The Folding Knife (20 page)

Two less-than-happy faces looked back at him. "Yes, Dad," Pio said. "We're to make a good impression on Tragazes, and learn the business."

Basso nodded. "You think you can do that?"

"We'll do our best," Festo said.

"Of course you will," he replied, and something prompted him to add, "and if you make a good job of it, I'll let you go to Badava for the summer. Well? Is that a good deal?"

They were grinning at him, and he thought: they assume I'd planned that all along, the reward, the incentive. It's how a good father would've structured it; first the bluster and the stern eye, then the special treat, whipped out of the sack at the end. But Badava was just an afterthought, because I was feeling guilty. "But only," he heard himself say, "if Tragazes gives you a good report; and I mean good, not just all right. I want you to impress him so much, he'd offer you jobs if you'd just come in as stowaways on a grain ship."

They left the room cheerful, excited, grateful, with something to look forward to (and the Invincible Sun only knew what sort of mayhem they'd get up to let loose in Badava in the long summer evenings), and Basso thought: I have the knack of doing things well, even when my intention was to do them badly. So what would that make me? Basso the Fortunate?

That evening, there was a letter from Bassano. It arrived in a small wooden box of figs, which made him grin. He hadn't actually hollowed out a fig to hide it in, but it was the next-best thing.

My first day at the Studium. Very strange people. The dogma of the indivisibility of the Double Essence of Being in the morning; land management in the afternoon. Lunch not at all bad. Sharing a room with a very pale man from Vinessus who keeps wanting to talk about girls: what are they like, have I known many, have I ever you know, and if so how often and what exactly happens? Rather wearing. If I murder him, can I have a prerogative pardon? Otherwise quite relaxed, and a good library; they've got a pre-rescension Avitius, would you believe, with the five anathematised chapters. I bet even you never knew that. Hope the tiresome people aren't getting you down. If you felt like sending me twenty nomismata it'd come in very handy; we're not supposed to have money, and I do miss it dreadfully. Not necessarily to spend. I just like looking at the faces on the coins.

Mother told me what you agreed. I understand.

Cordially, Bassano

The first anyone knew of it was a ship, found drifting just outside the harbour mouth. It must have been blown down from the Cape during the night; the watchmen on the Great Light saw it at dawn, and as the day wore on, they wondered why it was just sitting there, when the weather was so fine. Reasonably enough, they suspected it might be a pirate, hanging about waiting for a victim it could tail into less well-regulated waters. When the harbour prefect made his rounds in mid-afternoon the Light captain reported it, and the prefect decided to send a patrol sloop to take a closer look.

The sloop captain, a Verrhoean with twenty years' service, sailed cautiously to just inside hailing range. The ship, he observed, looked like an ordinary Scleriot merchantman: a fat pot of a ship, triple-masted, with high castles, not exactly a pirate's vessel of choice. He tried hailing, but there was no reply, and no sign of activity of any sort. He'd seen something rather similar thirty years earlier, when he was working for his uncle. He sent a boat, with instructions to board if nobody answered their hails.

The boat came back an hour later. Everybody on board was dead, they said. Most of them were lying in their bunks; a few must've kept going until they dropped where they stood, and one man had fallen from the rigging. Any marks, the captain asked: swellings, blisters? Yes, the boatswain said, in a voice that suggested he knew exactly what he'd seen.

The sloop captain knew what to do. He went on board the merchantman personally to supervise the breaking open of the tar barrels and the setting of the fires. Then, once the merchantman was burning well, he set course for the Cape. There was an island just off the southern point that was kept empty, for use as a quarantine base. Before putting in, he sent the boat to within shouting range of the nearest village on the mainland, and raised the alarm, giving orders for a message to be sent to the City immediately. The village choirmaster (closest thing to a mayor) borrowed a horse and set off for town, where he went straight to the harbour prefect.

The prefect knew exactly what to do. First, he gave orders for the harbour chain to be raised, to stop any ships entering or leaving. Then he sent word to the City prefect, the Guard commander, the gatewardens and the First Citizen's office in that order, and put down the barriers to seal off the harbour from the upper town. The gatewardens closed all the six main City gates and put sentries on the five sally-ports. The City prefect issued emergency notices: all markets, fairs, shops, inns and places of entertainment to close immediately; no unauthorised gatherings of more than five people; a curfew; compulsory notification of plague symptoms to ward and guild officers. The Guard commander posted troops to enforce the emergency regulations, keep order and prevent looting. The First Citizen gave out commissions and warrants to the designated activity officers, conferring the usual additional powers on them for the duration of the emergency, sent compulsory service notices to all registered medical practitioners, suspended the House and called an immediate cabinet meeting.

They were intelligently planned procedures, quickly and efficiently carried out, by men who knew what they were doing. They'd never worked in the past, and this time was no exception.

The room was full of smoke, so thick that Basso couldn't make out the mosaics on the wall ten feet away from where he was sitting. He had a handkerchief pressed over his nose and mouth, but his eyes were watering. It had been proved a century ago that braziers burning aromatic herbs did nothing at all to prevent the spread of plague but everybody still did it anyway. There wasn't anything else anybody could do.

"We know for a fact that it's spread by rats," said the tall, bald doctor, his voice muffled by his scarf, making him sound like he had a bad cold. "That's not a guess, it's science. But this time, it can't be rats. The customs men who went on the plague ship to burn it took all the usual precautions, and anyway, they didn't see a single rat anywhere."

"How do you know that?" Sentio queried. "By the time our people got to the Cape, they were all dead."

"The captain wrote a log," the doctor replied. "All the relevant details, he was a good observer. They can't have caught it from rats on the merchant ship. It's not possible. And even if one of them had got it, the rest of them--"

"So it can't have come from that ship," Cinio interrupted. "There must've been another ship, with people on it who had the plague at a less advanced stage."

Basso shook his head. "The ship we found adrift was from Leucis," he said. "No other ships in from there in the last month. Besides, you've seen how quick this thing develops. It's hours, not days."

"Then it can't be rats," the doctor said. "In which case, it's an entirely new strain, and everything we know about dealing with the plague is most likely useless."

Basso scratched his head. "Wonderful," he said. "We don't know how it spreads, we sure as hell don't know how to cure it, and it takes hold so fast there wouldn't be time anyway. So what do we do?"

The other doctor, the one who looked like a cat, said: "We let it run its course. No choice in the matter."

"We let it run its course," Cinio repeated. "For crying out loud, gentlemen. We've got to be able to think of something better than that."

Basso turned and looked at him. "Such as?"

"I don't know," Cinio said helplessly. "But my mother and both my sisters died in the last lot, and all anybody said was, there's nothing we can do, just let it run its course. And that's not good enough."

"You haven't got anything to suggest, in other words." Basso turned to the doctors. "How about you?" he said. "Anything at all, doesn't matter how drastic. I'll burn down half the City, if you think it'd help."

"They did that in Coele Opuntia, sixty years ago," the bald doctor said.

"Did it work?"

"We don't know. The fire spread all over the city, and most of the people in the lower town were trapped behind the quarantine barriers and couldn't get out. It hadn't spread to the upper town, so really there's no way of telling. Personally, I wouldn't recommend it."

"Fine," Basso said. "What else is there? I seem to remember something about diverting a river."

"Dapoeia, forty-six years ago," the cat-faced doctor said. "They dammed up the Asper and flooded the slum district, with the people still in it. Same problem as with Coele Opuntia. Nobody left alive to see if it did any good."

"Besides," the bald doctor said, "we're not dealing with the same disease. In both those cases it was the regular strain, spread by rats. Burn or drown the rats, you get rid of the plague, though of course they didn't know that then. But in this case, since we don't know how it spreads, we'd just be guessing. Suppose it's water-borne, and you flood the whole of downtown. All you'd achieve would be to spread it all through the suburbs."

Basso nodded. "Nothing to be gained from the big, broad gesture, then," he said. "All right. You've left us in no doubt about what we don't know. What do we know?"

The bald doctor frowned. "All we can say for certain is that it's a mass of contradictions," he said. "It's been going on for eight days. In the first forty-eight hours, it spread across a quarter of the City; infection rate close to ninety per cent; mortality, as far as we can tell, something like one in three. After forty-eight hours, it stopped dead in its tracks; no new cases in the next twelve hours. Then there was another spurt, right across the west side; same infection rate, same mortality. Then another pause; then we started getting a few scattered outbreaks on the north side, with much lower infection rates but rather higher mortality. Then practically all the southern wards catch it, but the death rate drops to one in six." He paused to catch his breath, then went on: "In seven out of ten cases, it's all over in twelve hours; they die, or they get better. In three out of ten cases, rising to fifty per cent on the south side, it drags on for eighteen hours, though the mortality ratio stays pretty much the same. That's the worst thing about it, from our point of view. There's no pattern. Which means," he added, "that there is a pattern, but we haven't seen it yet. I just hope some of us live long enough to figure it out."

Basso had been taking notes. "What we need," he said, "is a ship's captain, preferably off a merchantman. Or a fisherman would do just as well, I guess. Cinio, get out there and find me one, quick as you like."

Cinio knew better than to argue. He doubled his scarf round his face, got up and left without a word. Basso was frowning at the notes he'd made. "This is no good," he said. "What we need is a map. Doctor--sorry, I keep forgetting your name. I want you and your colleague here to get a map of the City and mark on it where the outbreaks have been. Sentio, round up some clerks to help them. And when you've done that, find Aelius, if he's still alive, and bring him here."

"Is that a good idea? What if--?"

"Sorry," Basso said, "I thought I was the one who's deaf, but obviously I was wrong and it's you. Come on, all of you. This is important."

When they'd gone, he stoked up the fire with laurel, sandalwood and the dried leaves in the bag from his mother's private store, until he could hardly see at all for the smoke.

Cinio got lucky. The first clerk he asked had a brother-in-law who'd just come home after three months as first mate on a charcoal freighter; he was at the clerk's apartment right now, just a few hundred yards down the street, in one of the big grace-and-favour blocks reserved for the civil service.

The clerk's brother-in-law, a short, square man by the name of Mavorsus, wasn't too keen on leaving the house, but the platoon of Palace guards Cinio had brought along just in case eventually managed to persuade him. He arrived in Basso's office in the Severus house about twenty minutes after the clerks had handed Basso the map he'd asked for.

Yes, Mavorsus said, of course he knew the winds in the bay. He'd been a sailor all his working life, ever since he used to help his dad on an oyster boat. Including the times of day? The times when the wind changed direction. Well, naturally. You had to know that stuff if you were a fisherman.

Basso showed him the map and explained his theory. It's possible, Mavorsus said. Possible? Well, it fits. You'd get a good blow coming in from the sea around about then, for sure; we used to ride it home from the oyster beds; and we'd take the turn of the tide out again, when the wind'd be blowing south-west, out to sea. Then we'd be stuck out there until the late evening north-easterly, which (Marvorsus had to admit) is what you've got written in here.

"It's airborne," Basso said. "It moves when the wind changes. And the incubation period is short. If we know where the wind will be blowing and when, we can move people out of harm's way."

The doctors looked mildly stunned. Sentio looked terrified. Aelius, who'd arrived shortly after they brought Mavorsus in, opened his eyes wide. "I'm convinced," he said. "Mind you, I'm no expert."

"Yes you are," Basso said. "You were at the siege of Lyssa, weren't you?"