Kiar tried to steer him back on topic. “And it has struck men, women, children, all equally?”
“Aye, Your Ladyship. I’ve been more concerned with keeping my village alive, so I can’t say for other places afflicted, though I know they exist. The traders bring word, and sometimes they’ve left their own victims with us. I’ve seen it in the young and old, male and female: the fever, the vomiting, the hallucinations, head pain and seizures. It doesn’t spread like other illnesses. Usually, if one person gets something bad—and it ain’t the flux—the whole family gets it. That just isn’t true for this. A mercy, I suppose. Given how it kills.”
Kiar asked, “How long does it take? Is there someone I can observe directly?”
The old man hobbled down the stairs of the porch and Kiar followed him, Berrin trailing behind her. “Once we know they have the screams—that’s what we call it around here, Lady—they last anywhere from three days to two weeks. Usually at least a week, though. The fever rises and falls and rises again, and there’s the seizures and the delusions. They get worse throughout the week and then, well, the victim either lives or dies.
“If they survive the peak of the illness, like young Mere, there’s another week of a cool fever, and weakness, and lots of sleeping. Then, well, they’re either like Mere, or like Paul, who you came in with.” He fell silent.
Sickness was rare in the Palace, where everything was kept scrupulously clean, and everybody was well-fed. The Blood themselves hardly ever contracted physical illnesses. But Kiar knew the poorer districts of Lor Seleni had outbreaks of worrying illness, the generic ‘plague.’ And she knew that city officials responded to such outbreaks by strictly controlling traffic in and out of those districts, as well as taking other steps, depending on the illness. Three years ago, they’d fought an outbreak with imported beer, and Twist had showed her the contaminants in the water.
Elder Whitestaff had a long, if uneven, stride once he found his rhythm, and Kiar had to quicken her usual pace to keep up as he led them out of the village proper. “Mae Parker’s husband died to the screams late last year, at the beginning of the outbreak. She didn’t catch it until just recently. She and her family culture our silk.” He nodded as they passed a large stand of mulberry trees on the west side of the road. Just south of the stand of trees was a fenced yard full of chickens and attached to a house.
Kiar’s pace slowed. She could see the taint of the family magic on the house, a moving, morphing darkness much like the mark left on the wall outside Iriss’s quarters the other night. She stared at the mark, watching as it faded and shimmered and grew again. Then she jumped as the Elder rapped on the door and called, “Good day, Parkers.” He opened the door, and Kiar hastened to catch up with him.
The main room of the cottage was dominated by a large and ancient loom, where a very young woman had half-turned to greet the Elder. A door led off to the left, while a staircase led up to a loft, but Kiar hardly registered those details, her gaze glued to the bed made up against the right wall. That was the wall she’d seen from the outside, marked by magic. Something moved there, something dark and alien to the Logos-vision. It whimpered and turned towards the sound of voices.
“Good morning, Ilsa. This Lady’s come from the capital to study the screaming plague. She wanted to meet your mother.” The Elder’s voice was soothing, and Kiar tore her gaze away from the mother to look at the daughter. She was touched only by her nearness to the thing on the bed, but her alarmed look and deep breathing bespoke a deeper disturbance. “Ilsa had the screams when her father did, last year, aye Ilsa? Your family’s a strong one; your mum will pull through just like you did.”
Ilsa nodded slowly, ducked her head shyly at Kiar, and turned to fuss at her loom. The Elder sighed and explained quietly, “Before the screams, Ilsa was as outgoing and sociable a girl as you could imagine. Afterwards… shy as a fox. Even the ones who survive… they don’t survive the same.” He shook his head. “But I’m going on. Here, why don’t you take a look at Mae and see if there’s any wizardry about.”
He led her across the room, to the magic-tainted shape on the bed. Kiar took a deep breath, made sure she wouldn’t start babbling gibberish, and forced herself to stare down into the taint. This time, it wasn’t as if the woman beneath the taint were being attacked by eidolons, not like Iriss. Instead, it was as if she was becoming an eidolon, like the magic was crawling inside her, being absorbed under her skin.
With a rush of horror, Kiar wondered if that was what she’d looked like when she had absorbed the eidolon attacking Iriss. She looked down at her hands, saw the taint that was always there, and repressed a whimper. Panic made the phantasmagory surge up, and she struggled to untangle herself from it before she lost control.
The woman on the bed started screaming, broken cries from a tortured throat. The eidolon within her reacted to Kiar, its essence swirling and moving towards her, and then away. She saw the endless smooth wall of her rising shield overlaid behind it and she pushed it away, frightened of being enclosed with the plague eidolon.
The sick woman and her plague eidolon sat upright, cowering against the wall, away from Kiar, still screaming. Ilsa rushed over to the bed, passing right through Kiar’s phantasmagory-expanded sense of self and tried to calm her mother, while the Elder said something, only words with no meaning. Ilsa was clean and untainted in the Logos-sight, with what looked like new patterns creating a fortification against the screams of the woman. There was something horrifying in the sound, a living madness that assaulted them all. But the Elder wasn’t sensitive enough to Mae’s nature to absorb the madness, and Ilsa had found a way of rejecting it, like white rejected light.
Kiar buried the phantasmagory deep inside and the woman’s screams stopped. Coincidence? The daughter stroked her mother’s hair, murmuring to her about nightmares. Kiar hesitated. She could see the Elder’s concern warring with tired cynicism, emphasized in his Logos. Then, under her hand, she shaped a tiny eidolon probe, a dart of rainbow frailty. She felt it against her palm, and no sooner did she feel its half-real substance did Mae begin whimpering and crying out.
Kiar banished the emanation and stumbled from the cottage, past Berrin, past the chicken yard, and crouched down in the dirt of the road. She reacted to the Blood magic. She felt it. It made no sense, it was impossible, but she displayed a sensitivity even users of Blood magic lacked.
She heard Berrin’s footsteps behind her. “Your Ladyship?”
“I need answers, Berrin. In the two weeks before the illness appeared, did the mother go to other farms? The village center? Did she meet anybody new? What does she do normally?’
Berrin hesitated and then said, “Yes, Your Ladyship.” His footsteps moved away.
Kiar longed to banish the Logos-sight and go back to being just prickly Kiar. But she’d barely started. There were more people to interview, more victims to meet. More nightmares to see. She could conclude nothing from just one. But she couldn’t let herself fall into phantasmagory while seeing through the Logos.
It was dangerous enough for her normally. But the Logos combined with the phantasmagory would leave her both blind and beyond anybody’s reach. She had to resist panicking, even though she was seeing impossible things, frightening things.
She looked at the chickens, their simple patterns and complex, distinctive traits. She murmured a description of the closest one, a white hen with a red splotch on her back. It was like her in only the most basic ways: a living, mobile thing that ate and slept. It was unable to control its reactions or choose what it feared. It was unable to have courage, only blind stupidity. She was Kiar, half servant, half princess, and she had to have courage.
Two sets of footsteps returned, Berrin and the uneven rhythm of the Elder. The Elder spoke. “Mae mostly stayed on the farm. She didn’t meet anyone new that Ilsa or I know about. She works on the weaving and takes care of the trees when it’s not silkworm season.”
“No changes in behavior? No new interests?
” She turned around to face the Elder.
He looked disturbed. “You one of those who thinks sickness is a punishment for misbehaving, Your Ladyship? I suppose it’s easy for castle-born to think that, but it just isn’t so. Maybe you have to be old to understand that.” He scratched his face.
Kiar shook her head. “Not a punishment, just a consequence. I’m sorry.” She turned and looked at the grove of mulberry trees. “I suppose I might as well look around in the stand first. Then I’ll want to see the others who are sick.”
“As you wish,” the Elder said.
Though the day was bright, the grove was cool and shadowed. The mulberry trees in the Royal Garden were small, pruned things, barely more than bushes, and widely spaced. These trees were large and old, with wide-spreading branches and long weeping twigs full of leaves. There were ladders lying here and there on the ground, and large wicker baskets were piled under trees, barely visible beneath the drapery of leaves.
The trees were evenly spaced here as well, she realized. They’d been planted by someone who had anticipated just how big they could get. Under one drapery of leaves, she saw some children’s toys, and she realized what a wonderful hiding place this would be. She stopped, pushed through the drape of leaves and then turned to look out, her back against the broad trunk. It was a little, living version of her phantasmagory world, and she could just barely see outside the strands of leaves. They rustled together pleasantly. There was an old rag doll and two rough clay cups nestled in the roots of the tree.
“Lady?” queried Berrin.
“Just looking,” she said, and pushed her way out of the hiding space again. She walked along the wide rows, concentrating on the Logos-vision, looking for any sign that someone with the family magic had been there recently.
And much to her surprise, that was what she saw.
First, she saw the markings along the ground, as if someone had a drawn a path that blotted out the real path beneath it. She swerved from her route and followed it, walking alongside it down the narrower way. Where she had found it, it was fading, but as she tracked it, the mark grew stronger. It was more like an eidolon than typical magic taint, a stable darkness interrupting the patterns of the Logos. Eventually, it led under the veil of a tree’s canopy.
Kiar stopped and tilted her head. “Do you hear that?” she asked the two men following her.
Elder Whitestaff listened. “Some animal den in the roots, perhaps.” The rustling behind the canopy stopped, and then a low, bestial moan emerged.
Kiar pushed some of the branches aside and peered in. “Lord of Winter,” she whispered.
To her human vision, the creature in the den among the mulberry roots was a monstrosity, a horned mastiff with a mane of spikes and three tails. To her Logos-vision, it was something new, something she only recognized from other wizards’ written descriptions: a sky fiend. Earth fiends were children of the Logos, just as animals were: infused with it, defined by it, controlled by it.
Sky fiends, she’d read, were not part of the Logos, but they affected it and were affected by it in turn. And they were capable of using it directly, just as wizards did, which made them a rare and frightening monster.
She saw the horned mastiff, and she saw the hole in the Logos that it occupied: not a blind spot as the eidolons were, but a place where the Logos curved around something else, embracing it. It looked at her with mad, red eyes and roared, pressing itself against the tree trunk and then falling on its side in a violent seizure. The Logos twitched and flowed, and Kiar could feel strands of power grasping at her. She muttered her own words of defense, rejecting the Logos strands, and started to back away.
Then she saw the iridescent shimmer of an eidolon around the torso of the sky fiend, and she froze. It was not a taint on the Logos, for there was no Logos there to taint. But she was just as familiar with the look of family magic in the normal world. Somehow, there was an eidolon inside this fiend.
The spray of pale color shifted and moved, and then swelled out from the thrashing creature’s side. The eidolon within emerged. It had a head and arms, and it moved like one of the King’s companions, almost like a person. It pulled itself free of the sky fiend, and slowly its color darkened to the color of shadow. Kiar stumbled backwards, reached for her own magic, and faltered, remembering the screams of the woman in the house. She didn’t know how the magic was related to the illness yet—
Berrin grabbed her around the waist and lifted her out of the way, pushing her towards Elder Whitestaff. Then he drew his sword. “Not one of yours, Your Ladyship?” He backed away as the shadow-colored eidolon emerged from the veil of leaves. The bellowing of the sky fiend faded away to a sobbing.
“N-no,” Kiar said. “If you can drive it away, please do! But I don’t know what it’s capable of. I don’t know if the sky fiend spawned it or if it was… an illness.” She wondered why she’d said that.
The shadow eidolon twitched and tilted its head, then sidled to one side. Berrin sliced his sword at it. “Feels kind of backwards. Usually it’s the other side cutting at ‘em, hey?” His blade penetrated the eidolon and slid through, and the eidolon stopped, wavering. Then it glided towards Berrin, extending an elongated arm that sprouted claws.
“Lady, we must flee and gather your other guards!” Elder Whitestaff tugged at her hand. She resisted and he released her, planting his feet. She shook her head.
“No, this is my responsibility; this is why I’m here. You go!” He stared at her and then began hobbling out of the grove.
Berrin slashed at the arm reaching for him, and the eidolon recoiled. Kiar ducked under the veil of leaves again and began to describe traits to the Logos, assigning them to the empty space in the Logos where the sky fiend was. It cried out and twisted, clawing at the mulberry tree with thick, heavy claws. The shimmering began around the sky fiend’s torso again.
Changing the Logos was a lot harder than just describing it, but describing it was where change started. Then she had to find the words to make the changes within her imagination, and if she couldn’t imagine it completely enough, it would fail. Kiar clenched her fists and let the Logos flow through her, taking her desires and tumbling out of her mouth faster than she could consciously shape the sounds. Mist was simple, mist was easy. It could fill the space, push the monster out. The eidolon magic blooming against the creature’s side was a problem and as she realized this, her speech faltered.
Then she lunged forward and pressed her hand against the writhing creature’s side. Her fingers sank into the eidolon, past a barrier of warmth and life, into something terrible and far away. She reached for the memory of what she’d done in Iriss’s room. It had been a terrifying accident then, but now she realized it was a discovery. She opened herself and pulled the burgeoning eidolon into herself, stuffing it into her own magic source.
Something inside her stretched painfully. She was choking, like she’d tried to swallow dry bread. There was a tearing sensation and then alien memories of a place without light opened up inside her head. The Logos-vision vanished. Darkness moved against her skin. There was screaming—
She opened her eyes. Her cheek was pressed against dirt; she lay flat on the ground. The sky fiend was still thrashing, half-banished. She was so tired.
She pushed herself to her knees and shook her head. Then she opened herself to the Logos again, not the gradual raising of the vision she preferred to practice, but a full embrace of the power.
Once again, she let herself become a channel for the Logos as she concentrated fully on her vision of mist, in that place right there, right now. The sounds tore themselves from her throat. The Logos around the sky fiend slammed into it, reclaiming the space it had occupied, forcing the entity back to the place that had spawned it, outside the world.
She fell onto her side again, rolled over, and stared up at the branches overhead. The leaves were still swaying, and a sunbeam flickered through the dissipating mist. She didn’t hear anything other than her own labored
breathing. Then the leaves rustled, and Berrin called, “Ladyship? Kiar?” He sounded healthy.
She said, “I’m alive,” and pushed herself to her feet. “Did you dissolve the eidolon?” She emerged from the veil of leaves.
Berrin said, “Yes. More like fighting a shadow than a real man, but it didn’t like being cut.”
“They don’t. Well, ours don’t. They take their reality from us and we don’t like being cut either.” She shrugged.
Berrin lifted a tail of leaves with his sword. “What happened to the other thing?”
Suddenly self-conscious, Kiar said, “I banished it. I don’t know how or why it was doing what it was doing, but sky fiends can be kicked out of the world, just like the books said.”
Berrin grinned. “Lady Wizard.” He bowed and sheathed his sword.
Kiar blushed. “Twist would have been much faster about it.”
He still grinned. “Of course. Here, you’ll want to brush that dirt off before the old man brings back the militia.” He pointed a knuckle at her face and side.
Her blush deepened as she rubbed at her face, and shook soil and dead leaves from her clothes. “I’m sorry I left you to fight the eidolon alone. I wanted to see if I could deal with what created it.” I don’t understand what sky fiends have to do with rogue eidolons and a screaming plague….
“Lady, I’m your guard. If you didn’t trust me to handle that kind of thing, I’d be ashamed of myself.” He pulled his grin back to a solemn expression.
“Well, thank you.” She walked out of the grove and looked up at the sky. “I really hope there aren’t any more of those around. More sick people to inspect is bad enough….”
Citadel of the Sky (Thrones of the Firstborn Book 1) Page 10