The Red Blister

They rode for nineteen days.

Teo would not remember much of it afterward. The salt people gave them four camels, and Sefa's grandson to guide them, and they rode west across the Ashlands from dawn until long after dark, and slept a few hours on the cold ground, and rode again. The camels were tall and swaying and smelled worse than anything Teo had ever smelled, including the pyre-yard. Turnip the mule, tied on behind with his load of red books, hated them with a deep and personal hatred and said so at every opportunity. Bram's leg ached. Mira barely spoke.

And every night, Teo took out his board and measured the Pole Star, and watched it sink, slowly, degree by degree, until it stood at the height where he had first seen it, on the night they left the Fens.

Then the grass came back. Then the reeds. Then the Fens, grey and frozen under the first snow of winter, and Ama Tull's round reed house, with smoke rising from its roof.

Ama took one look at them and put food on the table. She did not ask questions. She did not need to. The answers were already written on her face.

"Since the end of the Harvest month," she said. "A trader brought it down the river, they think. From the city. First the fever, then the aching, then the spots. Red ones. On the face first, then the hands, then everywhere. Then they fill. With water, then with pus. Like blisters." Her mouth tightened. "One in three who catch it dies. More, for the little ones. The ones who live are scarred for life. Some go blind."

Teo set down his spoon. He did not feel hungry anymore.

"And the city?"

"Shut." Ama shook her head. "The Chantry closed the gates in the second week. No one goes in. No one comes out. They put Ashwardens on the switchback road and chains across the river. The traders say they burn the dead in the streets now, every night. You can see the smoke from here, on a clear day." She paused. "They say the Crown has closed its gates too. Against the rest of the city. The priests are up there with their Flame, and everybody else is down below with the sickness."

Teo looked at Mira. Her face had gone very white.

"Hesk," he said. "Nell. Is there any word?"

Ama looked at him for a long moment.

"My daughter's boathouse is at the very edge of the ferry ward," she said at last. "Last word we had was a month ago. They were alive then. Both of them." She hesitated. "My daughter said the old man was nursing the sick. In the ward. Going from house to house. Blind as he is."

They went in three nights later, by the river.

Bram knew a way past the chains. Of course he did. The Ashwardens had stretched a great iron chain across the Calder at the bend below the Old Bridge, from bank to bank, so that no barge could pass. But the river was low in winter, and on the southern side, where the bank was soft and muddy and choked with reeds, there was a place where the chain sagged into the water, and a shallow barge with three people lying flat in the bottom could slide over it in the dark without a sound.

They slid over it. Teo held his breath the whole time.

...And then they were in the Sump.

He had thought he knew what to expect. He had heard Ama's words. He had seen the flux, and Saint Ardo's Fire, and the hungry winter. He had carried more corpses than he could count. He had walked through the dead city of Glass Bones.

He had not been ready for this.

The Sump was dark. That was the first thing. The Sump was never dark. There were always lamps in the windows, fires in the alleys, torches outside the taverns on the Rope Walk. Tonight, there was nothing. The tenements rose up along the riverbank like black cliffs, their windows empty, their doors shut. And on almost every door, even in the darkness, Teo could see a pale shape nailed to the wood. A square of cloth.

Red cloth. The mark of a house with the sickness inside.

There were hundreds of them...

Beyond the tenements, the face of the Spillway rose up into the night, as vast and grey and ancient as ever, weeping from its thousand cracks. The lights of the Shelf were dim and few. And high above everything, at the very top of the wall, the Flame burned blue and gold against the stars, steady and endless, exactly as it had always burned.

It looked very far away tonight... further than Mount Selk.

And between the Spillway and the river, all across the Sump, there were fires.

Not lamps. Not hearths. Pyres. A dozen of them, perhaps more, scattered through the dark streets... in Saint Orlen's Square, in Coopers' Yard, on the open ground at the foot of Tallow Row... great heaps of burning wood and burning bodies, throwing up columns of thick orange smoke that rose and merged and hung over the Sump in a low, dirty ceiling, lit from beneath with a dull red glow. The smell reached them on the river. Teo knew that smell better than he knew his own name.

The Mercy House pyre-yard could not hold them all, anymore. So they burned them where they fell.

Teo did not count the fires. For the first time in his life, he did not want to know the number.

The boathouse at the edge of the ferry ward was dark too. But there was a thin line of light under the door, and when Bram knocked — twice, pause, three times — there was a long silence, and then a voice that Teo would have known anywhere, cracked and thin and a great deal older than it had been in the spring.

"...Is it Fifthday already?"

Teo could not answer. His throat had closed up completely.

The door opened.

Nell stood there with a candle in her hand. She was taller. She was thinner. Her hair was cut short and ragged, and her face was grey with exhaustion and smudged with soot. She stared up at Teo for a long, long moment, as if she did not believe he was real.

Then she dropped the candle, and threw herself at him, and he caught her, and held on.

She did not cry. Of course she didn't. She buried her face against his chest and held on so hard that it hurt, and said, muffled, furious:

"You took forever."

"I know," said Teo. "I'm sorry. I know."

Behind her, in the dim room, Hesk was sitting in a chair by a small fire with a blanket over his knees. His face was turned toward the door. He was smiling.

Teo set Nell down, very carefully, and looked at her face. At her hands. At her arms, where her sleeves had been pushed back.

No marks. No spots. No blisters.

He let out a breath he felt he had been holding for nineteen days.

"She hasn't had it," Hesk said quietly, as if he had heard the question in Teo's breathing. "Not yet. I've kept her inside, mostly. Here, by the river. She doesn't like it."

"I hate it," said Nell.

"And you?" Teo turned to the old man. "Ama said you've been going house to house. Nursing them. Hesk... you can't..."

"Oh, I can," said Hesk. "I'm the only one in the ward who can." He lifted his face toward the firelight, and for the first time, Teo saw what he had never noticed in three years of lamplit evenings in the cellar. Faint, pale pits in the old, wrinkled skin of his cheeks and forehead. Dozens of them. Small and shallow and very old, almost lost among the lines.

"I had the red pox when I was six," said Hesk. "It came to Calder Reach sixty-odd years ago. It killed my mother and my two sisters. It didn't kill me." He shrugged his thin shoulders. "And whatever you are, if you live through it once, it never takes you again. Everyone knows that. That's why the old pox-survivors always nursed the sick, in my grandmother's time."

'...Everyone knows that,' Teo thought, very slowly. 'Everyone knows that, and nobody knows why.'

He thought of the red book in his pack. Of the long shelves in the hall under the mountain, and of a chapter whose title he had seen in the index and had not had time to read. He thought of Ama Tull, telling him: a better summer, higher ground, the Fens. He thought of the milking cows, standing in their hundreds in the frozen water meadows.

Nell was tugging at his sleeve.

"I did it," she said. "The thing in your note. The stick. On the longest day." Her chin came up. "It didn't rain. I measured my arm, like you said, and I put the stick on the roof... what's left of the roof... and I waited for the shadow to be the shortest, and I marked it. I did it three times, because you always do things three times." She reached into her shirt and pulled out a scrap of paper, folded small, worn soft at the edges from being carried for half a year. "Hesk didn't help. He wanted to. I wouldn't let him."

Teo took the paper.

He looked down at it. At the numbers in Nell's careful, square handwriting — his own handwriting, he realised, because he had taught her to write — three measurements, each a tiny bit different from the others, and an average underlined twice beneath them.

Six months ago, a girl had knelt on a roof at the foot of a wall, beside a stick.

And three hundred miles away, on a hill in the Ashlands, so had he.

He would work it out later. The difference between the two shadows. The angle. Bram's knotted cord. Tonight, he just held the scrap of paper, and found that his eyes had blurred.

"Thank you," he said hoarsely.

Nell shrugged, as if it had been nothing. But she was smiling.

The door behind them opened. Mira came in from the dark, her cloak wet with sleet, her face set and pale. She had gone to the Mercy House the moment the barge touched the bank. She had not even stopped to see Hesk.

"The deacons are gone," she said. "All of them. The Proctor, Deacon Pruett, the senior acolytes. They went up to the Crown three weeks ago, before the gates closed, and they haven't come back." Her voice was very steady, which meant it was taking everything she had. "There are four acolytes left in the Mercy House, and three hundred sick, and no medicine, and no food, and no one to bury the dead. Cobb is running it. Cobb, Teo. He's seventeen."

Nobody said anything.

"And the Chantry has sent down an order," Mira went on. "From the Crown. From the Archdeacon himself. It was read out in every square in the Sump yesterday morning." She drew a breath. "It says the red pox is the judgement of the Flame upon the city for harbouring heresy. It says the Crown will remain sealed until the heresy is purged. And it names the heretics."

She looked at Teo.

"It names you," she said. "And Hesk. And me."