In the quarantined west of the kypra, index patients suffered in stone cells. Convicts who had been exposed to the living and the dead, to their flesh or blood or breath, to sniff out the plague’s vector. One by one, on a fixed schedule, they would be executed and dissected. Had those exposed to dead flesh been infected? Had the men been struck harder? Or the women? Had lovers passed the disease to each other? All in the name of containing and understanding the plague.

The plague.

A hemorrhagic fever of extraordinary latency and mortality … first stage indistinguishable from a brief flu … second stage after eight to forty weeks* without symptom … the skin bruises at the slightest touch, the stool blackens, thirst and headache are most severe … blood weeps from the digestive tract … hemorrhage spreads to other organs with unpredictable course … liver, spleen, and kidneys struck next in more than a third of cases … the most rapid and certain deaths occur if bleeding spreads to the brain …

A characteristic green-black tint colors the blood …

Index patients on Mercipole Isle achieve a Blister Number of 2.9 except in pneumocystic cases** (however see—and here a scribble erased this line of the report).

Mortality in the index population approaches seven in ten.

Survivors experience persistent aches, visual abnormalities, madness … infectious reservoirs remain in the eyeballs and semen for weeks after symptopause …

Vectors: Tainted blood and flesh. Sexual contact. Airborne transmission, but only in the case of pneumocystic cases** …

The effects upon pregnant women are particularly acute. The fever induces massive uterine bleeding and sepsis of the fetus. Total mortality in mothers and unborn children.

*The latency period presents an obvious challenge to the forecast.

**Pneumocystic patients hemorrhage into the lungs. The sputum and vapor emitted by coughing is highly infectious, with a Blister Number of—(another scribble: this line, too, had been destroyed).

“I always wondered,” Baru whispered, “why they called it Kettling, in the stories…”

Tau seemed to stare through her. They were looking at the imagined suffering, at the dead. Baru was afraid that their warm eyes would suddenly swell with blood. “I would tell you,” they said, in a ghostly voice, “but the reason for that name is secret, and although it is pathetically obvious, I vowed not to reveal it.”

“You know where it comes from.”

“Of course I do. That’s why I’m afraid.”

“Is it true that the Mbo will unleash the Kettling on anyone who invades your heartlands?”

“I can’t tell you.”

Baru was about to ask, did someone release it here, and why? But just then Shao Lune and the enact-colonel came out onto the houseboat’s bow with them.