Prologue

A great darkness was stirring. There was something on the wind. Something in the sounds of voices.

Fear. Superstition. Greed. Jealousy. It made no difference. In men and women, God fearing or skeptic, a malignant darkness was rising, stretching, sharpening it's claws.

Pestilence, drought, earthquakes, and flooding. Overpopulation and war.

The world was set like a great bonfire, and already the tinder smoldered everywhere. And then a new flame rose in the East, and trails of fire coursed Westward.

The Black Death raced from body to body. Village to village. Town to town. City to city.

And as an inferno of horror blanketed the world, the darkness grinned and licked it's chops.

* * *

Dire predictions had become somewhat redundant. Those who were not too busy dying or tending to the dying were waiting for the next dramatic step in the apocalypse. A rain of fire. The appearance of the devil or God perhaps. Each night there were those who placed their wagers on the world ending before dawn – for the momentary satisfaction to be had in the event they were vindicated, one assumed.

Oblivious, physics kept the world spinning, as usual. And the sun stayed where it was, but seemed to rise, as usual.

Yellow-orange light poured across the land. It would soon burn away the thin fog hanging over the road to London, but for now it seemed to give the mists a phantasmal life of their own.

John Postlethwait strode through the ghostly pall, with a walking stick in one hand and his leather satchel of tools in the other. He had taken to the road in the wee dark hours of the morning, while the city was still quiet save for the occasional howls of stray mutts, which came less often than they once had done. He wore the full regalia of a plague doctor, even the mask, despite planning to retire from the unpleasant occupation upon reaching Denburry. The past four years administering what passed for medicine to the rapidly diminishing population had taken a toll on him.

Still, wearing the beaked mask and black linens gave him space and some security. Those peasants who were not yet afflicted would generally avoid him like... well, like the plague. Even brigands and thieves didn't think twice about bothering him – once being sufficient.

From the fog up ahead came the measured clanking of bells. A rider walking his mount or, more likely, someone leading a pack animal. Still a ways off...

So it came as a surprise when a ragged, filthy figure stumbled out of the fog to accost him.

The figure's clothes were torn and stained with dirt, grass, and what John's practiced eye recognized as dried blood. From behind matted grey hair, eyes bulged wide with a tired desperation that rode close to madness, and for a moment John feared the wretch might attack him. Instead, the hoary fellow staggered, reaching forth with grubby, groping hands.

Clank... clunk.

“Oh, thank God. M'lord, please, my son. I fear he's dying.”

John drew back before the man could catch his sleeve.

“Fool! I travel on noble business,” he lied indignantly, “Stand aside.”

Clank... clunk.

The man groveled pitifully, as only those whose suffering has drowned the capacity for shame or pride can do. He fell to one knee, weeping without tears and beginning to babble. Again he leaned forward, reaching.

John turned side-on and thrust down with the butt of his walking stick in the manner of one pinning trout with a spear. Unbalanced, the man went over onto his side in the dirt and weeds of the track. Dew dampened his clothes and provided to one cheek a few crystal clear tears.

Heedless of the pain blossoming in his ribs, the poor soul struggled back to his knees. Scrabbling about, he snatched at the hem of John's cloak as the doctor stepped around him to carry on walking.

Clank... clunk.

“It's only a short ways. Off the road to the North, after the-”

John turned and there was a hard, vibrating tok as the end of his staff met the man's head. Without so much as a grunt, the man crumpled and sprawled like a ragdoll. Looking down at him, John was breathing harder than he had a good reason to. Surreptitiously straightening his cloak, he turned away, pretending not to notice the slow rivulet of blood seeping from the man's ear.

Clank... clunk.

John started, almost walking straight into the oncoming traffic. A mule, laden with packs and bedroll and a rather expensive looking wooden trunk. The beast halted with it's nose scarcely a foot away, so that John had to tip his beaked head down to regard it.

He immediately wished he hadn't. The mule rolled it's eyes up to return his gaze, for all the world as if it knew exactly where his eyes were despite the mask. There was something speculative in it's manner, and John wanted to be far away from it. Or a lot more than a foot, at least.

When the mule lazily twitched an ear, it seemed to break a spell. Glancing around, John was all at once unsure how long he had been standing there. Then the visual center of his brain jabbed him in the cerebral ribs and said 'Where's the beast's owner?'

Whether the creeping sensation along his spine started just before or in response to the voice, John would never be sure.

“You'll find Caesar has a thicker skull... and no respect for the nobility.”

The voice was right behind him.

* * *

Robert 'Big Rob' Wimbly leaned over the rail and emptied a bucket of slop into the pig pen. He leaned on the fence and watched as the animals began eating. He grumbled.

“I'd give ye more but we'll be sharin' the booket w'ye soon enough as it is. Eh, well, to say true, we'll be puttin' one'a you on the spit afore that. That's us fed and one less for the rest of you to share with.”

Clank... clunk.

Catching movement out of the corner of his eye, Rob looked up. There was a figure on the road. One of those bloody bleeders, all in black with the beaky mask. Headed into the city, leading a mule. Big Rob spat.

One could make a lot of slops out of a lanky bird like him, Rob thought.

Before he could pursue the thought, Constance (the old sow he called by his mother-in-law's name – when his wife wasn't around, anyway) threw herself down and wallowed as if practicing for a competition. Slop and mud spattered the big farmer. Cursing, he lumbered off to fetch a rag.

Clank... clunk.

Further along, a man stood at the roadside, leaning on a wooden spade. Behind him, in a small grassy lot, a grave was being dug. An oversized grave, meant to hold several bodies. Either that or the draftsman had gotten the measurements confused on the plans of a new well.

Every few seconds, a clump of clay cleared the edge of the hole, adding to an existing mound. The rhythm broke off as the party in the hole addressed anyone in a half-mile radius who might be listening - regarding the current division of labor. Specifically about his dissatisfaction with same.

The fellow leaning on his spade seemed not to notice. He carried on watching the plague doctor and his mule until he could see only their backsides. Raising a hand, he cleared his nostrils onto the road before taking up his spade and turning.

Clank... clunk.

As the doctor carried on walking, the smell of smoke, carrying some other odor, gradually overpowered the herbs stuffing the beak of his mask. The fog had burned away, but now the light dimmed as if the edge of a storm front were rolling up from the city. The thin blanket of darkness causing the gloom hung too low to be clouds.

Several times, at high points on the road, where his view was largely unobstructed, he had seen trails of smoke rising from various points further on. Up to now, the hovels and farmhouses and stables had been interspersed with sparse fields of drought choked crops, empty pastures, and narrow tracts of woodland. But now the walls of the city proper could be seen. And, outside the gate, the cause of the smell and the veil of smoke.

On either side of the road, a short walk from the gate, massive pyres burned. A few bits of detritus in the vicinity told a short, sad story. Not long ago, beggars and fugitives had squatted in ramshackle structures along the wall. In the squalor, they lived more or less on equal terms with the vermin of the city. Before anyone had entertained the notion that the rats might have anything to do with the spread of plague, the squatters had sickened and dropped like hothouse orchids in an arctic wind. Their makeshift shelters were then unceremoniously toppled and dragged into heaps to serve as the foundations of the pyres. Onto which the dead were then placed.

More bodies were carted out daily.

The mule's ears twitched and it voiced a weak, halfhearted bray as it passed between the fires.

“It's only going to get worse, I'm afraid.” The doctor sympathized without looking round.

* * *

The sun was high in the sky when John Postlethwait came-to.

This was far from being the first thing he noticed, however. He was slow, in fact, to notice anything beyond the pulsing pain in his head that came with each beat of his heart. An attempt to rub his temples brought new pains to his attention. The throbbing in his head suddenly shared the spotlight with aching shoulders and elbow joints.

John groaned, and his throat rasped like sandpaper. There was a moment when the idea that he had been clubbed and subsequently run over by a cart seemed a real possibility.

Finally he cracked his eyelids, and the risen sun seized his attention. Inadvertently looking directly into the sun meant that what mostly seized his attention was a stabbing pain in his eyes that seemed to reach straight back into his already painful head. Laying with a hand over his eyes and moving as little as he possibly could proved too appealing an option to pass up.

Eventually, mercifully, the pain eased up. At which point John registered a sensation other than pain. It was a sensation of the decidedly drafty variety.

Lingering aches and pains temporarily forgotten, John sat up sharply, eyes snapping open. Someone had stripped him down to his short breeches and undershirt. Casting about, he saw no sign of his clothes, mask, hat, or walking stick. He still wore his boots, but the laces were missing.

It was not being a good day. He was not given a lot of time to dwell on the sentiment, nor to consider what he ought to do about it. Movement up the road had turned out to be a man on horseback. The somber fellow's surcoat suggested he was a squire or otherwise sworn to a knight or lord. At second glance, he was riding in advance of a further small group of riders. One of the latter bore a standard from which flapped a pennant.

Bugger.

They might ride on by, ignoring John completely. Knights and Lords were good at ignoring smallfolk. It came with the title. Like money, bad teeth, or the unthinking surety that one was always right.

On the other hand, the bastards might thrash him with a riding crop, feather him with arrows, or simply ride him down. Any excuse would do, especially the way things were going now, but boredom was not uncommonly the only true reason. With this in mind, John did a few very practical calculations and came up with: one road plus one John plus one nobleman's party added up to plus or minus one unpleasant ending to a bad day. Whereas, R + J + N (-J) resulted in... well, chalk the day up as a loss regardless, but at least he wouldn't end it wearing hoof prints.

This was a field of maths that even the most poorly educated peasant tended to manage at considerable speed, and two heartbeats after spotting the riders, John was legging it away from the road, bound for a copse of poplars.

In his haste, he failed to notice the short, crude cross planted in the ground forty or fifty feet off. It was made from a polished piece of wood that had been snapped. Tied with leather laces. It stood at the head of a patch of disturbed earth.