Across the Long Sea

by Sarah Remy

  THERE WERE KINGSMEN guarding Wilhaiim’s temple, two pairs on either side of the narrow door, the king’s red a bright spot in the smoke. Their cheeks were smeared with sweat and soot. They watched the sluggish trickle of ­people moving across the temple threshold, but evidenced no inclination to interfere in temple business, even when the priest standing defense in the door turned a grieving woman back, blocking her desperate bid for entrance with a long staff.

  The woman shrieked and pulled at her own hair, falling on her face on the street in supplication, but the tonsured brother held firm. The sparse foot traffic allowed through paid the woman no notice.

  “Leave it,” Russel ordered when Avani took a step in the crumpled woman’s direction. “You’ll only make it worse.” Russel snuffed her torch in a barrel of sand meant for the purpose.

  “Ai, but—­” The woman lay still at the priest’s feet, her long hair a tangle against his robes.

  “Stop.” Russel said, sharp. Her fingers were hard bands around Avani’s forearm. “Woman’s done her duty; she’ll only regret it more if you interfere.”

  “Duty?” Avani demanded. She glared at Russel until the soldier released her arm.

  “The theists bring the Worm-­touched here, to the infirmary.” Russel spoke into Avani’s ear, the silk of her mask tickling. “When they don’t hide them in a back room or cellar. It’s not out of hope, it’s royal decree.”

  She moved back, adjusted her halberd, touched her sword, made the neat, common warding gesture with her hand. “Ready, my lady? Best if we find your friend quick and get out before we’re numbered among the sick for breathing infected air.”

  Avani nodded, gathering courage. She knew sickbeds, had grown up helping her mother ease the suffering of both the dying and the temporarily infirm. She prided herself on a calm head and steady hands in the worst of conditions, but she knew by the state of the quiet streets and the wrinkle of Russel’s brow that she’d never before faced anything quite so terrible as the Red Worm.

  Neither the tonsured brother nor the kingsmen prevented Russel from stepping over the distraught woman and shoving into the temple. The priest studied Avani with unfeigned interest, but seemed unimpressed by her uniform of vocent black. The man stepped sideways, allowing Avani to pass around both his staff and the still form at his feet.

  She couldn’t help herself. She bent briefly on the threshold, brushing fingers across the woman’s head, murmuring a quick blessing. She hadn’t meant to add the small prayer for courage, but it fell across her tongue of its own accord, turning the haze briefly warmer. The grieving woman sighed and moaned. The priest made a harsh sound of surprise or disapproval.

  Avani ignored him. She rose and followed Russel’s rigid back into the temple.

  “Goddess,” she swore, blinking rapidly as her eyes tried to adjust to darkness and muted candlelight. She inhaled shallowly through her mask, expecting the fugue of sickness and sweat and too many bodies in a small space. Inside the temple, the air was oddly smoke-­free.

  “The priests don’t burn incense in the infirmary,” Russel said, correctly interpreting Avani’s involuntary glance ceiling-­ward. “They claim it muddles the Masterhealer’s nose. On clear nights, like tonight, they open the temple louvers. Air’s not exactly fresh, but you won’t be breathing ash. Watch where you step, now. Floor’s not exactly fresh, either.”

  The temple floor, which Avani remembered as cold stone, was strewn with a thick layer of dried straw and sweet flag, either to provide insulation or sop up fluids. The sick lay in regimented rows right atop the rushes, most without blanket or bedding to provide comfort. They lay in their clothes, or naked, or in a stage somewhere in between, and the flickering candlelight from the great candelabra hung suspended above made their young faces pale and ghastly.

  Russel tapped Avani’s elbow, rousing her from the paralysis of dismay.

  “You’re not here to save them,” the other woman cautioned. “Won’t do anyone any good if you get involved. Look away and leave them some dignity. Can’t say they much notice, anyway. The brothers see to that.”

  Someone had swept a narrow path down the temple axis, and again from left to right, dividing the infirmary into four small sick rooms. Avani counted heads as she followed Russel toward the altar, and then had to start her count over again, fuddled by disbelief.

  “So many,” she breathed.

  Russel glanced over her shoulder. A reflection of candle flame leapt in her irises.

  “Once here they’re usually in no state to last long. Otherwise the priests would long ago have run out of room. As it is I think most of the brothers are busy with burying a rapidly growing pile of small corpses.”

  Avani shuddered.

  The temple altar was much as she recalled, a wide rectangular table shrouded in red fabric. The trappings of worship were gone, replaced instead by the necessities of the sickroom. Avani took quick inventory of cloth for bandages and flannel for bathing; and sweating pitchers of cool, fresh water; and thinned alcohol and witch hazel in shallow bowls for purification; and on ceramic plates, slabs of tallow and lye soap.

  The priest presiding over the altar looked up at their approach. His hands were busy with rolling bandages, his face aged by lack of sleep and the bruises of sorrow, maskless. He nodded at Russel with weary familiarity, then looked at Avani with unconcealed interest.

  “The wagging tongues spoke true,” he said, brows arching over yellow eyes. “Come to lend a hand, have you?”

  “We’ve come on His Majesty’s orders, looking for a friend.”

  The priest’s stare wandered from the altar to the spread of still forms on the temple floor. “We stopped recording names days ago, but mayhap if you’ve a description . . .” He trailed off, shoulders lifting beneath his robes.

  “Our friend is an adult,” Russel said, gruff. “One of the volunteers. An island man called Deval.”

  “I know him.” The priest nodded. “This time of night, you’ll find Deval downstairs, in the library. He’s a good man. Insists he’s got far greater apothecary skills than the rest of us, and who’s to argue?”

  “The Masterhealer?” Russel suggested, scowling.

  The priest smiled, and not with humor.

  “You’ll find the library stairs just there,” he said, nodding toward the rear of the temple. “I’d show you down, but I’m afraid we’re short of hands and I’ve patients to attend.”

  “Thank you,” Avani replied, then had to hurry to keep pace with Russel.

  “You don’t like this place,” she ventured. Russel’s spine was stiff, her hand set firmly on the pommel of her knife. The woman looked stern and impressive in her red-­and-­black livery, the king’s badge on her breast, but she swallowed often and convulsively, and breathed shallowly through her mask. “Are you afraid of the Worm?”

  “Nay,” Russel snapped without looking around. “The plague season doesn’t frighten me, though it’s true I’d rather die on the point of a blade. It’s the children, laid out and helpless as dolls, just waiting for the next trip to the corpse fires.”

  “They’re not lost yet.” But Avani couldn’t quite quell a shiver.

  “Might as well be.” The threshold between temple and stairway was arched above and below, an oval set into the northmost wall. Repeating sigils decorated the lintel. The etchings were cold and dark, but Avani could feel the magic simmering just beneath the surface of the stone. “The brothers dose them to make them sleep, you know.”

  Avani looked away from the lintel and down at the pitifully still forms decorating the rushes. She’d been trying very hard to steel herself against shock and horror, to react as healer and not parent, but the lad closest to her foot was as fair and blond as her Liam, and favored with a similar sharp chin. Pustules disfigured his brow and cheeks, leaking pink fluid. Avani could hear the death rattle in his lungs.

 
; She turned quickly away. Russel grunted knowingly.

  “The sleep is so they don’t suffer,” Avani diagnosed. “Some infusion of belladonna or thorn-­berry, by the color of their lips. Tricky, ai, but not uncommon in the sickroom.”

  “Mayhap. But once they bed on the temple floor, my lady, they’re not like to wake again.” When Russel crossed the threshold, the staircase slowly grew bright; a diffuse mage-­light issued from the hewn steps, illuminating the steep descent. Avani paused long enough to commit to memory the shape of the newly glowing sigil on the lintel, then hurried after.

  “Surely you don’t believe the theists are helping the afflicted into the Goddess’s arms?” she demanded of Russel’s stubborn shoulders.

  Russel’s dismissal was muffled by dusty tapestries hung in intervals along the staircase. “But what are they doing, other than wrapping blisters and dosing sleep? Clogging the streets of the city with their infernal smoke?”

  The mage-­light shone on a plain wooden door at the foot of the staircase. Russel knocked twice, tried the latch, and pushed the door open.

  She wheeled in the doorway, crossed her arms over her chest, and awarded Avani a narrow stare.

  “What I think, is, the theists are over their heads, aye? Wilhaiim’s without its vocent, and the temple’s helpless against the Worm, and the tonsured brothers are easing the death blow”—­Russel mimed a short, forward strike, bumping her knuckles against Avani’s side—­“but there’s no one left in this city knows how to rally a defense.”

  “Mal’s no healer,” Avani retorted. She ducked past the soldier. “His office is death, and the making and unraveling of it.”

  “Life and death. Two sides of a coin!” Russel argued, striding after. “His Majesty said you were stubborn, my lady, and I respect that. No one wants to be second choice in a bad spot, but never did I believe you’d a heart of stone, walking unaffected through the temple as you did, else I never would have agreed to smuggle you in through the Maiden gate under the theists’ very noses—­” she broke off, strangling on a sound somewhere between a gasp and a moan.

  Avani had expected a modest space beneath the temple footprint, a cellar or small catacombs turned study. Instead she looked upon a cavern wider by far than the building above, hollowed from the earth by the steady drip of time and the stubborn work of mortal hands. The walls shed an unnatural amber light, far warmer to look upon than any mage-­light she’d yet encountered, gentler on the scholar’s eye.

  It was a proper library, as neatly organized as the king’s own, tomes arranged in glass-­fronted bookcases, scrolls rolled and tied and shelved with equal care. The cases ran front to back and side to side in ordered rows not unlike the precise arrangement of dying children above, evidence of a scrupulous mind. The air was uncommonly dry, cold as Mal’s laboratory.

  Avani knew with an uneasy certainty that she stood amongst an unmatched collection of long-­collected lore.

  “Goddess take me.” She puffed a breath in disbelief, and not a single mote of dust stirred in response. “That so many books even exist in the world.” She wanted to touch every single volume, unroll each scroll and spend untold hours devouring previously unlooked for knowledge.

  Russel made another strangled sound and Avani struggled past awe, recollecting herself with effort. The other woman was frozen in a half-­bow, one knee on the carpeted floor, one hand fisted against her throat. It was not quite the deep obeisance one presented royalty, but it was very close.

  Russel’s mouth worked beneath her mask. The robed man standing over her clicked his tongue against his teeth in dismay or exasperation.

  “Stand, soldier,” he said. “And move away. You’re blocking the door.”

  He’d obviously been on his way out as they’d come spilling into the library, and Avani too overwhelmed to take note. The long sleeves of his brown robes were folded around his hands as if for warmth, his cheeks pink over a gray-­shot beard. The mage-­light gave his yellow eyes a golden sheen.

  Russel rose as abruptly as if she’d been kicked.

  “Masterhealer,” she managed. “I didn’t see you there.”

  “I gathered that.” The theist turned his lambent stare on Avani. Avani realized she knew him, recalled his face from blurred memories of Mal’s sickroom.

  “My lady,” he said, and Avani knew he remembered her as well. “I trust you’re well?”

  “Aye.” And because Russel appeared too rigid to manage fresh speech, Avani mustered a smile. “We’ve come seeking a friend.”

  “Deval.” He nodded. “You’ll find him halfway past the reading bench, near the bones. He’s been expecting you, I believe. If you’ll excuse me?”

  The Masterhealer stepped around Russel, the hem of his robes whispering across carpet. Russel flinched as he passed, then jerked again when he closed the door between them. She looked green as if she once again stood in the Maiden’s foul flow.

  “There’s my commission gone,” she said, hoarse. Then she shook her head, curls bouncing into disarray. “His Majesty will have me sent down for stupidity and a wagging tongue.”

  Avani looked thoughtfully at the closed door. “He didn’t appear much distempered.”

  “He’s a face like a still pool, depths unplumbed. Believe you me, he’ll be on his way to king’s audience now.” Russel’s jaw bunched. “Naught to do about it. Come on. Let’s find your friend.”

  They walked together amongst the books with quiet reverence. The cases were taller than Avani, reaching nearly to the top of Russel’s head. The glass gleamed, well polished. Avani noted the keyholes on each cabinet, and the sigils carved into the face of each shelf. The temple’s collection of knowledge was guarded as fiercely as any treasure.

  The reading bench was in fact a table; old, scarred, and ink stained. A straight pier of wood made of many joined, mismatched tables. Avani and Russel followed it through to the center of the library, stepping around chairs as varied and battered as the bench pieces.

  Deval had chosen the most comfortable of seats, an overstuffed straight-­backed stool softened with two flat pillows. He sat cross-­legged on the stool, elbows on the bench, stylus clutched in one hand, books and scrolls scattered across the surface of the bench.

  “The bones,” Russel murmured. She tipped her head, pointing her chin at the ceiling, but Avani had already seen them, entire skeletons of every size and species hung like macabre puppets on silver wire from the ceiling, turning the library’s domed apex into a ghoulish theater. Avani identified the tiny fruit bat, floating on miniature ivory bone wings, and the fanged cheval, the wolf and the lamb, the snake and the pheasant and the crowned stag, his bleached hooves a hand’s breadth from striking the surface of the bench.

  There were human skeletons, as well. Three men and two women and an infant with mal-­formed limbs. A boar’s skeleton with dark pinions attached, a two-­headed snake, and a child-­sized humanoid, finger bones stretched too long, fangs gleaming in a narrow jaw.

  “Barrowman,” Avani said, and Deval looked up.

  “Avani,” he said, lined browned face registering surprise and pleasure. He set the stylus on the bench and rose, ducking his head to avoid dangling tarsal bones. He smiled, and held his arms wide in welcome.

  Avani took the last few steps without conscious decision, and threw herself into Deval’s warm embrace. He clasped her firmly, and she buried her nose in his shoulder, snuffling the welcome perfume of sandalwood and spice and enamel paint and ink. Deval patted her back, rumbling low in his throat, and pretended not to notice the tears she wiped on his salwar.

  “I expected you after sunup,” he said into her hair. “Or I would have come upstairs to meet you.”

  “And spare us this Fair of books and bones?” Russel said, dry. “This sepulcher of study?”

  “Yes.” Deval set Avani gently aside, tapped a knuckle to his nose. “Sit, sit.
Take off your masks, they’re of no use here. Don’t upset the inkpot, that’s dearly bought.”

  “Indigo,” Avani agreed, glancing at the ink on the tip of Deval’s abandoned stylus. “Very dearly bought.” She tugged the mask from her mouth, breathing out a huff of relief at the brush of cool air across her lips. She chose a ladder-­back chair and settled with relief, then drew the nearest book close, curious.

  Russel yanked her own mask away, then stood at attention beneath a bony, dangling otter form.

  “We’ve not much time,” the soldier warned. “Especially now I’ve run my mouth. Have you got the king’s herbs, my lord?”

  “Certainly.” Deval dug beneath his salwar, then set a small leather pouch on the table. “Spices for his morning ale, and for his bedsat wine, to help him sleep and ease the rheumatoids.”

  “That’s done, then. Speak the rest quickly.”

  Avani felt the vibration of Russel’s unease all the way across the floor, a gray cast to the woman’s usually pleasant features.

  “Note-­taking?” Avani tapped a finger on the book she’d gathered, then again on parchment decorated with Deval’s flowing, familiar letterwork. She opened the book, scanned parchment gone yellow with age, found the print strange and impossible to read. “What language is this? Not the royal lingua.”

  “Coastal shorthand.” Deval folded himself back onto his cushioned stool. “Very old and mostly forgotten, but for chart work or trade inventory. I learned some of it as a young boy, working the village pier. Enough to pick through a few of the oldest journals, though it’s slow work.”

  “Not here to nurse away the Worm, then,” Avani guessed. “Or at least not entirely.”

  Deval bowed his head. He scrubbed his palms over his shorn skull. Avani saw weariness in the slump of his shoulders, and in the bruised flesh beneath his eyes.

  “Have you lost your jhi?” he asked, suddenly stern. “Has your household blessing flown away, after all this time? And you, dressed in the black of flatland wizards?”