The traditional age to enroll in one of the Academies Arcane was ten, but my father was among the most prominent of their alumni, and so I started earlier, at age eight. There were some objections, but I knew more than some students who had already come of age. My father's doing. He expected me to do well in magistrate studies, and I did, but from the first it was the lore of the cursewrights that attracted me the most. I imagined Lady Terazla must have been the most beautiful and wisest woman who ever lived, and in my daydreams I saw myself as one of the seven Knights-Vigilant who served her when she left Titansgrave. When I was older my father would tell me he didn't care for how some cursewrights liked to romanticize their own fellowship, and I understood that. But at that age I was completely under their spell.

After that first year, I was judged skilled enough in the arcane arts -- which at my age meant I had learned a goodish number of lessons, not that I was capable of invoking the simplest enchantment -- that I was given what was to be a short-term apprenticeship. A cursewright named Narson Ulleth had taken a liking to me. Master Ulleth already had a task in mind. My father was not entirely pleased my first apprenticeship would be to a cursewright, but Master Ulleth was well-respected, and there was no question that he and his fellowship were in need of help, even from a neophyte like myself.

No one really knew how bad the situation was in Munazyr, but stories had started to reach the rest of the world. Caravans were refusing to pass the Straits of Twilight, let alone approach the Peddlers' Gate. Rumor held that the city had fallen into chaos, that the Doge had died, that the surviving members of the Argent Council were taking refuge in their manses, or had fled the city altogether. My mother and aunt were horrified at the idea of me being taken there, but Master Ulleth assured them I was safe. He could lend me some of the protection from such maladies he enjoyed himself. It's not something I would do for Casimir only because my own gifts are . . . not quite as healthful as Master Ulleth's were.

How it began is a matter of debate, even now. I suppose we will never know the whole story. What is known is that it began on a derelict vessel that drifted into Brightmoon Bay on a night in the middle of high summer, a vessel of no known name and with ragged sails. It might have been at sea for years from its appearance. Her crew was dead to a man, bloated and jaundiced and covered with blisters far worse than the ones Lord Marhollow here suffers. Munazyr had not been part of the Anointed Realms for centuries, and so its population of cursewrights and healers was a token presence at best. The ones who were present were none too skilled. They determined it to be some exotic plague from the east -- or the south -- or from some place behind the north wind, who knows -- and put the vessel and bodies to the torch. The wreckage still sits at the bottom of Brightmoon Bay, and I always wonder if it will someday poison the waters.

But if it was an exotic plague it was not one the healers of Munazyr were inured against, for they began to fall to it as well. Soon the healers in the city were victims, and only a few cursewrights remained to tame the disease, along with a few priests of the Graces who had little interest in working alongside graduates of the Academies Arcane. Above the streets they burned the bodies, throwing the ashes off the cliffs into the Straits. The Argent Council declared a quarantine, and slowly the wards began to seal themselves off from each other. Soon only Peddlers' Gate and Nocturne Gate were open, and vessels were being turned away. All the longshoremen who had handled the plague ship were dead, and Brightmoon Bay was on fire with the disease. Under the streets things were worse.

What we passed over the last few days was a true ruin. Once thousands thrived in that world; the eight or nine criminal guilds Barthim mentioned numbered in the dozens, some of them more powerful and wealthier than the more respectable guilds that operated in the city above. The Argent Brand kept a strong presence down there, but they didn't run the place and they knew it. If they had flexed their strength a little, perhaps the Yellow Death wouldn't have wielded such a huge scythe. The criminal guilds took control of the body disposal, and rather than burn them -- they feared poison fumes filling the tunnels, and they were right -- they took them to catacombs and empty cellars and abandoned foundations and simply dumped the bodies there. Sometimes they threw in a little lime. Their method was simple and efficient. And ultimately lethal.

There were no healers to examine the bodies, not after the first months. The Madrenites and others drafted into the crisis -- they even had some of those grubby little moneylenders from the countinghouses of Tol Daether winding bodies in shrouds and throwing them on the fires -- decided there was no time for thorough examinations of the dead and their energies needed to be focused on the living. Only the Othillic deacons objected, but they were sealed away in their library trying to ride out the plague. Their hedge was replaced with a thick wooden fence, topped with bits of broken glass and twists of metal. Looting had already broken out, and as the plague began to take its toll on the city guard order was crumbling away. When the first skeletons began to boil up from under the streets, any remaining order was destroyed.

They should have called in my fellowship before it reached that point. The mere fact it struck down the fellowship of healers was proof enough this was no natural phenomenon. But Munazyr is ever in an uneasy position, with the Malachite Throne wanting its old capital back, or at least brought to heel. The Sultan is even worse with his whims, one decade happy to have an independent little nation on his borders as long as they trade freely with him; another decade wanting to enslave every man, woman, and child behind Kyrantine's Wall. And the Argent Council feared that appealing to the Malachite Throne for aid from one of its most formidable assets might anger the Sultan, especially considering the animosity that existed even then between Somilius Deyn and Q'Sivaris. But in the end the fires of the plague were too much, and supposedly a few infections had shown up beyond the Wicked Cliffs, so a brace of experienced cursewrights and their assistants travelled to Munazyr at the Doge's invitation.

There were ten of us. I wasn't the only apprentice cursewright but I was by far the youngest. It was a terrifying and exhilarating time, traveling with those men and women. We arrived at the Nocturne Gate in an armored carriage, escorted by armed guards. They were irregulars who had volunteered from the Vilais citizenry; the Emperor's armies may never pass the gates of Munazyr without it being an act of war. There was supposed to be a contingent of the Argent Brand waiting for us. We were met only with fires, and terrified mobs of sick and well alike, and even as we passed the gates we saw the marching dead, which none of us really believed in until we saw a trio of skeletons clad in rags tearing a man to pieces in front of us.

I was unarmed and terrified. I remembered my mother's terror of my going to Munazyr. Master Ulleth might have protected me from disease, but he couldn't protect me from a skeletal monstrosity tearing my head off. One of the other cursewrights lent me a skymetal dagger. They weren't such a rarity then, and while I was years away from earning the right to carry a cursewright's symbol, practicality dictated I carry some kind of weapon. I carry that same dagger to this day. I think they probably let me carry it just for my own peace of mind; certainly I had no skill in actually using it.

An outpost was to have been set up for us in a tavern requisitioned by the city guard. It had burned flat. There were blackened skeletons prowling the ruins, throwing themselves at our carriage. In the end we made for Titansgrave, which remained secure throughout the plague. The Captain-Commander of the time was no Mielle Thalia, though, and we really found no help there. Some of the Argent Brand did their job; others had become little more than roving bands of thugs. So lacking in leadership was the city guard during the Yellow Death that when it was finally over, the Captain-Commander -- Torius Pathrell -- was hanged for treason and cowardice.

What guardsmen we could find who remained loyal to Munazyr instead of their own pockets joined with us, and as a small band we were able to make our way into the deeper wards. And perhaps you will not be surprised to learn that we seized control of the Old Godsway, making our headquarters in the old Temple of the Graces. Even then it was connected to the tunnels beneath the city through its catacombs, and our first order of business was to cleanse the temple and seal off that entrance.

For weeks we worked in that temple, the cursewrights lending their protection to the guardsmen and their own apprentices, those of us who could fight setting out in sorties to destroy nests of the creatures. I was not one of them -- Master Ulleth kept me close to him at all times, and there were moments I think he quite regretted bringing me to Munazyr at all. But even if he did regret it, I saw more and learned more than almost any apprentice of my age had ever imagined, and he knew it.

Those sorties rarely returned with all the men and women they set out with, and it seemed a hopeless war of attrition. We were learning things, of course -- we had a pair of healers with us, and between the cursewrights and the healers they had unraveled many of the Yellow Death's secrets. How it attacked the vital organs, how it seeped into the bone by poisoning the humors, how it withered organs and muscles into the substance that allows them to rise. Not that such esoteric lore was doing us much good.

Every night we huddled around the fire, discussing whether we should flee the city, and if we did whether we ought to offer our services to the Sultan. Perhaps Munazyr was lost, but we could stem the tide of the plague before it ravaged his kingdoms. The Malachite Throne surely would not have approved such an overture of goodwill, but quelling the Yellow Death was all that mattered.

But Master Ulleth was not the only experienced cursewright present, and the healers who accompanied us were some of the most celebrated teachers from Witchlight Tower. We had not been there a season before we managed to brew an effective treatment. There was nothing to be done about the legions of roaming dead beneath the city other than to destroy or quarantine them, but we could at least cure those who had the plague itself, and prevent it from spreading further.

Our worst enemy proved to be the chaos of the city itself. Our numbers were stretched thin. The temple was still our central location, but we had claimed the rectory next door -- it was certainly not the Prideful Lioness in those days -- and had turned it into a hospice. We had so much of the plague at bay, but the city guard was fractured, the chaos beneath the streets was something we had barely contained, and war had broken out among the surviving criminal guilds. Titansgrave was a battlefield between those loyal to the Doge and those loyal to Captain Pathrell.

I had seen little of Ulleth for weeks -- going on patrols with the elder cursewrights, learning to fight, learning to draw wards, helping seal away places beneath the city once they were cleansed or at least blocked off. Through it all Ulleth seemed consumed with something he refused to share with the rest of us, often going to Brightmoon Bay and Fathoms Gate, roaming strange places beneath the city. He seemed ever more agitated, and I began to wonder if he had lost his wits. In the end that might have been a kinder fate.