“Somewhere out there,” said Jean, “must be an illness that makes its sufferers meek, mild, and agreeable. I’ll find it someday, and see that you get the worst possible case.”

“I’m sure I was born immune. Speaking of agreeable, will that wine be arriving in my hands any time this year?”

Locke had seemed alert enough, but his voice was slurring, and weaker than it had been even the day before. Jean approached the bed uneasily, wineglasses held out like a peace offering to some unfamiliar and potentially dangerous creature.

Locke had been in this condition before, too thin and too pale, with weeks of beard on his cheeks. Only this time there was no obvious wound to tend, no cuts to bandage. Just Maxilan Stragos’ insidious legacy doing its silent work. Locke’s sheets were spotted with blood and with the dark stains of fever-sweat. His eyes gleamed in bruised sockets.

Jean pored over a pile of medical texts each night, and still he didn’t have adequate words for what was happening to Locke. He was being unknit from the inside; his veins and sinews were coming apart. Blood seeped out of him as though by some demonic whim. One hour he might cough it up, the next it would come from his eyes or nose.

“Gods damn it,” Jean whispered as Locke reached for the wineglass. Locke’s left hand was red with blood, as though his fingers had been dipped in it. “What’s this?”

“Nothing unusual,” Locke chuckled. “It started up while you were gone … from under my nails. Here, I can hold the glass with my other one—”

“Were you trying to hide it from me? Who else changes your gods-damned sheets?”

Jean set the glasses down and moved to the table beneath the window, which held stacks of linen towels, a water jug and a washing bowl. The bowl’s water was rusty with old blood.

“It doesn’t hurt, Jean,” muttered Locke.

Ignoring him, Jean picked up the bowl. The window overlooked the villa’s interior courtyard, which was fortunately deserted. Jean heaved the old bloody water out the window, refilled the bowl from the jug, and dipped a linen cloth into it.

“Hand,” said Jean. Locke sulkily complied, and Jean molded the wet cloth around his fingers. It turned pink. “Keep it elevated for a while.”

“I know it looks bad, but it’s really not that much blood.”

“You’ve little left to lose!”

“I’m also in want of wine.”

Jean fetched their glasses again and carefully placed one in Locke’s right hand. Locke’s shakes didn’t seem too bad for the moment, which was pleasing. He’d had difficulty holding things lately.

“A toast,” said Locke. “To alchemists. May they all be stricken with the screaming fire-shits.” He sipped his wine. “Or strangled in bed. Whatever’s most convenient. I’m not picky.”

At his next sip, he coughed, and a ruby-colored droplet spiraled down into his wine, leaving a purplish tail as it dissolved.

“Gods,” said Jean. He gulped the rest of his own wine and set the glass aside. “I’m going out to fetch Malcor.”

“Jean, I don’t need another damned dog-leech at the moment. He’s been here six or seven times already. Why—”

“Something might have changed. Something might be different.” Jean grabbed his coat. “Maybe he can help the bleeding. Maybe he’ll finally find some clue—”

“There is no clue, Jean. There’s no antidote that’s going to spring from Malcor or Kepira or Zodesti or any boil-lancing fraud in this whole tedious shitsack of a city.”

“I’ll be back soon.”

“Dammit, Jean, save the money!” Locke coughed again, and nearly dropped his wine. “It’s only common sense, you brick-skulled tub! You obstinate—”

“I’ll be back soon.”

“ … obstinate, uh, something … something … biting and witty and thoroughly convincing! Hey, if you leave now, you’ll miss me being thoroughly convincing! Damn it.”

Whatever Locke might have said next, Jean closed the door on it. The sky outside was now banded in twilight colors, orange at the horizons giving way to silver and then purple in the deep bowl of the heavens. Purple like the color of blood dissolving in blue wine.

A low gray wall sliding in to the north, from out of the Amathel, seemed to promise an oncoming storm. That suited Jean just fine.

4

SIX WEEKS had passed since they’d left the little port of Vel Virazzo in a forty-foot yacht, fresh from a series of more or less total disasters that had left them with a fraction of the vast sum they’d hoped to recoup for two years invested in a complex scheme.

As he walked out into the streets of Lashain, Jean ran his fingers over a lock of curly dark hair, tightly bound with leather cords. This he always kept in a coat pocket or tucked into his belt. Of all the things he’d lost recently, the money was the least of his concerns.

Locke and Jean had discussed sailing east, back toward Tamalek and Espara … back toward Camorr. But most of the world they’d known there was swept away, and most of their old friends were dead. Instead they’d gone west. North and west.

Following the coast, straining their lubberly skills to the utmost, they had skirted Tal Verrar, swept past the blackened remains of once-luxurious Salon Corbeau, and discussed making far north for Balinel, in the Kingdom of the Seven Marrows. Both of them spoke Vadran well enough to do just about anything while they sought some new criminal opportunity.

They left the sea and headed inland, up the wide River Cavendria, which was Eldren-tamed and fit for oceangoing vessels. The Cavendria flowed west from the Amathel, Lake of Jewels, the inland sea that separated the ancient sister-cities of Karthain and Lashain. Locke and Jean had once hoped to buy their way into the ranks of Lashain’s nobility. Their revised plan had merely been to weigh their boat down with stores for the voyage up to Balinel.

Locke’s symptoms revealed themselves the day they entered the Cavendria estuary.

At first it had been nothing more than bouts of dizziness and blurred vision, but as the days passed and they slowly tacked against the current, he began bleeding from his nose and mouth. By the time they reached Lashain, he could no longer laugh away or hide his increasing weakness. Instead of taking on stores, they’d rented rooms, and against Locke’s protests Jean began to spend nearly every coin they had in pursuit of comforts and cures.

From Lashain’s underworld, which was tolerably colorful if nowhere near the size of Camorr’s, he’d consulted every poisoner and black alchemist he could bribe. All had shaken their heads and expressed professional admiration for what had been done to Locke; the substance in question was beyond their power to counteract. Locke had been made to drink a hundred different purgatives, teas, and elixirs, each seemingly more vile and expensive than the last, each ultimately useless.

After that, Jean had dressed well and started calling on accredited physikers. Locke was explained away as a “confidential servant” of someone wealthy, which could have meant anything from secret lover to private assassin. The physikers too had expressed regret and fascination in equal measure. Most had refused to attempt cures, instead offering palliatives to ease Locke’s pain. Jean fully grasped the meaning of this, but paid no heed to their pessimism. He simply showed each to the door, paid their exorbitant fees, and went after the next physiker on his list.

The money hadn’t lasted. After a few days, Jean had sold their boat (along with the resident cat, essential for good luck at sea), and was happy to get half of what they’d paid for it.

Now even those funds were running thin, and Erkemar Zodesti was just about the only physiker in Lashain who had yet to tell Jean that Locke’s condition was hopeless.

5

“NO NEW symptoms,” said Malcor, a round old man with a gray beard that curled out from his chin like an oncoming thunderhead. Malcor was a dog-leech, a street physiker with no formal training or license, but of all his kind available in Lashain he was the most frequently sober. “Merely a new expression of familiar symptoms. Take heart.”