The necromancer's death had set Smazor free. Free on this plane. A demon is savage hunger made flesh and Smazor had achieved the ambition of every single one of them - to be set free among food. In the few hours it took for the United White Colleges to the realize their mistake, capture and dispel Smazor he laid all of Moria between the Red Mountains and the Sea waste and killed around half of the population. That had been the most populous and fertile area of Moria and much of Morian history since then, its poverty, its backwardness, its dislike of mages, even the rise of the Burning Light stemmed from that dark day.
"Well it's the worst part of Moria now," said Tomas. "After a fire, plants grow back in the ash but after Smazor's Run, though it's been over 100 years since then, there is still nothing but ash in the Great Waste, great clouds of it blowing in the wind. They say Smazor sucked the life out of the very soil and it needs magic to put it back in. It's a fearsome place. Only ghosts and nightmares live there."
"In Gallia I heard the Duke intended to try to reclaim the Wasteland when Lady Julia regained the throne," said Hamel. "I will be glad if he takes that on."
"Yes I heard about that too," said Parrus.
I heard Tomas laugh in his chest. "That'll be interesting. I'm sure that cunning Leon Saar will feel no shame about taking credit for something that the Burning Light has started for him."
It was almost dark and we were already talking of stopping for the night, when we came upon a disturbing sight. On a lonely stretch of road a young woman had been taken with a fit.
I will never forget how helpless I felt as I sat beside her watching her, thrashing the ground with her arms and legs, bashing her head back and forth on the cloak I had placed under it. Grit and blood flecked the foam at her mouth. Her basket lay tumbled at her side and broken eggs littered the ground.
'One spell,' I thought sadly. 'One little spell would lift this.' I did what I could to lessen the fit, preventing her from hurting herself too much and holding a phial of soothing oil under her nose, but all we could really do was wait for the fit to run its course.
Hamel had gone to see if he could get help, but Tomas stood beside me.
"Watch yourself," he said warningly. "Don't get any smart ideas about doing a quick healing spell. It'll just bring the Witch Hunters down on us."
"I hate this," I said. "I wish I could do something more."
"I know," said Tomas. "But don't, please. The girl's probably lived with this for the last five years. She can surely live with it a few more weeks."
"Aye," I said miserably.
Five or six treatments with a specialist healer and the woman might never have another fit again. She would certainly have less of them. It would be useless suggesting it to her however. She wore black and grey and no doubt her family would never hear of such a thing. I wondered if there was any priest in Moria capable of performing such delicate healing.
"Isn't there anything more you can do?" said Parrus in a distressed voice. He was holding the horses nearby. "Honestly," he went on. "This is an insane country. What sane person would choose to have Falling Sickness?"
If it had been Tomas who had said that I would have agreed whole heartedly, but somehow I felt a need to defend my countrymen to Parrus.
"They haven't turned their back on healing completely," I said. "Its just that they believe that all magics should be performed by priests or nuns and there are not enough priests with the right training to go around yet. In time it could be a workable system."
"And in the meantime, people suffer from curable things. Great!"
Just then the woman began to come out of the fit. She was weeping and distressed to find strangers leaning over her. I did my best to reassure her as Tomas and I wrapped her in a blanket. I dosed her with a little herbal sleeping potion and she soon fell into an exhausted post-fit sleep with her head in my lap.
"Morians have got their reasons for disliking mages," Tomas said to Parrus. "Half of Moria died in Smazor's Run, all because mages were careless. It brought home to people just how much harm mages could do."
"And King Jennow too," I said remembering a story my foster father had told me. "He was a King who had magical powers and he used them to make people do things against their wills, to sign over land to him, to seduce women and to send reluctant troops into hopeless battles."
"But that's an exception," said Parrus. "I agree that magely power shouldn't be allied with political power, but otherwise mages are no more or less capable evil than other people."
"But they have more power to express it," said Tomas, "When the Church of the Burning Light started saying that magic should only be practiced with the moral authority of the Church to guide it, they found a lot of sympathetic ears. Though I wonder what people would say now."
He looked at the sleeping woman and changed the subject.
Hamel was soon back, bringing with him a tall man driving a light pony cart.
"I met the lady's brother coming to look for her," he explained.
The two of them gently lifted the woman onto the cart.
"Mortality here, has offered us lodging for the night," said Hamel.
"Well thank you," said Tomas. "We would be very glad of that."
"What?!" I hissed in Gallian. Parrus looked horrified. Tomas squeezed my arm warningly.
"Have a heart, sister,” he said cheerily in Morian. "It's growing dark and there's more rain coming."
I could equally cheerily have strangled him.
Mortality Genez was a gentle, dreamy man. Not at all the sharp-tongued sharp-eyed zealot I usually associated with the Burning Light. I could not imagine him cursing or spitting on anybody. He insisted I ride on the cart with him, fussing over my warmth and comfort and showing a genuinely sympathetic interest in my journey to the bed of my sick sister.
He lived in a big rambling farmhouse set around a courtyard. As we turned into the courtyard, a group of women came rushing out of the house, exclaiming over the woman in the back of the cart.
"My mother Juba, my sister Mercy of Thy Hands, my brother's wife, Great Light Shall Return," said Mortality, by way of introduction.
His sick sister's name was Voice of Grace. His brother, Obedience, carried her into the house with the mother fussing around her like a hen around a chick, but the other women waited to draw me down from the cart and took me into the kitchen to stand before the fire, where they took my damp cloak, plied me with refreshments and food and asked me all about Gallia, forcing me to elaborate on the story we had worked out. I wished I could be with the men in the stable yard where I could see them unsaddling the horses.
It was not to be however. Men and women among the Burning Light seemed to lead even more separate lives than normal people did and so I sat in the kitchen with them until it was time for dinner. Even then we did not sit with the men, but served them at the table, waiting till they had finished before eating ourselves in the kitchen.
Parrus was highly amused by the situation. Had I dared, I would have kicked his shin several times during the meal for he winked and carried on, ordering me about and calling me "woman."
"My wife has a servant," he told the others. "No doubt she thinks such tasks beneath her."
"The care of men for women, finds its echo in the care of women for men," quoted Mortality as if from a holy book. After that gentle criticism Parrus toned it down. The Burning Light