The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume III: Volume III

cough. Terra’s plague caused all of the internal organs to hemorrhage. Eventually the patient either bled to death or drowned from blood filling the lungs.
    The soldiers had orders to gather fallen branches and limbs along the route to supplement the loads of firewood. Nimbulan had added the request to include the Tambootie for bonfires in the central marketplace of afflicted villages and manors. Scarface had countermanded Nimbulan’s request. Smoke from the Tambootie was toxic to mundanes. In this case, the cure could be worse than the disease.
    Nimbulan had countered that only eating the raw leaves of the Tambootie had proved lethal to mundanes. Breathing the smoke was such a private ritual of magicians that no record of a mundane reacting to the smoke existed. If a distillation of the Tambootie proved safe to mundanes, then the smoke should be as well.
    Who was right? Katie wanted to believe Nimbulan because he was a friend and had proved wise so many times in the past year. But Scarface sounded so logical. . . .
    If only they knew for certain that the smoke would safely prevent the disease.
    The queen traced the baby’s cheek with her fingertip. Such soft skin, warm and pink. She vowed that her new home would never know the plague, never live in fear of bearing children lest the plague strike mother and child when most vulnerable.
    Silently Katie moved away from the crib to a secret recess in the wall near the outside corner of the room. She pressed and twisted an imperfection in the stonework. The false face of the stone popped open on well-oiled hinges to reveal an opening about twenty centimeters square. Previous queens of Coronnan had secreted jewels and valuable documents here. Katie used the cache for more important equipment.
    She withdrew a small computerized box, a vial of test strips, and a lancet. “Do I really need to do this every day?” she asked herself. She dreaded the painful pricks from the lancet more and more. Maybe today she would just put the equipment back in its hiding place. The anxious mother part of her insisted she proceed.
    Once brought out of dormancy, the virus spread rapidly by the briefest human contact, devastating entire populations in a matter of weeks. Each carrier caused a mutation of the virus that was resistant to the previous generation of antibiotics. In seven centuries of fighting the plague, Terran scientists had found that only a distillation from the Tambootie tree cured the plague.
    In all those generations, Katie’s family had never lost a member to the plague. The O’Haras and a few other families had proved strangely immune to the disease. But the microbe mutated so quickly Katie dared not take a chance that the next bug would kill her and devastate her new home.
    She had lived on bush worlds for three years before being dispatched to the distant planet known as Kardia Hodos. Aboard the space transport here, she had lived in a special isolation chamber with a different air supply from the rest of the ship. Was that long enough to know she was free of the plague?
    No. She had to perform this small chore once every day for ten years to be sure. At least another four years of painful pricks from the tiny needle.
    Katie washed her hands with the hard lye soap used by the common populace. She preferred the cleansing properties of this soap to the softer perfumed stuff favored by the local nobility. She winced as the lancet pricked her finger. A bright hanging drop of blood welled up from the minute wound. She touched the surface of the test strip with the blood and slipped the chemically treated slide into the meter.
    The tiny computer whirred and hummed to itself as it checked her blood against a thousand tests, including iron levels, thyroid, cholesterol, blood sugar, and hormone levels for pregnancy. In less than a standard minute the machine beeped, satisfied that Katie’s blood was clean of the plague, her red and white counts remained normal, and her hormones maintained a satisfactory level. She wasn’t pregnant.
    This tiny machine should be the only machine that would ever taint Kardia Hodos. And she would destroy it when she no longer needed it.
    Except her father had given a sonar unit to the Guild of Bay Pilots. She wished she could sabotage that device. One bit of technology always led to another and another until the entire society was riddled with machines, synthetics, and pollution.
    A knock on the door roused her from her silent