"Hello?" Guerrand called tentatively through a crack in the curtain. "Is anyone here?"

"Just," came a man's adenoidal rasp. "Who's there?"

"A… friend," Guerrand said, unsure if he wanted whoever was behind the curtain to know him or not.

"Come back only if you've a strong stomach."

The warning gave Guerrand pause for a moment before he pushed his way past the opening in the scratchy curtain, his lower lip clamped between his teeth expectantly. His first breath beyond it was half- choked by the stench of rotting flesh he recognized too well from Kirah's room. The mage blinked away the tears that instantly welled due to the smell.

The silversmith lay on a dirty mound of linen- covered hay in the corner of a dark room, lit in thin, muted streaks by a small window in back. The man's thick, grizzled forearms that had always reminded Guerrand of roasted meat were now six writhing snake heads. He could see that snakes also writhed beneath the blanket that covered Wilor from the waist down. The once-powerful man was shrunken and pale and crippled, and clearly would never again practice his beautiful craft.

"Guerrand DiThon, as I barely live and breath," the smith said with difficulty, surprise and pleasure evident on the pale, sunken face that the mage remembered as round and jolly. "I hadn't expected yours to be the last face I behold before Habbakuk takes me home, but I can think of none I'd rather see."

"I-I'm sorry to find you thus, Wilor," was all Guerrand could think to say. Wilor had been a short, sturdy man of immense strength from his vigorous life. His teeth were gone save one. The smith's hairline had receded even farther in the last decade and was now tbe CDedusA pUguc

past the midpoint of his scalp, until only a narrow ring of salt-and-pepper hair remained.

"How is the second son of Rejik DiThon?" the smith asked, as if over shepherd's pie at the Red Goose Inn. Wilor eyed Guerrand's red robes with obvious interest.

"Well enough, Wilor," said Guerrand. What could he do but shrug his shoulders, apologizing for his healthy presence at death's grim door?

"Ah, well, I have been better," said the man, trying hard but not succeeding at a self-deprecating chuckle. Instead, Wilor was caught up in a choking cough that slowly subsided.

Guerrand could think of no delicate way to ask the questions that burned in his throat. "Marthe? Your sons?" he queried, looking hopefully about the dim storeroom.

Wilor didn't blink. "All dead. The boys went first, about a week ago. I wish I could have spared Marthe seeing that." His bald pate rocked from side to side. "After watching them, I considered sparing us both this, but-" He sighed from his soul. "It turns out I was too much a coward to do anything about it."

Wilor looked, unblinking, toward the window, to the sky. "Then Marthe caught the chill, and I had to stay for her." His eyes sank shut briefly, as if willing the courage for the words. "She went two nights ago. By then it was too late for me. I didn't tell Marthe, but I got the fever that afternoon and barely had the strength to bury her." Wilor bit down on his lip until it bled and a tear rolled down one wan cheek. "At least Marthe wasn't alone in the end. She got a proper laying to rest next to her sons in the field she tilled for years out back, instead of being squeezed into the green. It's all that matters now."

"I'll stay with you, Wilor."

The silversmith turned his head with great effort tolook directly at Guerrand. "You'd do that?"

Guerrand nodded heavily. "I promise to stay as long as you need me, until the Blue Phoenix comes to take you home," he vowed, invoking the Ergothian name of the god he knew the adventuring friends, Wilor and Rejik, had revered. Guerrand gained an odd sense of strength and purpose from repeating a secret promise he'd made as a seven-year-old at the deathbed of his own father.

The smith's expression contained an odd mix of grat- itude and embarrassment. "The promise of Rejik DiThon's second son has always been good enough forme."

Guerrand gave him a grateful smile, then stood awkwardly, unsure what to do now, unable even to hold the dying man's hand. He ordered his reluctant feet forward to close the distance between them so that Wilor wouldn't need to strain so to speak. Suddenly the snakes hissed and snapped toward the mage. Cursing the vipers, Wilor struggled to hold them down to the bed of straw. Their tongues lashed and flickered, as if they had heard the man's sadness and were laughing. One of the heads lashed away from the rest and snatched a small, fright-eyed mouse from the shadows of the floor and swallowed the thing in one gulp.

Guerrand drew back and maintained a four-foot remove from the sick man so as not to excite the snakes again. He stared, as if mesmerized by the intricate diamond patterns behind the dark and beady eyes on their heads. Each little, slithering head recalled to Guerrand the memory of the mage who had caused this.

He circumnavigated the bed of straw to prop open both the grease-streaked window and door to let some fresher air into the sickroom. "Is there much pain, Wilor?"

Wilor seemed to realize Guerrand was not just making idle

conversation. He leaned forward and considered his bizarre new appendages. "Some, mostly when I try to control them. Tbe change was excruciating, I'll admit, but now the snakes are more inconvenient than hurtful. I can't use my hands or feet to do anything. It's a good thing nothing itches anymore." He fell back against the straw, winded. "But it all be over as soon as the moons rise. There's a comfort in knowing that."

Guerrand only nodded; his repartee was not at its best today. He had often played attendant to the minor ailments of folks in Harrowdown, listening to their dilemmas and suggesting solutions both magical and not. Though this was no minor ailment, Guerrand pulled up a stool and called those long-used skills to his side.

"I'm a mage now, Wilor," Guerrand informed him softly.

"I figured that out from the robes," said the silversmith, and his glance held a covert amusement.

Guerrand reddened. "I don't know what your views on magic are," he continued somewhat hesitantly, "but I'm hoping to use my skills to find a cure. Kirah's got the plague now." Guerrand heard his own hollow voice in the quiet of the death room. "She just finished shedding the skin from her arms and legs."

Wilor bobbed his head sadly. "You've seen too much death in your life, Guerrand DiThon." The silversmith stunned Guerrand with his next words. "Use me to find the cure."

"I don't know that I can help you, Wilor," he said awkwardly.

"I'm not asking you to," Wilor nearly snapped. "Have I given you the impression I'm afraid to die?" The mage had to shake his head. "I don't wish to live without my Marthe"-he looked down at himself- "like this."

Wilor scowled when he saw Guerrand hesitate with a look of pity the mage couldn't disguise. "Don't waste time," declared the smith, looking at the slant of the light. "I'm unsure how much of that I have left."

Guerrand rummaged around in the pack he'd carried with him on his first trip from Thonvil and withdrew his much-used spellbook. Hundreds of pages had been filled with his illegible scribbling since the handful he'd painstakingly inked in secret corners of the castle and upon a potato wagon outside Wayreth.

He looked up, his lips pursed in thought. "I'm unclear about what starts the disease in some people and not others," he admitted. "Kirah said she drank something that caused the onset of the illness. Do you recall drinking anything unusual?"

Wilor creased his brow momentarily. "Just water and ale."

Guerrand scowled his frustration. "I'll bet Lyim tainted the village water, but it would help if I knew if the disease was magical in nature or simply transmitted by magic." He snapped his fingers as an easy enchantment came to mind. The mage muttered the oft-spoken words that would reveal the presence of magic in Wilor's body. He frowned when that, too, revealed no glowing emanations, nothing.