‘Leave us,’ said Schenk.
The soldiers obeyed. Seroff remained and slammed the iron door shut. Schenk crouched before the man while Seroff stood beside him, looming.
‘What is your name?’ said Schenk.
The man’s lips moved silently. He was shaking his head in short, rapid jerks, his eyes fixed on a greater terror than the inquisitor.
Schenk snapped her fingers in front of his face and squeezed his burned forearm. The man jolted in shock. He blinked, and looked directly at Schenk.
‘What is your name?’ she repeated.
‘Remmis,’ he rasped. ‘Arven Remmis.’
‘Good,’ said Schenk. ‘Citizen Remmis, why is your district on fire?’ She kept his left arm in her grip, and squeezed again to keep his fear focused on her.
‘Burn the dream,’ Remmis said. He shook his head more violently. The words came out in a rushing, desperate mutter. ‘We have to burn the dream.’ His eyes fastened onto Schenk, and he gripped her arm with his right hand. ‘Promise me I won’t dream. You won’t let me dream. Promise me, promise me.’ He sobbed. ‘They were all dreaming… my children… such dreams…’ He began to keen. ‘I can’t dream. Will you promise, will you promise, will you promise?’
The inquisitor shook his arm off and straightened, taking a step back. Remmis wrapped his arms around himself and rocked back and forth, muttering about dreams and fire.
‘This is getting us nowhere,’ said Schenk.
‘Maybe not,’ Seroff said. ‘But it does confirm there was something in that object.’
Schenk tried another tack. ‘What landed? Was something let loose?’
‘Dreams,’ Remmis whispered. ‘No, not dreams. Dreams of the end of dreams. Dreams of decay. Catching.’
Seroff exchanged a worried look with Schenk. ‘Catching,’ he repeated.
‘A plague?’ Schenk murmured.
‘This is more your territory than mine,’ Seroff pointed out.
Schenk nodded slowly, thinking. ‘I will need to see,’ she said. ‘When the fires die down, I’ll go back in.’ She grimaced. ‘He keeps talking about dreams. This does not sound like a plague.’
‘No!’ Remmis shouted. ‘NO!’ He looked back and forth between Seroff and Schenk, his eyes staring wide, looking as though they might jump from his skull. ‘Don’t let me,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t let me dream. Why won’t you stop the dream? You mustn’t let me dream.’ He scrabbled forward, reaching for the hem of Seroff’s coat. A second later, he shrank back. Eyes closed, he clawed at the walls, breaking his fingernails. ‘Stop the dream!’
Remmis shrieked. He reached for his eyes. Bloody fingers hooked. As Seroff recoiled, Remmis’ cries turned into a single, unending scream. He sank his fingers into his eyes, and the eyes welcomed the fingers. Remmis’ eyelids liquified, and his eyeballs sucked at the fingers. His eyeballs became soft jelly, and then his eyelashes became tendrils, and sliced through skin and muscle, and then bone. With a splintering, sucking sound, his fingers came off his hand and disappeared into the hungry substance of his eyes. His arms fell back, the flesh around the stumps of his fingers turning black and flaking away. Rot gnawed its way along his hands and up his arms, spreading onto his torso.
Remmis’ eyes ground his fingers to pulp, and then blossomed. Black, furry petals unfolded, their edges sharp as blades, their surface wet as tongues. A heady, cloying perfume filled the cell, and Seroff felt as if his nose were packed thick with buzzing flies. The unholy flowers kept unfolding, pulling themselves further and further out of Remmis’ skull. Soon they were a yard long, trembling and flapping against the ground. His screams finally choked off when his tongue swelled and coiled into a thick rope coated with slime and mould. The bones of his skull turned brittle and they collapsed in on themselves. It looked as though his head were deflating. The black petals kept growing until there was nothing at the junction of their stems but a trembling grey sludge. The petals slapped against the floor, the sound sharp, hard and slick, wet palms clapping. Then they, too, fell still and succumbed to the decay that had taken the rest of the body.
After a few moments more, there was only ash. It drifted back and forth, caught in a nonexistent breeze. Seroff thought he heard something whisper.
Seroff had his back against the door. His breath came in short, hitching gasps. Schenk had turned pale. She met his gaze, and they rushed out of the cell. ‘You’ll need to have this sealed,’ Seroff said as he slammed the door shut again. ‘What kind of plague is that?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Schenk. ‘I’ve never encountered anything like that before.’ Given what she had encountered, her ignorance alarmed Seroff almost as much as what he had just seen.
‘Airborne?’ Seroff asked. ‘Are we infected?’
‘I don’t know. I feel nothing. Do you?’
‘No. Not yet, at any rate.’
‘The symptoms seem to develop quickly. A few hours at most.’
Grimly, they moved to another cell and sealed themselves in. They waited out the next few hours in silence, trapped in their expectation of monstrous change. Seroff braced himself with every breath to feel a fluttering in his lungs, a swelling of his tongue. Towards the end of the third hour, when no symptoms had developed, he began to relax.
‘The dust,’ Schenk said, half to herself. ‘Airborne, but larger particulates? I don’t know. I think we’re fortunate we didn’t breathe it in.’
‘If what we saw are the effects of the contagion,’ Seroff said, ‘we’re lucky the residents set their quarter on fire.’
‘A needed step, but we don’t know if that was enough. I’ll have to go in.’
‘And we don’t know how much further it might have spread,’ said Seroff.
‘Do you have the means to quarantine the zone?’
‘I hope so. Troop numbers aren’t the problem. But quarantining any sector is not going to be easy or certain.’ With no real roads, his perimeter would be a ragged zigzag around the mountains of wreckage, and the boundary might still be porous. To do this right, he would need, at the very least, the means to dig a clear ditch all around the infected area. That would require an army of excavators he did not have. In the immediate, he would have to make do with infantry, and hope that Schenk could do something effective against the plague. ‘Do you think there is any chance of an immunisation?’
‘No. Not quickly.’
‘Amputation, then.’
‘Yes,’ said Schenk. ‘Purge the infected and the region they are in.’
A thought occurred to Seroff. ‘It is worth investigating further, though, yes? I could just order an immediate bombardment.’
‘That step will be necessary. But you are correct. There will be something of value to learn first.’
