With the threat of quarantine hanging over their heads, Alec and Micum made their forays into the Ring slum. Alec wore his peasant-woman garb and Micum looked suitably disreputable in a dirty soldier’s coat and an eye patch. He went armed and they were mostly left alone. Though they found more people, mostly children, who claimed to have traded with a raven person, almost none of the descriptions matched. One had dealt with the old woman with the strange belt adornments, but no one had seen the old man. There was talk of a young woman in a ragged cloak, and the lame young man on a crutch, but none of the people they questioned were able to give much more of a description than that. No one remembered a tall swordsman hanging about.

Kepi soon turned up at Wheel Street again with news of a boy who fit the description of the one Alec had gotten the yellow crystal from. He’d been brought into the Yellow Eel Street temple, along with many others.

“The merchants in the square are up in arms about it,” Kepi told them while having his customary meal in the kitchen under the fond eye of the cook. “They’re hollerin’ for quarantine louder every day ’cause folk are staying away from the merchants nearest there.”

“Then we’d better hurry,” said Seregil.

Alec and Seregil rode to the temple and found it ringed with angry people shouting at the priests and trembling acolytes.

“You know we can’t turn away the sick,” the head priest cried. “Maker’s Mercy, good people, let them at least die in peace.”

They shouldered their way through the crowd and into the temple. Once inside, Alec shook his head, looking at all the sightless sleepers lined up against the walls. The boy he’d gotten the stone from lay on a pallet near the door.

Alec hunted out the drysian in charge. “Could I borrow two of your acolytes, please, Brother? I need to send some messages.”

The two boys were quickly sent off, one with a message for Valerius, the other for Thero.

While they waited he and Seregil made use of their time examining the stricken people, looking for marks of any sort, or anything else out of the ordinary.

“Here’s something,” said Alec, kneeling by one of the little girls. “Look, someone’s cut a lock of her hair in the back. I saw that on another of the little ones over there, too.” He turned to the drysian woman. “Have you noticed that with any of the others who’ve come through here?”

“No. But we deal in illness, not hair.”

“Alec, look!” Seregil pointed to a child on the far side of the room.

It was the little golden-haired washerwoman’s daughter and her mother. The child still lived.

“That’s a few days longer than we expected,” Alec pointed out hopefully.