Captain Dane

He came in the middle of the night, a week after the turn of the year, and he came alone.

Teo was asleep on a pallet in the corner of the Mercy House storeroom when Cobb shook him awake. The young acolyte's face was white in the light of his candle.

"There's an Ashwarden," he whispered. "At the side door. He says... he says he wants you."

Teo was on his feet at once, his heart hammering.

'So. It's finally happened.'

The Crown had sent down three more proclamations since the cow-scratch began. Teo had heard them all, read aloud in Saint Orlen's Square by an Ashwarden standing on the dry trough of the dead pump, with a dozen more standing behind him. The first had called the cow-scratch a heresy. The second had called it the Mark of the Beast, a deliberate corruption of the pure flesh that the Flame had made. The third, a week ago, had declared that any who bore the mark were damned, and that any who administered it would be burned.

Nobody had come for them. Not yet. The Ashwardens stayed on the switchback road, and at the gates of the Crown, and in the squares when the proclamations were read, and did not go into the houses with the red cloths on their doors.

Teo had wondered how long that would last.

He went to the side door. Mira was already there, in her nightdress with a shawl around her shoulders, standing very still. Bram had come up silently behind her, huge in the darkness. Teo could not see Bram's face, but he could see his hands, and they were closed into fists.

The door was open a crack. Beyond it, in the narrow alley, in the falling sleet, a tall man in a long grey coat was standing alone.

He wore no mask. His iron mask was hanging from his belt, as if he had taken it off and forgotten it. His short grey hair was plastered to his skull with sleet. And in his arms, wrapped in his own grey coat, he was holding a child.

It was a boy. Eight years old, perhaps. Thin and pale, with his father's square jaw. He was asleep, or nearly asleep, his head lolling against the man's shoulder. Teo could see no spots on his face. Not yet.

Captain Sorrel Dane looked at Teo for a long moment. His eyes were very tired.

"My son," he said. His voice was hoarse. "Pell. His mother had the red pox. She died four days ago." He paused. "He sat with her. At the end. He wouldn't leave. I couldn't make him."

Nobody said anything.

"He isn't sick," Dane said. "Not yet. But he sat with her for two days." He swallowed. "I've watched the cart-man carry the pox dead out of the Sump for three months. I know what comes next."

Teo found his voice.

"How long ago? When did she... when was he last near her?"

"Four days."

Teo looked at Mira. Mira looked back at him.

They both knew what the red book said. They had both read it a dozen times. If a person was exposed to the red pox, and then given the cow-blister within three or four days — before the pox had time to take hold — the cow-blister could still protect them. Or at least make the pox much milder. The body learned faster from the cow-blister than from the pox itself. It was a race. A race between two lessons.

Four days was the very edge.

"Bring him in," said Mira.

Dane did not move. He stood there in the sleet with his son in his arms, and looked at Teo, and something passed across his hard face that Teo had never expected to see there. It was not anger. It was not fear. It was something much worse. It was shame.

"I burned your cellar," he said quietly. "I led the raid. I watched the pages burn on the water." He paused. "I had my orders. I believed in them. I still... I don't know what I believe." He looked down at the sleeping boy. "But I know what I saw in the streets these last weeks. I know which houses have the red cloth and which don't. The ones with the cow-scratch don't. My men know it too." His jaw tightened. "So I'm here. I'm asking. Not as an Ashwarden. As his father."

Teo looked at him for a long moment.

He thought about the burning Leaves on the black water. About Hesk, curled around the last one on the floor of the cellar. About the Ashwarden's fist in his stomach.

And then he thought about a boy called James Phipps, who had had no say in anything. And about Pell, who had sat with his dying mother for two days because he would not leave her.

"Bring him in," he said.

Mira did it herself, by candlelight, in the storeroom, while Dane held his son on his lap. The boy woke when the knife touched his arm, and cried out, and Dane held him and murmured to him in a low voice that Teo had never heard an Ashwarden use. The thread went in. Mira pressed it there for a long time.

Then there was nothing to do but wait.

Dane did not leave. He sat in the storeroom with his son through the rest of the night, and through the next day, and the next. Cobb brought him food. He ate it without seeming to notice. Teo came and went. On the second evening, he found the captain sitting on the floor with his back against a sack of grain, his son asleep with his head in his lap, staring at nothing.

Teo sat down across from him.

They did not speak for a while.

"The Archdeacon knows," Dane said at last, without looking up. "About the cow-scratch. That it works. My men talk. The deacons talk. Word goes up the stairs to the Crown as quickly as it comes down." He paused. "He knows the Sump is getting better while the Shelf is getting worse. The Shelf has no cow-scratch. The Shelf won't take it. The Chantry told them it's damnation, and the Shelf believes the Chantry."

Teo was very still.

"Then why hasn't he..."

"Stopped you?" Dane laughed shortly. There was no humour in it at all. "He's tried. Three weeks ago, he ordered the Ashwardens down into the Sump to take you. All of you. And burn the Mercy House." He looked up, and his eyes were very cold. "I didn't do it."

"You...?"

"I told him my men wouldn't go into the pox streets. That they were afraid. Which was true. Some of them." Dane looked down at his son again. "He gave the order to another captain. That captain's men went down as far as the bottom of the switchback road, and saw the pyres, and turned around, and went back up. Nobody wants to go into the Sump right now, cart-man. Not even for the Voice of the Flame."

Teo did not know what to say.

"So he's waiting," Dane said quietly. "He's sealed the Crown. The Cathedral has its own wells and its own granary... the Flame provides. He has three hundred priests and two hundred Ashwardens up there, and none of them have the pox, because none of them have been down here. And he's waiting for the pox to burn itself out. Then he'll open the gates, and come down, and tell the Sump that the Flame has spared the faithful and punished the heretics." He paused. "And if the Sump is still alive... and the Shelf isn't... he'll need to explain that."

"How?"

Dane looked up at him.

"The Wrath of the Flame," he said.

Teo frowned.

He had heard of it, of course. Everyone had. It was the oldest miracle of the Chantry. On the holiest days, in the great Cathedral on the Crown, the Archdeacon would summon the Wrath of the Flame before the people... and fire would leap from the altar, from the very air, invisible fire that struck the unworthy and threw them to the ground. Teo had never seen it. Sump people were not allowed into the Cathedral on holy days.

"I've seen it," Dane said. "Many times. I stood guard for it. Blue sparks out of nothing, cracking like whips. Men thrown down on the stones, shaking. A sound like thunder in a bottle." His voice was very flat. "He's going to open the Cathedral to the whole city, when the gates open. He's going to call down the Wrath on the heresy of the cow-scratch. Before everyone." He looked at Teo. "And I think he's going to call it down on you."

The boy in his lap stirred, and murmured something, and was still.

Teo looked at him. At his small pale face, sleeping. At his arm, wrapped in a clean cloth, where the scratch was.

On the fourth day, a pale bump rose on Pell's arm, exactly where the thread had been.

On the eighth day, he woke with a fever, and a scatter of red spots on his forehead and his cheeks, and his father's face went the colour of ash.

But there were only a few. A dozen, perhaps. Not the hundreds that covered the dying in the Mercy House, that ran together into one great weeping sore. They rose, and filled, and crusted, and the fever rose and broke and was gone in three days instead of ten.

On the fourteenth day, Pell sat up on the pallet in the storeroom and demanded bread, and honey, and to know why everyone was staring at him.

Captain Sorrel Dane went out into the alley behind the Mercy House, in the falling sleet, and stood there for a long time with his face turned up to the sky.

When he came back in, his eyes were red. He did not mention it. Neither did Teo.

"Tell me," Dane said, in his hard, flat voice, "what you need."