It took him about a half an hour to find a solitary passerby hurrying home with his head down and his hands jammed into his tunic pockets. Balsca stalked him for a block or so, his rope-soled shoes making no sound on the cobblestones. Then, as the passerby went by the dark mouth of an alleyway, Balsca stepped up behind him and rapped him smartly across the base of the skull with his marlinespike. The man dropped like a pole-axed ox. Balsca had been in enough shipboard fights and tavern brawls to know exactly where and how hard to hit his man. He rolled the fellow over, hit him alongside the head once again just to be on the safe side, and then methodically began to go through the unconscious man's pockets. He found several coins and a stout knife. He put the coins in his pocket, tucked the knife under his broad leather belt, and pulled his victim into the alley out of the light. Then he went on down the street, whistling an old sea song.
He felt much worse the following day. His head throbbed, and his throat was so swollen that he could barely talk. His fever, he was sure, was higher, and his nose ran constantly. It took three pulls on his bottle to quiet his stomach. He knew that he should go out and get something to eat, but the thought of food sickened him. He took another long drink from his bottle, lay back on the dirty bed in the room he had rented, and fell back into a fitful doze.
When he awoke again, it was dark outside, and he was shivering violently. He finished his bottle without gaining any particular relief, then shakily pulled on his clothing, which he absently noted exuded a rank odor, and stumbled down to the street and three doors up to the inviting entrance to the Red Dog.
"By the Gods, matey ," the tattooed man said, "ye look positively awful."
"Grog," Balsca croaked. "Grog."
It took nine cups of grog to stem the terrible shaking which had seized him.
Balsca was not counting.
When his money ran out, he staggered into the street and beat a man to death with his marlinespike for six pennies. He lurched on, encountered a fat merchant, and knifed him for his purse. The purse even had some gold in it. He reeled back to the Red Dog and drank until closing time.
"Have a care, matey ." the proprietor cautioned him as he thrust him out the door. "There be murdering footpads about, or so I've been told -and the police are as thick as fleas on a mangy dog in the streets and alleys in the neighborhood."
Balsca took the jug of grog he had bought back to his shabby room and drank himself into unconsciousness.
He was delirious the following morning and he raved for hours, alternating between drinking from his jug of grog and vomiting on his bed.
It took him until sunset to die. His last words were, "Mother, help me."
When they found him, some days later, he was arched rigidly backward, and his face was fixed in a hideous grin.
* * *
Three days later, a pair of wayfarers found the body of a bearded teamster lying in a ditch beside his wagon on the road to Mal Gemila. His body was arched stiffly backward, and his face was locked in a grotesque semblance of a grin. The wayfarers concluded that he had no further need of his team and wagon, and so they stole it. As an afterthought, they also stole his clothes and covered the body with dead leaves. Then they turned the wagon around and rode on back to Mal Zeth.
Perhaps a week after Balsca's largely unnoticed death, a man in a tarred sea coat came staggering into a rundown street in broad daylight. He was raving and clutching at his throat. He lurched along the cobblestone street for perhaps a hundred feet before he collapsed and died.
The dreadful grin fixed on his foam-flecked lips gave several onlookers nightmares that night.
The tattooed proprietor of the Red Dog Tavern was found dead in his establishment the following morning.
He lay amidst the wreckage of the several tables and chairs he had smashed during his final delirium. His face was twisted into a stiff, hideous grin.
During the course of that day, a dozen more men in that part of the city, all regular patrons of the Red Dog Tavern, also died.
The next day, three dozen more succumbed. The authorities began to take note of the matter.
But by then it was too late. The curious intermingling of classes characteristic of a great city made the confining of the infection to any one district impossible. Servants who lived in that shabby part of town carried the disease into the houses of the rich and powerful. Workmen carried it to construction sites, and their fellow workmen carried it home to other parts of the city. Customers gave it to merchants, who in turn gave it to other customers. The most casual contact was usually sufficient to cause infection.
The dead had at first been numbered in the dozens, but by the end of the week hundreds had fallen ill. The houses of the sick were boarded up despite the weak cries of the inhabitants from within. Grim carts rumbled through the streets, and workmen with camphor-soaked cloths about their lower faces picked up the dead with long hooks.
The bodies were stacked in the carts like logs of wood, conveyed to cemeteries, and buried without rites in vast common graves. The streets of Mal Zeth became deserted as the frightened citizens barricaded themselves inside their houses.
There was some concern inside the palace, naturally, but the palace, walled as it was, was remote from the rest of the city. As a further precaution, however, the Emperor ordered that no one be allowed in or out of the compound. Among those locked inside were several hundred workmen who had been hired by Baron Vasca, the Chief of the Bureau of Commerce, to begin the renovations of the bureau offices.
It was about noon on the day after the locking of the palace gates that Garion, Polgara, and Belgarath were summoned to an audience with Zakath. They entered his study to find him gaunt and hollow-eyed, poring over a map of the imperial city. "Come in. Come in," he said when they arrived. They entered and sat down in the chairs he indicated with an absent wave of his hand.
"You look tired," Polgara noted.
"I haven't slept for the past four days," Zakath admitted. He looked wearily at Belgarath. "You say that you're seven thousand years old?"
"Approximately, yes."
"You've lived through pestilence before?"
"Several times."
"How long does it usually last?"
"It depends on which disease it is. Some of them run their course in a few months. Others persist until everybody in the region is dead. Pol would know more about that than I would. She's the one with all the medical experience."
"Lady Polgara?" the Emperor appealed to her.
"I'll need to know the symptoms before I can identify the disease," she replied.