Chapter 17 #2
Over the course of the next hour, the guard scratched every body part he possessed, many of them twice.
Nostrils, groin, and scalp came in for special attention.
The Dervish had never seen anyone so itchy.
Worst of all, the man’s itching made the Dervish want to scratch.
It was one of the most effective tortures he’d ever witnessed, and at this point, the Dervish considered himself something of a connoisseur.
He couldn’t even get away by closing his eyes. He could still hear the dry scritch scritch scritch of nails on skin.
“Are you all right?” asked Edmund, after this had gone on long enough that the Dervish was seriously considering bursting into song just to drown out the sound.
“Got an itch,” muttered the guard. “Must’ve gotten into poison ivy or something.” He raked his nails along his scalp again.
When he pulled his hand away, clumps of hair came with it.
“Shit!” The guard jumped to his feet. “What did you do to me?”
“Do to you?” The Dervish stared at him, genuinely aghast. “Ancestors have mercy, what’s happening?”
The light through the bars revealed what the shadows had hidden. There were angry red blotches across the man’s skin, with raised welts where he’d scratched.
The guard moved toward him and the Dervish fell on his back on the bed, lifting his feet to kick out. “Don’t come near us! You look contagious!”
“What’s happening?” the guard outside the door demanded.
“It’s this itch!” their guard wailed. “Oh god, I’m dying!”
“What the hell?”
And if the ancestors are kind, he’ll unlock the door, come in, and while he’s busy with his friend, I’ll figure out a way to kick him in the head or something … The Dervish wasn’t quite sure how he’d manage that, but certainly it would be easier with the door unlocked.
The ancestors, alas, were not kind. He heard retreating footsteps. Their guard sank down into a ball, still scratching. Some of the welts had broken open and oozed wetly.
“Stop scratching,” the Dervish snapped. “You’re only going to make it worse.” And when did I turn into my aunt?
Three sets of feet came pounding down the hall. The key clicked in the lock and the door swung open.
“What is the meaning of this?” Otto demanded.
“They did something to me,” said the guard, sounding near tears. “Look!”
He held out his arms, turned them over. The gesture made the skin of his wrists part into oozing lesions.
Otto took a step forward, started to reach out, then jerked his hand back. He wheeled on the prisoners. “What have you done to him?”
“It wasn’t us,” said Edmund. His voice was quiet, but the absolute certainty in it stilled the room around him. “He’s got werkblight.”
“Werkblight?” Even Otto’s stern patriarchal facade seemed shaken. “Are you certain?”
“I saw it often enough in Anuket City.” Edmund grimaced. “Until the healers found a treatment, it was bad. Very bad.”
“But werkblight kills you,” said the guard, and the Dervish realized how young he was. Early twenties, perhaps, and suddenly realizing that Death was not off in some hazy future but right here, right now, with her hands outstretched.
“You say there’s a treatment?” asked Otto.
Edmund nodded. “Every healer in the lowlands knows it by now.”
“Wait,” said the Dervish, remembering where he’d heard the name before, “didn’t you say that was what hit the people in that valley? The Sleevies or whatever they were?”
“Half-Sleeve, and no, it was the other group, the Netweavers.” Edmund shifted on the bed.
“Oh god, it’s that, it’s that…” The guard pulled further into himself, fingers digging into his scalp. Strands of hair floated to the ground.
“Did you carry it here?” Otto demanded.
“Do we look sick to you?” the Dervish snapped. “It’s more likely he’ll give it to us.”
“It’s not contagious like that,” said Edmund, remarkably patient for a man in a cell with his hands tied behind his back.
“It’s not a disease. It’s an allergic reaction.
” He paused. “The healers don’t know to what.
But if you’re susceptible to it, your skin starts to break down, and then everything else. ”
A sob came from the miserable guard.
“Fetch Alba,” Otto snapped. One of the other men ran off.
Edmund’s sigh seemed to come from his toes. “I can probably save him,” he said. “I carry some of the treatment with me.”
“How convenient,” Otto said. “And I suppose we just need to untie your hands and give you access to your belongings?”
“That would be helpful, yes.”
The Dervish turned and pressed his forehead against the planed wood of the wall, fighting back the urge to laugh hysterically.
“I’m not a fool. You brought this here, and this is your plan to escape.” Otto folded his arms.
Edmund sighed again. “In my pack,” he recited. “A hard leather case, about as long as my forearm. Inside it, there are pouches. Take the blue one and put the contents in a pint of boiling water. Stir it until it dissolves.”
“You would have us believe that you simply happen to have this remedy with you?”
Edmund’s chin dropped to his chest, his eyes closed as if suddenly exhausted. “If you had seen what I have seen,” he said, “you would carry it too.”
Silence fell, broken only by the quiet moaning of the afflicted guard.
The Dervish stared at Edmund, feeling as if he was seeing the scholar for the first time.
Sheltered, feckless, obsessed with things as silly as barnacle pigeons …
It had been easy to believe that Edmund had been unaware of the horrific experiments carried out in the name of his god, because Edmund seemed unaware of half of what went on around him.
He sees a dragon, and his first instinct is to draw it, for pity’s sake!
Gone was the spark of childlike wonder. The Edmund that sat beside him now had eyes as dull as weathered stone. He had seen eyes like that on the old peasant women who searched the battlefield after the fighting had ended, picking through the corpses for their husbands and their sons.
The Dervish had no choice but to protect Edmund, but suddenly he wanted to do more than that. He wanted to wrap his arms around the scholar and hold him and tell him … Tell him what? That it will be all right? When we’re in a prison and about to be fed to a monster?
It won’t be all right. Not for him. You’ll live, of course. You’ll live to the end of the world, most likely.
Hell, Otto will probably be the next wielder.
The door opened again. Alba the farmwife came in, reluctance in every line. She did not look at Edmund or the Dervish, but went straight to the guard huddled on the floor.
“Ah,” said the Dervish, pleased to have an outlet for his frustration. “If it isn’t the traitor.”
Her shoulders flinched, as if from a blow.
“They do say that no good deed goes unpunished, but this was really—”
“Enough.” Otto’s voice held a threat of violence, and the Dervish subsided. “Alba, is it this werkblight?”
She did not answer for a moment, coaxing the guard to uncurl.
The Dervish was reminded of Large Francis, and spared a thought to hope that the pillbug had escaped while everyone was occupied.
Alba looked into the man’s face, then down at the wreckage of his forearms, where the skin seemed to be almost melting from his flesh.
“It looks like it,” she said finally, sitting back on her heels. “I know nothing else that works so quickly.”
“Can you treat it?”
Alba’s laugh was an ugly thing. “With what? Willow bark and chamomile tea? You have told me for years that we cannot afford to trade for anything but tools and raw iron. I can barely treat a fever, and you ask me to cure werkblight?”
Otto said nothing, face impassive. Alba rose to her feet and inclined her head to him. “Sir,” she said. There were entire volumes written in that word and the line of her neck. The Dervish might have pitied her, if his hands had not been bound.
She left the room. Otto was silent for a long moment, his stern face giving no indication of his internal struggle. Then he turned to the guard who waited behind him and said, “Fetch their bags and boil some water.”
The relief that swept over Edmund’s face was hard to look at. The Dervish stared at his feet instead, and tried very hard not to scratch anything he could reach.