I was completely bathed in light.

Here and there constellations of dust floated around, trapped in the golden rays. I found the shimmering to have a syrupy, almost tangible consistency. It was still, blinding and very silent, but it didn't look like death as I had imagined it. For a long time, I didn't dare to move further, withdrawn into the simple satisfaction of existing. Yet, one after the other, the parasitic sensations anchored themselves in me and competed for my attention. The rough contact of the blanket that sometimes brushed my cheek. The tiny breezes that froze my nose and cheekbones. My breath, warm and moist and regular. Mineral and then organic smells, sometimes sweet, sometimes pugnacious. The white reflections of my blackened fingernails moving, close to my face. I finally understood that this wasn't the afterlife. That I was on my bed. That it was no longer raining. The sun was shining through the gaps between the rickety boards of the barracks. In the distance, I seemed to hear birds squabbling.

My parched tongue slipped over my chapped lips and swallowing was raspy and uncomfortable. I winced and let an uncertain hand wander in search of the tumbler I had placed under the leak in the roof. My fumbling fingers closed on the pewter. I rolled to the side to drink. The water seemed bitter and cold, with an unpleasant taste of rotten wood. I coughed as I swallowed, which brought back memories of the plague and the fate of Landros and all the others who had drowned in their own blood. I took a cautious breath and exhaled immediately, weak, but attentive to the slightest crackle. Nothing. I tried again to make sure. My lungs were unharmed. My body was bruised and my muscles throbbed with every demand. I felt as if I had been beaten up, beaten whole by a merciless scourge, but I was alive.

I sat up on a wobbly elbow and surveyed my surroundings, blinking my crusty eyelids like a startled owl. Rays of light pierced all along the dormitory, which seemed to be on the verge of disappearing, half engulfed by its own gloom. There wasn't a movement, and not a sound. No more coughing or complaining. I croaked, a faint call that must not have carried very far. There was no response. Not a single body stirred in the twenty span building. It was as if my voice had never existed.

I wondered how long I had slept, before I toppled over on shaky legs, which struggled to support me. Each step was painful, but I eventually tamed the pain. I began to drag myself toward the entrance, taking time to catch my breath regularly. My hands brushed the beds and chains, the occasional pale limb sticking out. The bodies were stiff and cold. Under the moth-eaten blankets, human meat was beginning to ooze, and my inquisitive passage stirred the miasma of decay. I finally pushed open the door of the barracks, my eyes squinting, my nostrils filled with the scent of carrion. I called out again, and wandered through the mud for a few spans. Pale corpses lay in the spring sunshine, stretched out on the ground or slumped against the buildings. On the other side of the camp, a dormitory gutted by fire was burning away. I sniffed, still not understanding. I was the only one left.

Swarms of crows had come and large vultures as well, and I could see the birds flying over the camp. I imagined that at first they had been wary, but now their trajectories were calm and assured. Food was plentiful enough for this. The satiated birds perched on walls and roofs awaiting the next meal, streaking the surfaces with their white droppings. Silence may have dwelt in the shadows of the dormitories, but out in the open, under the clear sky, the camp had become a realm of dark rustling and hoarse arguments. Outraged by the greedy intruders, the robins and chickadees we usually frequented had taken refuge in the pine forest. I could hardly hear them chirping timidly.

As far as I could tell, the gate of the stockade was open to the valley, and I wanted to move forward to see if the phalangists were still settled below. I took three steps, and then a handful of dark, shaggy forms emerged from the corner of one of the farther barracks. I froze in place. The beasts were running around, eating the bodies, shaking them one after the other, and yelping. The Carmians had unleashed the dogs on the camp. As this plague didn't seem to affect them, their fangs were the best way to finish off the dying fugitives without risking contagion. It suddenly occurred to me that other dogs might be roaming the aisles of the mass grave looking for survivors, and a shiver ran down my spine. Even when I was in full control, I had no illusions about my ability to fight the dogs. As it was, they would hardly need to run. I watched the creatures for a while, sheltered by the shack, attentive to their macabre games. When a new pack left the shadow of an attic, close to the burned out infirmary, I decided to barricade the door of the dormitory with the tools that were lying around the entrance. Despite my limping, I then proceeded to inspect the premises.

There was no miracle. I was searching for men who had already lost everything. Under the blankets, in the nooks and crannies, there were many small treasures that their owners would have defended with their lives, but in the lot, absolutely nothing useful. Carvings of wood or bone or metal, grotesque figures, leather necklaces, a knife whose blade was a shard of sharp glass. If the trinkets had been solid gold I wouldn't have smiled more. For the moment, the kettledrums were empty, the food had been eaten to the last crumb and my parched gullet was begging to be filled. Despite the devastation and the silence, I was hungry and thirsty.

I continued my work methodically, without much hope but with the idea that it would postpone the time I would inevitably have to devote to reflection. For the moment, it kept me busy, which seemed to me to be a good thing. I was pushing aside the soiled sheets, sinking my feverish fingers under the rags and benches in search of new hiding places. I had to stop often to pull out the splinters I collected. Eventually I discovered a removable hole in the plank wall, on the other side of which was a wooden bowl that I nearly knocked over. The bowl was small and splayed, wedged between two clumps of grass, and it contained a bottom of dirty water that I mistook for piss at first because of the color. There wasn't enough to quench my thirst, but it was better than nothing. I then sat down on the nearest bed to take a breath, clutching my empty stomach. Amidst the mucus-darkened sheets, my gaze fell on the faces I had discovered. Many were those to whom I could give a name. I didn't wait to close my eyes to not see them anymore.

That the disease had spared me while the others had died without exception seemed impossible, so unreal that I didn't yet dare to make the observation a certainty. I imagined that some of the plague victims had managed to leave, or that the camp had been hit unevenly by the plague and that some slaves had gathered somewhere to protect themselves from the dogs. Other more fanciful thoughts also arose, superstitious whiffs that the Padekke, the philosophy of doubt that the val-warriors had taught me, was quick to silence, like smothering a fire. However, embers remained, and dug their way. While I staggered on the edges of reason, torn by hunger and the remains of disease, the barracks sometimes took on the appearance of a tomb, a gigantic mound, a hundred sacrificed bodies, and among them all, I had been chosen to live. If there had been one man left, just one, I could have relegated my survival to a kind of insolent luck - after all, I had always been lucky - but that wasn't the case. There was no one else. Not a breath but my own. I began to think that maybe the Vals were wrong. That this wasn't a coincidence, nor an accident.

Despite the swirling questions and the terrifying void left by the plague and the lost lives, I managed to survive. The same resolve had kept me alive for the past five years. I knew that I owed this pugnacity, this clear-sighted but stubborn determination to Ulrick the val-warrior, who had forged it with patience in the fire of my own rage. The camp may have turned into a devastated crater from which nothingness had sucked all substance, I, Fyss, was standing. I furrowed my brow and rubbed my calloused hands together, doing my best to push the rest aside. The guilty echoes, the questioning, the mystical fantasies. Anything that got in the way of the present had to be put aside, because nothing was over and I was still far from being out of danger. If the miracle of survival was to continue, it would have to be earned.

For the moment, I clung to a single certainty: I had to leave, and quickly. Of course, there were the dead I didn't want to see and the dogs and the stench of decay that would soon become unbearable, but above all the Carmians would eventually reoccupy the camp. If they didn't kill me, which seemed unlikely, I was still marked by the triangle. I had decided long before the epidemic that life as a slave was impossible for me. It was out of the question that I would be taken back alive. The dogs were a more immediate danger, and though I assumed they were satiated, I also knew they were snarling beasts who would give me chase if I gave them the chance. To the north, the road and the foothills would be held by soldiers. I figured that even if I managed to escape the patrols - which seemed like no small feat - Carm would never be a haven for a runaway slave. That left the south, and the mountains.

Through the cracked cladding of the barracks, I gazed at the rock walls that rose behind the mines, at the wooded ravines that climbed steeply to the heights, and at the winding paths that followed. The carmian Wall stretched from east to west as far as the eye could see, a stark line of snowy ridges that exuded a hostile cold. The steep slopes and the maze of frozen cirques had a bad reputation. The massif was well named. However, I nodded at the sight of the white peaks to give me courage, because I had convinced myself that there was no other way out. On the other side of the mountain range lay the Grey-Walk and the brownian country. I didn't want to project myself any further than that, not yet, but the memory of Vaw came to me without me being able to do anything about it. I saw myself briefly at the ferry of Gorwill, and I thought of Spinel and the roads that led there.

I spent the next few hours making a rough cloth bag out of the rags of the dead, and listening to the yelping of the dogs. My eyes kept wavering between my work and the watchtower that stood about fifty spans away, between the barracks and the nearest mess hall. I couldn't see inside because of the railing, but the red fabric of a cloak waved in the wind and sometimes licked the edge of the parapet. I hoped to find something useful for the journey. The glass knife was lying next to me on the bench. I had wrapped a few more shreds of linen around the sweaty cloth that served as a handle, until the grip was right for me. There was also a hand axe that I had planned to take with me, but I suspected I wouldn't have the strength to drag it far if I didn't find food soon. If dogs and carmians soldiers were a problem I could leave behind, hunger wasn't. Without supplies, I wouldn't last long in the mountains.

When the shadows lengthened and night was about to fall, I slipped out of the dormitory with caution. The gibbous moon seemed stationary, captive of the stringy clouds that never left the highest peaks. I had my knife folded along my wrist to prevent it from casting reflections, and I had wrapped a sheet around my left arm, in case a dog found me. I was walking crabwise, bent in half, my nose close to the peaty ground. In my legs, every muscle quivered under the effort and awoke the dull bruise of the plague. The campfires on the heights were less numerous than I remembered, but there were still a good dozen of them, scattered in a semicircle in the surrounding pine forest. The mist was beginning to rise from the valley, and at the sight of the flames, distant as they were, I envied their warmth and brightness.

Halfway there, a chorus of barking sounded behind my back. Two dogs were fighting near the warehouses at the north gate, and I gently laid down in the mud beside the milky corpse of a naked woman. Her neck was twisted at a strange angle that couldn't be explained by the epidemic, and the waxy light revealed the bruises that stained her pale skin. Outside, in the alleys, even if their swollen wounds faded with the birds' rapacity, many of the dead showed signs of violence. When the belligerent beasts had settled their dispute, they disappeared with a groan, and were swallowed up in the limbo that flowed in from the valley. I ran an uncertain tongue over my chapped lips and cautiously resumed my walk, my heart pounding.

The turret was four spans high and there was no ladder leading up to it, but I had solved this problem before I left, by cutting and then roughly braiding some blankets together. I had thus obtained a makeshift rope, heavy and not very handy, of which I had weighted the end with a smooth pebble the size of my fist. I had also made sure that the stone was covered with a thick layer of cloth, so as not to make any noise. I stood up in the shadow of the observation post and hoisted the lanyard, flinching when an owl ululated nearby. The acute awareness of my own vulnerability aborted the first attempts. My movements were weak and nervous, and I could see dogs lurking in every dark puddle. When I finally managed to get onto the platform, I climbed painfully, my legs wobbling erratically until they found a place to rest on one of the posts of the frame. I rested for a while on one of the braces, before I managed to get to safety.

As I had hoped, a supervisor had died in the turret, leaning against the railing, and his corpse had escaped looting. Exhausted and feverish, I wanted to catch my breath before doing anything else, but my eyes suddenly fell on a plump wineskin hanging within arm's reach of the parapet. I grabbed it quickly and opened it with impatient fingers. The water mixed with vinegar poured into my withered throat. I drank eagerly, savoring every sip. When I discovered six flatbreads, a few crusts of cheese and a pair of dried fish in a nearby pouch, I couldn't repress a few tears. I quickly ate one of the breads, soaking it with water, and swallowed what was left of the cheese. With my lips, I mumbled some meaningless thanks while chewing.

Feeling stuffed but tired, I set out to relieve the man of his belongings. I barely had the strength to take off his boots. The fog was pouring over the fence now, a whitish foam that flooded the camp, flowing between the buildings to swallow up the corners and take away all consistency from the world. I turned away and hid in the back of the turret, knees pressed against my chin. Before I fell asleep, I retrieved my makeshift rope, and wrapped myself in the dead man's red cloak. Shivering, I finally closed my eyes and dreamed of Brown-Horn.