He caught Raupasha's eye and inclined his head. "My lady of Mitanni, I seem to owe you a life. I shall not forget."

Then he looked around. "Where is the sheshgallu of Marduk?"

The chief priest came forward, looking shrunken and old in his gorgeous robe and ziggurat hat. "My lord king, may you live forever-"

"If I do, it will be no thanks to your incompetence!" Shuriash snapped.

"O Ensi of Marduk, there are so many priests in Babylon for the akitu…"

Shuriash nodded. "That is true. You, you-" he pointed to guardsmen. "Take the corpse of this dead dog and put it where it may be examined later. You, go speak to the people in the temenos; tell them that the king has been spared by the grace of Marduk and the other great gods assembled here in Babylon. Now, sheshgallu, it is time for me to take the hand of the great god my lord, Bel-Marduk."

The high priest gaped at him. "You… you wish to go on with the ceremony, King of the Four Quarters?"

Shuriash snorted. "Of course! If there was any aim to this plot besides killing me, it was to interrupt the akitu, that doubt might be thrown on my right to rule as vice-regent of the great Bel-Marduk. This shall not be! The ceremony shall continue!"

There was a slight commotion at the doorway; it was a breach of decorum for anyone to enter the feasting-hall after the monarch. King Shuriash turned, his shaggy brows rising when Justin Clemens pushed past the guards. He smiled, though, despite the breach of protocol. The guards had known he would; the man who had saved the king's darling would not be denied audience even if his reasons were frivolous. Not for the first few times, at least.

Nobody thought his reasons were, once they saw his face. He came up to the table at the king's side and bowed.

"O King," he said. "I have grave news." He glanced around. "For your ears, and your heir's, and these officers of my people."

Shuriash looked at him keenly for a moment, then nodded. "Leave us," he said. There were murmurs from some of the ministers and generals. "Leave us, I said!" When the audience chamber was empty save for himself and his son and the Islander commanders, he went on: "I have given offense to powerful men. There had better be a good reason for this."

"O King, there is. There is mutanu in your city."

Shuriash's tanned skin went gray; so did his son's. Mutanu translated literally as "certain death." A better rendering into English would have been "plague."

"Are you sure?" the king said, grasping at a small image of Shamash that hung at his belt, a rare gesture for him.

"I am sure. It is…" He paused, groping for a word. "I do not know if you have a word for this mutanu. It starts with fever and a reddish rash, and then red sores erupt upon the body. If the victims live, they may be scarred. We call it smallpox."

Shuriash shook his head. "No, I do not know of this mutanu." His gaze sharpened. "You do? Have you brought this thing to the land of Kar-Duniash?"

Clemens licked his lips. God, I wish I was sure, he thought. "I do not think so," he said. "We have not suffered from this disease for a very long time. We have a means of making a person safe from it."

"Ah," Shuriash said. "That is well; that is very well."

Clemens shook his head. "Lord King, we have such a means at home in Nantucket, not here. Not our best means." In English, to the appalled faces of Kenneth Hollard and the other Islanders: "We've got enough vaccine on hand to immunize a couple of hundred people, no more."

"Is there another way, then?" Shuriash asked.

"Yes." Clemens hesitated, and the Babylonian made an imperious gesture. The doctor licked his lips again, tasting the salt of fear.

"Lord King, we can protect you and your family by the best method, for we have some of that medicine."

He winced internally. Still, there was no choice-they couldn't vaccinate the population at large, and if they were going to pick a few hundred, then it would have to be-coldly-based on who was most essential to the Republic's purposes.

"And my people?" Shuriash asked quietly.

"There is another way. It, too, protects against the disease, but… there are drawbacks."

Colonel Hollard snorted. "Spit it out, Lieutenant," he said.

"Lord King, the other method involves-" How the hell do I say "attenuated virus" in Akkadian, goddammit? He took another breath and began again. "It involves giving the healthy a weak form of the disease. In most cases, they recover with little harm and are henceforth immune."

Kashtiliash leaned forward, his brown eyes narrowed. "Most? That is a word as slippery as a fish dipped in sesame oil," he said.

Clemens nodded. "Of every fifty so treated, one will develop the strong form of the disease. Of those, one in two will die."

Shuriash seemed to swell where he sat. "You would kill"-he paused to calculate; Babylonian arithmetic used an eight-base system-"one in every hundred of my people?"

"King, if we do not, at least two in every ten will die! And that is… to rely on the favor of the gods." It wasn't easy to say "probability" in Akkadian either. "If this is truly the first time that this mutanu has visited your lands, then as many as nine in ten or more may die. And I think it is the first time; your asu Azzu-ena knows nothing of it, and her knowledge of your healing arts is very complete."

"Oh, shit," Hollard said, into the echoing silence that followed Clemens' words. "Why didn't I stay on Nantucket, where they don't have emergencies?"

May, Year 10 A.E.

"Dull duty," Guard Recruit Mandy Kayle said.

"Sky Father give me 'dull' anytime," Petty Officer Samuel Taunarsson said. "I mean, God the Father and His Son," he continued, crossing himself. "And His Mother. Whether or not She is Moon Woman, too," he added for safety's sake.

Above them the fabric of the balloon creaked in the predawn chill. She could see a few intact aircraft-they'd probably never fly again- pegged down under shelters at the little airport, and the big blimp-construction shed-empty right now. Despite that addition there was a forlorn air to Nantucket Airport, boarded windows and bindweed slithering out over the runways… as if the Event had left it stranded in its own little bubble of time. Kayle shivered slightly at the thought; she'd been nine years old the night of the Event, but she was never going to forget it. The world before, yes-there were times when she wasn't sure if her memories were real or dreams.

"Pressure?" Taunarsson said.

"Full, Petty Officer," Kayle said. The two-hundred-foot-long balloon was tugging at its moorings, rocking a little in a fresh westerly breeze. "At present weight, neutral buoyancy at five hundred feet."

"Drop stationary ballast," he said, and went to one side of the gondola. Kayle went to the other, her hand on the slipknot of a burlap sack of sand.

"One!"

Two fifty-pound bags hit the asphalt in unison with dull thuds.

"Two! Three!"

Ropes creaked sharply. The noncom nodded and stepped up to the head of the open oval gondola, picking up the handset. "This is Eagle's Eye. Communications check."

Evidently that went smoothly too, since he clicked the knob to a different channel and spoke again: "Ready, aye, ready."

From the gray-shot darkness over the side came the rare brilliance of an electric light; nobody was going to use an open flame near this much hydrogen.

"Paying up!" came the voice of the line team.

"Stand by to let go fore and aft!" Taunarsson called.

"Ready!"

"On the mark… loose!"

There was a hobbling heave, a sharp tung sound, and a steady Clinkaclinkaclinka as the mechanism let the cable run in a smooth, controlled surge. The Coast Guard fixed observation balloon Eagle's Eye rose and turned its nose into the wind as the fins caught the breeze. Kayle yawned and settled back on the bench by her duty station, keeping an eye on the pressure and altitude gauges.