"How much do you think you'll be able to do against this plague or curse or whatever it is?" he asked, not for the first time.

Not for the first time, Pterocles shrugged. This time, though, the motion threatened to send waves slopping over the edge of the tub and out onto the slate floor. The wizard had warm wine, too, the cup resting on a stool within easy reach. He took a sip before answering, "Your Majesty, I'll do the best I can. Until I know more, how can I say more?"

That was reasonable. Grus was usually a reasonable man, one who craved reasonable answers. Even Lanius had said so, and he was reasonable to a fault. Tonight, though, despite not being soaked and shivering anymore, Grus craved reassurance more than reason. He said, "You have to find a cure, you know. Everything will unravel if you don't. It's already started hitting soldiers along with the thralls." That unwelcome bit of news had come to him only a couple of days before; he'd intercepted it on its way north to the capital.

"Yes, Your Majesty." Now Pterocles sounded patient.

Grus was in no mood for patience, either. "What happens if – no, what happens when – it spreads to this side of the river?"

"We do the best we can, Your Majesty," Pterocles said again, patient still. "Maybe you shouldn't have come south yourself."

The same thing had occurred to Grus. He'd been fighting the Banished One for years, so he'd naturally assumed that fighting the pestilence required him to be here in person. Would the Banished One mind killing him by disease instead of more directly? Not a bit – the king was sure of that. He was also sure of some other things. "If the plague crosses the Stura, it will get all the way to the city of Avornis," he said. "Or am I wrong?"

"I wish you were," Pterocles said.

"In that case, it doesn't make any difference," Grus said. "If it can get me down here, it can get me up there, too. And if it gets me a little sooner down here than it would up there – well, so what?"

He might have fought an ordinary outbreak of disease by ordering that no one south of the Stura should cross to the north side of the river. That might have slowed things down. For a plague in which he suspected the Banished One played a part.. well, what was the point? The exiled god could make sure a diseased thrall came over the river, or might waft the illness across it some other way.

And, even if Grus had given the order, it would have come too late. Less than an hour after Pterocles finally came out of the tub, a messenger ran up to the city governor's residence shouting that two soldiers and a merchant by the waterfront had come down sick.

People who heard the news gasped in horror. Some of them seemed ready to disappear as fast as they could. When people heard a pestilence was loose, they often did that – and they often brought it with them and spread it places where it wouldn't have gone if they hadn't. That was one more reason Grus couldn't have hoped to hold the disease on the southern side of the Stura.

He and Pterocles looked at each other. "Well, now we get the chance to find out what we're up against," Grus said, hoping he sounded more cheerful than he felt.

"So we do." Pterocles frowned. "You don't have to do this, you know, Your Majesty. No one will call you a coward if you don't."

"A coward?" Grus stared and then started to laugh. "I wasn't worried about that. No, my thinking went in the other direction – if the Banished One wants me to come down with this disease, he'll find a way to make me catch it. I don't expect I can escape it just by staying away from the first few people we find who've come down with it."

"Oh." Pterocles kept frowning, but the expression took on a slightly different shape. "Well, when you put it like that, you're probably right. I wish I could tell you that you were wrong, but you're probably right."

"Come on, then," the king told him. "We're only wasting time here."

The waterfront at Cumanus was a busy place, full of barges and boats that went up and down the river, and lately even more full of those that crossed the river and brought the Avornans on the far side whatever they chanced to need. It smelled of horses and wool and olive oil and spilled wine and puke and the cheap floral scents the barmaids and doxies splashed on themselves to draw customers and fight the other odors. Dogs scratched through rubbish. So did derelicts. Someone sang a syrupy love song and accompanied himself on the mandolin; the music floated out through the shutters of a second-story window.

Normally, the dockside was where you could also hear the most inspired cursing in the kingdom. Riverboat men, longshoremen, the taverners and the wenches who served them, and the merchants who tried to diddle them were all folk of passion and vivid imagination. Back when Grus was a river-galley captain, he'd had to try to hold his own in such company, and it hadn't been easy.

Now, though, the wharves and the warehouses and whorehouses and inns and shops close by were, apart from that love song, quieter than they had any business being, quieter than the king had ever heard them. The few voices that did come to his ear were high and shrill and frightened. He was frightened, too, though he tried not to show it.

The messenger who'd brought them down from the city governor's castle pointed to a tavern. "They're in there," he said, "in a back room." He showed no interest in going into the place himself.

"Thanks." No, Grus wasn't falling over with eagerness to go inside, either. But this was what he'd come for. He dug into the pouch on his belt and handed the messenger a couple of pieces of silver. The man made them disappear – and then made himself disappear.

Pterocles went into the tavern first, as though being a sorcerer guaranteed him more protection than it did Grus. Grus knew that wasn't necessarily so, and Pterocles no doubt knew the same thing. The king followed close behind. The front room of the tavern, the room where people did their drinking, was empty. By all appearances, it had emptied in a hurry. Some stools were pushed back from tables. Others lay overturned on the rammed-earth floor. A lot of the cups of wine and ale on the tables were half full, several quite full. Some of them had been knocked over, too. Wine spilled across tabletops like blood, but smelled sweeter. A goose had been roasting over the fire in the hearth. It was one sadly burnt bird now.

Grus pointed. "There's the door to the back room." It stood open. By the signs, someone must have led or dragged the sick people in there and then departed along with or just behind everybody else. That's bound to help spread whatever this is, too, Grus through morosely.

Again, Pterocles went in ahead of him. Again, Grus didn't let the wizard lead by much. "Well, what have we got?" the king inquired.

He needed a moment to adjust to the gloom in the back room. A little light came in through the open door, a little more through a small window set high in one wall. Stout iron bars made sure no one could climb in through that window. The taverner stored jars of wine and barrels of ale and salty crackers and smoked fish and pickled cucumbers and olives in brine and all the rest of his stock back there. The three men who'd been taken sick lay in the narrow space between a row of earthenware jars and another of barrels.

Pterocles and Grus had just enough room to kneel beside them. Two were unconscious, barely breathing. The third, a soldier, twisted and muttered to himself in some dream of delirium. Pterocles set a hand on his forehead, then quickly jerked it back. "Fever?" Grus asked. There, he didn't want to imitate the wizard.

"High fever," Pterocles answered, and wiped his palm on his breeches. Grus wasn't sure he even knew he was doing it. He went on, "He's burning up. And the rest – well, you can see for yourself."