Chapter 19: Aldric's Authoritarian Temptation

The smell reached the northern checkpoint before the reports did.

Aldric noticed it on his second morning walk — a sweetish rot underneath the cold, the kind that had nothing to do with the charnel work they had mostly finished by the third week. He noticed it and filed it and kept walking, because there was always something that smelled wrong in a settlement of eleven thousand people living in salvaged structures with inadequate drainage, and the body learned to sort threats by degree. By the time he returned to the administrative hall, he had half-forgotten it. By midday, he had not.

The first formal report came from Elder Soss of the northern district, written in the cramped hand of a man who was not accustomed to writing things he feared to say aloud. Two households on the lane behind the old tanner's row. High fever, rapid onset. Blistering inside the mouth. One family of four had been symptomatic for three days before Soss learned of it, which meant three days of movement through the northern market, the water queue at the eastern well, the communal ash-clearing crews who worked the rubble line at the district's edge. Soss did not use the word contagion. He did not need to. The three days of prior movement was the word he meant.