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  Veterans who had served in Prince Perryn’s ill-fated campaign to wrest Evanore’s gold mines from his bastard half brother displayed wicked burn scars from Osriel’s mage-fire arrows and told of comrades snatched in the night and returned without balls, tongues, or hands. They described plagues of nightmares that afflicted their encampments, and men and women found wandering the tangled forests naked and mindless, their privy parts blistered from forced breeding with gatzi—creatures from the netherworld, pledged to Magrog’s service. And they swore that on every battlefield near Evanore, what dead were left to lie through the night were missing their eyes on the next morning. Which seemed not such a dreadful thing in itself compared to being dead, save that most Navrons believed a man’s soul resided in his eyes. Without a soul, a man was left with no hope of an afterlife, for the Ferryman had naught to carry.

  It’s a soldier’s wont to top the next man’s tale. For years, I took no more stock in the stories of Prince Osriel’s evils than in legends of angelic visitations or of the Danae whose dancing supposedly nurtured fields and forests. Gods knew battle left enough mutilated bodies for every demonic purpose. The pox from unclean whores was a scourge that could flay a man’s loins, and drinking raw spirits squeezed from agueroot could scour a mind to blankness for a week. Yet over the summer, as Prince Bayard’s march across Ardra drove us toward Evanore, one comrade and then another swore me to find him should he fall in battle, and to pierce his heart before nightfall to ensure he was well and truly dead before Osriel the Bastard came for him. Such stern belief cannot but wear upon a man’s mind and take on the likeness of truth.

  When the lay brother Anselm had hurried off to bed and the choir monk Robierre to the church for another bout of praying, I prowled through the infirmary stores. Using scraps of twine and linen from Brother Robierre’s baskets, I wrapped up small amounts of his powders and herbs—anything he had in plenty that I might sell or need. I discovered an herb knife with a nicked blade shoved to the back of a shelf, and I took that, too, bundling it with the medicines in a rag and stuffing the bundle under my palliasse with the bits of cheese and bread I’d saved from every meal.

  As I worked, a lesser puzzle nagged at me. Pureblood families flaunted their unbroken descent from the decadent Aurellians by speaking Aurellian and Navron interchangeably. It was a useless skill that only they and hidebound scholars set store by now Aurellia was reduced from a great empire to a walled city a thousand quellae distant. But such childhood training penetrates very deep. Even after twelve years away from pureblood society, I could not have said in which language I articulated my thoughts. Therefore, I could wonder at the Aurellian farewell that Brother Gildas had exchanged with the Evanori lord. Teneamus—we preserve.

  The infirmary was dark, a single tall rushlight left burning. After returning from his prayers, the yawning infirmarian had retired gratefully to his own bed in the monks’ dorter, declaring me well enough to survive the night with only Iero’s angels to watch over me.

  The weather had taken a turn for the worse. Sleet clicked on the roof and the stone path outside the open window, threatening to freeze and rot what scanty harvest might have ripened in the disastrously short, cold summer. A month or more remained till Saldon Night, and I ought to be basking in Ardra’s golden summer, pleasuring a milkmaid out of her chastity in a haystack instead of shivering in my bed.

  Unnerved by the day’s events, I was infernally restless. When my breath became visible in the air, I dragged the blankets over my head, abandoning my toes to the cold draft left by the waning flames in the infirmary brazier. My wounds itched and throbbed, more annoying than sore. But deep in my gut sat a small tight knot, cold and quiet for the moment, the threads that linked it to every particle of my being slack.

  A disease had gnawed at my gut since I was seven, probably longer if one assumed the rebellious temper and indiscipline that caused my parents to despair of me in the nursery were its first manifestations. Every day of my life I had lived with an unrelenting restlessness. On occasion it would worsen, exploding into a tormenting fire in the blood and a virulent overexcitement of the senses—everything I heard or smelled or looked on exaggerated until my body felt raw. By the time I was ten these attacks had become a regular occurrence, and as I got older, the symptoms grew worse and lasted for days at a time. Even soft candlelight would blind me, whispers set my nerves screaming, and any smell stronger than porridge leave me nauseated. The knot in my gut was ever the precursor of an attack.

  I lay wide-eyed, sated with the days of sleep, wishing I had been able to convince Brother Robierre to give me poppy extract again. He hoarded it so carefully. Said their plants were not propagating well in the foul weather. That the abbey had any healthy plants at all was a wonder. Perhaps their god had powers enough to protect his holy place.

  Matins came and went, allowing me to forget myself for a while in the beauteous surge of their singing—fifty-three strong male voices honoring their god. What deity could fail to manifest himself with such power at his beck? Yet in the ensuing silence, the warning in my belly grew more insistent, and hot, as if Brother Robierre had made another incision and implanted a burning coal inside me.

  I slammed a fist into the thin pillow wadded under my head. This is far too early. It’s scarce been a fortnight. I buried my face in the pillow, unable to stop the calculation. We had abandoned the battle before its second day and spent two on the road, then I’d lain two days insensible in this infirmary, and four more recovering…and I’d last dealt with this a twelveday before the battle. Twenty-one days. Since I’d first chosen to control my disease with magic, I’d never felt its waking sooner than twenty-eight days. The problem, of course, was that the remedy had become its own disease, and I could no longer distinguish one from the other.

  So think of something else. The wind whined in the cold and lonely blackness outside the infirmary walls. The blanket wool tickled my nose. Propped up on my elbow, I drained the last of the weak ale Brother Anselm had left me, and then threw the mug across the square red tiles. The clay vessel shattered. No rushes on the infirmary floor. No straw. Brother Anselm thought them unclean. I curled my arms over my head.

  This is no battlefield with the stench of death all around. No whorehouse after the women have moved on to other customers. No stinking back street with rats and refuse your only company. Nor even is it that wretched house in Palinur where your existence was an offense to those who birthed you. You’re fed and warm and healing. You’ve friends here already. You don’t need this. Let the cursed sickness burn itself out.

  But the coal took flame in my gut, its fiery wounding spreading rapidly into my chest and limbs, into my head, my eyes, my dry tongue. I shoved off the blankets and lay there naked and exposed, unbearably hot as I tried to breathe away the pain. The light seared my eyes. The rain drummed like thunder; the wind bellowed like maddened oxen.

  Why had I thought of my parents? If ever the gods had played a wicked prank on human folk, it was on the day they quickened my father’s seed in my mother’s womb to produce me. From the distance of so many years, my parents’ hatred seemed wholly out of proportion to my misdeeds—at least in the years before I learned to detest them in equal measure and was old enough to demonstrate it.

  A spasm contorted every sinew in my back, as if a giant played knotwork with my spine. Cascading cramps wrenched my shoulder, legs, and belly. Ignore them. You’ve been abed too long.

  On a small painted chest near my bedside lay my torn shirt, stained padded jaque, ragged braies, and hose, neatly folded and stacked. The monks had cleaned or brushed them as I lay insensible, and set them alongside my rifled rucksack. They wouldn’t have examined the bag too carefully. Surely. I just needed to see.

  I grabbed the rucksack, knocking the stack of clothes onto the floor. Every object I touched seared my skin as if it were iron new drawn from a forge. Jerking the scuffed leather bag onto my lap, I prayed that what I needed would be there. I turned the bag insi
de out and fumbled at the thick seam. Intact. Blessed be all gods. Now for a knife…

  Holding on to the wall, the rucksack looped over my arm, I hobbled across the tiles to Robierre’s worktable. I dragged the stinking rushlight close only to find it on the verge of guttering death. Muttering epithets, I snatched another from the stack under the table, set the fresh one aflame from the stub, and clipped it in the iron holder. Then, seated on the brother’s stool, I used his well-honed herb knife to rip the long stitches that held the newer layer of leather to the bottom of the rucksack. Great Kemen Lord of the Sky, Mother Samele, Lord Iero and your angels or Danae or whomever you dispatch to watch over your children be thanked. The little green bag—the one Boreas had not found—fell into my trembling hand. And the craving swept through me as a fire sweeps across a parched grassland.

  In the pool of smoky yellow light I set out the shard of mirror glass, the silver needle, and the white linen thread, and spilled the tiny black nivat seeds—all that was left of my emergency store—onto the table. The fragrance of spice, dust, and corruption burst from the nivat as I crushed the seeds with Robierre’s knife. I could not rush, could not afford to be careless, yet the first monk who saw what I was about would know me as a cursed twist-mind, Magrog’s slave, a gatzé’s whore, and boot me over the wall to languish in the darkness with the rest of the Adversary’s servants.

  A prick of the needle freed three drops of blood from my finger to mix with the aromatic powder, the pain of the bloodletting as exquisitely shrill as a virgin’s scream. My sinews cramped and knotted. My hands shook. Sweat beaded my brow, my arms, my back. Soon…hold on… Perhaps my injuries had made the disease and the hunger for its remedy come upon me early and so dreadfully fast.

  Holding one end of the thread between two fingers, I let the other end dangle into the reeking little mess, using the connection to channel every scrap of magic that lived in me into the patterned spell. Touching the mixture directly with my agonized flesh would sap the spell’s strength before it reached full potency—a hard lesson I’d learned when first experimenting with this particular remedy. The black paste heated and bubbled. In the enchanted mirror glass I watched the otherwise invisible vapors rise from the unholy brew. Waiting…

  A mixed-blood alley witch named Salamonde had given me the glass fragment on my fourteenth birthday. The disease had seared my gut and lacerated my senses with such virulence that day, I’d felt the Ferryman’s breath on my neck. For the first and only time in my life, I had swallowed pride and hatred and begged my parents for help with my sickness. My mother, typically, retired to her bedchamber and drank herself senseless. My father tied me to his favorite grate and beat me until I pissed myself, insisting that my malady was naught but my vile nature festered in my soul. He said no remedy existed for it. And so, on that night, for the twentieth time that year, I broke the locks on my room and ran away. By the time they dragged me back home three days later, old Salamonde had introduced me to perversion.

  The rushlight flickered. I squinted at the glass. One final wisp of vapor drifted upward, taking the last of the earthy scent. I scooped the dark droplets onto my finger and onto my tongue. The potent liquor spread quickly to my pain-racked extremities…the satisfaction of cool ale on a parched tongue…the scent of rain after drought…

  Groaning, I snatched up my rucksack and bit down on the leather strap, for the tasteless paste that was my salvation would not instantly quench the fire. The perverse remedy had first to feed the torment. As did I.

  I gripped Brother Badger’s grinding stone and slammed it, edge on, into my wounded thigh. Once. Again. Fiery agony swelled to monstrous proportion…devouring my organs, my limbs, my senses…threatening to completely unhinge my mind…until the moment body and spirit teetered on the verge of dissolution, and then…

  O, elixir of heaven! Rapture! An explosion of exhilaration engulfed every sense, every limb, every part and particle of my flesh and spirit, transforming pain to pleasure as quickly and as absolutely as the ax of a skilled headsman transforms life to death…

  …and then with the same abruptness, it was gone, the convulsion of sensation past. Fire quenched. Cramps dissipated. Throbbing wounds silenced. Every shred of my being quivered with release, the searing heat of my flesh yielding to languid warmth like the aftermath of carnal climax, lacking only joy or merriment. Not oblivion, but assurance that the world was right and ordered exactly as it should be. The rucksack dropped to the floor. My forehead rested on the scratched wood, my dulled mind fallow, my senses throbbing in gratification. The knot in my gut unraveled.

  The spell was called the doulon. Legend claimed the nasty little enchantment was Magrog’s wedding gift to Nemelez when he took his human bride to the netherworld—to ease the pain of their coupling. And more than just the ignorant believed that every invocation of the doulon opened a door to Magrog’s kingdom and allowed a demon gatzé to crawl into the earthly plane. Such was no concern of mine.

  Some of those enslaved to the doulon burnt or mutilated themselves before they succumbed, for the degree of pleasure in the release always matched the severity of the pain that preceded it. I had not fallen so far out of mind as to do that—not yet, at least. Nor did I use it for ordinary physical discomforts that I could anywise tolerate. I told myself that these practices delayed the inevitable consequence. Every doulon slave went mad eventually, trapped inside a ruined body whose perceptions of pain and pleasure were irretrievably tangled. Unfortunately, between the disease itself and the nivat hunger, the consequences of stopping were equally dreadful. Once in the year just past, I’d had to wait three days until I could get nivat, and I would throw myself off a cliff before doing so again.

  Move, fool. Quickly, before losing all sense, I licked the thread clean and purified the needle in the rushlight flame, packed all away in the empty green bag, and stuffed it in the bottom of my rucksack. No time or means to sew the flap shut again.

  The bent, the power for spellworking, was the only virtue of my pureblood birth I’d ever seen, and for good or ill, I had chosen to abandon the small magics I had learned as a boy and whatever greater uses I might develop as a man and spend it all on this. I hobbled away from the worktable and threw the rucksack onto the painted chest. Naked and shuddering, I crawled under the blankets and gave myself to dreams of pain and pleasure.

  Chapter 6

  Between supper and Compline, as the gray light filtering through the infirmary’s horn windows faded, I was alternately dozing and perusing the intricate little drawings attached to the margins and headings of my psalter. Though lacking the elaboration and gold leaf one would likely find in the abbey’s service books, the little codex had been created with the care always given holy books. Had Brother Horach himself inked the illustrations? The copyist had surely borne a fascination with the natural world, inserting energetic and sometimes fantastical representations of stags, foxes, and racing hounds alongside the angels and vines that graced the prayers and psalms. I speculated as to whether he had suited the beasts’ postures to the mood or sense of the prayer, which struck me as a clever idea.

  Yawning, feeling lazy and dull-witted as always on the day after the doulon, I traced my fingertips over the letters as I had so often as a child. In those days, believing I might remedy my persistent failure to decipher the mystery of written words, I had allowed magic to roar from my body’s center into the confounding shapes on the page—scorching no few books in the endeavor. The fingers are the conduit of magic.

  I no longer wasted my resources on that particular exercise. I had come to terms with my incapacity and managed well enough all these years. But if these holy brothers discovered my lack, they would surely pitch me over their lovely wall. That was damnably annoying.

  I slammed the book shut and hunched deeper in the bed, warm and dry again after the previous day’s unsettling excursions. Jumbled thoughts of murdered monks and abbey benefactors who just happened to serve unsavory princes had plagued me all the bori
ng day—or at least when I could avoid thinking of my empty nivat bag and the difficulty of refilling it. I had trained myself to set that worry aside for a few weeks between necessity, refusing to allow the disease or its unhealthy remedy to set the course of my life. The attack, a full week short of the usual and with so little warning, had profoundly unnerved me.

  Under the more direct beams of the rushlight, Brother Anselm worried over his colored chart that detailed astrological influences on the body’s humors, certain he would find some correlation with my relapse in the cloister garth. Sooner or later the earnest fellow would approach the bed with his piss jar or his magnifying lens or his well-polished lancet, asking politely to examine my eyeballs or the underside of my tongue or to take some sample of my regenerating bodily fluids.

  I was trying to decide whether to give in to sleep and thus keep good Anselm at bay, when a blast of cold air heralded Jullian’s appearance in the infirmary doorway. The boy was as pale as an Ardran milkmaid’s ass. “Brother Anselm, Brother Robierre summons you immediately with his medicine box and both litters. We’ve wounded soldiers at the gates!”

  “Who?” I said, sitting up straight as Brother Anselm jumped from his stool and dragged litter poles from beneath the vacant beds.

  “Ardrans. Fifty of them at the least. Or a hundred…bloody…torn to pieces…”

  The boy’s peaked complexion and strangled declaration indicated that the evening’s events had already profoundly altered his understanding of the world. Exposure to ugly injuries such as mine was one thing, but four or five cadres’ worth of battle wounds would be far different. Angels preserve the boy from ever seeing the battlefield itself.

  It had required many a tankard to dull the images of my own introduction to the soldiers’ mysteries. I had never subscribed to myths of noble purpose or personal glory in battle, but I had believed that shoving a spear into a twitching body busily shitting itself could make a man of me. I’d blundered through innumerable bloody days since, as much avoiding other fools’ spears and axes as wielding my own.