It seemed the scented smoke had driven back the flies.

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  Someone shouted, ahead of us. Next instant, a white brilliance pierced through the cloak. A man’s voice called.

  “Is it the Empress? It’s safe, madam; you can unwrap the veil. They don’t come here. Masrimas keeps them from us with his holy light.”

  2

  We sloughed our protection and the scene came clear.

  Directly in front of us rose the image of the god, pure gold, dressed in the warrior garb of the east, one naked flame before him. High up, lamps of heavy amber glass; the smoke of their incense was drifting everywhere in long blue eddies. There were no flies, save some dead ones that had fallen from our garments or our skin.

  A sparse straggle of humanity crouched among the pillars and about the subsidiary altars. Some of the children wept, otherwise there was no disturbance. An anguish too huge for expression had stolen speech, even lamentation, from them.

  A priest in the white and gold of the Temple had approached Malmiranet, bowing and smiling through pale lips. He reiterated that the god would protect her and asked her how she was. Her face was black as mine, plastered with insect mortality, as were the faces of all those around us. She stared at the clean priest, who had escaped by means of his location.

  “What of the people?” she said, like stone.

  “Those who have sought sanctuary here are unharmed, as you see, my lady.”

  “No one but I had come to aid her; no one aided the frantic crowd outside. The vast Temple blocked out the strangled screaming, the sudden bursts of ominous clamor, the whining of wings.

  She looked at me and said, “They don’t care how many die, providing they are whole.” Then of the priest she demanded, “Where is my son? Have you guarded your Emperor at least?”

  “Ah, madam,” the priest said, stepping back a way. “Lord Sorem tried to reach you, and was struck a glancing blow among the horses. Nothing of any consequence. Two of his

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  captains brought him here. The shrine physicians attend him.”

  Malmiranet clenched her blackened hands upon her skirt. If he had not been a priest, she would have struck him, so much was obvious. To the priest also, who hastily offered to conduct her to her son. She seemed to have forgotten me as, gathering the trembling Nasmet in one arm, she stalked after him. But about six paces off, she turned almost involuntarily toward me and, leaving Nasmet huddled there, came back.

  Malmiranet grasped my hands, ignoring now the crushed things that broke between our skins. She needed to say nothing, her eyes saying all of it. Then she left me and followed the priest into the warm darkness, bearing her girl with her.

  A faint cacophony from the far end of the Temple-a man had plunged in at the door, rushed forward two or three steps, and collapsed. I went that way, toward the vaulted entrance, the slender bluish arch that showed its opening into the nightmare world beyond. The refugees among the pillars scarcely glanced at me.

  I had let BarIbithni burn; there had been a reason for that. There was no reason now to hold my hand. I had reacted to the horror outside, not as a magician, not as a god, but as a man. Even if I had dared use my Powers, most probably I should not have thought to use them, caught up in that whirlpool of malignity. Vazkor had become only one more pitiful human creature. I confronted that doorway, the corpse sprawled across the threshold. And, from moving sluggishly, I began to run, winding the protective cloak about my head.

  What I intended, I am not sure. To pick up the struggling and fallen and carry them bodily into the fastness of the fane, to herd the rest, like berserk cattle, up the stair and through the arch. My body was stretched like the athlete’s as he poises himself upon the starting point. Thrusting out from the vaulted door, I beheld that the race was already done.

  Under the lightening sky, the square and the streets that led from it had the uncanny, semi-mobile quality that attends a battlefield when the armies have withdrawn. From the black blanketed piles and heaps of the dead would wave a hand or an arm, exploring for its freedom. Some, actually free, crept forward on their knees. Many who could not see, their eyes sealed or damaged by the flies that had attached there, groped about calling barely audible pleas, curses, the names of friends that went unanswered. Everywhere the flies,

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  in glistening mounds, like an enormous spillage of black sugar, were growing quiescent.

  Occasionally a small spiral would rise, spin listlessly for a second as if stirred only by the wind, and fall back upon the rest beneath. Rivulets of flies had trickled along the Temple stair. I trod on their motionless husks as I descended. Those not dead were dying by the instant. One drifted from the air onto my open palm. I looked at it, a thing half an inch long, its legs stiff as wires, its black wings lusterless, harmless in its solitude.

  A blinded horse lay against the bottom stair, feebly kicking. I took the knife of a jerdier laying nearby and finished it quickly.

  A man, crusted black as were each of the figures in that appalling place, limped up to me and caught my arm. He babbled that another horse had fallen across his wife’s body, but that she was alive. I went to help him and managed to lift the horse sufficiently that he could drag her from under it. Then he sat down by her, and held her head in his lap, cheerful that she felt no pain. But it was bad, for her back was broken, and I could perceive she knew it as well as I, though she smiled and patted her husband’s hand.

  I turned away to help another, glad they had not recognized the sorcerer and begged for healing. I could have done nothing. The Power in me was no longer fettered-it was gone. Such a thing I could feel, as the woman felt the incurable wound in her body. As I bent to my fresh task, I was aware that what I did was, in any case, superfluous.

  This man we brought out living, but part choked. I laid him on his belly and worked upon him till he spewed a black vomit of flies and commenced breathing.

  Standing, I looked up. The sky was empty, the sun blazing through a steely haze.

  Observing what I had done for the choked man, a trick learned on most ships to clear a man’s lungs of seawater, I was in demand from every side. So I turned healer in this rough-and-ready fashion. If any knew me, they said no word.

  I worked right through the morning and the noon, not pausing to meditate. I understood very well that this was not the end, but had no notion what the end might be. A strained normalcy was struggling to repossess the city. The rain of flies had fallen everywhere, from here south and east, and to the western dock, not a street or a house had been missed,

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  but only here, about the Temple, was there such a harvest of death.

  A few had noted the potency of incense, and by early afternoon there was hardly a byway that did not have a brazier set out, smoking up heady blueness from its grille. The faces in the windows were wooden with fear, and on some was a rigor of grief held in.

  It was Shaythun who had sent the flies, this they all believed, even those who could not give the name of the ungod of Old Hessek BitHessee. Shaythun, Lord of Flies, Shepherd of Swarms.

  Long before sunset the sky was darkening, the sun a smear of bloody heat through the incense smoke. Men climbed about their sloping roofs, sealing cracks and chimney outlets. Often they gazed westward for another swarm.

  Bailgar had taken charge of the Citadel, mounting a watch on the high places, the towers and parapets of the city.

  I had got down as far as Winged Horse Gate. There were fewer casualties that side of the wall, though a deal of panic and ghastliness. I went through and washed myself at the public basins in the Market of the World. One of the unicorn beasts of the black men, attacked by the flies, had run bellowing, smashing the booths and pavilions, till some artery burst and it slumped against the wall of the basins. Two black men stood beside its body, periodically ululating and trying to force the beast, which was quite dead, to rise.

  A sense of purposelessness had come on me again, my services dispersed to their limit among the people, and forgotten. Priests were moving about, as I had seen them do in the aftermath of the fire that day after Hessek’s rising. Lamps were already burning, for it had become so dark from the smoke and the abnormal overcast. The sky had become a thick lens interposed between BarIbithni and the light. With an awareness of irony, I turned my steps toward the Grove of the Hundred Magnolias.

  On the street, three jerdiers in the livery of the Citadel rode up to me.

  “Vazkor-is it the Lord Vazkor?”

  It appeared they were not familiar with Sorem’s accusation of treason against me and my subsequent confinement, from which I had so incidental and peculiar an escape; they wanted only to escort me to the Palace. I related some yarn of having a woman whose safety I must make sure of on this side of Hragon’s Wall, and asked them how Sorem did. The

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  young captain slapped his thigh-that suspect gesture of Orek’s, which I recalled as if in a dream where past and present mingled like sands.

  “Sorem Hragon-Dat is well. The horse merely stunned him, but the priests carried him to the Temple. The Empress Mother is also secure. We shall have to make the coronation another day.” He smiled at me, charming as a girl, and said, “I remember how you slew the Hesseks, that wild night, like the god himself.”

  I thanked him. Soon, getting no more from me, they cantered away into the misty, blood-orange dusk.

  I had no wish to return to Temple or Palace, to watch Sorem struggle with new gratitude, his raw emotion, yet another pardon. Nor to my woman, though in truth, a portion of me would have been glad enough to seek her arms, what comfort her love and her body could give us both, before the final stroke of the sword.

  But there was no logic to it. It would be fruitlessly dreadful to see these grapplings after hope, after life itself, and I partaking of them, when life and hope were done.

  I lay down beneath a flowerless tree in the Grove. No stars shone between its branches in that occult sky.

  A little after the midnight bell-I had been surprised to hear it ring, this formality and order between the double brinks of chaos-a voice started up not far from me, and Went on and did not cease.

  I went to look. It was like my omen, and I must seek it.

  A man lay in the bushes. He was a thief, out slitting purses even on such a night, and had been counting his gains there. Now he lay on his side, hugging himself in his soiled coat and staring up at me. He shook all over, and he whined, “I’m cold, Fenshen. Fenshen, run to the widow and get some coals. See, I’m cold and I’m sick, Fenshen. I’ve a pain in my belly like a worm ate me.”

  As if a bright lamp shone on a word in a book, I grasped the fact.

  He shivered, and doubled up his body, and called me Fenshen once more.

  “The flies didn’t hurt me, Fenshen,” he said. “I hid in the cellar of the widow’s house, and I brushed them off when they fastened on my arms. But she screamed, the silly bitch, and they went in her throat.” Then he laughed and cried and clutched his abdomen, smiling horribly with the pain.

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  He was the first victim I saw of the plague that the flies had brought to BarIbithni.

  3

  The plague came to be called Yellow Mantle. Men must name everything, as if, by giving a name, they will decrease the nameless horror they experience. Though it was an accurate title enough. Those who contracted the plague passed swiftly through a stage of lassitude and weakness into delirious fever, accompanied by a purging of blood from the bowels. This was the turning point, for here the purging would either unaccountably stop, the fever cool and the patient gradually recover, or else the hemorrhage ‘would worsen, the entire structure of the inner organs apparently poisoned and breaking down, until death ensued. By this time the body was so drained of blood that the skin of the corpse-in most cases a brown-fleshed Masrian-had altered to a pallid, overtly disgusting yellow. There was no doubt on seeing those corpses piled up on the sweepers’ carts that they had perished of some vile pestilence for which no cure was known.

  Yellow Mantle came in the night, sudden as only a supernatural curse could be. There was hardly any period while the plague hatched in the bodies of the most susceptible victims. Those who fell sick after, their constitutions being more vital, had simply held illness at bay a fraction longer.

  I speak from an intimate knowledge of the disease. I saw all its stages and almost all its variations. I watched the thief die in the Magnolia Grove. He went quickly, before sunrise. I could do nothing to ease him, and indeed had not tried. I knew this for the last stroke of the sword. I think it gave me a strange fortitude to understand that.

  By morning, three hundred lay sick of the plague. By noon, three thousand, and there were hundreds already cold.

  At first, not properly realizing what had come among them, relatives were attempting to bury their dead in stone grave-chambers, furnished with priestly rites. Soon, vast pits were being dug in the commercial parks, and presently in the open lands eastward of the Palm Quarter. Being a Masrian city, it was two days before an edict was condoned to burn

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  the corpses on open bonfires. By then, the pestilence had spread across every quarter and district of BarIbithni. It was indiscriminate in its choice, sparing sometimes the old, the crippled, killing the young men, brides newly wed, women big with child. While of the children themselves, scarcely one in five hundred escaped.

  For myself, I knew I should end with the rest. Each process of suffering I observed in another, I accepted would shortly come to me. I, too, was young and strong, I had survived the venom of a snake, my wounds had healed without a scar, but this I should not survive. The white woman, she I had sought, she I had vowed to slay, had sent to slay me instead. Of all this doomed metropolis I, more than any other, could expect no redemption.

  After the thief had died, going down into the smoky, predawn twilight, which had about it already the miasmic half-dark of a plague pit, I encountered a small procession from the poorer area: a group of families who had ventured out, carrying their sick ones on makeshift biers. Their faces were all equally haunted by rabid fright, but they jabbered to each other softly, trying to deny their own prescience. As I was coming up with them, a girl of about twenty, who was walking at the back with a boy child holding to her skirt, abruptly fell down on the ground. The nearer members of the procession sprang about, the women making religious gestures. None went to the girl, and the little boy, tugging at her, erupted into tears.

  I went and kneeled down by her, putting my hand on the child’s head in an attempt to reassure him. Obviously the girl was in the primary grip of the plague.

  One of the women said, “It’s a fever, sir. Several have got it. We are going to the Water Temple on Amber Road. The priests are clever healers.” The girl muttered and stirred and opened her eyes. There was a glaze over them and she was bathed in sweat, but she seemed to glimpse the child, her brother or her son, and stretched out her hand unsteadily.

  “Don’t cry,” she said. Then she saw me, the blurred face of a stranger bending near, and she said, “I’m well enough, sir. I will get up now.” Plainly she could not, so I raised her in my arms and began to carry her after the others. The child had forgotten to weep; he was only about three or four years of age. The older woman took his hand uneasily, and hurried back into the shelter of the group. Before we had got very far, the girl had begun the bone-

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  rattling shivering that the fever brought, but she was still lucid, and entreated me to put her down. Because of her distress, I laid her on the paving. There in the street she lay to-two hours in a pool of matter and blood. She grasped my hand in her agony, and coming to herself again, asked me what hour it was, and died before I could tell her. She had gone more quietly even than the thief in the Grove.

  It was very hot, the smoke-laden sky the scorched color of blue cinders, without bird or cloud; a smoldering glare of sun. I did not know what possessed me, unless it was some spirit of guilty contrition. I felt no terror or rage at that point; these had been set by for me. I went on the way the procession had taken with its biers, and arrived presently at the Water Temple.

  It was a small building of stucco and red-painted plaster, a Masrimas of green bronze inside, and a magic well, reckoned to be healing. Within the courtyard and the precinct the sick were already packed in rows. They were burning fresh incense here to alleviate the stench-in vain-but one grew accustomed to the nauseous odor after a while, and scarcely noticed it.

  I offered my service to the priests, who plainly considered me mad but were yet thankful to find one madman at least who would help. At my stained and draggled finery, they glanced in curiosity, but had no leisure for questions. We fell to our grisly, hopeless tasks. There was no shortage of labor.