Nala and her father led them into a cheerless little third-floor room. It was clean, but sparsely furnished. Two neat pallets lay on the floor near the window. A battered cabinet, a warped table, and two rickety-looking chairs stood against the far wall. The old man took a seat while Nala took out a half loaf of brown bread and a small lump of cheese from the cabinet and carved slices for them. Even here, Mycenians practiced their native hospitality. Seregil hated to take even a morsel away from them, but it would be the height of rudeness to refuse the humble meal.

“So you’ve met them, have you?” Master Elren asked as they nibbled their stale bread and hard cheese.

“Aye. I think they’re plague carriers. We lost our sister to the sleeping death last week,” Seregil told him with a catch in his voice.

The woman made a Dalnan sign against ill health and stepped back from them.

“You know of the sleeping death?”

The old man nodded. “My daughter here lost her first son to it, some thirty years back, when we lived in Dresher’s Ford, up in the northern freeholdings.”

Seregil exchanged a surprised look with Alec. The first time they’d heard of the place was from Atre.

“My boy was only six years old,” the woman whispered, hand pressed to her heart as if to fend off fresh pain.

“Oh, you poor dear,” Seregil said sorrowfully. “What happened to him?”

“Why, it’s just like you have here,” she told him. “A person falls down in a trance and dies before the week is out.”

“And you saw others stricken with it?”

“Dozens in our town,” Master Elren wheezed. “And it stopped quick as it started. People said it was on account of the strangers.”

“The traveling beggars,” Nala explained. “They traded trinkets with children, who soon fell sick with what you call the sleeping death. But the blackguards ran away before we could catch them, and the sickness gradually stopped after they were gone.”

“How many beggars were there?” asked Seregil.

Nala spread her hands. “It’s been so long. Four, perhaps five?”

“But it didn’t end there,” said Elren. “We moved south after that, down into Mycena, and a few years ago we saw it again, in the city of White Cliff, and I heard from some others on the road here that it had happened in Nanta, too, just before the siege this year.”

For an instant Seregil couldn’t breathe as a terrible idea came to him. “Were the beggars there, too?”

“I don’t know about Nanta, but they were in White Cliff. I told the mayor about what we’d seen before, but they ran off again before anyone could catch them. It must have been the same clan of people, don’t you think?”