The wooden stool sat three feet from the brick base of the central oven stack. There, the stone was so hot it baked the dampness out of Len’s canvas trousers.
Dr. Brant Sallow pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his sweat-streaked nose, dipped a short-bladed razor-sharp razor knife into a shallow tin tray of boiling antiseptic wash. Then it pointed the bone handle at Len’s left shoulder.
“Tunic off, courier,” Sallow ordered, his tone devoid of the bedside gentleness he had shown the sick girl. “Sit down, plant your heels on the slate, and don’t move unless the ceiling comes through. I smelled that arm the moment you walked past the meat block.”
Len unbuckled the leather harness of his postal dispatch pouch with his right hand, laying the waterproof leather case on the bench beside Deren’s brass bell. He worked the horn buttons of his gray woolen tunic free, easing the left sleeve down over the linen sling with slow, deliberate care.
Even that tiny movement sent a sharp, sickening throb of pain through his forearm.
The skin beneath the dirty linen dressing was burning with a fierce, nearby fever heat that radiated outward through the coarse cloth, warming the air around his wrist like a hot stove damper. The bandages themselves were stiff, yellowed with dried pus. Then he crusted along the inner seam with blackened, rusted blood from the Salt Ward steam crawlway.
