Shallow Breaths, Bird Beaks

Synopsis

The morning after the Twisted Grove Mikhail woke worn through and coughing, and by evening he was burning. Dwayne named it pneumonia and did not pretend to hope: he had never saved anyone from it. The other two split the town looking for better help. Yullen Gemsmith gave up one of the two doses of anti-plague he owned, and Aldo bought a second. Kurvroc, told a curse might be in it, sent his own physician. For six days Mikhail was too weak to read or to speak without coughing, and Dwayne did not leave him. He lived.

What the other two did with those days set the shape of the month. Koa chopped firewood until he had taught himself the beginnings of carpentry, and produced a chair so bad it stayed in the house as evidence. Aldo bought a filtered mask for a gold piece and then built the rest of the costume around it (feathers off the Al-Sāmiyah bird among them), and walked out into the streets in it. Loshev began reporting a birdman.

Kurvroc would not have a possibly cursed man indoors, so Mikhail waited outside his door and played to pass the time, and was invited in before he had finished the piece. What followed nobody had planned: Mikhail walking the old hobgoblin through the Encyclopædia’s cipher, Kurvroc turning out to be a far better scholar than any of them had taken him for, and the two of them failing together over volume after volume until several gave way. Kurvroc offered two things. Stay, break the whole collection, and he would sponsor a council seat. Or five gold a book, worked side by side. Aldo slept on it and decided the seat was an offer made to a man Kurvroc believed he could steer; they took the coin, and stayed weeks.

Koa meanwhile nagged the council until the repairs to Loshev’s ancient bridge were approved, and built a cedar hope chest for Gwenivere and a table long enough for eight. Aldo put it about the taverns that nobody had really seen anything, while continuing to appear to Mikhail in the costume.

Kurvroc’s gift came at the end. He wanted the knowledge for the afterlife, being too old, he said, to make use of a secret himself; and he gave Mikhail a plain electrum ring he called the keys to the Mól Empire, his family’s heirloom, out of the Muharib. Mikhail knew better within the minute and said nothing. It is the Ring of Säv, and Säv was another house entirely: publicly the breeders who raised the Idiran thoroughbred to its fame, privately the emperor’s information-gatherers and fixers, who ruled with access, not swords. When the empire came apart their leader, the regent of the throne, was the last thing holding it together. He went mad, and was put down by someone close to him for the good of everyone else: the first the Curse of the Shattered Throne took, and the true end of the empire. The ring is a skeleton key to Mól work, wanted by an organization Mikhail knows nothing about beyond its name, and its previous owners either vanished or died in their sleep. He took it, kept the truth from Kurvroc, and asked the other two never to mention he had it.

The Birdman finished the month badly. Sightings climbed until Kurvroc, drunk and frightened in his own house, began feeding Encyclopædia volumes into the fire to draw the thing out. The party got in and stopped him with most of the collection intact, but not all of it, and the volume they had borrowed, the twenty-eighth orange, was the one the alchemy set still needed. The ciphers are broken and the words are gone. Kurvroc paid forty gold for the work, furious and grateful at the same moment, then told Tariq al-Mahir he had been attacked in his home, and by morning the town had a hunt, with Dwayne ready to shoot on sight.

Koa closed the month by telling the other two, in confidence, what Gwenivere had told him: her father’s experiments made her illness. Nobody gave it to her, and understanding the work is the only road to a cure. Then Leon came back from Draazstone with Arthur Freym and three items traded off a band of road-folk, and the long conversation everybody owed him was put off one more day.