Suggested Listening

Elruin clasped her hands together and bowed as was expected of her as a vassal. "Please give me a moment to check on the patients, first. I wouldn't want to put anyone at risk."

"Be as thorough as you need. In fact, if you need anything, just tell me. Preventing an epidemic should be your top priority, as it is mine." Juna began to follow behind Elruin as she approached the hospital building. "I'd like to meet your priestess as well. She's an elusive one."

"She is, but I can always rely on her to be there when I need her." Elruin pretended not to be concerned. "Is the bloodmold dead?" She asked through the door. "Lady Juna has requested an audience. It seems there's more to the disease than we know."

"It appears to be, Lady Elruin." It was rare for Cali to use her title, but these were rare circumstances. "I think we're safe, yet I must advise caution. It might be wise for us to remain in quarantine for a time, on the possibility that you were less successful than we hoped."

"I agree." That it provided an excuse for Cali to avoid the direct eye of Lady Juna and perhaps her brother played no small part in the decision. "How is the child doing?" He was still alive, Elruin could see that much, but alive did not mean well.

"He's unconscious, and if the gods are feeling merciful, he'll remain so for a long while," Cali said. "When he awakens, it will be to the news that he lost his legs, an arm, and his mother. With time, maybe a month or two, we'll be able to restore his limbs, but nothing short of a god can bring his mother back now. Speaking of, although we should remain in quarantine, I would beg you make room for us elsewhere. The smell in here is terrible. Then we should burn this building."

Elruin didn't want that poor child to wake up with his mother's desecrated corpse still in the room with him, either. "I'll do what I can." After assuring Cali, Elruin dipped into her magic, and the practice she had with sound manipulation, to amplify her voice. "I need four quarantine shacks built next to one another over there." Elruin pointed to a spot a safe distance from the well of necromancy. "Then burn this building. If you're not here to help, then leave before you're drafted."

"I believe I count as already helping." Lady Juna smiled for a moment, before adding her own orders. "Guards, see to it that those who lack a reason to stay are cleared out, or feel free to make good on Lady Elruin's threat. This is a place to aid the sick, not to make a spectacle of their suffering."

With the possible plague averted, people would have cleared out on their own, but the reminder of social propriety and potential punishment sped the process along. Meanwhile, Elruin found Erra near the edge of the crowd, alongside Lemia.

"Is it true, everyone's safe?" The worry that Elruin was lying for the benefit of the crowd was plain on Erra's face.

"Not everyone," Elruin said. "By the time I arrived, it was too late for one, and another is in for a difficult recovery. I think our people will recover soon, though. Lady Juna needs to talk to me. Lemia, you should come with. Erra, please keep things stable while we're gone, since the priestess must remain in quarantine until we're certain it's safe. We won't go far, in case I'm needed to purge the bloodmold again."

"What will we do about the medical supplies in the hospice room?"

"They'll be useless, after I cleansed the room," Elruin said. "We'll have to make up the difference with more herbs from the garden, later, but once word spreads that there's bloodmold here... we might not see patients for a while."

"Unless there are others in the city who've been infected," Lemia added. "If they hear you've even managed to slow it down, they'll come to us first." She clasped her hands and bowed to Lady Juna. "My apologies, but the established nobility has a bad reputation when it comes to diseases like this one, which extends to the church and the Order."

"A deserved reputation, I'm ashamed to admit." Juna allowed herself to be led along with no further commentary on the state of trust between peasant and nobility.

Elruin took them to the small building they constructed to hide themselves from prying eyes and scrying magic, as well as to help prevent more of those freakish hand-things from crawling up the tunnel Lyra built for them. Their small collection of shielding sarite wasn't much, but it covered a small building well enough for most purposes. "I hope it's safe enough here."

Juna looked around at the building that was more storage shed than proper meeting room. "You never cease to surprise me. Most people I know would have sold those shards the moment they got hold of them, and trusted the city's protections to be enough. I always knew you were going to be something special some day."

Elruin smiled, taking the compliment for what it was. "You said something about others thinking the bloodmold was strange?"

"I did." Lacking chairs, Juna chose to sit on a chest containing some of the unreadable centaur tablets. "We've seen several outbreaks. They began in the northeast, and began to spread almost immediately. Which makes little sense in its own right; bloodmold sprouts in small clusters, often in graveyards where former victims were buried. It moves slow, and kills fast. While this stuff is spreading faster than should be possible, and kills slow enough to let victims get through city checkpoints without anyone noticing there's anything wrong, and we can't find any shared spot the victims went that might have the original mold."

"You suspect it's being spread as a weapon, don't you?" Lemia caught the implications before Elruin. "Is it the Ghosts of Sorvel, again?"

"Yes to the first, no to the second. If the Ghosts had the sort of skill and knowledge needed to control and change bloodmold to this extent, they wouldn't have fallen apart so easily after Claron's death." On mentioning her brother, Juna touched the scar still on her cheek. "We think this is being done by some other force, one which comes from the plains."

"Is this why you've been restricting trade to the northeast?" Lemia hesitated for a moment. "What? I kept in contact with the merchants we met in Sonhome. It's a good way to stay aware of the world around us. They didn't mention any plagues, though there was something about seeing monsters none of them recognized. They thought they were chimera, but I'm beginning to suspect it's related."

"And I thought we had our leaks under control," Juna said. "They're called chamrosh, which until now had only been found in the plains to the north. If they're migrating south, it's because something even more dangerous is driving them south."

"Are you going to ask me to investigate?" Elruin considered the disruption that would cause to the remnant of her school year.

"I was going to have you deal with the outbreaks," Juna said. "While Arila has been spared until today, other cities have lost good people. Engewal lost two of their finest healers, including one of the six in the empire capable of resurrection magic. As well as four medical necromancers who attempted the same trick you did, and one of my half-siblings who attempted the same trick I almost did. This plague, whatever its origins, is by far the strongest of its kind. Did you learn anything of value in fighting it?"

"I'm not sure." Elruin considered what she witnessed, and how best to explain it to Juna. "I'm not a medical mage, but according to the priestess, it grew faster and stronger when exposed to healing magic, which I think is normal for bloodmold."

Juna nodded. "This one seems able to do more than most, but that is one of bloodmold's defining features."

Elruin considered how to explain it without revealing her lifesight. "I did notice it seemed to share its strength with the rest of the plague. When I hurt the infection in one person, it withstood more than it should have, but the disease around it also suffered. Like it was just parts of a single creature. When I changed to hitting all of it at once, that's when I saw real progress."

"Interesting," Juna said. "I'll relay that to Engewal. The healers might be able to use it. What else did you learn?"

"Nothing." Elruin bowed her head. "I apologize, I wasn't thinking about how I might have to describe everything about the plague to you. I was too concerned with killing it to study it first."

"Where did it start in the body, how did it spread?"

"Umm, the hands?" Elruin guessed. "It was in the fingers and hands of the women, and I guess in their eyes."

"Normal bloodmold starts in the lungs or stomach," Lemia said. She hadn't studied much on plagues, a fact which she was fast coming to regret. "It will only start in other parts of the body through open wounds in the skin. Unless it's been festering secretly in the body for quite some time, or it's found another way to spread."

Outside, screaming started.

"Merat ne!" Juna rolled to her feet and jumped through the door, choosing to smash it rather than take the extra half-second to pull it open.

Elruin rushed out next, followed after by a much less enthusiastic Lemia. Outside, Cali was struggling to fight with her own nurses whose eyes were now the pure red color of living bloodmold. Behind them, the blob that had once been a woman, and another which was a dismembered little boy, struggled to crawl after them onto the fresh battlefield.

"But I killed it!" Elruin shouted. Then she looked, and realized the mold was, in fact, still dead. "Necromancy!" Somehow, using methods Elruin could only guess at, someone had found a way to bring the fungal goo back as a zombie without needing to be within detectable magical range. The technique was either more subtle or more powerful than anything she'd ever heard of outside a theology lesson to accomplish such a feat. "It's undead!"

"Then we both know how to deal with it." Juna didn't wait for an acknowledgment as swords of pure flame manifested in her hands. Her first strike took off the heads of both nurses, then set their corpses ablaze like they had been coated in lamp oil. Juna then plunged her weapons into both the boy and his mother, a second death more merciful than the first.

Elruin began to sing, to strip and purge the taint born of this strange, unliving, weapon. The taint fought her, resisted every step of its cleansing like a feral beast backed into a corner, like the occasional swine at the farm which realized it was being led to the slaughter. It attempted to flee, to hide, until it exhausted the tattered remnants of strength and burned itself out, the last remaining wisps chained and shattered by Elruin's control.

Only once before had she seen such a obstinate will to live from the force of undeath.

Juna stood there, holding her breath amidst the smoke and flame of four burning bodies. Her eyes were on Calenda, rather than the carnage around them.

Elruin said the only thing she could think of to draw attention away from elder sister. "It was intelligent."

Juna looked up at her. "What?"

"The mold, or the taint which controlled it, was sapient. A true genius loci, and one too old to have begun here. We're facing an abomination necromancer."