He shouldered his pack. A visit to the village would do him some good, even if it slowed him down. His stomach agreed with the decision. It was unlikely the peasants would have much in the way of food, but perhaps they would be able to provide something other than broth. Besides, they might have news of events at Luthadel.
He hiked down the short hill, taking the smaller, eastern fork in the road. Once, there had been little travel in the Final Empire. The Lord Ruler had forbidden skaa to leave their indentured lands, and only thieves and rebels had dared disobey. Still, most of the nobility had made their livings by trading, so a village such as this one might be accustomed to visitors.
Sazed began to notice the oddities immediately. Goats roamed the countryside along the road, unwatched. Sazed paused, then dug a coppermind from his pack. He searched through it as he walked. One book on husbandry claimed that herdsmen sometimes left their flocks alone to graze. Yet, the unwatched animals made him nervous. He quickened his pace.
Just to the south, the skaa starve, he thought. Yet here, livestock is so plentiful that nobody can be spared to keep it safe from bandits or predators?
The small village appeared in the distance. Sazed could almost convince himself that the lack of activity—the lack of movement in the streets, the derelict doors and shutters swinging in the breeze—was due to his approach. Perhaps the people were so scared that they were hiding. Or, perhaps they simply were all out. Tending flocks. …
Sazed stopped. A shift in the wind brought a telltale scent from the village. The skaa weren’t hiding, and they hadn’t fled. It was the scent of rotting bodies.
Suddenly urgent, Sazed pulled out a small ring—a scent tinmind—and slipped it on his thumb. The smell on the wind, it didn’t seem like that of a slaughter. It was a mustier, dirtier smell. A smell not only of death, but of corruption, unwashed bodies, and waste. He reversed the use of the tinmind, filling it instead of tapping it, and his ability to smell grew very weak—keeping him from gagging.
He continued on, carefully entering the village proper. Like most skaa villages, Urbene was organized simply. It had a group of ten large hovels built in a loose circle with a well at the center. The buildings were wood, and for thatching they used the same needle-bearing branches from the trees he’d seen. Overseers’ huts, along with a fine nobleman’s manor, stood a little farther up the valley.
If it hadn’t been for the smell—and the sense of haunted emptiness—Sazed might have agreed with his gazetteer’s description of Urbene. For skaa residences, the hovels looked well maintained, and the village lay in a quiet hollow amid the rising landscape.
It wasn’t until he got a little closer that he found the first bodies. They lay scattered around the doorway to the nearest hovel, about a half-dozen of them. Sazed approached carefully, but could quickly see that the corpses were at least several days old. He knelt beside the first one, that of a woman, and could see no visible cause of death. The others were the same.
Nervous, Sazed forced himself to reach up and pull open the door to the hovel. The stench from inside was so strong that he could smell it through his tinmind.
The hovel, like most, was only a single chamber. It was filled with bodies. Most lay wrapped in thin blankets; some sat with backs pressed up against the walls, rotting heads hanging limply from their necks. They had gaunt, nearly fleshless bodies with withered limbs and protruding ribs. Haunted, unseeing eyes sat in desiccated faces.
These people had died of starvation and dehydration.
Sazed stumbled from the hovel, head bowed. He didn’t expect to find anything different in the other buildings, but he checked anyway. He saw the same scene repeated again and again. Woundless corpses on the ground outside; many more bodies huddled inside. Flies buzzing about in swarms, covering faces. In several of the buildings he found gnawed human bones at the center of the room.
He stumbled out of the final hovel, breathing deeply through his mouth. Dozens of people, over a hundred total, dead for no obvious reason. What possibly could have caused so many of them to simply sit, hidden in their houses, while they ran out of food and water? How could they have starved when there were beasts running free? And what had killed those that he’d found outside, lying in the ash? They didn’t seem as emaciated as the ones inside, though from the level of decomposition, it was difficult to tell.
I must be mistaken about the starvation, Sazed told himself. It must have been a plague of some sort, a disease. That is a much more logical explanation. He searched through his medical coppermind. Surely there were diseases that could strike quickly, leaving their victims weakened. And the survivors must have fled. Leaving behind their loved ones. Not taking any of the animals from their pastures. …
Sazed frowned. At that moment, he thought he heard something.
He spun, drawing auditory power from his hearing tinmind. The sounds were there—the sound of breathing, the sound of movement, coming from one of the hovels he’d visited. He dashed forward, throwing open the door, looking again on the sorry dead. The corpses lay where they had been before. Sazed studied them very carefully, this time watching until he found the one whose chest was moving.
By the forgotten gods… Sazed thought. The man didn’t need to work hard to feign death. His hair had fallen out, and his eyes were sunken into his face. Though he didn’t look particularly starved, Sazed must have missed seeing him because of his dirty, almost corpselike body.
Sazed stepped toward the man. “I am a friend,” he said quietly. The man remained motionless. Sazed frowned as he walked forward and laid a hand on the man’s shoulder.
The man’s eyes snapped open, and he cried out, jumping to his feet. Dazed and frenzied, he scrambled over corpses, moving to the back of the room. He huddled down, staring at Sazed.
“Please,” Sazed said, setting down his pack. “You mustn’t be afraid.” The only food he had besides broth spices was a few handfuls of meal, but he pulled some out. “I have food.”
The man shook his head. “There is no food,” he whispered. “We ate it all. Except … the food.” His eyes darted toward the center of the room. Toward the bones Sazed had noticed earlier. Uncooked, gnawed on, placed in a pile beneath a ragged cloth, as if to hide them.
“I didn’t eat the food,” the man whispered.
“I know,” Sazed said, taking a step forward. “But, there is other food. Outside.”
“Can’t go outside.”
“Why not?”
The man paused, then looked down. “Mist.”
Sazed glanced toward the doorway. The sun was nearing the horizon, but wouldn’t set for another hour or so. There was no mist. Not now, anyway.
Sazed felt a chill. He slowly turned back toward the man. “Mist … during the day?”
The man nodded.
“And it stayed?” Sazed asked. “It didn’t go away after a few hours?”
The man shook his head. “Days. Weeks. All mist.”
Lord Ruler! Sazed thought, then caught himself. It had been a long time since he’d sworn by that creature’s name, even in his thoughts.
But for the mist to come during the day, then to stay—if this man were to be believed—for weeks … Sazed could imagine the skaa, frightened in their hovels, a thousand years of terror, tradition, and superstition keeping them from venturing outside.