The Thran

by J. Robert King

  The patient—he was clearly that in his powerstone-driven wheeled chair—was wan and haggard. His eyes and cheeks were sunken, his shoulders slumped. He looked up toward the two arrivals. His eyes settled first on Rebbec and then shifted to Yawgmoth.

  “You must be Yawgmoth. I am Glacian, the genius husband dying of a wasting disease.”

  Into the awkward silence, Yawgmoth said, “Not any longer.” He slung the pack from his back and strode confidently toward the man in the chair. Yawgmoth shucked his travel cloak on the floor, set his pack on the bed, and flung back the flap. Dust settled onto the spread. He poured water from a pitcher into a basin and washed his hands to the elbows, then turning to his pack, he gingerly pulled forth a small knife, a set of tweezers, and several stoppered vials. “No more muggery. We’re going to discover the cause of your illness. We’re going to heal you.”

  Glacian cast a long-suffering look at Rebbec, and he gave a raspy sigh. “You have to understand, you are no savior, Yawgmoth. We are done with real healers. They have exhausted their techniques, and now in desperation we turn to you. We aren’t setting aside witchery. We are summoning it.” Glacian fixed the large man with a level stare. “Your so-called methods are only too well known to us. I was among the elders who voted for your original banishment. If it were up to me, you would still be stuck in far Jamuraa, poking sticks up the backsides of syphilitic mules. But my wife fears for me, and the council and city are terrified to do without me, as I am the only one who truly understands the machinery beneath this city. They are willing to try anything. And you, Yawgmoth—you just barely qualify as anything.”

  The men’s eyes met. Hatred leapt like sparks between them.

  Glacian continued. “You got one thing right, though. I am dying of a wasting illness. I am resigned to it. Only in that resignation do I let you poke and scrape. You cannot make me worse than death itself will shortly.”

  Breaking eye contact, Yawgmoth laughed lightly. “You wouldn’t say that if you were a syphilitic mule.”

  Glacian joined the man in laughter. The sound set Rebbec to breathing again. She had not caught a breath since entering the room.

  Her husband coughed raggedly and then said, “Even if I were a syphilitic mule, I would still say it.”

  “Well then,” Yawgmoth said, “it is up to me to convince you otherwise. You, and the whole city.” He crouched beside the chair. “Now, travel talk says there are lesions. Let’s have a look.”

  Glacian’s eyes flared. “Travel talk?”

  “The whole empire is worried,” Yawgmoth soothed. These words balmed the man’s ego, and the fury in his eyes dimmed. Yawgmoth said, “In fact, you are not the only one suffering from this condition. In some of the city-states, it is becoming endemic, if not epidemic. Many of the poor have been infected. Your own Caves of the Damned are said to be rife with it. Even a few of the elite suffer from it. But, of course, you are the first national treasure to have the disease. Now, let’s have a look.”

  “The worst spot is on his back,” Rebbec said, hurrying to her husband’s side and drawing the dressing gown back from the man’s shoulder.

  “Can you lean over?”

  “I lean over for no man,” growled Glacian. “As soon you will discover.”

  “Then it’s the bed,” Yawgmoth said. Glacian was suddenly in his arms. Yawgmoth’s movements were so quick and assured there was no time for objection. He conveyed his patient onto his belly on the bed and drew the robe summarily back from the man’s body.

  Glacian lay there, small and panting. His ribs showed through flesh the color of mushrooms. The skin was covered with a large mass of suppurating lesions. A hundred dark smudges schooled across one scapula. A white substance oozed from the spots. Each lesion showed a dark tail that sank away into muscle.

  “When did these first appear?”

  “Just after the attack,” Rebbec said. “They came one by one. The healers only made the spots worse. There are also sections on his belly and his left buttock.”

  “Ah,” Glacian snipped, “he’ll want to be seeing that.”

  “No,” Yawgmoth said. “Not today. Today, what I want to see is this.” He took the small knife he had brought from the pack and lightly scraped some of the filmy liquid from the lesions. Careful not to touch the substance himself, he wiped the stuff from the knife onto the lip of an unstoppered vial. He fastened the lid. “This fluid will tell me much about the source of this ailment. It is lymph, one of the body’s defenses against illness. Its composition will tell me what sort of disease your body fights.”

  “Shall I spit and piss in your jars, too?” mocked Glacian.

  “Soon enough,” Yawgmoth replied smoothly. “First—” With a pair of tweezers, he lay hold of the end of one oily hair that protruded from a lesion. Tugging back and forth on the hair, he slowly cracked the skin around it. Glacian twitched with each pull, and his hands clutched the bed. Persistently, Yawgmoth worked the hair until it pulled free, trailing a tattered section of flesh. He gingerly deposited it in another vial. “This is a follicle, a specialized tissue. The effect of the illness on it will tell me much about the disease’s means of spreading.”

  “Why don’t you just carve up my back?” Glacian protested.

  “Yes, why not?” Yawgmoth replied. The tip of his knife sliced into the healthy skin just beyond one large lesion. With a slow precision that might have seemed relishing, Yawgmoth insinuated the blade beneath the lesion, cutting deeply enough to take the tail of the infection along with the main body. Glacian’s knuckles grew white on the bed. Yawgmoth finished the cut and drew the disk of skin up in a pair of tweezers. Dark blood welled up in the hole he had made. “And this—this is the ailment in microcosm. This will tell me how it develops.” He deposited the bloody item in a third vial. Gore began to run from the cut, and Yawgmoth absently dropped a piece of bleached wool on the spot.

  “I’ll say this for your methods,” Glacian said. “You understand how to inflict pain.”

  Yawgmoth smiled his dazzling smile. “I have ways of preventing pain—opiates and the like—but I don’t imagine you go in for that sort of witchery.”

  “Next time I will,” Glacian said. “Next time I will.”

  Yawgmoth nodded, stowing the vials in his tattered backpack. “In the meantime, Rebbec, you must avoid touching any infected sites, the lymph or blood from your husband, even what appears to be healthy skin. We do not yet know how this disease spreads, person to person, and you are at grave risk of becoming infected yourself.”

  Rebbec objected, “But for over a year now, I have touched him.”

  “You must cease,” Yawgmoth replied sternly. “No skin-to-skin contact, no fond caresses of hair, no kisses or hand holding or embraces unless a clean linen separates you.”

  “You’ve been here only moments, and you’re trying to wrap me in cerements!” Glacian said.

  Yawgmoth quickly covered the man in a blanket and deposited him in the chair.

  “I’m trying to keep your wife out of cerements. I’ll be giving the same instruction to the healers who tend you.” He closed his backpack and lifted it and his cloak. “Now, I need a bath and a rest and someplace to work over the samples.”

  Rebbec crouched beside her husband’s chair. Her hands nervously shied from the man’s skin and clothes.

  Distractedly, she said, “I’ve arranged apartments nearby—a short walk—so you can easily reach my husband at any hour. There is a workspace—tables, cabinets, ample light, a splendid view—”

  “Another of your designs?” Yawgmoth teased. When Rebbec nodded, he laughed. “ ‘Stick with me,’ you said, ‘and the city will be yours.’ ” He took her arm and drew her up, away from her husband. “I’m sticking with you.”

  Yawgmoth sat up in bed, sheets draping him. He’d spent months in this apartment. It was beginning to feel like home.

 
Morning sunlight streamed through eastern skylights. In the high windows above the western wall, the upper city floated in golden panorama. This was typical of Rebbec’s designs. Her architecture always drew the eye upward and the feet afterward. Entryways lay in the east, the place of origins, and on the lowest level. By rising through a gentle turn, the entrant came to see a spectacular view of the west, the place of destinies. Council Hall, amphitheater, palaces, temples—the skyline of the eighth terrace presented a visual feast. By way of gentle stairs, the viewer rose toward that vision.

  The Architecture of Ascension, Rebbec called it, transforming all who entered.

  The bed was another entranceway, admitting a person from the land of dream. Yawgmoth had just arrived from such a place. He had been visiting Rebbec there. His dreaming eye had seen her approach, bearing a perfect world in her arms. Except it hadn’t been a perfect world, but her disease-ridden husband.

  “Phthisis,” Yawgmoth yawned.

  Glacian suffered from phthisis—progressive degeneration. Magic only exacerbated it. Removing the powerstone from Glacian’s wheeled chair had allowed the lesions on his back to clear up. Other advances came more slowly. Yawgmoth had found plenty of microbial organisms—“little beasties” was the name he used—in the various samples harvested from his patient, but all were secondary infections. The primary microbes were elusive. Yawgmoth began to wonder if the creature he sought bridged the worlds of flesh and magic—affecting both but residing in neither.

  “I just may find out today.”

  In search of answers, he was bound for the filthiest, darkest place in Halcyon—the Caves of the Damned. This warren of caverns below the mana rig was home to the criminal outcasts of Halcyon—the Untouchables. They were rife with phthisis. Surely Glacian had been infected by the man who stabbed him. Find that man, and he would find the source of the disease.

  The Caves of the Damned had once been a penal colony, where the city shipped all its incorrigibles. Thieves and murderers were sent down into brimstone darkness. There they were to farm mushrooms and catch blind-eyed fish and carve obsidian. There they were to learn communal cooperation or die. Some learned too well. They banded together, overthrew their counselors and facilitators, and took over the caves. Every attempt Halcyon made to force a surrender resulted in dead negotiators. War was declared. The Halcyte guard marched down to reclaim the caves. The prisoners fought viciously in their own element. At last, the city relented. It sealed off all but one entry into the caves and posted a garrison there to prevent upward incursions.

  Though the city had lost control of its penal colony, it had not lost a repository for its human refuse. Every day, chained parades of prisoners trooped down into the darkness. Their crimes were serious enough to result in the renunciation of their citizenship. Citizens of Halcyon were allowed to descend into the caves to visit relatives, to minister to the ill, to do whatever they dared beyond the reach of law and reason. One’s weapons were identified, and the citizen could not emerge unless all weapons came back with him. Some citizens even drifted down there to remain—lunatics and indigents, laggards, disaffected youths, perverts, brawlers, and any number of others who found life in heaven more hellish than life in hell.

  As Rebbec had once said, Halcyon was a place of ascension, and some people preferred to descend.

  Today, Yawgmoth was one of those folk. He donned his old travel robes. The leather was cleaned and mended, at Rebbec’s insistence. Even when tattered, they had been proof against daggers in the back. The metal plates and ring mail sewn into the lining made that sure. These were robes that had guarded him against attacks of orcs and lizard men. Surely they would ward off the diseased. Into one interior pocket, he tucked metal flasks and a set of scalpels. Into another, he slipped three powerstone lanterns. Two long coils of rope lay in bags by the door. About his waist, Yawgmoth strapped a wide belt with daggers, darts, and a pair of swords, all dipped in poison.

  Yawgmoth felt at home in the company of the damned.

  * * *

  —

  “There is nothing we can do for you once you descend!” shouted the guard captain from the embankment above the Caves of the Damned.

  “There was never anything you could do for me,” Yawgmoth called back over his shoulder.

  He stood above a stone shaft that descended into utter darkness. The space seemed a mucousy larynx—Yawgmoth had cut one open once—and a chill breath came up from the black heart of the world. The thousands of others who had descended here had etched a switchback path along one slanting wall.

  Yawgmoth had no patience to descend as others. He stooped to check the cable he had knotted to the stone column and then flung the vast coil out into the unlit space beneath him. Rope unwound. The loop disappeared down the giant stone throat. It yanked tight and slapped the wall. Wrapping the rope once about him, Yawgmoth stowed his lantern on his belt. He donned steel-palmed gloves, clutched one hand on the rope above, and clamped the other on the strands below.

  “They’ll find out you’ve no kin there. They’ll strip your weapons and kill you and eat you,” the captain insisted. “Cannibals. Madmen. Monsters!”

  “Madmen, monsters, and me!” Yawgmoth declared.

  He flung himself out into empty air. He hung there a moment and then plummeted. Cord whirred through his hands. The lantern flickered. Its gold light cast a ring across the cave walls. Yawgmoth tightened his grip. The rope snapped taut. Yawgmoth extended his legs, seeing his own shadow loom up across the wall. His feet struck stone. He pushed off again and released the whirring line. Rippling walls slid upward past him. He plunged.

  The cave air grew colder and wetter as he descended. Blackness above and blackness below. Yawgmoth inhabited a slim ring of light. Each time his feet struck stone, the lantern flickered—a loose powerstone—and threatened to go out. It was the sort of claustrophobic moment that would unhinge the minds of most men and women, but Yawgmoth needed neither light nor solid ground to be at home. He needed only himself.

  One bound brought him down beside a ledge. His circle of light revealed a pile of bones—the remains of travelers who had slipped from the path and landed in broken heaps. The fall had killed them, and something had eaten them—cave crickets, roaches, mice—perhaps the damned themselves.

  Down farther, Yawgmoth passed a rag-garbed woman making the ascent. She cowered in the shadow of a stalagmite. If she had a light with her, it was hidden beneath her shabby clothes. Yawgmoth’s swift approach must have been terrifying to her. He looked directly into her eyes and flashed her his glittering smile. Her look of fear deepened. Yawgmoth brought his boots thudding to ground beside her hiding place. He locked his gaze with hers. Then he pushed off and plunged farther.

  The woman clambered from hiding, ignited her own light—a crude thing of oil and wick—and scrambled up the treacherous trail.

  Yawgmoth continued down. For a time, there was only the whir of line through steel-palmed gloves, the rhythm of boots striking stone. The first rope had been a thousand feet long, with knots along its last fifty feet. He reached those knots now and stopped to tie off the five hundred foot length he carried at his waist. It bore him down past more of the same until the knots in its end struck his hands.

  He pulled up short, dangling in midair beneath an overhang. He fetched the lantern from his waist and held it out. The shaft descended straight away into murk—but in that murk, figures moved.

  They were human or once had been. Perpetual darkness had given their skin an otherworldly pallor. Their eyes were wide and black in their faces. Frown lines creased their mouths. Blade scars creased cheeks and jaws. Filthy clothes draped gaunt frames. The larger males wore the thickest, cleanest, and newest garments.

  A giant of a man stood at the center of the crowd. He was taller than Yawgmoth and double his weight. Garbed in warm wool and provisioned with weapons, he was a man of considerable influence—and a
bility.

  “You better start climbing back up, spider!” the man growled. “No guards here.”

  Dangling above, Yawgmoth said. “I am not a guard. I’m a healer.”

  Angry laughter rattled among the damned. The giant said, “A man who heals with swords?”

  “A healer who knows blades both small and large,” Yawgmoth replied.

  “Why would a healer come here?” asked the giant, circumspectly motioning some of his folk to climb to the ledge above Yawgmoth.

  “I seek a man, a man with a deadly disease—a disease that is ravaging your people,” Yawgmoth said.

  Craven figures made their way up the path.

  The giant hissed. “My people? My people? Since when do you parasites care about my people?”

  Yawgmoth saw no reason to lie. “Since the artificer Glacian has become infected with the plague. I want to find the man who stabbed him—if that man still lives. It was in the last raid on the mana rig, a little over a year ago. A prisoner stabbed a white-haired man who stood in the charging chamber. I want to find that prisoner. I want to study the disease that is killing him and Glacian—and many others here, as well. If I can map the stages of the degeneration, if I can discover the factors leading—”

  His words were cut short, along with the rope that held him aloft. Yawgmoth plunged thirty feet toward the cave floor.

  Prisoners scattered below him. Only the giant remained.

  Yawgmoth dropped to ground and rolled. He came up standing, a pair of blades flashing out. They struck the giant’s own blades, already converging to take off his head. He flung back the steel and ducked under and away.

  The giant man lunged after him.

  Yawgmoth was too quick. He spun. His swords cracked against the prisoner’s metal and cut a shallow trough in his side.