The markian plague had already struck the Peninsula a dozen times since the Horspices established the Short-Cape calendar, and it's likely that more outbreaks were not recorded. Not all were fatal, some were even mild. An infection hit Southy four centuries before I was born and decimated only the rats, much to the delight of its inhabitants. A few decades later, a new pestilence struck Tag, in the canton of Sandport, and caused the flowering trees to wither. However, other epidemics had led to real massacres and turned populated areas into open-air mass graves. This was the case during the Dark Century, at the beginning of which men and livestock died like flies as winter approached.

Although access to the Marks has been strictly guarded by Breakbase's navy since the catastrophic events of the Dark Century, legends of the cursed islands and their unimaginable riches were legion. There were always reckless adventurers who ignored the warnings, slipped through the cracks and landed, driven by the tales and the lure of gain. Most didn't return. Those who escaped the plague spoke little of what they had seen, many went mad and painted contradictory pictures of the Marks that were difficult to interpret.

Concordant testimonies mention a mysterious place that the Sarps had named Vorenhal, an abandoned city of giants that resembled nothing known. There was also talk of a distortion, a strange halo that made the three markian islands, though distinct from the open sea, become one when you walked on their soil. Although men had once discovered diamonds as big as a fist, heaps of gold and gems and curious objects made of precious and unknown alloys, their stories never ended happily. And sometimes, some of them carried the plague away from the deserted shores from which it should never have been taken.

It was the end of the rain Moon and I was entering my eighteenth year. I had the body of a man now, slender and lithe and stretched by toil. A well-fed Val would have outgrown me by a head, but among the slaves I was not considered small. The lumbering crews were pampered compared to the others, and since I worked in the woods, I improved my meals with all the edible things that Narsilap and Ulrick had taught me to find there. The pine forests of Carm had little to do with the forest of Vaw, but there were still some plants and mushrooms that I recognized. My flesh, accustomed to deprivation from a very young age, had been able to draw from it the slightest bit of sustenance. My face had not changed that much during my adolescence, my expression had perhaps become more severe and my attitude more feline, but I still had fine features, a narrow jaw and a sharp nose. I kept my hair half-trimmed because nits abounded and, because of the irons, you couldn't scratch at night.

Spring was budding timidly, showers fell unexpectedly on the mountains, and the forest was dripping with cold humidity. On the slopes, the broken stones trickled with water and the mist stagnated for a long time on the road to the valley, where it merged with the greasy fumes of the blast furnaces. There was a pale light that hung over the peaks of the carmian Wall, a hostile reverberation that hovered for days, and we only looked up to the sky reluctantly. My team had been confined to camp for days because of the dreary, sooty mantle that draped the foothills of Ifos. We were reduced to assisting those who were splitting wood and carrying it to the depots, a thankless task that didn't suit us.

The camp was a vast jumble of flat buildings, encircled by a rickety palisade of logs and rock. Here and there were gaunt lookout posts, open to all winds, occupied night and day by armed guards. The other buildings were intended for daily life, a small infirmary, refectories where one could eat in the evening, and above all, the hundred or so barracks where the slaves crammed together to take a rest. An icy torrent flowed not far from the mountains. A water reservoir had been built a little lower down to provide for the camp's needs. The site had been chosen because it was wedged between two rocky arms, and it was difficult to move towards the mines or the valley if you didn't follow the trails. Thus, the slightest hint of an organized revolt could be put down or crushed against the mountain with ease.

The disease first broke out among the kitchen slaves, suggesting that the infection had come through the supplies. At first, a handful of them complained of cramps and pain in their legs and then in their groin. Soon they were in so much pain that they couldn't walk at all. As the new cases were piling up, the overseers withdrew from the camp itself, preferring the heights of the turrets and walls. They carried their weapons prominently, as if they feared an uprising, and in our ranks a rumor swelled about the roads that had suddenly emptied to the east.

Three days after the first symptoms appeared, all the free men, afiliadi, inroï, or spitaï had disappeared from the camp, taking with them the beasts of burden. Only the overseers remained, wrapped in their soggy capes on the platforms, and they did not respond to any of our injunctions. No one went to the mines, nor to the lumbering. The furnaces on the road no longer belched their bilious smoke. The camp was closed, immersed in a confused clamor woven of fear and suffering. There were many slaves still trapped in irons, and they were begging to be freed. The food supplies inside the compound were looted, and there were deadly brawls between bands of akoï who took advantage of the disorder to settle scores. While they were killing each other with pickaxes and hammers, I managed to take advantage of the confusion and get half a loaf of bread, which I hid in the back of one of the woodcutters' dormitories. There was no water left, and we drank the rain that poured down from the roofs.

On the fourth day, the first to fall ill began coughing up blood. A good half of the camp no longer left the barracks because they couldn't move. A few able-bodied slaves set fire to the infirmary, and more fires followed. No one moved to put them out. There were reports of cannibalism and other unspeakable acts, chthonian rituals born of insanity and desperation. Those who were spared by the disease retreated into the shelters and expelled the men who couldn't hide their symptoms. Complaints and rattles rose to the gray sky in a wave of agonizing litanies. I sat with other loggers in our old dormitory. Several of them were already bedridden.

During the night, those who coughed began to die. Others tried to cross the fence near the water reservoir. We heard them fighting with the guards for control of the walls. The clanking and howling reminded me briefly that I had been a warrior, and a dozen lumberjacks came out with their axes to join the riot, but I was content to chew my moldy bread, thinking of the fights in Lager and Ac-Pass, and the weasel-faced kid I had killed near Long-Vein. In the early morning, my companions began to talk about the markian plague in hushed tones. They were afraid, I think, afraid to name openly the scourge that was eating away at us. Outside, the fighting continued sporadically. My thighs began to throb.

The plague of 631, which devastated the east of Carm, was stopped in the vicinity of Ifos. The event was so deadly that its spread was largely contained by the rapidity with which people died of it. Isolated as we were, we knew nothing of the fate of Nycenae and Archea, which were transformed into ghost towns, nor of the drastic quarantine measures which allowed the other cities to be saved. We saw only the arrival of the soldiers, and the erection of the barricades.

The troops of the doka Monza and the doka Kosolaï emerged from limbo on the northern road on the sixth day. With others, we hobbled to the palisade to witness the installation of their bright pavilions, five hundred spans below, and then the beginning of the works of wood and earth that would condemn us. I thought bitterly that I was leaving the mines the same way I had entered them: in a siege. In the distance, the officers' plate armors glistened in the rain, the formations of pikes stretched above the men in bristling, skeletal banners. At noon, the remaining overseers on the walls wanted to retreat to them. The characteristic whistle of the carmian crossbows greeted them. They were shot down on the broken rocks between the camp and the road. A handful made it back, and most of them were limping as much as we were. I remember hearing them crying.

Now, pale bodies lay everywhere, lying in the mud between the barracks, their faces stained with the blood they had vomited. There were hardly more than a thousand of us still standing, and the number was getting smaller by the hour. I wasn't the only one to realize that there would be no help. That there would be nothing for us but death. It wasn't a cruel statement, not really, but it was nonetheless implacable. We saw fires breaking out on the ridges around the camp, and phalangists patrolling the woods. I don't think we would have had the strength to get to them even if we had wanted to. I returned to the shelter. The waiting began.

Huddled in the back of the woodcutters' hut, I began to talk with another slave whom I liked, because he was funny and lively and sympathetic, and he had been a pickpocket in the port district of Lept. He was a Carmian who called himself Landros, and we had worked side by side for the past two years. We sat in the dark massaging our aching legs, and exchanged stories about our respective lives as the plague took root in our flesh and spread like a slow venom. It was a gentle way of taking stock, and mourning what was to disappear. For the first time in five years, I could tell the truth.

My name was Fyss, I had grown up in Brown-Horn, on the wild frontier, but no one knew where I really came from. I had a family of orphans like myself, but Robin had been sold by smugglers to a slaver from Rajja, Ucar had died in the riots in the lower city, and Brindy, whom I loved more than anything, had probably been kidnapped by an agent of the vawan rebellion. I had been a thief, a spy, a healer and a soldier, the apprentice of a great surgeon and then the yunling of a val-warrior. On my chest was tattooed my friendship with Dera, a girl of the chaig clan whom I had not seen since my childhood and who I missed terribly. I had been wanted in Brown-Horn for a series of murders that I had not committed, which had been imputed to me by the old families of the city, whose patriarchs had killed the primate Bard Govon and made a deal with the League of Franlake to take over the primacy. I had shared the secret dreams of two solar creatures, one of which was certainly linked to the Seïd demons of the Stone Forest, and the other of which had been presented to me as a deity, worshipped by the Leafies of Vaw and their allies, the mysterious Ktoï. I had been fascinated by both of them without knowing the reason and, one after the other, they had irreparably shattered my existence.

To finally say it, to affirm it in front of another man, even if he was feverish and incredulous, I had the feeling to become myself again, for a few hours. I briefly realized how much the mines had changed me, but also that the fire in my chest had not completely gone out. I regretted not having taken a chance earlier, not having at least tried to escape, and I kept wondering what had happened to the people I had known before the mines. Dera and her family. Frieze. Crumby and Jerem Natime. Sven and Katja and Ereck. Jask and Ringer. I hoped that Brindy had forgiven me for my failures, wherever she might be. I thought it all had a sad, unfinished feel to it. Landros nodded, it was the same for him. There was so much left to be done. The pain slowly overtook the rest, and turned the memories into hissing noises, which we struggled to make live between our clenched teeth.

My thighs were now starting to hurt, with awful flashes of pain that arched from my knees to my lower back. It finally settled in the groin, where the ganglia had swollen to the size of small apples. I was sweating profusely, convulsing with spasms and pain. I tried to remember the last time I had been sick, but I couldn't. Landros had a chalky face when he told me that he felt a little better around dawn, then he started coughing. Eventually he stopped coughing altogether and lay down on his side. His breathing was heavy and crackling, like the deers Ulrick used to shoot in the Culon heights.

What surprised me more than anything else was the relative calm at the end. When we realized what was really going on, there was no revolt or uprising. We were certainly weak, but I have no doubt that, if we had really wanted to, we could have reached the quarantine lines, even if we had crawled. We could have left in a burst of violence, become the voluntary vectors of evil to avenge ourselves on a world that had snatched our lives and our freedom. It would have been enough to go and die at the feet of the phalangists. I don't believe that a single slave of Ifos tried to leave the enclosure of the barricades after the arrival of the soldiers.

The speed of the decimation and the debilitating nature of the plague certainly played a role in the peaceful extinction of the camp, but there was something else, too. A slightly proud resignation in the face of the inevitable and a determination to face it with dignity. The annihilation had freed us from the masters and in these conditions, the sacrifice was the most generous way, and undoubtedly also the easiest, to reconnect with a lost humanity. We could accept death as an old friend and submit. Forgive the torturers, make peace with the injustices and regrets, and contain the plague by letting it die with our bodies.

Landros died during the following night, while I was talking to him to calm him down. The raucous echo of coughing had invaded the camp, so much so that I had to move closer to him to make myself heard. I told him how I had studied bone medicine from the Carmian skeleton with the same name as him, and I also told him about the hair of Brindy, the silty banks of the Brown, and the taste of roasted lurs. When he finally gave out, I shivered as I got out of his bed and into mine, and wrapped myself in his still warm blankets. There was a leak along the back boards, and I had put a tumbler to catch the drops. I drank and ate what was left of the bread, without worrying about the mold that was growing on it. I don't know how many were still alive at that time. I only felt very tired, and I couldn't tell if it was the illness or if I had been watching Landros for longer than I thought. The fever was growing inside me, inexorably. I closed my eyes. I wasn't fighting it anymore. I wanted to drift off gently. To go quietly to sleep and not wake up.