The Red Dust

Overview

The Red Dust is a name for the rust that would come for people as well as iron. A reddish-brown dust drifts in, hinges and ploughshares spot orange, and then the same spots appear on hands and faces. Where they spread, the skin cracks and the bone beneath thins, until a strong arm withers. It is slow away from its source and quick near it.

No Rustfall has ever settled on Caeldon; this is what its sickness would be.

Cause

The dust is the rust spores of the Rust Flower, a Beyonder that takes all lasting for an unnatural refusal to fall apart on time. The spores settle on metal, wood, stone, and skin alike, and each spot corrodes what lies under it and sheds more dust as it crumbles. They ride out of the Rustfall on the wind and on the Rust-Hosts.

Who It Strikes

Anyone the dust touches. Those who handle spotted things take it most: smiths, carters, millers, and soldiers, whose tools and harness carry it home. The young and the strong suffer the cruellest losses, since the dust takes first the limb that is used hardest. The Wrought, whose frames are metal, stone, and wood, take no ordinary sickness, but the dust seems to eat a frame as readily as a hinge.

Signs and Course

• The spot. An orange speck on the skin, often on a hand or forearm.
• The rings. The spot spreads outward in rings, each a little paler than the last.
• The thinning. Under a spreading spot, bone thins. A finger snaps at a knock, and a wrist bends where it should not. The limb loses its strength and its flesh.
• The withering. A neglected limb dries to a husk. Inside the Rustfall itself the course runs in minutes rather than weeks, and the whole body wastes and cracks together.

Contagion

The dust travels on the air and settles on whatever it meets. Every spot sheds more, so a sufferer's bandages, tools, and bedding carry it. A Rust-Host passing through a town leaves rafters and hinges spotted, and the spots spread after it has gone.

Treatment and Its Limits

Fire clears it. A smith's or healer's iron, heated in the forge, burns out a fresh spot, which is painful and leaves a scar, and Cauterize does the same work by magic. Cracked skin is oiled or waxed and bound tight in waxed linen, and the limb is kept moving, never rested. Mouths are wrapped against the dust.

Workings of rot and ending fail or turn back on the caster. Workings of stasis and preservation hold, and Preserve Form can slow the dust on a body for a time. Healing can mend a broken finger, but thinned bone does not grow back while a spot still spreads, and no working restores a withered limb.

Mortality

Away from a Rustfall the Dust would seldom kill those who seal and mend, but it would maim often: fingers lost, a hand that cannot grip, a limb cut off to save the rest. Inside a Rustfall it would kill in minutes. Survivors would keep ringed scars and brittle bones in the limb that was taken.

Lore and Belief

Most people would take the Dust for a witch's curse on the iron, and look for the witch. Iron hung at the door would do the reverse of good, since iron is what the dust eats first, though oiled iron holds; a smith's fire does clean rust-spotted tools.

In the Medieval Era

The Dust has never been seen on Caeldon. Where it came, households would keep oil, wax, and pitch by the door, smiths would become the first healers, since the forge is the cure, and the first spot on a carter's hand would be mistaken for an ordinary rash.

Where It Appears

• The Rust Flower (the Rustfall, the Rust Spores, Travel Notes for Mortals)
• Beyonder Spores (rust spores; the folk name)
• Rust-Hosts
• the Writers' Guide chapter What Waits Outside