Ozorne looked at the master for a moment, then bowed his head. “Yes, sir. I apologize.” He put a hand on Arram’s shoulder. “May Hekaja watch over you”—he glanced at Ramasu—“watch over you both, and bring you home safe.”
Arram hugged his friend. “Tell Varice I’m sorry I couldn’t say goodbye.” He gave Preet’s carrybag to Ozorne.
“Stay with me, Preet,” Ozorne said cheerfully. “I’ll show you the new finches that came for the university birdhouse. And Varice will be with us. You like her.”
Preet muttered unhappily but accepted her transfer to Ozorne’s care. With a wave, Ozorne walked off down the corridor.
Once Ozorne and Preet had gone, Ramasu looked at Arram. “Report to the infirmary. Tell them you’re working with me in the city. They’ll give you something to ward you against typhoid. Drink it all—it’s cursed expensive to make, which is why we can’t give it to everyone. Then meet me at the Imperial Gate.”
“But shouldn’t I pack clothes, soap, and the like?” Arram asked.
“We supply what you need,” Ramasu told him. “You want to bring as little of your own belongings as possible. Everything is burned when we’re done.”
Arram looked at his boots. They had cost a good piece of his allowance, and he was quite vain of the painted designs in the leather. They were waterproof, too, just the thing for a Carthaki winter.
Ramasu smiled. “Leave your student robe and boots with the staff in the infirmary. They will give you straw sandals for the plague districts.”
Arram could have kissed the man. “Thank you, Master!”
“Don’t thank me—get to the infirmary. Have them send someone for the plants you ground. A very good job, by the way. Now, go!”
Arram raced through the servants’ hallways rather than deal with students who were changing classes. The potion they gave him to stave off typhoid was the worst thing he had ever forced down his throat. The student who supervised as he took it made him sit on a chair and put his head between his knees to keep from fainting.
“Does it affect everyone this way?” he asked, embarrassed to see a number of pairs of feet pass by.
“Even the masters who take it ’most every year,” the student assured him. “There’s no getting used to it. Hand over them boots.” Arram obeyed, exchanging his boots for straw sandals. Once he was on his feet, the student sent him behind a screen to trade his clothes for a rough wool tunic and a broad-brimmed straw hat to keep off the rain. She gave him a token on a string to hang around his neck so he could claim his belongings when he returned. “The stone, too,” the student said, noticing the small opal Arram wore around his neck. “We’re sworn not to steal, never worry about that. The last medicine student that stole ended up chained to the pillar of a house when there was rat plague. He wasn’t given no potion, either.”
Arram remembered to tell her about sending someone for his jars of powder. The student ordered a youngster on that errand and handed Arram a large chunk of cheese and several flats of bread to go with it. “Stick ’em in your shirt and nibble while you can,” she advised. “Master Ramasu hardly remembers to feed himself, let alone students. And good luck. Gods all bless, Arram.”
His heart thumping from combined excitement and terror, Arram returned the blessing and headed to the Imperial Gate at a trot. Ramasu wasn’t there, and they would not leave without him. Arram looked over the two carts with waxed canvas roofs to shed the incessant rain. In addition to supplies, two other healing masters and three senior students waited inside them.
When Ramasu arrived, the masters took him aside to argue about Arram’s inclusion in their group. Whatever Arram’s master said, it silenced them, but they glanced curiously at Arram on the journey. The three senior students napped.
The first sign that they were approaching the slums, and the plague areas, was the smell. Arram had wandered this far into the city with Ozorne and Varice in past years, looking for cheap books. On hot days there was a smell, but it had never been this bad.
The older students had woken and noticed he was covering his nose. They told him the stink was a combination of human dung, vomit, the rotting bodies of the dead, and the burning dead. The mages did their best to encircle the corpse fires with spells to kill the odor, but there were rarely enough mages who could be spared from working on medicines and tending the sick.
“Not enough mages?” Arram asked as they turned off the river road and onto mostly deserted streets. Many doors were marked with a white chalk O, the sign for quarantine. Several that Arram noticed were slashed through—Ø—to indicate that everyone who lived there was dead. Arram bowed his head and prayed that the Black God of Death would give them gentle treatment in his kingdom. He had a feeling there was no one left in the living world to pray their way into the Realms of the Dead.
“All of us fourth-year students who study healing have to work the plague breakouts,” the most senior of the students replied to Arram’s question. “It’s how we get experience. Mages with only a credential will do a lot of that. But any of us who want to make coin, real coin, we contend for our mastery—”
“And when we have that,” the only young woman of their number said, “we can find work where we’ll be paid what all this muck-groveling qualified us for. Then you’ll never see us tending the flea-bitten and stinking again!”
As the carts made their way deeper into the slums, through Sweet Hollow and into Riverfront, the odor thickened with the rain. So did the mud. Down here no one filled the deeper gaps with stones. Over and over students and masters had to get out of the carts and lift them free of mudholes. The few people out and about made the Sign against evil and hid as they passed.
“Why do they make the Sign?” Arram demanded, outraged. “We came to help!”
“Peasants,” a master said, and sniffed. “They think our work carries the disease.”
Children watched them, too starved or despairing to move. Occasionally one or several would rush the carts, only to get their fingers stung by the protective spells on the goods inside.
“Can we give them food?” Arram asked. “We have plenty. They’re skin and bone!”
“We would have nothing if we gave handouts to every street urchin,” the master who’d sniffed replied. “Criers go about telling folk where to go for soup and bread each day. We have more important things to do.”
Arram looked down. Had any of them tried to live on one meal a day? He hoped that he would never be as hard and cynical as these people, or as cruel.
Finally they stopped at the last of a series of warehouses. Over its door someone had set a shelf with a figure of Hekaja, the Carthaki goddess of healing. Arram kissed his fingertips and touched them to his forehead in salute. Silently he prayed that he would make his teacher proud. He looked for Ramasu for instruction or farewells, but the master was already being hurried inside by two acolytes of Hekaja.
Arram wondered what he should do. He tried to ignore the stench that made his stomach roll. With the other students he began to carry goods to the door, but realized almost instantly he would not make it inside.
A man took the jars in his grip. “Around the side is the midden. Try to make it that far,” he said, not unkindly.
Arram ran, slipping in the mud. Several times he nearly skidded into a line of scantily clad, muscled men and women who carried bundles in their arms: they were going in the same direction. Once he stumbled and would have fallen if a big arm had not gripped his and hauled him to his feet. Arram didn’t dare to speak his thanks. Waving to his rescuer, he continued his flight around the edge of the long building.
Even in the bad light and rain he saw too much of the midden for his unhappy nose and belly. Men in rags stood around it with rake-like devices, shoving the outside material toward the center so it would burn. The strong folk were tossing their bundles directly onto the fire.
When Arram reached the edge of the piles of rotten food, blood- and pus-stained bandages, and other unspeakable thi
ngs, he began to vomit and kept doing so until he thought the next thing to come from his mouth would be his belly. At last he stopped, clutching his aching ribs and breathing with his mouth open. Now he sent a prayer up to Hekaja on his own behalf, so he wouldn’t stumble and fall.
Someone put a ladle of water up to his mouth. “Don’t worry, it’s safe,” said a deep rumble of a male voice. “ ’Specially if you’re already medicked against the plague.”
He nodded and gulped the water down. “Thank you,” he gasped when the ladle was empty. When he looked ahead, he saw scarred black legs the size of tree trunks and gnarled feet in straw sandals.
“Thought your head might come off there, youngster. Hold this,” his savior instructed, shoving the ladle into his grip. Arram obeyed. Brisk hands slapped a thin cloth scented with mint over his nose and mouth and tied it firmly behind his head.
“See if that don’t make it easier.”
Arram straightened, taking tiny sniffs of air. It was still bad, but the mint kept it from overwhelming him. Suddenly a woman tripped. Her bundle fell, spilling its contents into the mud and trash. She had been carrying a child’s body.
Cursing, she bent and covered her burden with the cloth, then picked it up again. Arram stared, gape-mouthed, noticing the differing sizes of the bundles. These people carried the dead to the fire. His stomach heaved again. Quickly he pushed the mask away from his mouth, not wanting to soil it. After a few moments while his belly writhed, he straightened and lowered his mask. He’d had nothing left to bring out.
“Arram, what are you doing here, boy?” boomed his new friend. “You’re young for this, seems to me.”
Startled, Arram looked up into a familiar scarred face.
“Musenda!” he cried. “What are you doing here?”
The gladiator smiled and waved a muscled arm to indicate the midden and the people working there. “This. Why aren’t you at school?”
“I study medicines,” Arram said, and hiccupped. “First time working in a plague.”
His friend gave him a fresh ladle of water. “First mouthful, rinse an’ spit,” he advised. “Then little sips. All the students I seen are older.”
Arram drank the last of the water and returned the ladle. “Master says I grind herbs well,” he explained. He eyed the gladiator. He wore only a loincloth, which left his scarred chest bare. On his right shoulder was a branding scar: the image of a circle around two crossed swords. The mark of the arena. “Aren’t you cold?”
Musenda chuckled. “You learn to ignore it. Look at you. First you break up rocks; now you work with the healers. What next—will you fly?”
Arram smiled. “Forgive me for asking—how are you here? I thought you weren’t allowed to leave coliseum grounds without guards.”
“Oh, they’re around, somewhere dry,” Musenda told him. “We can leave the coliseum sometimes. Especially when we are privileged to offer service to the crown.”
Arram looked at the line of muscular people of all colors who came around the corner, each carrying a limp, sad bundle. “You mean when there’s a plague.”
“Especially when there’s a plague.” The man shrugged.
“Aren’t they afraid you’ll escape?”
The man chuckled. “Oh, no, boy. No, no.” He turned to show Arram his left shoulder. A twist of sigils written there in yellow ink shone in his magical vision. “If I go more than one hundred paces from this building, my heart starts to slow down. The farther I go, the slower it gets. They clean the mark off once we’re back in the arena, but the next plague…” He glanced at his companions. “I need to work. Are you going to be all right?”
Arram nodded. “I should work, too.” He offered his hand. “I’m glad I saw you, Musenda, even here.”
The gladiator looked down, then said, “Not many people offer a hand to a gladiator and a slave.” He took Arram’s hand in his callused grip. “We keep meeting. I start to think it’s fate. Stay well, Arram Draper.”
“Stay well. Thank you for the water and the mask.” Arram watched the big man join the slaves who were returning for more of the dead.
Arram trotted into the hospital, where a healer grabbed his arm. “Where are you supposed to be, youngster?” she demanded. “You don’t look sick.”
“Master Ramasu said I grind herbs and strengthen them well,” he said, unnerved by the fierceness in her eyes.
“Oh, Hekaja, I thank you!” the healer told the ceiling high above, though Arram thought she could also thank Master Ramasu. “Here.” She led him into a large area partitioned off into many small canvas rooms. Looking him over, she pulled a folded length of canvas from one of many piles stacked against the wall. “Go in there, close the flaps, take off all but your loincloth, and throw the old clothes in the barrel,” she said rapidly, as if she’d said it a thousand times before. “That includes your mask. Keep sandals and loincloth, nothing else. If those who sent you didn’t say you couldn’t keep your clothes, take it up with them, not with me. Move, youngster. I have work to do!”
Once he was done, she led him at a fast walk through long rows of canvas-fronted rooms for the sick, some with the canvas lifted wide to reveal plain, empty cots and chamber pots, others with the canvas shielding those who moaned or wept inside. Some chambers were open to reveal stacks of basins, sheets, blankets, buckets, and small tables. Others held those who were clearly well, visiting family or children. Healers, priests, and priestesses moved along the aisles, looking weary and preoccupied.
They reached the far side of the warehouse. Arram’s guide opened a door and thrust Arram through it. “Here we are,” she said. “Healers work on supplies in here. There are cots for naps and food down that way.” She pointed. “And medicines are that way. Good luck.” She left before he could even thank her.
A wave of plant spells, most of them familiar, flowed from behind the section the healer had identified as “medicines.” When he extended a feather of his Gift, he felt the plants he’d ground earlier that day.
“Who did that?” someone nearby asked sharply. “Whose Gift do I feel?”
He wasn’t sure who had spoken out of the identically gowned people, so he raised his hand. A tall, slender black woman swept down on him. “Who are you? You’re much too young to be here.”
“Master Ramasu sent me to grind and strengthen herbs,” Arram replied.
“Are you the one who did the batch that just came in from the university?” she asked, walking Arram into the workroom for medicines.
Arram saw his jars on the floor in their crate, unbroken, the seals still whole. “This is mine,” he told the woman. People never introduce themselves here! he thought. “This crate and the one next to it.”
The new mage produced her Gift, using it to inspect the jars. When she released her magic, she looked at Arram. “Some of the herbs—the plants are dry, but their power is as great as if they were green.”
Arram rubbed the side of his head. Between the journey, the stinks, and the vomiting, it hurt. “I told you, I don’t just grind, I strengthen. That’s why Master Ramasu sent me along. You could ask him, and I could do something about this headache.”
“I’ll do better,” the senior mage said. “Gieyat!” she called, looking over the large space. “I want Gieyat!”
A short Southern man, with the heavy muscles of someone who had worked hard labor all his life, appeared immediately. “To hear your enchanting call is to be wafted to your side, O wise woman,” he said, his eyes twinkling. His head was shaved bald. His sleeveless tunic revealed the scar of the gladiator on his right shoulder, a circle around crossed short swords. Beneath it was a fresher scar, a stylized bird flying up toward the swords: the mark of a freed gladiator.
“Can you and one of your lads carry these to the medicine cooks?” the mage asked. “Just these two crates, special. Have that savage Viya prepare medicine from these, no one else.”
Gieyat picked up the top crate as if it weighed nothing and handed it to a young man.
“I will see to it, Nazaam,” Gieyat said. “And you were supposed to go to supper the last time I saw you.”
“As soon as I settle this youngster, I will, Mother,” Nazaam replied. “Get someone to bring the lad the stomach-soft headache tea. The odors do not suit him.” There was less snap in her voice, and a softening in her eyes. She turned to Arram and said, “Let’s get you settled, boy, and me eating supper, or Gieyat will never leave me alone.”
It was plain that Nazaam and Gieyat were lovers. I’d like that, Arram thought as he followed Nazaam. To be comfortable with my lover, and laugh together, even when things are terrible. Like I do with Ozorne and Varice.
“How did you know I’d been sick?” he asked.
Nazaam took him to a worktable, one of many lined up against the chilly rear wall. Workers—mages and older students—stood at each one, pummeling and mixing the contents of mortars. A slate leaned against the big, bowl-shaped mortar where his guide halted. On it someone had written “Arram Draper.” No one was positioned at the table on his right; a much older mage labored on his left. He didn’t even look up.
Nazaam twitched a finger; a man ran up with a sack. He cut it open with his belt knife and poured its contents into the mortar until it was half full. Arram flinched. The herbs were so stale as to be useless. “They’re old,” he said, forgetting his company.
“Really?” Nazaam asked with awful sarcasm. “What a dreadful oversight on our part. You’d think we’d labored for weeks and gone through the fresh stuff.” She leaned close to Arram, her masked face a thumb’s width from his, her gloved forefinger poking his chest. “Now see here, student. If Ramasu foisted you on me, I must hope you have something useful. If you give me extra trouble, I swear to the Black God, granter of peace, you’ll be outside keeping order in the burning pile, understand?”
Arram gulped and nodded.
“And if you slack on work when people are dying…”
Arram straightened and replied stiffly, “I never slack on work, mistress.”
“It’s Master. Master Nazaam. I judge if you slack. When you’ve finished with one mortar’s worth, pour the contents into one of these”—she produced a bowl from a shelf beneath the table—“and start on your next mortar full. If you must stop, tell the next person who asks you if you need anything. Don’t leave until you’ve told that person, understand? We’ll let you know when it’s time for meals, sleep, or a halt.”