The Red Pox

Overview

The red pox comes to a town every generation or so, runs through every child born since it last came, and leaves. A pocked face in a corridor town draws no remark. Those who have had it never take it again, and every town knows it.

Cause

A contagion too small to see, living only in the sick. It cannot live long without new bodies, which is why it needs towns and roads, and why it dies out of a town for a generation once everyone there has had it.

Who It Strikes

It strikes the crowded peoples: Humans of the towns and corridors, Halflings in their close folds, and Goblins of the warrens and town fringes hardest; Dwarves and Orcs where they live close beside them. Elves take it seldom and lightly. The peoples of the water rarely meet it, and the Wrought never. In a town it is a sickness of children; in a remote valley where it has not come for two generations it takes the grown as well, and kills more.

Signs and Course

About ten days after it is caught, a sudden high fever comes, with a splitting head, a broken back, and vomiting. After two or three days the fever eases, and red spots appear in the mouth, then on the face, the hands, and the feet, and spread inward. Over the next days the spots rise into blisters and then into hard, deep pustules, thickest on the face and limbs. This is the dangerous week: the fever returns, the face swells shut, and the sick cannot eat or see.

The turning point comes when the pustules are full. Where they stay apart, they crust over, and the scabs fall in the third or fourth week, leaving pits. Where they run together into one sheet, or the skin bleeds beneath them, most die.

Contagion

It passes on the breath of the sick to anyone who sits close, from their first spots until their last scab falls, and by their clothes, bedding, and scabs long after. A shirt from a pox house can carry it to the next town.

Treatment and Its Limits

The best nurse is one who has had it already: pocked nurses tend the pox house, and towns know to send nobody else. Care is water, broth, a dark room, and keeping the sick from tearing the scabs.

Containment is magic's surest work here. A pox house is marked with Threshold Mark before stronger quarantine is laid, and a ward-maker walks Line of Binding around a quarter that has shut. Sickness Gate slows the pox in a body without curing it, and Cure Affliction can turn a case but often needs repeating. All of it is paid from the healer's reserves or the patient's strength, and a pox year has more sick than healers. Healers use Death Hour to spend what they have on those who can still be turned.

Mortality

About one in five of those it takes, more of infants, and more where it falls on the grown. Survivors keep the pits on face and hands for life; a few are blinded. Once taken, it is never taken again.

Lore and Belief

The red pox is blamed on bad air, red stars, the anger of the gods, and on the family of whoever sickened first. Many hang red cloth at the windows of the sick and wrap them in red, to draw the red out of the skin. Mothers in some towns send a child into a mild pox house on purpose, to have it over with young.

Looters strip the marked pox houses, and the pox goes with them from town to town; the songs of the pox years tell of bandits who took a dead merchant's silks and carried the red to every village they robbed.

In the Medieval Era

The red pox runs through the corridor towns, the march-towns of the Confluence Basins, the crossings of the Greyford Reach, and the folds about once a generation, and reaches remote valleys more rarely and more cruelly. The towns' ruling houses shut pox houses, mark their doors, and post watchers at the gates. The temple hospitals of Sanctified Magic, the Houses of Mercy, fill their wards, and the Red Mercy Hospices send healers to the worst quarters. In a pox year the pocked are hired to nurse, bury, and carry, because they alone may come and go.

Where It Appears

• Warding: Threshold Mark
• Binding Magic: Line of Binding
• Augury Magic: Death Hour
• the Writers' Guide chapter The Schools of Magic