The Cursewright's Vow

Chapter 16: Daybreak, Part 3

 The traditional age to enroll in one of the Academies Arcane was ten, but my father was among the most prominent of their alumni, and so I started earlier, at age eight. There were some objections, but I knew more than some students who had already come of age. My father's doing. He expected me to do well in magistrate studies, and I did, but from the first it was the lore of the cursewrights that attracted me the most. I imagined Lady Terazla must have been the most beautiful and wisest woman who ever lived, and in my daydreams I saw myself as one of the seven Knights-Vigilant who served her when she left Titansgrave. When I was older my father would tell me he didn't care for how some cursewrights liked to romanticize their own fellowship, and I understood that. But at that age I was completely under their spell.

After that first year, I was judged skilled enough in the arcane arts -- which at my age meant I had learned a goodish number of lessons, not that I was capable of invoking the simplest enchantment -- that I was given what was to be a short-term apprenticeship. A cursewright named Narson Ulleth had taken a liking to me. Master Ulleth already had a task in mind. My father was not entirely pleased my first apprenticeship would be to a cursewright, but Master Ulleth was well-respected, and there was no question that he and his fellowship were in need of help, even from a neophyte like myself.

No one really knew how bad the situation was in Munazyr, but stories had started to reach the rest of the world. Caravans were refusing to pass the Straits of Twilight, let alone approach the Peddlers' Gate. Rumor held that the city had fallen into chaos, that the Doge had died, that the surviving members of the Argent Council were taking refuge in their manses, or had fled the city altogether. My mother and aunt were horrified at the idea of me being taken there, but Master Ulleth assured them I was safe. He could lend me some of the protection from such maladies he enjoyed himself. It's not something I would do for Casimir only because my own gifts are . . . not quite as healthful as Master Ulleth's were.

How it began is a matter of debate, even now. I suppose we will never know the whole story. What is known is that it began on a derelict vessel that drifted into Brightmoon Bay on a night in the middle of high summer, a vessel of no known name and with ragged sails. It might have been at sea for years from its appearance. Her crew was dead to a man, bloated and jaundiced and covered with blisters far worse than the ones Lord Marhollow here suffers. Munazyr had not been part of the Anointed Realms for centuries, and so its population of cursewrights and healers was a token presence at best. The ones who were present were none too skilled. They determined it to be some exotic plague from the east -- or the south -- or from some place behind the north wind, who knows -- and put the vessel and bodies to the torch. The wreckage still sits at the bottom of Brightmoon Bay, and I always wonder if it will someday poison the waters.

But if it was an exotic plague it was not one the healers of Munazyr were inured against, for they began to fall to it as well. Soon the healers in the city were victims, and only a few cursewrights remained to tame the disease, along with a few priests of the Graces who had little interest in working alongside graduates of the Academies Arcane. Above the streets they burned the bodies, throwing the ashes off the cliffs into the Straits. The Argent Council declared a quarantine, and slowly the wards began to seal themselves off from each other. Soon only Peddlers' Gate and Nocturne Gate were open, and vessels were being turned away. All the longshoremen who had handled the plague ship were dead, and Brightmoon Bay was on fire with the disease. Under the streets things were worse.

What we passed over the last few days was a true ruin. Once thousands thrived in that world; the eight or nine criminal guilds Barthim mentioned numbered in the dozens, some of them more powerful and wealthier than the more respectable guilds that operated in the city above. The Argent Brand kept a strong presence down there, but they didn't run the place and they knew it. If they had flexed their strength a little, perhaps the Yellow Death wouldn't have wielded such a huge scythe. The criminal guilds took control of the body disposal, and rather than burn them -- they feared poison fumes filling the tunnels, and they were right -- they took them to catacombs and empty cellars and abandoned foundations and simply dumped the bodies there. Sometimes they threw in a little lime. Their method was simple and efficient. And ultimately lethal.