The Swelling Plague

Overview

The swelling plague is the great dying. It comes every few generations, by ship or by grain barge, and in a bad year a town loses a third of its people between spring and the first frost. Plague quarters, fever houses, plague pits, and crypts sealed in ice are its marks, and most of what the schools know of mass healing and containment was learned against it.

Cause

A contagion of rats, carried by their fleas and too small to see. When the rats die of it, their fleas leave them for the nearest warm body. In some of the sick it settles in the lungs, and from then on it passes on the breath without rat or flea.

Who It Strikes

Any people of flesh that keeps rats close: Humans in towns and on ships, Halflings in their close folds, and Goblins of the warrens. Kobolds of the drains and lower works know the rat-runs as well as their own, and the fleas with them. Elves take it less; the peoples of the water and the far herding country seldom meet it; the Wrought never.

Signs and Course

Dead rats in the streets come first. A few days after a bite, the sick are struck by fever, chills, and a crushing head; within a day or two a swelling rises in the groin, the armpit, or the neck, hard, hot, and agonising, and darkens towards black. Delirium and the drenching plague-sweat follow. The turning point is the end of the first week: the swelling bursts and drains and the sick slowly mend, or they die.

The lung form begins as the same fever and turns within a day to coughing, then to bloody spittle. It kills in two or three days.

Contagion

Fleas pass it from rats to people, and from the clothes and bedding of the sick to those who handle them. The lung form passes on the breath to anyone at the bedside.

Treatment and Its Limits

Containment comes first. A plague house is marked with Threshold Mark, a quarter is closed with Line of Binding, and a chamber is shut by Emergency Seal the moment containment fails. At the bed, Sickness Gate slows the plague's spread through a body without curing it; Siphon Fever draws the heat into steaming bowls; Cure Affliction can burn the plague-sweat out of one patient. Each costs the healer, and there are never healers enough, so Death Hour sorts who can still be turned. A quarter that pays Mercy Offering, a little blood and breath from each, can keep its fever house standing; a poor district pledges years of labour by Funeral Debt to power its wards, and owes it after. The dead are carried to the trench by Wakeful Bier, ringed with Pyre Circle for burning, or sealed in blue ice by Deep Freeze until a cure is found.

Mortality

About half of those who swell die, more of the old and the starved; of the lung form nearly all. Survivors are weak for a season and scarred where the swelling burst. Rushed plague pits breed Hostile Remnants, so the dying goes on haunting a town after the plague has left it.

Lore and Belief

Most blame bad air, the stars, or the gods, and burn sweet herbs against the reek. That rats are "a carrier of filth and sickness" is common knowledge, but almost nobody thinks of the fleas. Crows gathering over a district are read as the plague's herald. The Steward of Purifying Fire, who burns disease without hating the sick, is invoked at the pyres, and the Steward of the Living Current is felt near plague wards. When the Dawn Lantern glows in a ward chapel, the ward stops panicking.

In a plague year towns shut their gates and archers keep the roads, and the plague-tales are of the outlaw bands that took over the emptied villages, the corpse-carriers who robbed the dead, and the one healer who walked into the shut town of the songs and did not come out.

In the Medieval Era

The swelling plague comes to the corridor towns, ports, and granary country of the cradle-web every few generations, and each coming is remembered by the town it struck. The Red Mercy Hospices and the temple Houses of Mercy staff fever houses and plague wards. In the Stonewake Deeps whoever holds a reach may seal a way first and answer for it afterwards when contagion threatens, if anyone can make them answer (see The Stonewake Compact).

Where It Appears

Healing, containment, and burial workings

Vital Magic: Sickness Gate Sanctified Magic: Cure Affliction Warding: Emergency Seal Sacrificial Magic: Funeral Debt Necromancy: Wakeful Bier Frost Magic: Deep Freeze

Beings and peoples

Rats and Vermin Crows and Ravens Hostile Remnants Raised Corpses The Deepening of Stonewake

Writers' Guide

the Writers' Guide chapter The Schools of Magic