I think that he shared with Tau-indi Bosoka a profound hope that by reaching out he could somehow bind the horror before it entered our the world.

“No,” he said, nodding his head, yes, it does matter right now: but he said no. “I’m sorry.”

I would tend to him once we had Baru. “Gaios,” I said, “Iscend, go in and bring them out. Gaios.”

Execarne waved to his clothier, the man executing the operation. Iscend led the way in, and the Morrow-men followed. They took the houseboat in two smooth minutes.

Baru, Tau, and Osa were gone. Iscend found only Iraji inside.

The boy walked like a heron with a snapped leg. Broken grace. I had my mask on and so I indulged in a terrible habit, I gave him my silent sympathy, the boy looked like he needed it.

Iraji’s grief seemed to eat his face like noma.

Of all the diseases I’d treated in Aurdwynn, I think noma was the one I hated most—because it was so common, because it was so simple, because my father had it. Noma is a disease of starving children. It kills nine in ten, mercifully (the mercy is for those who are disgusted by the child, make no mistake, those who speak of a mercifully dead child mean that mercy for themselves).

The tenth child survives to live a bitter life.

When a starving child develops noma, the digestive factors in the child’s mouth become so desperately voracious that they turn on the flesh of the face. The mouth eats itself. First ulcers develop, and then, rapidly, a painless rot. It is incurable. Soon the tongue is devoured. Soon after the lips. The flesh of the lower face peels away. In time the bone, too, although not always.

My father suffered noma as a child. He kept a scarf over the hole where his mouth had been. When Olake and I were eight, a whore in our house—she worked in the bed next to ours, behind a curtain, and we learned how to shame her customers if they didn’t pay—died of a hideous vulval rot that got into her blood. The rot looked so much like noma that my father took the blame: people said he’d put his hole on hers in the night, people said he’d cast a spell on her.

So the whore’s mother came over and stabbed our father in the gut. It took him eight weeks to die. Men scream differently without a tongue.

He was the first man I ever killed. Olake told him what would happen while I brewed the tea, and then I served his cup, and father poured it down his hole and held us till he passed.