“Shit,” Slate muttered. “Another blighter.”
In the center of the circle was the prone body of a man. He was well-dressed, but there was something badly wrong with his skin. It peeled away as if he’d been badly burned, revealing bloody grey and yellow shadows beneath it. As the knight watched, one arm ratcheted upward, pawed at the air, then fell back down.
“That man’s hurt,” he said, starting forward.
Slate grabbed his arm. “Are you nuts? Stay back!”
“But that man needs help!” The sky retreated. The dying man in the middle of the pavement took all his attention. “Why isn’t anyone helping?”
“You’re insane! He’s beyond help!”
The crowd was very quiet. The sound of the man’s breathing rattled against the stones. He pawed at the air again jerkily, running down.
“Damnit, let me go, maybe I can—”
Slate turned into him, rammed a shoulder into his chest, and threw her full weight against it, like a woman trying to brace up a wall. Since he probably weighed twice what she did, this was spectacularly ineffective, but it did at least convince him that she was serious.
“Don’t make me use a knife,” she growled.
My god, I believe she would…“What’s going on?”
“Where have you been for the past—no, never mind, stupid question.” Slate put a hand to her head. “It’s blight.”
“Blight? Here? In the capitol?” Caliban frowned over her head. “There were some rumors that it had been seen in the outer cities, but no one thought it would reach the capitol.”
“Yeah, well, they were wrong. Showed up right at the beginning of the year. The guards should—here we go.”
A grim-faced guard appeared from the direction of the keep, pushing gawkers back with the shaft of his pike. “Get back, get back, you’ve all seen it already…”
He hardly needed to say that. The circle around the body was a good twenty feet in diameter. No one was taking any chances with blight.
A few moments later, the bone-pickers arrived. They woregrey gauze wrapped over every inch, even a thin veil of gauze over the eyes. Two of them leapt down from their cart and produced long poles, lifting the still-twitching body of the blighted man on the ends and ferrying him to the cart.
One of the grey figures dumped a bucket of water out across the stones. You could track its drainage by watching the ripple as the crowd skittered aside.
“And that’s that,” muttered Slate. “If you see another one, for god’s sake, don’t touch it. They don’t know how it spreads, but they’re pretty sure skin contact is a bad idea.”
“I’ll be careful,” said Caliban. His head felt hollow, and the light was giving him a headache.
Slate plunged back into the crowd, giving the bone-pickers a wide berth.
She stopped at last on the edge of the street, waving for a cab. Caliban put a hand over his face again. He was horrified to discover that he was on the edge of tears.
It was too much all at once. The sky, the tattoo, freedom, a suicide mission, the blight victim—too much. He’d spent four months in a cell, four months of changeless days and changeless walls, of praying for something, anything, to happen.
And now it had. He did not know if he was grateful, but he knew he was overwhelmed.
Has the god answered my prayers at last, or is this another punishment for my sins?
It seemed unlikely that it was the god. The Dreaming God’s presence was heat and light and rock-hard certainty. Caliban had not felt it in a very long time, and he no longer felt certain of anything at all.
Wheels rattled. Slate took his arm again. “Come on, the carriage is here.”
He climbed into it obediently, and sagged back against the wooden seat when the door closed. The inside was a safely bounded world, the proper size. The knot in his stomach loosened.
“Seven Crows,” Slate told the driver, leaning out the window.
“That’s two blocks from here,” the driver said, disgusted. “You could walk it faster than I can drive you.”
