Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

  That was the first time he realized he hadn’t been seeing straight. The forest resolved into focus, but only for a moment. He had to concentrate to see.

  When he heard a crumple of leaves, he was sure he was hallucinating it. He turned just in time to see a devilish shape dart into the long shadows. A four-legged shadow ran after the first.

  Golden eyes met his stare unflinchingly. His breath caught in his throat. Wolves. They looked as thin and ragged as he felt, but no less menacing.

  The pestilence had made the world mad. He was being stalked. Wolves didn’t attack travelers outside of children’s tales. He never thought it could happen here, in civilized Italy.

  But the pestilence didn’t just strike humans. The dead sheep outside Sacro Cuore, and the dead dogs within, were testament to that. These animals had avoided the pestilence because they were smart enough not to eat plague carrion, but they must have been starving. And crazed.

  The thought gave him the energy to push away from the tree. His pulse lashed against his ears. He marched onward, half-turned backward.

  He managed to get a count of the wolves from the glimpses they allowed him. There were four of them. They skulked after him speedily and relentlessly, closer every minute. Their features faded into shadow as the night advanced, but he could still see their perked ears, their loping canine grace.

  He tried shouting, but the noise that came out of his throat was hoarse and not very frightening at all. He couldn’t keep walking backwards, not on ground this uneven, so he eventually had to take his eyes off them. He lost track of two of them.

  As much as he’d braced for it, the first attack took him entirely by surprise. A hard, sharp pain slammed into the small of his back. It shoved him to the ground face first. Teeth the size of coins sank through his habit.

  Niccoluccio hadn’t known he had any energy left until that moment. His elbow lashed back, caught the wolf under its chin. He felt more than heard its jaw snapping. The wolf jerked back and danced away, but didn’t go any farther than the nearest clump of trees.

  He struggled to his feet. Heat ran fluidly down his back. His pressed his hand to it and felt warm and sticky cloth.

  The other wolves watched him from just a few dozen feet away. Niccoluccio frantically looked about the trees, trying to decide if he had the strength to climb any of them. He didn’t, but it hardly mattered. The trees were crooked and spindly. He doubted he could find a branch high enough to support his weight even if he could get up.

  One of the wolves circled him. Another trotted in the opposite direction, trying to get behind him. They were treating him cautiously, with respect – but they weren’t wasting any more time. Agony crawled up his back; the pain of the bites had just only just started to arrive. Everything went dizzy. The horizon spun, and, for a long moment, he had to put all of his effort into staying upright.

  For twelve years, whenever Niccoluccio thought of his death, he’d been content believing that he would be buried at Sacro Cuore. His body would be laid to rest intact, following his Last Rites and final confession, ready to be Purged and enter Paradise. What would happen beyond that was beyond imagination, but he would be as prepared as any mortal, short of saints, could be.

  Vanity and self-deception. He had administered the Last Rites to as many brothers as he could, but it was plain now that he would die unshriven. When he died, there would be nothing left to bury. He’d been foolish to expect robbers. There were never going to be any robbers. Everyone had left the mortal world, and he was the only one still here.

  He fell onto his knees without ever having been pushed.

  It was too dark to see the next attack. It landed on the back of his neck. Niccoluccio instinctively jerked his head aside. Teeth sank into his shoulder. He cried out. All he could see of the wolf was its snout, bloody-lipped, and demonically snarled. Its eyes met his.

  Niccoluccio saw a shadow move just soon enough to bring his arm up. He managed to deflect the second wolf’s bite. It latched onto his wrist and wrenched him aside.

  He was yanked to the ground, and his face dashed into icy mud. For a moment, the world had turned upside down, and he clung to the ground for fear of falling into the sky.

  A wolf’s paw stood two inches from his open eye. Red and black blotches filled his vision. He was sure he saw blood splash across the dirt. Needle-sharp pain stabbed into the side of his neck. He felt, but not heard, hot breath against his ear.

  He couldn’t force himself up. The weight of the wolves had become the weight of the earth, burying him. All of his limbs felt asleep, distant. With what little control he had left, he forced himself to lie still. His fighting instincts amounted to little more than twitching anyway. He allowed the wolf gripping his wrist to tug him over, face up. There was no point in fighting; there never had been. This was the end to which his whole life had crescendoed.

  The truth about everything that had happened since he’d left Sacro Cuore came to him in an instant, a snap-spark of revelation so bright that it seared. He had died long ago, back in the monastery. He had tumbled through Purgatory, and hadn’t made it through. He didn’t deserve to. He never had, not since the day he’d run away from the man he’d been in Florence. Sacro Cuore had just been a distraction.

  He couldn’t deny it any longer. For the first time in his life, he didn’t have the energy.

  He’d spent so much time hiding his secrets from himself, but he couldn’t hide them from the Father. The air roared in his ears. The sky turned too white to look at. His arms were pinned open. He craned his head to expose his neck, ready for the final Judgment.

  10

  The Genoese fell to the pestilence like wheat to the harvest.

  From infrared observation, Habidah confirmed a sixty percent mortality rate so far, and that was even taking the flight to the countryside into account. Whole neighborhoods became mass graves.

  The plague’s grip on the city was diminishing, but it was far from gone. Habidah spent all of her waking hours walking among the survivors, rapt by what she saw. Collectively, among every social class, they’d gone from fear and flight to acceptance, even as the plague took its daily toll of hundreds. Now, even people who had the opportunity to leave Genoa chose not to. It was astounding what people, collectively, could put up with when they saw their neighbors doing the same.

  Nobody had moved into the abandoned houses on Habidah’s street, of course. They knew better. Nor were businesses and marketplaces reopening. But people were venturing outside of their homes to find out which of their family and neighbors had survived thus far. Habidah heard men and women ask each other on the street, in disbelief, “You are still alive?”

  Courts were in session. Habidah listened in on one case, a nephew and a stepbrother disputing the inheritance of a small house. The previous owner had left a will, but all five other beneficiaries had died. When the court reconvened the next day, neither claimant arrived. Habidah tracked them down. They’d perished overnight.

  The city restructured around the plague. Civil servants were replaced as soon as they died. For once, they didn’t come exclusively from the Genoese elite, who no longer had so many sons and nephews to spare. The city hired hundreds of new corpse carriers and gravediggers.

  The only men willing to take such obviously risky jobs came from the lower strata of society, rural Italians who couldn’t survive as mercenaries or brigands. They plied the streets at all times of day. They kept the corpses from piling on the streets or rotting under too-shallow graves. But they also ran rampant through the taverns and whorehouses, or robbed whoever they pleased.

  On her nightly walks, Habidah observed gangs of gravediggers breaking into homes. She’d nearly run to help when she’d seen three gravediggers pull knives on a lone father with three children. The gravediggers wouldn’t have stood a chance against her. Only the thought of Feliks held her back. The last thing she needed was for him to report her.

  The worst thing was that he wouldn’t do it out of
spite. He’d do it because he was concerned. He’d already decided she wasn’t suited for this.

  Maybe he was right.

  Genoa’s response to the plague made a marked contrast to her own. She buried what she could under a flood of antidepressants and electrocortical stimulation. She could only go so far with those before arousing Feliks’ concern.

  She was accustomed to working alone. She’d forgotten how much pressure came from just the fact of being watched. She was always on edge, always thinking about how she would be seen.

  She trudged back in the hours before dawn, taking care to keep clear of the carousing gravediggers. She hardly went to their house except to sleep. She’d been out for thirty-six hours.

  When she entered, Feliks was sitting up on his bed, staring at a map of the city projected on the opposite wall. The onierophage was making using his demiorganics uncomfortable. Several hot yellow blips stood out on each street. He said, “I think we’ve got enough eavesdropper coverage that you don’t need to be out there.”

  “We don’t rely on eavesdroppers. That’s why I go out.”

  “The first wave of plague deaths are just about over here. I know we don’t have the manpower to visit every Italian city, but I think it would be appropriate to spend some manpower surveying the rest of the peninsula.”

  “The plague’s cooling down, sure. But not the people. The state of the city is changing every day.”

  “I think I’ll be able to observe that from here, through the eavesdroppers.”

  Habidah sat heavily on her bed. “You?”

  “I know I’m not doing well, but I’m not dead yet.”

  “You really think you’re up to it?”

  “I’m trying to be diplomatic, Habidah. You need to get out of this city before you lose your mind. Get in the shuttle, go up there, clear your head.”

  “Medical leave, you mean.”

  “We all need breaks. You’ve been out there for ninety-five percent of your waking hours for a month. Frankly, I’m amazed you haven’t had a breakdown already.”

  “The last time we were on assignment together, I managed three months like this.”

  “That assignment was a biosurvey. People didn’t die every day. You weren’t getting to know families just in time for them to get annihilated. This is harder than anybody should have to watch. It’s been getting to you. I know.”

  Habidah shrugged. Her impulse to deny it was a foolish one, she knew. She couldn’t deny what her brain chemistry made plain as day. “I didn’t come here to be happy.”

  “You’re not going to be much good to anyone if you fall apart. Come back after you’ve taken a trip, gotten some new air in you.”

  “Sounds too fair,” Habidah said, only just keeping back what she really wanted to say.

  Feliks said, “I also know you’re chafing living with me.”

  “I am not,” Habidah said. She didn’t know why she was denying it.

  “You’re not going to offend me if you say it. I don’t want this assignment to end with us not on speaking terms. I know it’s not your fault, or my fault, if we can’t live together. So I’m asking you to please take a break. I’ll let you know if anything interesting happens here. Sound fair, too?”

  Habidah hated the way her voice sounded when she said, “Sure.”

  That evening, she stood in a clearing outside the city, waiting for the shuttle. A gust of freezing wind ruffled her wimple. She’d had to wait; the shuttle’s camouflage fields weren’t up to protecting it during the day. A shadow waved across the sky. Then the shuttle dropped the camouflage fields. It was right there, hovering and huge.

  This time, the shuttle waited until she was snug in her acceleration couch before gaining altitude. She soared along the Italian coast, putting distance between her and Genoa. She watched the map, and then turned to the cameras. It was too dark to see past the reflection of the cabin lights.

  She leaned into her cushions and let the engines’ vibration throb against her ears. All of the exhaustion she should have felt over the past few weeks was catching up with her all at once. It wasn’t just Feliks that she was running from. It was the whole damned plane. The plague here and the plague back home.

  But she still had too much work to treat this like a vacation, no matter what Feliks thought. She dimmed the lights in the cabin. Details emerged on the monitors. She was cruising above a churning, tumultuous sea of starlit black-and-grey clouds. The western sky was still twilight-blue. She wasn’t even sure she was still over land until she pinged one of the survey team’s positioning satellites. The shuttle was taking her south, not too far from Naples.

  When she was nearly upon Naples, she told the shuttle to descend under the overcast. Visual scanning showed a few firelights, tiny stars. Infrared unveiled a far richer tableau. Bright red blotches delineated sleeping bodies, hazy old smoke from fires burning to embers.

  None of her team had been to Naples, and none were scheduled to go, but she didn’t need to pull up satellite records to see that the plague had struck here, too. Infrared showed empty houses, whole abandoned streets, even the cooling bodies of the recently dead.

  There was worse yet. A pulse scan found neighborhoods reduced to burnt husks, littered with fresh dead. All had died at once. They’d been massacred. She knew immediately what had happened. Joao had watched and reported on many similar events. All over Europe, people blamed the plague on a conspiracy of Jews, and torched their neighborhoods.

  The Neapolitans had washed streets in a slurry of Jewish blood and ashes.

  She couldn’t tear her eyes away. She nearly directed the shuttle to land, though she didn’t know what she’d do. She couldn’t stay long. Maybe she could help a person or two. But Feliks would immediately know what she was doing.

  He had his principles. They felt like shackles around her hands.

  She ordered the shuttle to turn hard north.

  She wondered, not for the first time, what had become of the fisherman in Messina. He might have gotten out of the city in time, he might not. It had been worth taking a chance for. She never could have done even that much with Feliks looking over her.

  She closed her eyes and breathed into her hands. How long it had been since she’d cried? Her eyes were so dry they hurt. When she tried, she couldn’t make one tear.

  She thought she’d been prepared for this assignment. All of the others seemed to be doing better, at least when she saw them. Maybe it would be best if she went home. But the moment the thought occurred to her, she knew it wouldn’t help. She’d be going from one plague to another. Here, she might still send something useful back to the Unity.

  She carefully charted a path away from any cities. The world below was a dark, gray canvas. Tiny towns and farms and country houses and even brigand camps lay scattered across the countryside. Their inhabitants’ bodies glowed tinily. Radar landscaping found several buildings empty and abandoned. Chemical analysis handily told the difference between those abandoned long ago and those that held the recently dead. Habidah’s mind’s eye conjured images of children lying still in their parents’ arms, livestock fallen in piles.

  Several wealthy country refuges seemed untouched, with dozens of active or sleeping inhabitants. These manors might be worth a look. They were perfect case studies of healthy, isolated citizens coping with the loss and despair seizing the Unity. They’d left their friends and families, and often their fortunes, just to improve their odds of survival. Many in the Unity were trying the same. Joao and Kacienta had left families to come here.

  She soared past the constellation of refugees without stopping. She didn’t know what she was looking for. She wasn’t fit for this assignment, not in this state. She’d come here to accomplish, but all she’d done so far was bear witness. It would drive her mad if she couldn’t do more. So many survivors of this plague drove themselves frenetic. They spent their hours working to collect for their churches, caring for orphans, praying for help and for the souls of the depart
ed.

  Radar landscaping showed broad, rocky hills. Very few infrared sources dotted the horizon. A distant town – more of a cluster of houses – stood to the east, a few farmhouses around it, without any infrared sources at all, even livestock.

  The infrared specks grew farther between. She’d entered a heavily forested region. This far from the towns and cities, the wildlife stood out. She pulled up an infrared survey of the region taken months before the plague. Even accounting for the seasonal change, there were far fewer animals than there should have been. The plague had come in through the trade road, but it penetrated the forest rapidly.

  She spotted a skulk of foxes out much later than they should have been. They had quite a hunt ahead of them, judging from the paucity of infrared fuzz to indicate hares and other prey animals.

  One heat signature caught her attention. She reduced speed. There – one human shape caught in the midst of several red blurs. They were dog-shaped. Habidah’s eyes widened. They were wolves, attacking the person.

  She’d seen wolves and wolf-analogues on many other planes, but never attacking a human. Like the foxes, the pack must have been desperate. As she watched, the person toppled to the ground with one of the wolves latched on his neck.

  She forced herself to look away, and commanded the shuttle to accelerate. She didn’t want to see what would happen. Everything in that person’s story had already been written. It was only a matter of flipping the last page.

  There was no reason in the multiverse why the amalgamates couldn’t have given them a cure for this plague. If not now, then when they had learned all they could and were about to leave. Even Feliks wouldn’t object to that. There was a difference between detachment and callousness.

  Before she’d applied for this assignment, she’d seen detachment as a mark of professionalism – of craft. She couldn’t take charge of the natives’ destinies. It would have been vanity. Even the amalgamates, powerful and control-hungry as they were, didn’t force planes to mirror their values. She was far less impartial than they.