Arram didn’t like the sound of that.
“He is splendid with herbs. He strengthens ones that are weak. We knew he’d have to go into a plague center at some point, Lindhall. Let it be now, while we might yet keep the disease contained.”
“He’s in your workroom? I’ll send Ozorne; he’s here.” The globe went dark.
“How did you do that? May I have one?” Arram asked, his fingers twitching with excitement. “Water scrying isn’t as solid.”
Ramasu looked at him as he tucked the globe into his pack. “May you have one? If I gave a globe like this to a student, Cosmas would have my head. Leave your bird. She may not go with us.”
Preet began the most woeful trilling Arram had ever heard her make. Ramasu picked her up. “The place is poor, dark, and wet,” he told her softly. “Young and old die there while their refuse flows on the floor. The stench is unspeakable. If you were seen—if you were heard—you would be caged and sold in a minute. It is too sad for you, my dear.” He stroked her as she quieted, until Ozorne knocked on the door. Arram had gathered her things by then.
He accepted the bird from Ramasu and passed her to his friend. “I’m helping the master in the city,” he explained.
Ozorne frowned. “The city?”
“A plague center,” Arram said quietly. “She can’t go with me.”
Ozorne looked at Ramasu. “Surely you have more senior students to help you. Arram’s no healer. He—”
“I am his master, and I determine what he is suited to,” Ramasu replied firmly. “I know that he is your friend and that you are concerned, but you are a student of fire magic, are you not? You understand there are no safe roads in our studies, not in the long run. At least, I hope you understand this.”
Ozorne looked at the master for a moment, then bowed his head. “Yes, sir. I apologize.” He put a hand on Arram’s shoulder. “May Hekaja watch over you”—he glanced at Ramasu—“watch over you both, and bring you home safe.”
Arram hugged his friend. “Tell Varice I’m sorry I couldn’t say goodbye.” He gave Preet’s carrybag to Ozorne.
“Stay with me, Preet,” Ozorne said cheerfully. “I’ll show you the new finches that came for the university birdhouse. And Varice will be with us. You like her.”
Preet muttered unhappily but accepted her transfer to Ozorne’s care. With a wave, Ozorne walked off down the corridor.
Once Ozorne and Preet had gone, Ramasu looked at Arram. “Report to the infirmary. Tell them you’re working with me in the city. They’ll give you something to ward you against typhoid. Drink it all—it’s cursed expensive to make, which is why we can’t give it to everyone. Then meet me at the Imperial Gate.”
“But shouldn’t I pack clothes, soap, and the like?” Arram asked.
“We supply what you need,” Ramasu told him. “You want to bring as little of your own belongings as possible. Everything is burned when we’re done.”
Arram looked at his boots. They had cost a good piece of his allowance, and he was quite vain of the painted designs in the leather. They were waterproof, too, just the thing for a Carthaki winter.
Ramasu smiled. “Leave your student robe and boots with the staff in the infirmary. They will give you straw sandals for the plague districts.”
Arram could have kissed the man. “Thank you, Master!”
“Don’t thank me—get to the infirmary. Have them send someone for the plants you ground. A very good job, by the way. Now, go!”
Arram raced through the servants’ hallways rather than deal with students who were changing classes. The potion they gave him to stave off typhoid was the worst thing he had ever forced down his throat. The student who supervised as he took it made him sit on a chair and put his head between his knees to keep from fainting.
“Does it affect everyone this way?” he asked, embarrassed to see a number of pairs of feet pass by.
“Even the masters who take it ’most every year,” the student assured him. “There’s no getting used to it. Hand over them boots.” Arram obeyed, exchanging his boots for straw sandals. Once he was on his feet, the student sent him behind a screen to trade his clothes for a rough wool tunic and a broad-brimmed straw hat to keep off the rain. She gave him a token on a string to hang around his neck so he could claim his belongings when he returned. “The stone, too,” the student said, noticing the small opal Arram wore around his neck. “We’re sworn not to steal, never worry about that. The last medicine student that stole ended up chained to the pillar of a house when there was rat plague. He wasn’t given no potion, either.”
Arram remembered to tell her about sending someone for his jars of powder. The student ordered a youngster on that errand and handed Arram a large chunk of cheese and several flats of bread to go with it. “Stick ’em in your shirt and nibble while you can,” she advised. “Master Ramasu hardly remembers to feed himself, let alone students. And good luck. Gods all bless, Arram.”
His heart thumping from combined excitement and terror, Arram returned the blessing and headed to the Imperial Gate at a trot. Ramasu wasn’t there, and they would not leave without him. Arram looked over the two carts with waxed canvas roofs to shed the incessant rain. In addition to supplies, two other healing masters and three senior students waited inside them.
When Ramasu arrived, the masters took him aside to argue about Arram’s inclusion in their group. Whatever Arram’s master said, it silenced them, but they glanced curiously at Arram on the journey. The three senior students napped.
The first sign that they were approaching the slums, and the plague areas, was the smell. Arram had wandered this far into the city with Ozorne and Varice in past years, looking for cheap books. On hot days there was a smell, but it had never been this bad.
The older students had woken and noticed he was covering his nose. They told him the stink was a combination of human dung, vomit, the rotting bodies of the dead, and the burning dead. The mages did their best to encircle the corpse fires with spells to kill the odor, but there were rarely enough mages who could be spared from working on medicines and tending the sick.
“Not enough mages?” Arram asked as they turned off the river road and onto mostly deserted streets. Many doors were marked with a white chalk O, the sign for quarantine. Several that Arram noticed were slashed through—?—to indicate that everyone who lived there was dead. Arram bowed his head and prayed that the Black God of Death would give them gentle treatment in his kingdom. He had a feeling there was no one left in the living world to pray their way into the Realms of the Dead.