Interestingly, no one was as yet making any attempt to stop people from leaving the city, so long as they were perfectly ordinary sorts. These were not perfectly ordinary sorts; they were lesser nobles, and had already been turned back once, probably because they had tried to leave with everything portable they owned piled up on carts behind them. This time they had smuggled their portable goods out ahead, and themselves out as Re-keron’s patients, rather than trying to leave with all their goods and gear at once. And probably someone would steal some of those possessions on the way, but that was the price they would have to pay to get any of it out. They should count themselves lucky, or so Kiron thought, to get out with more than their skins and the clothing they stood up in.

There was no way of telling if the Magi would have allowed them to leave had they simply walked out on their own two feet without taking all their belongings—or if the Magi didn’t care about the goods, but had no intention of allowing any of the city’s elite to leave. Forewarned by his children and Kaleth, Lord Ya-tiren had taken the precaution of moving people and goods in small quantities over a period of two fortnights, then had made a great show of taking the household, as he often did, to his riverside estate. He had encountered no opposition, but when it was discovered that he was not to be found, perhaps the Magi had decided that there would be no more such defections.

The nobles who had been turned back had quickly found one of Lord Khumun’s covert agents, who had seen them as the ideal candidates for the initial move of the greater plan of rescue. He had suggested the disguise as pox victims; they had no idea that they were just one more item in a much larger plan.

They had arrived at Re-keron’s home several days ago and were already gone, but Re-keron was keeping up the fiction that she was still tending them. As predicted, no one had ventured anywhere near the boundary of the estate as marked by the plague marker stones. It was by no means the first time Re-keron had taken in such people. She had a reputation for being able to make amazing cures, and an equal reputation for eccentricity that made people go to her only as a last resort.

There were some things not even the Magi could compel a man to face, and the pox was one of them. No one had bothered to follow the donkey carts, and no one was going to go past the plague marker stones until Re-keron herself took them away.