Our contagions must be incubated…” The white-rimmed eyes wandered, and Cerk held his breath. Kakzim was on the verge of inspiration, and that always meant something more for Cerk to do without thanks or assistance. “They must be incubated in alabaster bowls—ten of them, little brother, eight feet across and deep. You’ll find such bowls and have them set up in the cavern.”
Cerk blinked, trying to imagine ten alabaster bowls big enough to drown in and completely unable to imagine where he might find such objects, or how to transport them to the reservoir cavern. For once, his slack-jawed confusion was unfeigned, but Brother Kakzim mistook his bewilderment for insight.
“Ah, little brother, now you understand. This is not Laq to be measured by the powder packet. This is a contagion of poison and disease on a far grander scale. Once we’ve simmered it and stirred it to perfection, we’ll spill the bowls into the reservoir and Urik will begin to die. Whoever draws water from a city wellhead or drinks from a city fountain will sicken and die. Whatever fool nurses the dying, he’ll die, too as the plague spreads. In a week, Brother Cerk, no more than two, all the lands of Urik will be filled with the dead and dying. Can you see it, Brother Cerk? Can you see it?”
Brother Kakzim seized Cerk’s robe again and assailed him with Unseen visions of bloated corpses strewn through the streets and houses of the city, on the roads and in the fields, even here on the killing floors of Codesh. In Brother Kakzim’s envisioning, only the Urikites were slain, but Cerk knew that all living things needed water, and anything living that drank Urik’s water after Brother Kakzim tainted it would die. The useful beasts, the wild beasts, birds, insects, and plants that drank water through their roots, they all would die.
Even halflings would die.
Cerk could see Brother Kakzim’s vision more clearly than Brother Kakzim, and he was sickened by the sight. He nodded without enthusiasm. The poor wretches living in darkness on the shores of Urik’s underground reservoir were actually the luckiest folk alive. They’d be the first Urikites to die.
A chill ran through Cerk’s body. He clasped his arms tight over his chest for warmth and told himself it was nothing more than the coming of night now that purple twilight had replaced the garish hues of the sunset. But that was a lie. His shivers had nothing to do with the cooling air. An inner voice counseled him to run away from Brother Kakzim, Codesh, and the whole mad idea. Cerk swallowed that inner voice. There was no escape. The Brethren had made Brother Kakzim his master; he couldn’t leave without breaking the oath he’d sworn beneath the Black-Tree.
The choice between dying with Brother Kakzim in the Tablelands and returning to Black-Tree Forest with his sacred oath forsworn was no choice at all.
“Can you see it, Brother Cerk?”
“I see it all,” Cerk agreed, then squaring his shoulders within his dark robe, he grimly followed his companion and master down from the balcony to the killing floor where a silent, surly crowd was already gathered. “I see everything.”
That evening was like a dream—a living nightmare.
At sundown, Cerk took a seat behind a table, beside the abattoir door. He methodically and mindlessly put a broken ceramic bit onto the palm of every thuggish hand that reached toward him once its owner had crossed the abattoir threshold. A decent wage for a decent night’s work: that’s what Brother Kakzim said, as though what these men—the thugs were all males, mostly dwarves, because their eyes saw more than human eyes in the dark—were going to do tonight was decent.
And perhaps it was. The killing that went on in the abattoirs and would go on in the reservoir cavern wasn’t like the hunting Cerk had done as a boy in the forest, and it wasn’t sacrifice as the Brethren made sacrificial feasts beneath the branches of the Black-Tree. In Codesh they practiced slaughter, and the slaughter of men was no different.
When the doors were shut and barred and a ceramic bit had been placed in every waiting hand, Cerk had done everything that Brother Kakzim had asked of him. He rolled up his mat, intending to slip quietly upstairs to his room, but got no farther than the middle steps before Brother Kakzim began his harangue.
Brother Kakzim was no orator. His voice was shrill, and he had a tendency to gasp and