“There is no need, my lord.” Keera has been searching the surrounding trees, and has found what she desires—a length of thick climbing vine, which hangs from one especially stout limb of a high, spreading oak on the opposite bank. Taking up a long, notched branch that lies among a scattering of dead wood on the rocky surface, she grabs hold of the vine with it, and has swung across the spillway even before Stasi’s broad paws have leapt from the south to touch the northern side. The hardest part of their passage to the ash stand on the far side is, however, yet to come: Keera must exert all her will to keep from looking into the eyes of the now-close collection of dying animals—for there is, in the wide, dark eyes of each surviving thing, not only a terrible, bewildered fear, but a pitiable plea begging relief of any living thing that might pass by. It is not long before Keera must look away altogether, and hurry to keep pace with Stasi and Caliphestros. The panther’s mind is fixed most determinedly on the man suspended from the trees, a man who reeks with the scent of those deadly and despicable men of Broken …
When Keera does reach her comrades, she finds them both deep in contemplation of the scene of ritual mutilation: Stasi’s nose moves from spot to spot upon the ground, able, apparently, to pick up a scent trail. Caliphestros, in the meantime, twists and turns his head as Stasi roots through the undergrowth of the forest floor, keeping his eyes—which have gone from an expression of worry to one of recognition and shock—fixed on the hanging dead man. Deeply creased skin interrupts the victim’s grey and white beard and surrounds the eye sockets (the latter emptied by scavenging birds, some of them, perhaps, the very ravens that are now among the dying that ring the pool), all of which betray a man of advanced years.
“Korsar…,” Caliphestros pronounces, lifting a trembling hand to indicate the lifeless half-figure. “But I knew this man …” He stares deep into the famed soldier’s eye sockets as if searching for the light of mutual recognition, and finding only the gleam of putrid gore.
“Yantek Korsar?” Keera asks, herself shocked, now.
“Aye, Keera,” Caliphestros answers. “Once, the famed and honored commander of all of Broken’s legions. Yet now …”
Keera glances at Caliphestros, to take the measure of his sentiment; but she finds an expression impossible to interpret, and so looks again at the sadly mutilated body. “Was he one of those who denounced you?” she asks at length.
“Denounced me?” Caliphestros answers, his face and voice ambiguity itself. “No. Neither did he speak for me, but—Herwald Korsar was a good man. A tragic man, in many ways. But no …” And at that moment, as his characteristically certain voice trails away again, an aspect enters his features that surprises Keera, perhaps more than the sight of the mutilated body. For the first time during his alliance with the Bane foragers, this master of sorcery, or of science, or of whatever art it is that usually enables him to speak with such authority about so many strange and wondrous subjects, appears uncertain. “I had expected some such horror as this, when news came of Broken’s plan to invade the Wood and attack your tribe,” he says. “But to see it …”
Keera thinks to ask where such “news” could have come from, to one alone in the Wood; but the strangely discomfiting moment is shattered by a sudden scream of pain and terror from one of the stray and dying shag cattle that lie in the small inlet on the pool’s north shore. As if magically, the beast, a once-imposing steer, rises suddenly from the carcasses around it, stands awkwardly upon strangely misshapen hooves, and begins to buck wildly. Caliphestros and Keera both watch warily as the steer’s mad eyes—out of which seep small trails of blood—catch sight of Stasi’s brilliant green orbs, which must appear to it as a signal fire in the morning mist; and a clearly malicious intent abruptly taints the steer’s every breath and movement. Stasi growls in return, the massive muscles of her shoulders and haunches readying for combat; but, just as Keera prepares to lift Caliphestros’s scant weight from the panther’s back, in order to allow Stasi freedom for battle, the old man stays the tracker’s arm.
“No, Keera!” he cries, locking one arm as tightly as he can about the panther’s thick, straining neck, and using the other to cover Stasi’s eyes. “She must not tear the flesh of the diseasèd beast, nor allow herself to be even scratched—your bow, quickly, drop the animal as it charges!”
Keera asks no questions, but lifts bow from shoulder and arrow from quiver, each with one arm and in a practiced set of motions, as she steps out in front of her friends. She nocks her shaft at once, and then—with the shag steer bearing down on them out of feverish madness, charging through bank, mud, water, and finally over stone—she takes careful aim and lets fly. The arrow finds its way to the animal’s breast, through scant meat and between bone, and finally into the heart. The steer collapses and slides along the stone upon which Keera, Stasi, and Caliphestros stand, its body made slick by its own sweat, blood, and spittle, so that it comes to a halt all too near the brave Bane tracker. When the creature does stop, Keera finally draws breath once more, and for the first time allows herself to realize what has occurred.
“Impossible,” she mutters, as the last rattle of death shakes the pitiable beast before her. “Could the pestilence drive it so very mad?”
“Not the pestilence that you have described to me as afflicting your people,” Caliphestros answers, as he and Stasi come up beside Keera. He nods in acknowledgment of the skill of her shot, then says, “But another pestilence altogether was plain to be seen, as soon as the poor creature rose. Observe the ears, Keera, and then the hooves …”
Keera takes a few steps toward the beast, and sees that its ears have been badly mauled by some sort of combat; but then she realizes the truth, murmuring, “Nay—they have rotted away …!” And so, she then sees, have the hooves, whole parts of which are missing, revealing sickly flesh beneath.
“Oh, great Moon,” Keera whispers, going down upon one knee before the steer, but careful not to touch it. “What can this harmless animal have done to warrant your fire?”
Caliphestros’s head cocks at these words, as Stasi begins to shift to and fro, knowing now that the steer is a mass of disease and anxious to be away from it. But Caliphestros strokes her muzzle and neck calmingly, and asks the tracker, “What say you, Keera—‘fire’? You know of it?”
Keera’s head slowly nods. “Moonfire,” she says. “The fever that maddens and rots …”
“Yes,” Caliphestros says. “Of course that is what you would call it. Moonfire—the fire of Saint Anthony, Ignis Sacer—the Holy Fire …”
Keera stands and approaches the old man, who has again retreated into a world of unsettling thought. “My lord? What are these things of which you speak?”
“All names that are one, in their essence.” Caliphestros sighs deeply, glancing back up at the decaying body of Yantek Korsar. “So we are doubly cursed—doubly plagued …”
And then, strangest of all, the old man cradles his forehead in one hand—and quietly weeps. It lasts a mere moment, but the moment is enough: “Lord Caliphestros,” Keera says, not at all reassured at the sound of even quiet tears. “Do you not have the skill to face the presence of two pestilences in this place—and perhaps in Okot?”
But Caliphestros, his tears gone, only answers in a tongue that is strange to Keera, and which further unnerves her: “Ther is moore broke in Brokynne …”
“My lord,” the tracker insists, sternly calling him to the moment and its perils. “Has the fire taken your reason, as well, then?”
Holding up a delicate, wrinkled hand, the old man steadies himself and says, “Forgive me, Keera. It was a saying, a small jest, with which the monk in whose company I first came to the great city—Winfred, or Boniface, of whom we have spoken—was wont to ease our cares, in his own tongue, when we came to realize the true nature of the place: ‘Ther is moore broke in Brokynne, thanne ever was knouen so.’ It meant only that, beneath the surface of its renownèd power, Broken was a far more ominous place than either of us could
even say with accuracy. But now—” Again with his eyes fixed upon the old soldier strapped between the ash trees, Caliphestros murmurs, “—now, I know the bitter truth of that ‘jest’; and I believe we can begin to see and know the true extent of Broken’s malice and corruption. Certainly, it is doubled, at the very least: twice the peril—two pestilences, as you say, Keera, and perhaps still more danger. For we also have this testament”—he points up to the mutilated remains of the once-proud Yantek Korsar—“to another kind of illness, another type of danger, altogether …”
Keera can only shake her head in frustration, and then cries, “My lord, you must explain these things! I must know if my children—”
“And explain them I shall,” Caliphestros answers, with deep if controlled concern, as he turns away from the ash stand and attempts confident composure, putting a hand to Keera’s shoulder. “Not least for the sake of your children, Keera. And, as a way of atoning for any confusion that I may at times inflict upon you, let me say that all Bane children, at least, should be in no greater danger, from this second disease that we have discovered; for, although we cannot be certain, the plague you have described as being at work in Okot shares few if any symptoms with the second fever, that which you call Moonfire. That is one thing from which we may take solace. And with that assurance, let us be on our way, and speedily. I have much to explain to your leaders, and on our way to meet with them we might even try to prove why the rose fever alone has struck Okot.”
Caliphestros quickly urges Stasi back to the deep cleft in the rock formation, and to the noisy waterway at its base; once there Stasi bursts, with the fantastic strength that comes so easily to her kind, over the rushing outlet—
And yet Keera, clinging fast to her vine and reaching the southern bank just after Stasi, can hear the old man still murmuring to himself, over and over, as if it were a desperate prayer, now:
“Ther is moore broke in Brokynne …”
So long as Stasi maintains a fast pace, however, down the stone and back onto the trail that brought the three to this place, Keera does not question the old man’s strange speech, nor any other aspect of his behavior. Neither does she trouble her mind more than a little over a brief glimpse that she caught, as she swung back over that pool’s outlet, of a flash of shining white: a fleeting glimpse of a human bone, being washed quickly through the waterway. She has no cause to let it worry her, she assures herself as she runs: after all, where was found one dead, decaying man whose legs were severed, there would likely be an abundance of such bones, from long ago. And if this one in particular appeared too small ever to have resided within the body of a full-grown human, whether Bane or Tall, well … Certainly, it is of no importance to the affairs of the moment; thus, although she knows this explanation to be inadequate to the peculiar sight, she tucks the memory away in the back of her distracted mind and fixes her thoughts upon reaching Okot …
{viii:}
BEFORE OKOT, however, must come the arranged meeting with Veloc and Heldo-Bah at the Fallen Bridge. Keera finds, as she does her best to keep pace with Stasi during their morn-to-noonday run, that the memory of their terrible discovery cements the particular bond that the three of them—tracker, scholar, and panther—have from the first been inclined to feel, even as it confirms the full and terrible importance of the journey upon which they have embarked and the purpose that they are now serving; and this sense of importance, the tracker knows, outweighs anything that could have propelled even Heldo-Bah’s and Veloc’s swift steps: Keera is not altogether surprised, therefore, when—as the stench of the rotting soldier’s body begins to cause her nostrils to flare in renewed distaste soon after the enormous, moss-draped form of the Fallen Bridge comes within view some distance down the deep, rocky riverbed—neither of the male foragers are anywhere to be seen. She surmises aloud to Caliphestros that their own speed may have been sufficient to have allowed them to outstrip her brother and Heldo-Bah, who cannot always be counted upon to give their fullest effort or to follow instructions precisely once they are out of both the hearing and the reach of her personal commands and exhortations. For his part, Caliphestros wonders if the two Bane men have not met with some mishap; but Keera assures him that her heart is not vexed by such worries, for Veloc and Heldo-Bah know this stretch of the Cat’s Paw only too well; and since neither she herself nor Stasi have smelled the fresh blood that would characterize such violence, she suspects that her brother gave in to the lazy exhortations of Heldo-Bah, once they had run for a good part of their journey and their usual taskmaster was well out of sight, and slowed his pace to accommodate the added weight of Caliphestros’s books. Keera therefore suggests that Caliphestros and she inspect the diminished corpse of the soldier while they wait for the two to appear, an activity that proves to take little time: the seemingly sorcerous old fellow is able to judge, even by the maggot-infested mess that the soldier’s body has become, that he died of the rose fever alone: that he was not killed by the priests of Kafra (as the golden arrows that seemed to have pierced his body indicated), but was made to appear as if he had been so dispatched, and that the remains are no longer a danger to other living creatures, if indeed they ever were.
“But how can you make such judgments, my lord,” Keera asks, her voice rising over the eternally roaring waters of the Cat’s Paw, “when the body itself is so very decayed?”
“Most of my conclusions are the result of simple observation,” Caliphestros replies. “Keera, have you ever tried to loose one of the Tall’s golden arrows from your bow?”
“We have never had reason or opportunity,” the tracker answers. “When we discover such valuable items, they are always in the bodies of similarly executed outcasts from Broken, and our Groba insists that they be brought back to decorate that council’s Den of Stone, in order to increase the mystical power of the place.”
“Well, then,” the old man continues, “perhaps now you might examine at least one more such shaft from a practical point of view?”
Bemused, Keera steps toward the mass of decay on the ground; but then she pauses, seeking reassurance. “It—will it be safe to touch them?”
Caliphestros smiles gently in admiration. “While I should not be surprised if your healers and other wise men and women were unable to divine the cause of his death immediately, now that you, Keera, know it to be the rose fever, I will wager what is left of my legs that you know its chief properties.”
“I—believe so, Lord Caliphestros,” Keera answers. “As you have said, the rose fever, unlike some similar diseases, seems to lose its threat with the host’s death.”
“Indeed,” Caliphestros replies. “Although when my assistant brought my arrow to me”—he quickly takes the flower-entwined example that he displayed to the foragers on the previous evening from within his smallest, lightest satchel—“I was forced to take extra precautions. Only when you told me your tale did I realize they had been unnecessary, for both myself and my … messenger …”
As Keera makes her first informal estimate of the weight of the shaft she took from the soldier, she says, with affected disinterest, “Yes, your messenger—messengers—I wonder if we may not discuss all the creatures who do your bidding, ere we rejoin the others, my lord …” She moves quickly from the body, using the seemingly inconsequential moment required to study and clean bits of decayed flesh from the arrow. “For it is the only thing that you have yet to—”
“Clever, my girl,” the old man answers, with a light laugh. “But let me retain one small secret for now, eh? Well then—to the business at hand. What do you note about the arrow?”
Keera’s face fills with disappointment as she lets the arrow rest upon her finger. “The balance is wretched. You could not loose this shaft from more than a short distance with any chance of accuracy. And these flights—there is no question of their being able to steady its course, even could you launch it further.”
“Just so,” Caliphestros judges approvingly. “And what, then, would you
guess the likelihood of the best Broken archers killing a man with such arrows to be, even were the condemned close by?”
“Small, my lord,” Keera replies. “If it exists, at all.”
“Indeed, Keera,” Caliphestros says. “These arrows are intended to thus deceive Broken’s enemies. And the body itself was meant to spread a disease that the priests of Kafra were unaware could not be spread after death. They no doubt thought it identical with the Holy Fire, the pious fools …”
“Whatever their thinking, they pressed the deadly heads into the softer parts of his flesh,” Keera says, “after he was already dead.”
“Excellent.” Caliphestros urges Stasi a little closer to the corpse, glancing at it again for as long as he can tolerate the stench. “Thus we can, indeed, conclude that the fever had killed him before he was pierced by such precious ritual weapons.”
“Then when we were at that terrible pool upriver,” Keera says, “you were adamant about our not touching any creatures, the dead along with the living, because we could not say just what affliction had killed which creature, particularly from a distance.”
“Well reasoned, Keera,” Caliphestros answers. “Would that I had been able to teach the Kafran priests and healers such logic. My quickly increased alarm was due to my detecting the presence of what you call Moonfire; for after the victims of that disease—call it what you will, Holy Fire, the Ignis Sacer of the Romani, or the name other Christ-worshippers use, Saint Anthony’s Fire—die, their bodies release a type of evil vapor or bad air, one that the illness seems to use, to carry itself on to other living beings.”
“But, surely,” Keera answers, “if one disease can ride undetected upon the air released by the bodies, others—such as the rose fever—would do the same.”
Caliphestros lets a deep breath escape him in frustration. “Indeed. It is an inconsistency that I have not been able to resolve, save to think that these pestilences, like other orders of beings, are not all equally clever. Why should one sickness remain dangerous after its host has died, while another does not? Most that call themselves healers—and none worse than the Kafran—cannot grasp the notion that this is a question that must have an answer. To nearly all such, it is the will of their god, and that is enough.”