Saint Ardo's Fire

By the end of the week, there were forty of them.

By the end of the second week, there were over two hundred, and the deacons had given the sickness a name.

They called it Saint Ardo's Fire, after a saint of the early Chantry who had been burned alive for heresy and was said to have screamed that he could see the Flame dancing in his own flesh. It was a fitting name. Teo could not deny that. The people who caught it burned... or believed they did. It began in the hands and feet, a tingling and a crawling, as if ants were marching under the skin. Then came the burning, a terrible, endless heat that no cold water could soothe. Then the fingers and toes went cold and purple, then black. And in the worst cases, they dried up and withered and simply... fell off, like the dead twigs of a tree.

That was one kind.

The other kind was worse.

The other kind twitched. It started small... a jerking hand, a fluttering eyelid... and then it spread, until whole limbs were seized by violent, writhing spasms that threw people to the ground and twisted their bodies into shapes that bodies were not meant to make. Some of them screamed. Some of them laughed. Many of them saw things... flames on the walls, faces in the snow, monsters crawling out of the river, the dead walking in the streets. They ran out of their houses in the middle of the night, half naked, and danced in the frozen alleys of the Sump, jerking and spinning and howling at things no one else could see, until they collapsed.

The Sump had a name for that, too. It called it the dance.

Teo carried his first dancer to the pyre-yard on the ninth day. She was a girl of fifteen who had run out onto the ice of the Calder in the night, dancing, and gone through. He carried six more the next week. Then eleven. The burning did not always kill... many of the burned simply lost their fingers or their toes, or sometimes whole feet, and lived on, crippled... but the dance killed often enough, especially in the old and the very young, and the cold killed the rest.

He counted them. Of course he counted them.

And this time, the count made no sense.

That was what frightened him most. With the flux, the dead had gathered in one place, around one well, and once he had seen the shape of it, the shape had told him where to look. But Saint Ardo's Fire had no shape. Teo drew another map on the wall of Hesk's cellar, beside the old one, and put a mark for every case Mira could find in the Mercy House ledger, and when he stood back, the marks were everywhere. Tallow Row. The Rope Walk. The Old Bridge. The tanneries. Even a scattering of cases in the poorer streets of the Shelf, where clerks and servants lived.

There was no centre. No well. No spider in the middle of its web.

"Then it isn't the water," Hesk said, when Teo told him.

"No."

"Then what is it?"

"I don't know."

"Good," Hesk said. "Then we start there."

Teo very nearly threw the chalk at him.

But the old man was right, as he always was, and so they started there. Mira brought them everything she could find. Not just the names in the ledger — but the gossip of the Mercy House cots, the things the sick said in their fever, the things their families whispered when they brought them in. Teo walked every street of the Sump with his cart and asked questions of anyone who would talk to a cart-man, which was not many. And slowly, painfully, they built up a picture.

It was not a picture of streets. It was a picture of houses.

Saint Ardo's Fire did not strike one person here and one person there, the way a fever did. It struck whole families. A mother would begin to burn, and within a few days, so would her children. A father would begin to dance, and his sons would follow. But next door, in a house where the walls touched and the same air passed through the same cracks, no one would be touched at all.

"Like a curse," Mira said quietly, one night, staring at the wall. "That's what they're saying in the Mercy House. That it's a curse. That it follows blood."

"It doesn't follow blood," Teo said. "Last week, the Brannick family on Tallow Row. The husband and wife were both sick, and their maid, who isn't related to them. And the wife's sister, who lives in the same house, wasn't."

"Then it follows... what?"

Teo did not answer. He did not know.

There was something there. He could feel it. The same itch that had bothered him all autumn, ever since that night with the bread. Something he had seen, and not noticed, and put away. But every time he reached for it, it slipped through his fingers like water.

Hesk was very quiet that week. He sat in his chair with his blind face turned toward the wall, as if he could see the marks on it, and every so often, his lips moved soundlessly.

"Fire," he murmured once. "Burning limbs... the dance... I have heard that before. A long time ago. I'm sure of it. A Leaf. In the vault, before they took my eyes. Something about a saint... and fire... and the dancers in a place called..."

He trailed off, and shook his head, frustrated.

"It's gone. Forty years. It's gone."

The Chantry, meanwhile, had not been idle.

At first, the deacons preached that it was a judgement, as they always did. But Saint Ardo's Fire was not like the flux. It was slower and stranger and far more frightening, and the people of the Sump, who had accepted that the Flame judged them with a fever, could not quite accept that it judged them with visions and dancing and black, withering hands. They wanted something to blame. Something they could see.

And so, inevitably, a rumour began.

It began in the Mercy House, the way most rumours did. One of the burned women, half mad with pain, screamed that an old crone had touched her in the market and cursed her. Another dancer, raving in the night, saw a face in the snow outside his window... an old woman's face, wrinkled and grinning. A third family remembered that they had bought a poultice from the herb-woman on Tallow Row, a month before the fire took them.

The herb-woman's name was Maud. Everyone in the Sump knew her. She had lived in a hut at the end of Tallow Row for longer than anyone could remember, and she sold herbs and poultices and potions to people who could not afford the Mercy House's blessed oil, and sometimes they helped, and sometimes they did not. She was old and toothless and talked to her cats. She had no family and no friends. Half the children in the Sump were afraid of her.

She was, in other words, exactly the kind of person one blamed — and the Sump knew it.

Teo heard the crowd before he saw it. He was crossing the bottom of Tallow Row with his empty cart in the late afternoon, and the noise came rolling down the street toward him, a low, rising roar, like a river in flood.

Then he turned the corner, and he saw.

Fifty people. Perhaps more. Men and women of the Sump, faces he knew... the cooper's wife from Coopers' Yard, her eyes red and wild... the brother of the girl who had gone through the ice... Garrow, the pyre-man, with a torch in his fist. They were packed into the narrow end of Tallow Row like fish in a barrel, all of them shouting, all of them pushing toward a small, crooked hut with a sagging roof and a cat sitting on the windowsill.

The door of the hut had been kicked in.

And in the middle of the crowd, being dragged through the snow by her thin white hair, was an old woman in a ragged shawl, screaming.