The fire consuming the smithy guttered and died, the last of its palm leaf thatching flying upwards on the rush of hot air. Jocasta’s cheeks were puffed and her face turned slowly red as she held her breath. Several of the villagers ran into the smithy and began dousing charred wood with buckets of water, which hissed and steamed as they struck the cedar planks. Spots appeared in front of her eyes and she began to sway noticeably but she managed to hold her breath for another half a minute before letting out an explosive gasp. Flames burst back into life in a few places but the villagers quickly beat them out with damp cloths, or doused them with water. Jocasta didn’t know any spells designed for extinguishing fire but she had been able to reverse a spell for breathing underwater that allowed her to suck all the air away from the fire in the blacksmiths shop.

Fires were everywhere, whether this was a result of deliberate arson or merely a side effect of unattended cook fires or overturned lanterns it was difficult to say. Smoke and showers of sparks soared into the strange twilight sky, here and there lit by burning palm leaves held aloft by the heat. Beren was standing at the head of a line of villagers who were passing buckets of water from the oasis, tossing them tirelessly onto the other blazes that threatened to consume the village. They were nearly all under control now. For the most part the construction was a kind of adobe that proved difficult to burn, but the poorest areas, simple palm shacks, and the more affluent ones which used timber had proved very flammable in the dry desert environment. Some of those buildings had to be knocked down with spears and other improvised poles to prevent the spread of the flames. The inn they had stayed at was now a pile of glowing coals, though Jocasta’s enterprising dragonflies had, somehow, managed to drag her pack clear before the inferno consumed it. That had been a stroke of luck because there had been a scroll of fimblewinter in there that had saved the apothecary shop by encasing it in a crust of ice.

There was nothing they could do for the dead, which included the apothecary herself who had been gutted by a tar-fiend’s kopesh. Jocasta had seen a score of bodies, though no one had performed anything so formal as a count. The bodies were laid in the street, ignored while the villagers worked to put out the last few fires. There were perhaps twice as many dead tar-fiends, they had been piled in an undignified heap in the town square seeming harmless in death once the animating hate had been stabbed or bludgeoned out of them. Curiously no flies molested the pile of corpses as though the insects were put off by the blackish black blood that oozed from their wounds. The combination of smoke, human blood, and the strange ichor made Jocasta’s nose wrinkle in disgust. 
Jocasta wondered if the enemy dead had been searched, but she was too exhausted from her spell work to volunteer for the grizzly task. Instead she trudged back to the apothecary’s shop and went inside. The sheath of ice from the fimblewinter spell had melted but the residue of the spell kept it cool inside and coated several pieces of glassware with condensate. The sky above was still dark as though stained a constant twilight by the evil forces that transfigured the moon into a leering face but even so it was far hotter than she was used to. Jocasta wondered what life had been like during Natu… during the time of sorcerer pharaohs who could wield such magic. What wonders and terrors had they been able to conjure? What horrors had the war which destroyed their civilization brought about. Well the tar-fiends for one, if Jocasta was any judge.  

The shop had two rooms on its ground floor. The front was a large space lined with shelves stacked with bundles of pungent herbs, wax sealed amphorae filled with oils, phials of bright mineral powders, boxes of locust carapaces and snake skins, and the hundred other tools of the trade. The back was more of a lab or kitchen with brass stands and alchemic glassware. Blank papyri were gathered into bundles with swan feather quills and small ornate ink pots with brass tops.  Several charcoal brasiers and oil lamps had been thoroughly snuffed by her scroll, the potions that had been simmering above them cold and ruined.  The second story was much more abbreviated, containing only a bed, a prayer mat and the few worldly possessions of the now dead apothecary. It reminded Jocasta of her old potion shop, which seemed somehow like she had read about it in a post years ago.

Jocasta found some tea leaves and wrapped them in cloth, crushing them with the heel of her hand before dropping the bundle into a kettle that she sat upon one of the braziers. Tired as she was, she managed a spell to ignite the coals before flopping gracelessly into a chair of woven cane.

“Sayadati!” a woman's voice called as she rushed into the shop, a child of seven or eight in her arms. Jocasta’s eyes snapped open as the woman came to a stop before her, a look of despair on her face. The child had been wounded, a bloody shawl was pressed to his side and his flesh was pale and feverish. No doubt the woman had hoped to find help from the village healer, not aware that she was already dead. Jocasta stood up and gestured towards the bench that ordinarily was used for counting out weights of incense and marjoram.

“Lay him down,” she told the woman in her own language and she complied, gently laying the child atop the work bench. Jocasta removed the bloodied shawl to discover a nasty but shallow wound. The child whimpered as she examined the cut, eyes bright and febrile. Jocasta laid her hand on his brow and recited a spell she had learned back in Andred, sending the boy into a mystical sleep. Retrieving the now simmering kettle she wiped the wound clean with the warm astringent tea and a linen cloth she found under the bench. Blood continued to well up each time she cleaned it. Clucking under her breath she began to poke around the shelves, finding a pot of honey and a roll of catgut thread.

“If only I had…” she muttered to herself then spun as the woman shrieked. One of the dragonflies was struggling to lift the lid on a small clay pot. It succeeded, sending the lit crashing to ground before diving inside. A moment later it emerged hopelessly tangled in spiderweb. The dragonfly flitted drunkenly across the room to land on the table, trailing cobweb like pantomime smoke. Jocasta shook her head at the enchantment's antics and then scrapped the cobwebs from it. She combined the spider silk with the honey and then packed the wound with the resulting poultice. That done, she incanted a quick cleansing cantrip and then sewed the wound shut with the thread before wrapping the whole thing in a linen bandage. The child already looked better, some color returning to his dusky features.

“Thank you Sayadati, thank you, I can never repay you!” the woman gushed. Jocasta made a tired gesture of dismissal and sat back down into the chair, definitely ready for a rest. Which of course was the time a drover stumbled into the shop clutching at a severed finger.

“By Dannan’s tits, it is always something,” Jocasta griped as she stood up and got to work.
By the time Beren and Fazel arrived she had stitched up six wounds, set two broken arms, and placed a tooth back in its socket. If the farmer rinsed his mouth with the potion she had concocted twice a day for the next week, he might even keep it. She wasn’t a healer as such, but she had spent a fair amount of time learning from hedge witches and crones who tended to specialize in such things and so had learned the rudiments. The former apothecary had lacked magical talents but had made up for it by keeping her shop surprisingly well stocked which had helped Jocasta immensely.

“Our people are thankful for your efforts and those of the Rajul Khasab, both in war and peace,” Fazel said somberly. The old man was leaning heavily on his staff, but by the looks of several dark stains on the old wood, he had done more than provide sage advice during the attack. Jocasta dipped her hands into a basin of water and scrubbed them clean. Her grasp on the language wasn’t complete yet but ‘Rajul Khasab’ was some kind of local idiom which meant something like ‘wooden man’ or ‘man made of hard timber’. It was clearly a reference to Beren and had enough humorous associations in her own language to make Jocasta smile despite her weariness. 

“Truly, the White God has sent you to us in this evil hour,” he continued. This made Jocasta uncomfortable and she could have sworn she felt the pulse of the mark the demon had placed upon her in that cavern in the frozen north. 

“Well I don’t know about that,” Jocasta countered, "hopefully gratitude will extend to paying for all the supplies I used?” She made an expansive gesture to encompass the shop but Fazel shook his head sadly.

“Fatima had no family and no apprentice, I am glad that her things are finding the use she would have wanted for them,” Fazel said. Beren dragged out two more of the cane chairs and Jocasta poured them both cups of tea that she laced liberally with sugar. In Andred, sugar would have been a luxury, but Fatima had it in plentiful supply, perhaps it was more common in the south.

“Rajul Khasab and I have been discussing the attack and we cannot discover the logic of it,” Fazel confessed. Beren shook his head.

“Beren really is fine,” he admonished.

“I saw the tar-fiends escape with a stone tablet of some kind, from the temple,” Jocasta said. Fazel’s eyes sharpened at her words. Jocasta suspected that if the creatures had merely wanted to slaughter the village, they could have done far more damage than they had. Some will had directed them to their theft and there was no prize for guessing whose. 

“There was an old stone, with an inscription in a forgotten language, we held it as Holy but we could not decipher the words,” Fazel said, “what would such beasts want with such a thing?”

“If it is an artifact of the time of the Black Pharaoh, then nothing good I’ll bet,” Jocasta said darkly. One of her dragon flies landed on the spoon in her tea cup and began to stir noisily until Jocasta shooed it away.

“Perhaps if we recover it, it will give us some clue as to how to fight against the plagues which assail our peaceful village,” Fazel mused, as though considering it. He wasn’t fooling Jocasta for a second, he had someone in mind to do the recovering and it wasn’t ‘we’ in any real sense.

“Jo can translate it for sure,” Beren put in helpfully.

“The Rajul Khasabya overstates my skills,” Jocasta replied, deliberately mangling the idiom so it meant something closer to ‘wooden headed man’ which made Fazel chuckle.

“We would be grateful for anything you can do, and would be willing to pay generously for your aid,” he wheedled.