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VIII

I heard the nearness of our goal before the Guide said anything. I heard wind, wind and fire in measureless, empty places, yet nothing was as dead as the air of this world. Haldar too knew something—he said only that he sensed a chill, but I had seen his shudderings since paying the toll. He had a way of rubbing the skin on his arms as if to erase grotesque sensations, and sometimes he looked with amazement at his hands, as if he expected to find something in them, or crawling over them. I guessed his skin's premonitions matched those my ears received. Then the Guide pointed to a region of rocky outcrops which thrust up from a clay mesa to form a higher and more ragged mesa of stone. "Up there," he said, "are the gates of the Winds of Warr."

It appeared Defalk would be spared the payment of Toll, and it heartened him, I think. He began to stare ironically at the two of us. I said: "You look amused. What sunny ray has pierced your horizon?"

"I was only thinking, friend assassin," he said. I let this pass. "I was thinking how very like Dalissem it would be to show me her contempt by spurning my life. I mean once she'd proven it to be in her hand, for a nature like hers, the mere killing of me would seem too puny a conclusion. She would need a more exquisite gesture of scorn. To spit in my face, perhaps, and then to send me back to my little life—as she would call it. . . ." I thought I saw as much self-disgust as amusement in his smile, but my friend got growling mad. It was easy to understand because Defalk's guess sounded so likely. Indeed, the man was not far off the mark, as things ended.

"How can you bear your own miserable littleness?" Haldar asked him. His body shuddered with a sick wave of sensation that his aroused mind seemed not to notice. "You bank so smugly on her heroism! How gratefully you'd creep away with your face only spat in! If it saved your rat's hide, you'd wear her contempt with joy."

"You're a life-stealing, sneaking dog!" Defalk raged. He was beside himself, and did not even notice that the Guide gave him a dreadful look. "You've practiced skulking and back-stabbing all your scummy life. You swagger and beat your chest about heroism and nobility—" His voice was shrill, and words failed him. It was plain to me that he was as badly infected with high-mindedness as the man who taunted him. Poor Defalk agreed with Haldar in his heart. To my friend's credit, he contained himself. He did not even answer. Perhaps he glimpsed the same truth.

Now, just as the mesas towered quite near, we saw that a last canyon lay between us and them. We were nearly upon it before it appeared. As we spun down into it, we found a road beneath us, and saw a small city down on the canyon floor. Our road dove down the chasm wall and through the city's heart. Black smoke hung over the rooftops, and there were towers here and there in the streets supporting the braziers that produced it. Even from on high we breathed a reek like a druggist's shop afire. We noticed beyond the city a field of great square pits, where the smoke hung even denser, but our descent was swift, and we only had a moment's vantage of this. Defalk murmured, as to himself, "A pestilence . . . ?"

It was indeed a place of pestilence, but different from all plague-struck cities that I have heard of in being thronged and active. The Guide did not rein up as we tore into the streets, but our team at once began colliding with the citizens of that place.

All went thickly muffled—double hooded, with even hands and face wrapped. At a glance it seemed a drowsy place, for people sat or sprawled in doorways, and on the cobblestones with their backs to the walls. We even saw them lying in the raingutters under upper-story casement windows. The foot traffic usurped even the middle of the lane, for everyone walked quickly and gave everyone else a wide berth. The hounds snarled and bit, and the Guide plied his serpent on the heads of the people who blocked us. The drivers of other vehicles treated obstruction just as high-handedly, but our dire team made the other carters and wainsmen rein up. The wains were full of the dead, tied up in their sheets.

So we moved in surges through the streets, parts of which were narrowed by improvised spitals which were scarcely more than cots under canopies. The doctors who sat in these were coweled, and the limbs that poked from their sleeves were like barbed and jointed sticks. They did nothing, and seemed to watch eagerly while things like crablice, but big as cats, crawled from cot to cot laying eggs in the patients' open sores.

More than one man, in the extremity of sickness, ran raving through the crowd, trailing bedclothes. One such seized a mother who was hastening her child along; he tore her scarves aside and kissed her wetly. He did the same to the child, not relaxing his grip even as the woman hammered him to his knees with a stone. Another man who ran in delirium was chased by several apothecaries. He was nude, straight from his bed, and as he fled, huge swellings in his groin and neck split open. Wet young wasps the size of doves crawled out of them and clung to his body, waving their wings to dry them.

Meanwhile, above the street level, women in boarded-up houses conducted business from upper windows. Some used broomsticks to roll the night's dead off their eaves and down into the waiting wains. Others traded with cart-men below. We saw one lower a bucket to a man with a covered grocery cart. As she fished in her purse for coins, the man thrust his hand into his doublet and pulled out a handful of struggling cockroaches. He threw these into the milk he'd filled her bucket with, winked at me, and covered it.

For Defalk the worst spectacle came as we put the town behind us. It was the gate that stood before the field of smoldering pits outside the city. Our road lay through this gate, and a giant figure, all wound with foul bandages, sat in our way. It was weeping, and cradling a swaddled object. Past the gate, a second bandaged figure emptied a wain into a smoking pit, using a pitchfork that speared up three men at a stroke. The mourning giant sprang up. Its voice told the female sex which its pus-stained wrappings hid.

"Guide!" she sobbed. "He is so hungry and ill, our poor babe! Manflesh is what he needs. Give our starving babykins manflesh, please!" The worker—her husband by his greater size—was already out of the wain and running toward us. "Yes!" he shouted. "Manskin for our little sweetling, Guide!"

"Hail, Parents of Plague!" the Guide said. "Step down to them, courtier. What piece of him will you have, great ones?"

The parents fell into a doting conference with their precious one. They teased aside the swaddling rags, and questioned their child with twiddlings of their fingers:

"What does be want then? What does Babekin wants at all, at all?"—until the mother raised her head, and crowed: "An eye! Sweetkins wants an eye, he does he does he does!"

Defalk had stepped down and stood forth, and steady enough, too. But at this he reeled back. Faster than he moved, the Plague-father shot forth his hand. His black, gnarled fingers seemed to fumble against Defalk's face. Defalk shouted and his knees gave, and then the Plague-father held something teasingly above the swaddled bundle. "See? See? Does he wants it, hmmm? Does he wants it?"

The mother opened the swaddling wider, revealing not a face, but a boil of bugs, teeming and scrambling in the fetid caul.

"See? See? Does little lord love-kins wants it at all at all?"

Then the black fingers opened, and an eye fell, trailing red strings, into the anthill turmoil. As if floating on some liquid it bobbed there a moment. Defalk clutched his face and bellowed. The insects foamed over the bright ball, and it sank amid them. Defalk howled again. He held his face less in pain, it seemed, than in the way of one who tries not to see something.

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Framed