Now Lord Moureni was a wizened shell of a man; all that was wet and vital about him hollowed out and dry. His skin, once smooth and almost luminous, was now chalky and gritty to the touch, where it wasn’t split and weeping. He looked up at her with eyes of yellow and red, and she had to look away. His darkly curling hair, once his pride and joy, was now a collection of half-hearted wisps, most stuck to his broad forehead with sweat. There was black blood on his chin.
‘Here, I will change the sheets.’ Hestillion took the edges of the soiled linen in between her frozen fingertips and yanked the sheet away. Moureni cried out, pulling his legs up to his chest and twisting his ragged nightshirt, but Hestillion ignored him. ‘Stop whining.’
He opened his mouth to say something in reply, but instead he was coughing again, his whole body wracked with it. He pressed the backs of his wrists to his mouth but she still saw it: blood, thick and diseased, oozing through his teeth and the corners of his mouth.
I should just go, she thought. Turn around now, close the door and start walking. Walk until Ebora is far behind me, and let Lord Moureni cough himself to death. There was nothing she could do for him, nor for any of them, so she should just leave like her brother had and let it all fade into nothing – one endless corridor of shadows and memories and nothing else.
Instead, she threw the blood-stained sheet behind her, picked up the folded white linen and shook it out over the emaciated figure. The crimson flux was both merciless and slow. Those afflicted would feel tired at first, and then their muscles would feel sore. Next, they would start coughing, and that was the beginning of the true end. Skin became stiff and painful, flaking off in big pieces or splitting open to reveal raw flesh beneath, and the cough itself became a demon, a creature that attacked with razor claws and sharpened teeth. And they would live, in this half-life, for months, for years, some even for decades, until one day Hestillion would discover their husks – the last of their bodily fluids ejected out onto their clothes, their fingers twisted into tree roots with the final throes of death. That was the end that waited for most, if not all of them. That or a slow vanishing into decrepitude. This was what Tormalin had fled.
‘There’s no coming back from this.’ Moureni’s voice was a sour rasp. Hestillion was surprised he had a voice left at all. ‘This is how I will be, until I die.’
Hestillion waited. Sometimes they would ask her to end it for them, when the suffering became relentless. In the bed, Moureni clutched at the fresh sheet, pulling it up to his pointed chin, which now resembled a shrivelled root vegetable.
‘I remember Ygseril,’ continued Moureni. ‘You probably don’t, young creature like you, but I remember when the leaves were thick on the branch, and the sap ran. We were like children then. We had no idea of what fate was capable of. What a terrible lesson we have learned.’ The old man – not old for an Eboran, not truly, but ancient now – wheezed and gasped in some parody of laughter. ‘The Eighth Rain will be the last we’ll see, and we, we will be dust and bones, just like everyone beyond the Wall. Just like the humans. Because we drank their blood.’ Moureni stiffened as though he meant to sit up, but he didn’t have the strength. Instead, he rolled over onto his side. ‘This is their filthy disease! We’ve caught it from their dirty blood. That will be my last act. I will take my swords, my shining blades, and—’
To Hestillion’s relief, coughing took him for a while then. It was a terrible, pained session, and for a few long moments Hestillion thought that he had lost all his breath, that he would simply choke to death in the middle of a rant, but although all the cracks in his powdery skin opened up and wept their oily fluid, he was still alive at the end of it. His eyes, like wet pebbles adrift on bone-white sand, stared up at the canopy of the bed.
‘I must die killing them,’ he whispered at last. ‘The only way . . . the only way to cleanse this blood disease.’
‘I went walking out across the city yesterday afternoon,’ said Hestillion. She stood slowly and moved over to the dark wood cabinet. Behind the glass were various medals and trophies from Lord Moureni’s glorious past. ‘The doors to the old library were open, so I went inside. Hundreds of scrolls had been pulled out and torn to pieces, and in other places, an animal had made a nest of some sort. There were droppings.’ She paused, and took a heavy brass bowl from inside the cabinet. Gold coins rested in the bottom of it. ‘I walked on from there, and was followed for a time by a pair of wolves. They were skinny things, and they must have been hungry, but they only watched me walk. I think even the wolves know what a diseased place this is now. They know better than to eat rotten meat.’ She took the coins from the bowl and slipped them into her own pocket. ‘If you left the sanctuary of Ygseril’s palace, my Lord Moureni, you would perhaps have the energy to make it to the first flight of stairs. I promise you there are no nasty diseased humans waiting out there for you to kill, even if you had the strength to lift your sword.’
Moureni fell silent, and she returned to his bedside to pour a glass of water from the carafe on the side. The water swirled with motes of dust, but it hardly mattered. He would use it only to wash the taste of blood from his mouth – which struck her as ironic.
‘There is water here for you. Can I get you anything else?’
Rather than answering, the emaciated figure in the bed turned his face away from her, staring into the shadows in the corner of the room. For a moment she looked where he was looking, wondering if he too found himself in a trance, looking for a past that wasn’t there any more. Nothing left for Ebora but shadows and dust.
The man gurgled, preparing for another coughing fit, and Hestillion shook herself out of her funk. She snatched up the blood-stained sheets and closed the door quietly, before walking smartly down the corridor. On her right she came to a door that was half open, and without looking into its dark interior, she threw the dirty sheets inside.
There were no servants left to wash the linen, or indeed the windows or the crockery, but there were rooms and rooms full of things that had been made for people now dead: thousands of folded sheets, elegant glasses, delicate plates trimmed with gold, dresses and gowns unending. Much of it had been made or imported before the crimson flux began to make a serious dent on their population, and now Hestillion doubted she could possibly make use of all of it before it succumbed to mould, or rot, or simply crumbled away to nothing.