They moved her into a room in a lodging house over to the south of the city, a long way from the House of the East, in an area she had never seen before. She went in a hired litter, small and cramped, a bag of her clothing in her arms. The curtains were tightly closed, so she couldn’t see where they went. To stop people seeing her, she wondered, or to stop her seeing the way back? As she left the house she had heard the baby crying. Bilale singing it a song. Janush sat beside her, trying not to press his legs against hers. Awkward and hot, his face dripping sweat. Airless. He fanned himself with his hand.

They stopped with a jolt. Nilesh jerked forward, knocked against Janush. Janush tried uncomfortably to pat her hand.

Janush said, “It’s all right, Nilesh. Don’t be frightened. Look. It looks nice. Homely.”

A tall house, walls painted green-yellow like preserved egg yolks, stucco crumbling in the sun. Shutters bleached pale. Pale yellow flowers curling around the door. A fig tree grew in a pot by the doorway; a cat slept in the dust in a pool of light.

“The Five Corners,” said Janush.

Got her baggage and scrambled down from the litter. Warm dusty flagstones under her feet. The flowers smelled heavy. The cat woke up and rolled over, stretching out all its legs. Nilesh walked slowly to the door. Strange. So strange. Her legs were still weak. Her eyes itched. So strange. This was where she was going to live.

Janush did not get out of the litter, stayed back behind the curtains, pulled them quickly back closed. Nilesh raised her hand to wave.

“Goodbye, Janush.” Never see him again.

The room was much smaller than Bilale’s room. A bed, a cupboard, a table with a jug and a cup. Nilesh looked around for the alcove in which she would sleep. Then realized this was her room. Her bed.

Put her clothes away in the cupboard. Drank a cup of water from the jug. Glazed painted clay, not bronze or silver or gold. Tasted different. Wrong against her mouth. The water was warm from being in the room. Not freshly drawn.

Walked to the window. Walked back to the door. Smoothed the clothes in the cupboard. Walked to the window. Walked to the door.

Sat down on the bed and wept.

She did not sleep well. Different noises. Street noises, coming in through the window, dogs and cats and people and handcarts. Two women arguing in the middle of the night. Gilla fowl arguing at the dawn. She was used to hushed creeping servants’ footsteps, ferfews calling, wind in the tree branches, Bilale’s breath. The clay jug was empty: she wondered when it would get washed and refilled. The pot under the bed was brimming: she looked at it and wondered what to do, how to empty it. After a little while she went over to the window. From the window there was a view of the street and the houses opposite: people bustled about, two children playing with a ball, a man begging, a woman closing her door behind her, carefully balancing a tray of cakes. A dog came out of an alleyway and almost upset the tray. The children ran off. The woman gave the beggar man a cake.

Nilesh got dressed. She was hungry and thirsty. The pot under the bed stank. She went out of the room. Down the creaking stairs. The creaks made her jump again. On the stairs down there was a mirror, old greening polished bronze, showing her reflection blurred and strange coloured, wide eyes looking back.

She wasn’t used to seeing herself alone. Other faces should be there in the background. Bilale, or servant girls, or a boy who came to sing.

At the bottom of the stairs she met Alyet, one of the three sisters who owned the house. Alyet looked her in the face and smiled. Friendly. Nilesh didn’t know how to speak to her. Her hands were rough like servants’ hands and her hair smelled of work, but she looked at Nilesh in the face and this was her house.

“Good morning,” said Alyet. “Come into the courtyard. I’ll get you some breakfast.”

Nilesh sat down at a table under a fig tree in a pot. Alyet brought her herb-stuffed bread, sour milk, and walnuts. She ate in silence, looking at the tree. There were three other people sitting eating at another table, two men and a woman, talking in a language Nilesh didn’t understand. They wore dark embroidered clothing, very different to her own clothes, or lords’ clothes, or the clothes servants wore. The woman wore a gold chain in her hair. She laughed, stretched out hands that were worn and rough but decorated with rings and gold paint. One of the men saw Nilesh staring and smiled at her. Nilesh lowered her eyes quickly, went back to looking at the tree.

For five days, Nilesh sat in her room, ate in the courtyard looking at the fig tree, ventured occasionally out into the city to try to walk. Her eyes itched her. Her legs shook. Walking alone, without Bilale and guards and servants, she stumbled through the streets utterly lost. Stared at the streets hoping to see Bilale. The baby. The beautiful beautiful baby baby baby boy. Stared at the people wandering about buying selling arguing laughing. Doing things.

“We are like lice crawling on their bodies, for whom Bilale’s beautiful red hair is the earth and the sky and the house of God.” That was what Janush had said, that she hadn’t been able to remember.

On the fifth night, she went to bed early, worn out from walking about. Her head ached. It often ached. Her eyes itched painful as cuts. Janush had said it might stop, eventually. She did not think it would stop. Once in bed she lay awake a long time, listening to the noises of the building that were not the noises she was used to. It came to her that she was tense, waiting for Bilale to call. She was always tense. Always waiting. It came to her that she didn’t need to wait. The realization went through her with a shock. Like drinking ice-cold water. She sat up, clutching her body in fear.

Then she heard the screams.

It was so very like the screaming before, in Bilale’s room. A woman’s screams. Terror. Grief. Nilesh whimpered and screamed herself. Saw the things she couldn’t remember, blood and men with swords and Bilale without her hands.

The screaming stopped. Started again, more like crying. Someone shouted something she couldn’t understand. Voices in the corridor outside, whispering, urgent. A door opening, slamming again. Footsteps, moving fast. Nilesh opened the door a crack and peered out. The ghosts of men with swords fighting, Bilale crawling in blood. Closed her eyes, opened them. The corridor of the lodging house, the creaky stairs, the old bronze mirror, cobwebs in the furthest corners of the walls. Nothing. Then the door of the room opposite flew open. Lamplight, flickering, making shadows; in the light, the foreign woman with the gold rings. Her dress was stained. It looked black in the lamplight. She was crying. Screaming. She was terrified. A vile smell filled the corridor. Sweet and bloody and fishy and rank. Nilesh choked, nauseous. The woman ran down the stairs into the dark. Nilesh saw what was behind her in the room. A bed, with a man’s body in it. A man by the bed, looking down, appalled. Dark stains on the bedclothes and the floor.

The woman ran up the corridor again, still screaming. Alyet’s sister Navala came up after her, holding a knife. Navala shouted, waved the knife, gestured at the room. The woman’s screams grew louder. Moved forwards towards Navala. Navala leapt backwards, raising the knife.

Navala shouted, “Get away from me! Get away!” Jabbed the knife at the woman. The woman screamed, trembling between the doorway and the knife blade.

“Get away! Get away!”

A creak from the stairs. Alyet came down from the top floor, holding a lamp. Tamale, the third sister, behind her.

“No!” Navala screamed. “Go back upstairs! Go! Now!”

Tamale pushed past Alyet, came down the stairs. Saw the woman and the open door. Screamed. Navala was still screaming “Get away! Get away!” The lamp in Alyet’s hands and the lamp in the bedroom flickered, made the shadows dance. The smell in the air was choking. Latrines and filthy bodies, menstrual clouts, the muck at the bottom of the fountain when a bird had got caught there and drowned. Nilesh thought she would be sick at the smell. The man in the room came out to the doorway, grabbed at the woman. The woman struck at him. Navala brandished her knife, shouted, “Stay back! Stay back!” The woman bent forward like she was bowing. Vomited stinking steaming bloody filth at Tamale’s feet. Tamale shrieked. The woman swayed on her feet, making a gurgling choking noise, black filth dripping down her face; the man caught her, pulled her back into the room, slammed the door. Tamale stood with black vomit on her dress, shaking. Her sisters stared at her. The lamps they held shook and shook in their hands. From behind the door the woman’s voice screamed out.

For the next two nights and days, Nilesh kept in her room. The house rang with noises, sobs and shouting, footsteps up and down the corridor, a woman’s mad despairing laugh, the tramp of soldiers’ boots on the stairs. The woman with the gold rings died in the morning. Or stopped screaming, at least. More screams later, wailing crying howls of pain. From upstairs, this time: Alyet, Nilesh guessed, or Navala, or Tamale. She heard them stumbling up and down the stairs, fetching water, trying to find herbs and charm spells that might bring relief. They brought a wonderworker, the first morning, shortly after the foreign women died. Then a doctor. Nilesh listened to his shouts of terror as he fled the house. Cursing them. It was after that that the soldiers came. Nilesh heard Alyet pleading with the soldiers downstairs in the entranceway, begging them not to come in, telling them all was well. “Just a flux from bad meat,” she kept sobbing. “Bad meat. A butcher sold us bad meat.” Footsteps on the stairs. The sound of a door opening. Nilesh crouched by her door. A crack she could peep through, just about, a little view of floorboards and the opposite wall. The soldiers trooped into the foreign woman’s bedroom. Cries of horror. The smell when they opened the door. The soldiers ran out again, shouting. One stopped in the corridor outside Nilesh’s door and was sick. Nilesh crouched trying not to gag at the man vomiting. Trying not to move as he leaned moaning against her door. Her heart pounded so loudly. Trying not to breathe. The soldier stumbled off down the stairs, muttering. “God’s knives, God’s knives.” The smell of filth came so strong under the door. She heard voices shouting in the entranceway. A crash of metal. Silence. The door to the house slammed.

A while later came the sound of hammering.

Confusion. And then she understood.

They were nailing the front door shut.

“What then is the cure?” Nilesh had asked Janush. “For deeping fever. If it is as terrible as our master says.”

“Burning lavender and sysius berries can help ward it off,” Janush had told her. “Mint, for a general cleaning of the air. The Chatheans sacrifice cats to the disease as god-brought, drink a medicine of wine lees and rose hips and cats” blood. One can repeat the chant of Semethest. Bind to your chest the ashes of peacock feathers dipped in honey. Sing the hymn of the new sun.

“But all these remedies only work if the disease is caught early, before the sufferer realizes that they are sick.”

“What if the sufferer does not realize, then?” Nilesh had asked. “Until after they have become sick?”

“Ah. Then, then, Nilesh, there is only one remedy. Pray to the Lord Tanis. And open the veins in your wrists.”

The morning of the third day, the house was silent. The stink coming in under the door was heavier. Even worse than before. Nilesh sat on the bed staring at the wall and the light coming in through the shutters. The water jug was empty. Had been empty for a night and a day. The pisspot was overflowing. Her stomach ached with needing to eat. The sounds of the city drifted up. But more distant. Quieter. Some kind of hard edge. She kept thinking she heard screaming. But that was maybe in her mind, a ringing echo, like when Lord Emmereth had had some work done in the courtyard and the workmen had dropped a bronze slab.

She had to get up. Get out. She was sticky and sweaty and thirsty and hungry and the room stank from the pisspot that buzzed with flies. The whole house stank. The whole house was full of flies. Everyone in the house, she supposed, was dead.

Nilesh opened the door. Clouds of flies in the corridor, fat and heavy, buzzing joyful at the threshold to the woman’s room. Black beetles. Don’t look, she thought. Don’t look. Don’t look.

She made herself walk to the stairs. Black beetles on the floor and walls. The air was thick with flies. The smell. Oh god’s knives, the smell. Her legs were weak with hunger, her mouth dry; her lips felt puffy and sticky, not a part of herself. The house was very hot. She paused at the stairs, listening. No human sound from above, where the three sisters slept. She went down the stairs into the entranceway. Alyet lay on the floor on the bottom step. Her stomach was cut open. Dead. Blood and filth and beetles and maggots and flies. Nilesh would have to step over her to get past. Thought for a moment of going back, upstairs, hiding back in her room.

You have to go past, she thought. You have to get out. Thirsty. So thirsty. You have to get water. You’ll die of thirst. She gathered her skirt high round her thighs. Could feel the filth sticking to her as she stepped. The flies rose in a cloud around her. The noise the beetles made. She froze with her foot raised, couldn’t get over, a dead thing before her with beetles scrabbling in its stomach, the flies getting between her legs, getting caught in her clothes and her hair, landing on her, putting the filth from the thing on her skin.

You have to go past. You have to go past. She put her foot down, the blood was spread and seeping and running so that she had to step in it, blood and liquid on her sandal, slippery, she clutched at the wall, got over, ran down the entranceway to the nailed up door.

I have to get out, she thought. If she knocked on the door, screamed, shouted, pleaded for help? Or the walls, the next house, she could beat on the walls, open the shutters, shout.

This is a plague house, she thought. Sealed up. So if they found her alive, they’d kill her, as a bearer of the plague.

She looked out through the viewing holes in the thick wood of the door. The street was empty. A dog wandered across the street, panting. Two sweetsingers bathed in the dust. People should be about, doing things. Instead, silence. She could hear, distant, still, an echo in her head of screams.

The dog trotted towards the sweetsingers, barking. It drew Nilesh’s eyes. The door of the cake maker’s house was boarded shut.

The door of the house opposite opened. A woman came out. She stood on the threshold. Raised her face. Screamed. The scream hung in the air like the echoes Nilesh had thought were in her mind.

The dog barked and ran. The sweetsingers flew up in a beating of wings and a flap of dry dust. The woman screamed. Her dress was stained dark down the front, like the foreign woman’s dress had been.

Nilesh realized what was so obvious and inconceivable.

Deeping fever was loose in Sorlost.