath, then slowly let it out.
Then again.
Then a third time.
And he stepped back up to the guards.
After all, no matter how terrifying and painful it was to speak to the guards and make eye contact with them, if he turned around now, he’d know exactly what he’d see, looming over him, ready to pull at him and swallow him up and up and up. He could feel it behind him.
If he got past the guards, he could return to the blessedly close confines of the indoors.
Anton was shaking by the time the guards let him in, but they did let him in. He wasn’t sure what he said, but he remembered showing the guards the maps, and one looked ready to seize them from him, and the other looked bored, but no one took his maps, and something angry and protective and hissing crept up from the hole inside him and cut through the dreadful pressure from the guards’ eyes, and his words forced the guard back and then Anton was in the palace again and he could breathe again.
And he took a deep breath, then another, then a third, and then he set forth down the hallways to find the Moonsworn, because Anton’s maps could save them all.
Raquella could barely keep her eyes open. She’d hardly slept in days, and she had spent most of her time managing Ladreis’ healers and the crisis.
Managing wasn’t the right word, Raquella felt. You could no more manage the Wrack and the chaos around it than you could manage a storm.
Though they’d managed to finally spot the Wrack— and could now identify those who had it— their fight against it was of… mixed success. Twice as many inhabitants of Ladreis were infected with it as there should have been, but that extra half simply… never got sick. The Wrack never started producing its toxins from their liver. Over time, their bodies just killed off the disease, with little to nothing in the way of symptoms.
Briefly, they’d thought that they had been wrong in their identification of the true Wrack, but every single victim who did come down with symptoms all carried it inside of them. It seemed that in a great many people, the Wrack simply did nothing. It hardly even caused any diarrhea, and provoked no fever.
And, curiously, it showed up in remarkably few Moonsworn, as always. The same proportion of Moonsworn, however, had the disease without any symptoms as those that were struck by its full force.
As if that bit of confusion weren’t enough, as if she didn’t have enough weighing her down already, Raquella found herself planning and preparing for dealing with battle wounded. She found herself ordering the construction of makeshift hospitals in homes emptied by the Wrack, and she often found herself near overcome with irony at the fact that she was aiding Galicanta in war preparations against her own people.
Except, for the first time in her life, she truly felt the Galicantans were her people too. When that mob had come against the Moonsworn, she had been there among the healers. And when other Galicantans stood against the mob and protected Ladreis’ Moonsworn, Raquella had truly felt like she belonged.
She had always loved this city, but until the Wrack, a part of her had always known that she was only a guest. And now, she finally knew that she was home.
Somehow, though, that only made her more torn and miserable over the oncoming war.
When her assistant, Haim, led the skinny little clerk with the oversized hat into her office in the palace, she paid little attention at first. She doubted it would be a waste of her time— Haim had proved to be the best assistant she’d ever had, and she’d more than once cursed herself in the last few weeks for not noticing the boy before now, just because he numbered among the Dedicated. Haim was a decent healer, but he had a true talent for administration.
It wasn’t glamorous work, but it was important. Young healers tended to hate the very idea, but non-seers who understood enough about healing to adequately serve as administrators, like Raquella, were unfortunately rare. And it was best that future administrators get some experience young.
Haim, shockingly, hadn’t complained once. He’d seemed nothing but eager to please, for whatever reason. Maybe her gestures of goodwill towards the Dedicated had paid off. Maybe he was just that worried by the Wrack. Raquella had too much on her shoulders to worry about it, though.
When the shaky little clerk began unfolding maps on the table, though, she forced her attention to him.
And when he began to speak, she found she was having no trouble keeping her eyes open at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Flies Like Rain
There is a little valley, just an hour’s walk outside of Ladreis. In a wetter place than the southwest coast of Galicanta, it might have been a marsh, for it lay low between hills, and had no outlet to the sea. But in that dry land, it had once been merely a dusty little field with a few scrub bushes and infrequent desert flowers, poking up where they could.
Few go there now, save for songbirds who don’t understand that they’re not perching on sticks and stones, but on bones. More bones than you’ll see in one place than anywhere else on Iopis. More than any graveyard; more than any battlefield.
It’s not a mournful place, or an ominous place, for all that few ever set foot there.
It’s a place of rejoicing. A place of joy, and of triumph.
A place where once, for a time, desert flowers bloomed, watered entirely by the blood shed there, for that field was a slaughterhouse, from where no one but the flies and the rats and the wild dogs ate any meat, for not even the most desperate of men would eat meat from those slaughtered in that little valley.
That little valley where the Wrack was defeated.
“You understand how suspicious this sounds, do you not?” the Empress demanded of Raquella.
The tiny old woman looked to have aged a decade in those few days since Raquella had first met her. She’d been ancient to start with, and now she looked almost desiccated.
Raquella was convinced that she must have aged even more. She hadn’t looked in a mirror in days, nor intended to anytime soon.
“I do,” Raquella said, not bothering to make excuses.
Anton, the little clerk from the docks, shivered beside her and didn’t look at anyone. Blind Sherra stood at Raquella’s side, humming idly as she watched the little clerk. Disconcertingly, that involved her staring straight through Raquella with one eye of peridot and one of spinel.
Apparently, the strange little man had told her that her crystalline eyes were more alive than any living eyes and that they threatened to crush him under the weight of their gaze. According to Haim, who had witnessed the curious interaction, it had been the farthest thing from a flirtation he’d ever seen— Anton was absolutely terrified of the blind seer.
She, of course, seemed smitten with the clerk now. Both by his terror, and by the fact that he’d figured out what she hadn’t. That little Anton, who knew nothing of medicine or scrying or healing, had been the one to sol
ve the Wrack.
Raquella wasn’t sure whether Sherra would try to seduce or murder the little clerk, but it seemed best to keep a closer eye on her than usual.
The Empress glared at all of them, tapped her fingers on her throne, and considered.
Most of Ladreis’ butchers had died in the Wrack. In that little valley, where men slew the Wrack in turn, others stepped forwards to spill blood instead.
The sailors whose ships had been sunk to block off the harbor came to that little valley, and their knives spilled blood.
No soldiers could be spared to spill that blood, for they needed to prepare to spill the blood of the oncoming fleet. And no soldiers would be coming from the great fortress of Madracha, for the Wrack was not yet gone from Ladreis, and they could not risk the Choke.
The flabby merchants abandoned their pride and their fastidiousness, and they stepped into that little valley, and their knives spilled blood.
The carpenters could not be spared, for they were needed to barricade the streets of Ladreis, in preparation for the blood that would be shed there.
The prostitutes and thieves and beggars of Ladreis came to that little valley, and their knives spilled blood there.
And the city was divided, between those who spilled blood to save lives and those who prepared to spill blood to end them.
And, of course, there was that third group, who huddled in their homes and hid in fear in those last days of the plague, as they waited for war, but in the years after, everyone you asked claimed membership of the first two groups. Only the victims of the Wrack seemed to be in their houses, and that little valley, which may have held two hundred people at its busiest, must have held tens of thousands according to the stories. Years later it became, curiously enough, impossible to find anyone who’d hid in their homes while the Wrack was being slain.