Chapter Twenty
I slept in my own bed that night, as Taro had been acting like a plonker. And I had a vicious headache. And while it was sometimes nice to wake up snuggled up to someone, it was also nice to stretch out and have the whole bed to oneself.
I slept late for the first time in a long while. I woke with no nausea. That was lovely. And I had an appetite; I was really hungry. I went down to the kitchen and enjoyed a hearty breakfast of eggs and sausage. It was wonderful.
Then Taro strode in. He was scowling. “Where’s Laidley’s gesture of affection?”
I rolled my eyes. “I sent it all back. Thanks for telling me what would happen had I failed to do so.”
“It’s not my place to interfere.”
“It’s not your place to cause trouble.”
“No, that would be Laidley.”
Was he really willing to have me promised to Doran, or whatever would have happened, just because he was annoyed with me? Why was he annoyed with me, anyway? Doran was the one who was playing games.
“I don’t want to talk about Laidley.”
“Then why’d you bring him up?”
He sort of growled, then took a deep breath before saying, “There’s something strange about this illness.”
“So you’ve said.”
“Kafar was ill when he came here. I could feel it. There was nothing I could do for him. He was still ill when he left.”
“Are you sure?”
He nodded. “I could feel it.”
“Sometimes you’re not sure how much you’ve done for someone.”
“Not this time. There really was nothing I could do for him.”
“All right.” What was this about?
“But he moved in with his sister. And he got better.”
“Maybe he just got over it. If they don’t die, they eventually have to get better. It’s possible he’s not even truly better. He might just feel better for some reason and think he’s healed.”
“Perhaps, but the most logical explanation is that he actually is better.”
I had to give him that. “Aye, that’s true.”
“So maybe there’s something in the riverfront that’s making people sick.”
“Risa thinks it’s the water.”
“It can’t be the water. The water goes everywhere. The illness would be more widespread.”
“It has spread beyond the riverfront area.”
“But not everywhere the water goes. And most of the illness is restricted to the riverfront.”
“If it’s not the water, what else could it be?”
“I have no idea. But the logical assumption is that there is some unnatural element in the riverfront that’s causing this. Maybe it’s something only they are eating. Maybe it’s something only they use to build their houses. But it’s something that’s in the riverfront and nowhere else.”
All right, I could go with that theory for the purposes of discussion. “Do you want to tell Risa about this?”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to have to explain to her about why I think this is unnatural. She won’t believe me.”
“Why not? You’re a Source. She’ll believe you can do anything you say you can do.”
“I’m not worried about her believing me. I just don’t want someone else learning about this little trick I have. Besides, this sort of thing isn’t really the responsibility of the Runners. It’s an illness, not a crime.”
“But they must be investigating it, if Risa thinks it’s the water.”
“I don’t know where she got that idea. The rumors are that the Runners aren’t really doing much about this. They can’t. They’re too busy with other things, and the riverfront illness doesn’t fall within their sphere of authority.”
“Whose authority does it fall into?”
He shrugged. “I have no idea. No one’s, it seems like. Or maybe the healers, but they’re not going down there.”
“That’s alarming.” Was that possible? How could something so serious not have a group of people meant to deal with it?
“I think we should go to the riverfront and see what we can find out.”
I nearly choked on my tea. “What in the world makes you think we could find something the others can’t?”
“Why wouldn’t we be able to see something? We’re reasonably intelligent people.”
“Why would you even want to do this? You’re the man who got so furious when people expected us to do something about the weather during the Harsh Summer. You resented the fact that they expected us to do something beyond our responsibilities.”
He sniffed. “I resented the way they expressed their expectations. They were obnoxious.”
That was true. Obnoxious and violent. But this was bizarre. This wasn’t our task. I’d made a promise to myself not to get involved in things that were not my business. It rarely worked out.
“We’re not doing anything else, Lee. We’re off the roster.”
That was true, too. If we couldn’t be useful one way, we might as well try to be useful in another. Not that I thought we would find anything, but it would do no harm to humor Taro. “When did you want to go?”
“Might as well go now.”
I sighed and finished off my tea.
We left the residence. It was a bright, mild day. A market day, which meant most people would be haunting the merchant stalls.
The riverfront technically referred to the banks of all three rivers, along their entire length through the city. In reality, it was concentrated in the center of the city, where the three rivers met and crossed. The riverfront of the wealthy quad was kept empty, but the other five quads were filled with dye makers, trash collectors and manure mongers. It was a very fragrant area. And loud. And dirty. The buildings were narrow and dark and a lot of the windows were broken or gone altogether.
“So what are we looking for?” I asked Taro.
“I have no idea. Just something that jumps out as being strange.”
I wasn’t familiar with the area. How would I know what was strange? It seemed to me we were going to waste an afternoon just wandering around. “This all looks unusual to me.”
“You’re such a snob, Lee.”
“So you spend a lot of time here, do you, Taro?”
“There’s nothing here that I want.”
“How convenient for you.”
People were staring at us. I imagined they didn’t see Sources and Shields around there very often.
They looked awful. Pale with dark circles under their eyes, green and greasy. Those who moved did so slowly. Many were just sitting or lying in doorways.
“Let’s ask someone,” Taro suggested, leading me to a thin woman with lanky brown hair, sitting in a rocking chair in front of her hovel. “Excuse me, ma’am,” Taro said politely. “I’m Source Karish. This is—”
“You’re the Source what’s been healing people,” she said.
So much for them keeping that quiet. I’d known that was too much to ask.
“Actually, I haven’t been. I can’t heal people.”
“Healed Kafar, didn’t you?”
“No, actually, I didn’t. I believe he got better because he moved away from the riverfront.”
I suddenly wondered if it was the best idea in the world to imply that the place in which she lived was somehow causing the illness.
But she didn’t seem to leap to that conclusion. “So you’re not going to heal any more of us?”
How many times did he have to say it? He couldn’t heal people of this illness. At least, he didn’t think so. I still wasn’t sure.
He chose not to answer that question. “Have you noticed anything unusual about? Something other than the illness itself?”
She positively cackled with laughter. “Everything about the riverfront is unusual.”
Aye, she was going to be a lot of help.
But Taro gave it one more try. “There’s nothing you’ve seen that you can tell me?”
“What are you, a Runner?”
“Have Runners been here?”
“Runners never come here.”
“Really?” I said. That surprised me.
“Nothing here they think is worth protecting.”
How odd.
We worked our way down the riverbank, stopping to talk to whoever looked open to conversation. No one knew of anything strange happening. A few of them asked Taro to heal them, and were quite bitter when Taro said no. I was glad I didn’t have to convince him to refuse. I could just imagine everyone in the riverfront hearing that he was there and the two of us getting mired in a futile attempt to see to everyone.
A little boy, about eight, I guessed, ran up to us. He was too skinny, he was barefoot, and his clothes were too tight. “You a Source?” he demanded of Taro.
“Aye, I am.”
“I want to be a Source,” the boy announced. “What do I have to do?”
“I’m sorry, son. You have to be born a Source. There’s nothing you can do to make yourself a Source.”
The boy scowled.
He was only eight. In theory, he could be a Source, and no one had figured it out yet. Taro had been eleven before his family realized he was a Source. We couldn’t know whether this boy was a Source unless we spent more time with him. It was usually the families who discovered it.
“You been asking all sorts of questions,” the boy said. “I can answer them, if you take me with you and make me a Source.”
“We can’t take you with us, and we can’t make you a Source,” Taro told him. “But I can give you this.” He took the emerald stud out of his ear and held it out for the boy’s inspection.
I thought he was being careless to offer a bribe, of any kind. The boy could easily make something up, and we wouldn’t know the difference. I didn’t know how to communicate that to Taro without outright calling the boy a liar to his face.
The boy grabbed for the earring. Taro held it out of reach. “What have you got to say?”
“A woman comes at night sometimes. Real late. She’s dressed too nice to be someone from around here.”
“What does she look like?”
“I don’t know. She wears a hood, and it’s dark.”
“What does she do?”
The boy shrugged. “Don’t know. But she does it at the hub.”
“What’s the hub?”
The boy snickered. He thought the question stupid. “Where the rivers cross.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“I don’t know. A week, maybe.”
Taro gave him the earring. “Thank you.”
The boy crowed in delight and dashed off.
“A woman who comes in the middle of the night,” I said. “That could be for anything. And would he even be up that late?”
“No harm in looking around the hub, though.”
“No, if you want to.”
There were bridges all over the city, spanning the rivers at various points. The bridge spanning where the rivers met was massive, wide enough to allow two wagons to cross at a time. The bridge was made of wood, and there were chunks rotted out of it.
Walls about shoulder high were built along the rivers, for about twenty cubits each way. Open drains were built low into the walls to allow some of the water to escape for residential use. The grass in the area was beaten down and dead.
And I felt jittery. It reminded me forcibly of how I’d felt in the ash grove. “Ashes.”
“What?”
“I think someone’s been using ashes here. I think I have a reaction against human ashes.”
“That seems odd. Why would you have a reaction?”
“I react to niyacin powder. That’s not common.”
“That’s true. So you’re saying someone was trying to cast spells here.”
“Or dumping something in the water. At the drains, not the rivers themselves, which is why only some people are getting ill.”
“You’re saying someone is making them ill on purpose.”
As soon as he said that, I wanted to scramble away from the idea. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a side effect. Because why would anyone want to make a bunch of strangers ill?”
Taro nodded, though he didn’t look entirely convinced. “You know what the next logical step is.”
“Tell the Runners.”
“No.” Now he looked impatient. “We come back tonight and see if the woman comes.”
I sighed. “Really, why are you so enthusiastic about this?”
“I told you. We have nothing else to do. Why don’t you want to do this?”
“Because I’m really bad at this sort of thing. I’ll make a fool of myself.”
“You just don’t want to go through the discomfort of waiting around here all night.”
There was a kernel of truth to that, but Taro was right. I had nothing better to do.
“We need to get long black cloaks. We want to stay hidden.”
That meant shopping.
So we found nice long black cloaks, and then we went back to the residence for a nap. Luckily our watches at the Stall had gotten us used to strange sleeping patterns. Once the sun was down, we headed out with our melodramatic black cloaks draped over our arms.
The riverfront was quieter at night, which surprised me. I was ashamed to realize I had expected people to be walking around drunk and fighting and causing chaos. Simply because they were poor and lived in a grim environment. What was wrong with me?
We put on our cloaks, though really, who were we kidding? If a lone woman had been noticed simply because she was dressed too nicely, we would stand out by a league. But I pulled the hood as far over my face as I could and held my hands within the sleeves. We huddled into the shadowed corner of the walls, and we waited.
And waited.
And waited.
If spending a watch in the Stall was boring, crouching in silence all night was brutal. Despite my nap, I found myself nodding off, my eyes heavy and blurred.
This was so stupid. If someone did come, what were we going to do? Stop her or merely watch? Go back with the news to the Runners? The latter was the smart thing, but while Risa didn’t seem disturbed by my previous foray into the responsibilities of Runners, it seemed to annoy the others. They probably wouldn’t take us seriously.
But it turned out that I needn’t have worried about that. No one showed up, and when the sun started to rise we stood with stiff joints. “That was horrible,” I complained.
“Aye, and unfortunately, we’ll have to do it again.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“We didn’t catch her.”
“How long do you expect to do this?”
“Until we do catch her.”
I suppressed a groan. There was nothing I could reasonably do but follow along. But in all the rumors I had heard about Lord Shintaro Karish before I met him, no one mentioned an insane dedication to the duties of others.