Delia of Vallia by Alan Burt Akers Read Free Book Online Page B

twirl it and banish pain. He could not halt the onset or the course of the disease.
    One of the churches, the structure of crumbly brick dedicated to Flamdelka the Gatherer, commandeered as an emergency hospital, was crammed with sufferers. Flamdelka the Gatherer was one of the older spirits of this part of Vallia, only half-believed in by most folk, still worshipped by many whose business took them across the Ochre Limits.
    Dalki walked his totrix up slowly and dismounted. He, like everyone else, looked exhausted.
    “My lady. My father bids me to remind you that you promised to rest now—”
    “Yes, Dalki. Later.” Delia pointed up. “Look, Dalki. A warvol flying over, looking for food.”
    The black wings spiraled over the church of Flamdelka. Dead bodies were being carried out and placed in carts. The smell did not offend the warvol. He was a kind of vulture, not nicknamed Rippasch, and he was hungry.
    “Very good, my lady,” said Dalki, and lifted his bow.
    Agron the Needle nodded. He did not know how the disease was communicated. But if the warvol fed on a dead person and flew away — who knew where he might go and who knew where he might carry the disease? If he did at all.
    Dalki loosed. The shaft pierced the shining black feathers. Without a cry, the warvol pitched onto the roof of Mother Hansi’s Banje Store, and fell plump into the street. The corpse would be thrown onto the pyres along with the other corpses.
    If she was honest with herself, Delia felt she ought to admit that some venom for Rippasch impelled her in that deed. The warvol, like Rippasch, cleaned up dead bodies, prevented the kind of disease under which they now suffered. But, in stripping an already diseased corpse, the bird might spread the contagion. Of course, it could be spread on the air, by the skin, through tears... No one knew.
    She was persuaded to rest only by the consideration that if she collapsed then she would only be hindering the efforts of the others. Out of pride could come blind selfishness.
    “My lady?”
    “Yes, Dalki. I will rest.”
    Walking slowly back along Fruiterer’s Street and so across the dusty square of Palm Kyro, she could feel the way her legs ached. Her back ached, too; but in a different way. Dalki, tight-lipped that the queen had chosen to walk back to the strom’s grand villa instead of riding, walked a few paces in rear, leading his animal. His father had no need of dinning into his ears every few hours the sobering thought of how lucky they both were in being able to attend on the queen. As a Djang and a Vallian, Dalki needed his queen and his empress, and he was perfectly well aware of his good fortune.
    There were no airboats in Mellinsmot. Most of those in private hands had been used by their owners to fly away to safety. There were very few of those. The strom’s two fliers, of which he had been inordinately proud, had been commandeered by the soldiers and the mercenaries had robbed him, taken off in his airboats, and not even wished him a remberee. The black fliers used by a local Company of Friends to ship in ice had likewise all been seized. Delia was informed that in four days’ time a flier might be expected bringing ice. In that time those sufferers whose temperatures rose too high would die.
    Stromni Elspa wanted to fuss. Delia was brisk with the woman; not unkind. At last she could stretch out in the bed in the room they had placed at her disposal. Either Tandu or Dalki, or both, would remain just outside the door and not even an earthquake would shift them.
    She thought of the poor people of Mellinsmot, of Opaz, of her friends, of her children and of her husband. Then she went to sleep. She awoke early, washed and dressed, ate a huge breakfast, and stuck straight into tending for the sick, of caring and cleaning, of soothing and swabbing. The routine established itself. Until fresh cases ceased, the routine would continue.
    As for herself, she had no fears. She was concerned for her