Free Curse of Kings (The Trials of Oland Born, Book 1) by Alex Barclay Page A

journeys to other parts.
    Oland pulled himself up on to the stone sill of the shattered window. He had never been in a hospital. The closest he had come to sickness was tending to The Craven Lodge when they had succumbed to the excesses of eating, drinking or fighting. He would rather have tended the plague-stricken. He jumped down into the fire-damaged room and, despite the easy passage of the outside air, was hit with the smell of rot, and rain, and animals. He knew that he was walking through the symbolic core of the Dallen uprising: the desecrated room that marked its darkest night, when a flaming torch was fired through the window and raged through a good king’s dreams.
    The interior was illuminated by the moon. Oland stood, mesmerised; through a huge crater in the stone floor grew a towering oak. Its boughs, rich with leaves, had thrust their way upward, wrapping around the banisters and breaking through the roof; outside the grounds were a wasteland, yet inside, where the dying had lain, was this extraordinary display of life.
    Oland climbed to the first floor through the twisted limbs of the tree, grasping them for support as he jumped the remaining steps of the crumbling staircase. At the top, he walked around the balcony, opening and closing each of the doors that lined it, revealing rows of empty, dust-filled rooms. He made his way downstairs through a narrow back staircase, and found himself in the infirmary hall. At the end, Oland stopped at a large mahogany door. As he opened it, something scraped along the floor, revealing a quadrant of clean stone under a thick mantle of dust. He bent down and picked up a foot-long wooden plaque with holes in each corner, and rusted nails hanging from two of them. The plaque was missing the gold plate where a name would have been. Oland glanced around. He had no doubt that he was in a doctor’s office. All around him, gauzy spider webs stretched from the ceiling to the desk, to the second door frame behind it, to the floor, to the chair, to the bed against the wall, to the glass bottles and candlesticks and weighing scales.
    Oland broke through the webs and cleared a path to the desk, where he carefully laid the plaque, as if the mystery doctor would come back from the dead to reclaim it. But, when Oland looked at the shining doorknob of the door to the rear, he knew that whether or not ghosts existed, he was not the first visitor to King Seward’s Hospital in the past one hundred years. Or, by all appearances, in the previous week. There were large boot prints on the floor behind the desk, and a square clearing where something had once stood, but had recently been removed.
    Slowly, he opened the door into the adjoining room, a smaller empty space that had nothing but more footprints – a trail he had no desire to follow. He stayed where he was and, when he turned around, noticed a large map pinned to the wall. He felt a surge of hope as he approached it. It was a map of northern Envar. The territories were in pale green, their borders marked in broken lines of black.
    The area shaded in brown marked the path of the plague. It ran from the east coast of Decresian, bypassing Dallen, then southwest into the neighbouring territory. Then it ran south through Galenore, and onwards to its furthest point: Gort, mid-west Envar, where the scryer lived. No part of Gort had survived the plague. The bermids had built towering nests there, but they had been unable to breed. Their only legacy were the empty shells of the nests that still stood tall.
    Oland ran his finger from the top left-hand corner of the map to the bottom right, naming each town and village out loud, hoping that he would say the word Sabian by the time he reached the bottom right. But there was no Sabian. Oland folded up the map, nevertheless, and put it into his pocket. At least he now knew where to find Dallen Falls, and so Chancey the Gold.
    He walked into the hallway and passed a small ward of beds