Book 3 Chapter 22: Bad
Dantes awoke for the tenth night in a row holding his hand to his throat, sweat covering his sheets. Sevryn didn’t even wake up this time, she’d grown used to his difficulty sleeping, and he’d told her many times just to get rest herself at this point. He ran a finger gently across her outline and crawled out of bed. Luckily, this time he’d awoken only a little bit before dawn, his exhaustion had made it difficult to awaken from even nightmares.
He coughed, and poured himself a glass of water from the pitcher by his bed. It was getting worse. At first he’d thought his infrequent coughs were just a tickle in his throat, or perhaps a side effect of his new pigeon transformation, but he could tell he was getting sick. He hadn’t been ill a single time since he’d become a druid, and he found the experience incredibly unpleasant. Jacopo was sleeping on his nest of silk and satin that he’d torn from various places in the Vixen. He hadn’t been coughing, but Dantes had noticed he was a bit slower than usual over the last few days. It wouldn’t have been perceptible to anyone other than Dantes. He wasn’t sure if sickness was just something they shared due to their bond, or if perhaps whatever was making one of them sick happened to be affecting both of them.
He walked into his greenhouse audience chamber and extended his senses out across everything. The sickness that had been at the edges of Rendhold, had finally reached its interior. Outside the main gates everyone knew someone who was sick. On the inside, Dantes was starting to see more and more people coughing on the streets. Even Uptown had a number of cases. The Temple of Many Gods had sent out those priests with the gift of healing, and while they were able to lessen people’s suffering, they were unable to cure it. Disease had always been a complicated thing for healers, as they were better with physical injuries, but usually with enough effort, and gold, they could make most ailments disappear.
Dantes had himself attempted to use his abilities to help those within his gang that were ill. He could sense the taint in them and he would reach out to those parts of them that were fighting the taint and bolster them as much as he could. It lessened their suffering, and most importantly, kept them working, but he couldn’t rid them of it. It also affected each race differently. Humans tended to become feverish and gain a cough, orcs and dwarves got horrendous chills that made them shake like leaves, gnomes developed horrible rashes, halfings began leaking in unpleasant ways, and kobolds scales started to shed improperly, often pulling up healthy scales. Mutts were lucky enough to have awful combinations of all the possibilities of their bloodlines. There hadn’t been many deaths, but some of those that were already ill and infirm or elderly had been taken. He’d been worried at first that his own sickness was the result of the same disease, but he didn’t sense illness within himself or Jacopo in the same way he’d sensed it in others, so believed it was something else.
Dantes sat in his tree throne, trying to feel the taint that was spreading throughout the city. The exterior of the city was still hit the hardest, but he was beginning to feel larger pockets of it developing within. They felt tangible in an odd way, as if he could reach out and physically touch them. The largest of the pockets was, oddly enough, in the docks. He would’ve expected it closer to the gates, especially since there were so few ships in the dock lately, for fear of the disease as well as over the growing diplomatic problems the city was suffering. He’d need to investigate those thicker pockets of taint. They weren’t natural, Traizen had explained to him that diseases came and went through all locus’s as a natural part of the cycle of life, but this one felt like an an act of imbalance rather than balance. Sickness happened, but the way this one was developing didn’t feel right to him and he still suspected Serpica or another's interference.
The door to the audience chamber opened and Zak stepped through, he looked surprised when he saw Dantes there so early.
“Good morning, Zak.”
“Morning, boss.”
“Were you looking for me?”