Capiam lay back, exhausted by his outburst, the Records a heavy weight on his guts. That sense of loss, the pressure of that anxiety, had been growing inside him. That morning, when the lethargy had passed, he had been disquietingly aware of the many facts, practices, and intuitions he had never written down, had never thought to elaborate in his private notes. Ordinarily he would have passed them on to his journeymen as they grasped the complexities of their craft. Some matters he had been told by his masters, which they had gleaned from their tutors or from their working experiences, but the transfer of information and its interpretation had been verbal in all too many instances, passed on to those who would need to know.

Capiam became aware that Tirone was staring at him. He had not meant to harangue; that was generally Tirone's function.

"I could not agree with you more, Capiam," Tirone began tentatively, pausing to clear his throat. "But people of all ranks and Crafts tend to keep some secrets which-"

"Shells! Not the drum again!" Capiam buried his head in his hands, pressing his thumbs tightly into his earholes, trying to block the sound.

Tirone's expression brightened and he half-rose from the chair, gesturing for Capiam to unplug his ears. "It's good news. From Igen. Threadfall has been met and all is clear. Twelve wings flew!"

"Twelve?" Capiam pulled himself up, calculating Igen's crushing losses and the numbers of its sick riders. "Igen couldn't have put twelve wings in the air today."

" 'Dragonmen must fly, when Thread is in the sky!'" Tirone's resonant voice rang with pride and exultation.

Capiam stared at him, aware only of profound dismay. How had he failed to catch the significance of Tirone's mention of the Weyrleaders' joint interdiction of the Southern Continent? They'd had to consolidate Weyrs to meet Fall.

" To fight Thread is in their blood! Despite their cruel losses, they rise, as always, to defend the continent . . .'"

Tirone was off in what Capiam had derisively termed his lyric trance. It was not the time to be composing sagas and ballads! Yet the ringing phrases plucked at a long forgotten memory.

"Do be quiet, Tirone. I must think! Or there won't be any dragonriders left to fight Thread. Get out!"

Blood! That's what Tirone had said. It's in their blood! Blood! Capiam hit his temples with the heels of his hands as if he could jolt the vagrant memory into recall. He could almost hear the creaky old voice of old Master Gallardy. Yes, he'd been preparing for his journeyman's examinations and old Gallardy had been droning on and on about unusual and obsolescent techniques. Something to do with blood. Gallardy had been talking about the curative properties of blood-blood what? Blood serum! That was it!

Blood serum as an extreme remedy for contagious or virulent disease.

"Capiam?" It was Desdra, her voice hesitant. "Are you all right? Tirone said-"

"I'm fine! I'm fine! What was that you kept telling me? What can't be cured must be endured. Well, there's another way; Inuring to cure. Immunizing. And it's in the blood! It's not a bark, a powder, a leaf, it's blood. And the deterrent is in my blood right now! Because I've survived the plague."

"Master Capiam!" Desdra stepped forward, hesitant, mindful of the precautions of the last five days.

"I do not think I am contagious any longer, my brave Desdra. I'm the cure! At least I believe I am." In his excitement, Capiam had crawled out of bed, flinging sleeping rugs away from him in an effort to reach the case that held his apprentice and journeyman's texts.

"Capiam! You'll fall!"

Capiam was tottering and he grasped at the chair Tirone had vacated to prevent the collapse. He couldn't summon the strength to reach to the shelves.

"Get me my notes. The oldest ones, there on the left-hand side of the top shelf." He sat down abruptly in the chair, shaking with weakness. "I must be right. I have to be right. 'The blood of a recovered patient prevents others from contracting the disease.'"

"Your blood, my fine feeble friend," Desdra said tartly, dusting off the records before she handed them to him, "is very thin and very weak, and you're going back to your bed."

"Yes, yes, in a minute," Capiam was riming through the thin hide pages, trying in his haste not to crack the brittle fabric, forcing himself to recall exactly when Master Gallardy had delivered those lectures on "unusual techniques." Spring. It was spring. He turned to the last third of his notes. Spring, because he had allowed his mind to dwell more on normal springtime urges than ancient procedures. He felt Desdra tugging at his shoulder.

"You have me spend two hours fixing glowbaskets just to illuminate you in bed and now you read in the darkest comer of your room. Get back into bed! I haven't nursed you this far out of that plague to have you die on me from a chill caught prancing about in the dark like a broody dragon."

"And hand me my kit ... please." He kept reading as he allowed himself to be escorted back to bed. Desdra tugged the furs so tightly in at the foot that he couldn't bend his knees to prop up the notes. With a tug and a kick, he undid her handiwork.

"Capiam!" Returning with his kit, she was furious at his renewed disarray. She grabbed his shoulder and laid her hand across his forehead. He pushed it away, trying not to show the irritation he felt at her interruptions.

"I'm all right. I'm all right."

"Tirone thought you'd had a relapse the way you're acting. It's not like you, you know, to cry 'blood, blood, it's in their blood.' Or in yours, for that matter."

He only half heard her for he had found the series of lectures that he had copied that spring, thirty Turns gone, when he was far more interested in urgent problems like Threadscore, infection, preventive doses, and nutrition.

"It is in my blood. That's what it says here," Capiam cried in triumph. " The clear serum which rises to the top of the vessel after the blood has clotted produces the essential globulins which will inhibit the disease. Injected intravenously, the blood serum gives protection for at least fourteen days, which is ordinarily sufficient time for an epidemic disease to run its course.'" Capiam read on avidly. He could separate the blood components by centrifugal force. Master Gallardy had said that the Ancients had special apparatus to achieve separation, but he could suggest a homely expedient. " The serum introduces the disease into the body in such a weakened state as to awaken the body's own defenses and thus prevent such a disease in its more virulent form.'"

Capiam lay back on his pillows, closing his eyes against a momentary weakness that was compounded of relief as well as triumph. He even recalled how he had rebelled against the tedious jotting down of a technique that might now save thousands of people. And the dragonriders!

Desdra regarded him with a curious expression on her face. "But that's homeopathic! Except for injecting directly into the vein."

"Quickly absorbed by the body, thus more effective. And we need an effective treatment. Desdra, how many dragonriders are sick?"

"We don't know, Capiam. They stopped reporting numbers. The drums did say that twelve wings flew Thread at Igen, but the last report I had, from K'lon actually, was that one hundred and seventy-five riders were ill, including one of the queen riders. L'bol lost two sons in the first deaths."

"A hundred and seventy-five ill? Any secondary infections?"

"They haven't said. But then we haven't asked. . , ."

"At Telgar? Fort Weyr?"

"We have been thinking more of the thousands dying than the dragonriders," Desdra admitted in a bleak voice, her hands locked so tightly the knuckles were white.

"Yes, well, we depend on those two-thousand-odd dragonriders. So nag me no more and get what I need to make the serum. And when K'lon comes, I'll want to see him immediately. Is there anyone else here in the Halls or the Hold who has recovered from this disease?"