Crooked Kingdom (The Six of Crows Duology #2) - Leigh Bardugo Page 0,176

black stains on the broker’s face and hands, backing away quickly, but it was too late. The hand that had touched the broker’s shoulder turned an ugly purplish black, and now the pit boss was screaming too.

Nina watched the terror take on its own momentum, careening through the floor of the gambling hall like an angry drunk. Players knocked over their chairs, stumbling toward the doors, grabbing for chips even as they ran for their lives. Tables overturned, spilling cards, and dice clattered to the floor. People raced for the doors, shoving one another out of the way. Nina went with them, letting herself be carried by the crowd as they fled the gambling hall and lurched into the street. It had been the same at every one of her stops, the slow bleed of fear that crested so suddenly to full-blown panic. And now, at last, she heard it: the siren. Its undulating wail descended over the Stave, rising and falling, echoing over the rooftops and cobblestones of Ketterdam.

Tourists turned to one another with questions in their eyes, but the locals—the performers and dealers and shopkeepers and gamblers of the city—were instantly transformed. Kaz had told her they would know the sound, that they would heed it like children called home by a stern parent.

Kerch was an island, isolated from its enemies, protected by the seas and its immense navy. But the two things its capital was most vulnerable to were fire and disease. And just as fire leapt easily between the tightly packed rooftops of the city, so plague passed effortlessly from body to body, through the thick crowds and cramped living spaces. Like gossip, no one knew exactly where it began or how it moved so quickly, only that it did, through breath or touch, carried on the air or through the canals. The rich suffered less, able to stay sequestered in their grand houses or gardens, or flee the city entirely. The infected poor were quarantined in makeshift hospitals on barges outside the harbor. The plague could not be stopped with guns or money. It could not be reasoned with or prayed away.

Only the very young in Ketterdam didn’t have a clear memory of the Queen’s Lady Plague, of the sickboats moving through the canals piloted by bodymen with their long oars. Those who had survived it had lost a child or a parent or a brother or a sister, a friend or a neighbor. They remembered the quarantines, the terror that came with even the most basic human contact.

The laws addressing plague were simple and ironclad: When the siren sounded, all private citizens were to return to their homes. The officers of the stadwatch were to assemble at separate stations around the city—in case of infection, this was a means of attempting to keep it from spreading to the entirety of the force. They were dispatched only to stop looters, and those men were given triple pay for the risk of policing the streets. Commerce halted and only the sickboats, bodymen, and mediks had free rein of the city.

I know the one thing this city is more frightened of than the Shu, the Fjerdans, and all the gangs of the Barrel put together. Kaz had gotten it right. The barricades, the blockades, the checks on people’s papers, all of it would be abandoned in the face of the plague. Of course, none of these people were properly sick, thought Nina as she sped back through the harbor. The necrotic flesh would not spread beyond what Nina had grafted onto their bodies. They would have to have it removed, but no one would grow ill or die. At worst, they’d endure a few weeks of quarantine.

Nina kept her head lowered, her hood up. Though she had been the cause of it all, and though she knew the plague was pure fiction, she still found her heart racing, carried into a gallop by the hysteria bubbling up around her. People were crying, shoving and shouting, arguing over space on the browboats. It was chaos. Chaos of her making.

I did this , she thought wonderingly. I commanded those corpses, those bits of bone, those dying cells. What did that make her? If any Grisha had ever had such a power, she’d never heard of it. What would the other Grisha think of her? Her fellow Corporalki, the Heartrenders and Healers? We are tied to the power of creation itself, the making at the heart of the world. Maybe