Time inside the smoke-filled storeroom seemed to divide itself along the clean, ruled upright columns of a clerk’s ledger page.
Less than four feet in front of Seyun’s boots, the wide, flat-bottomed copper sterilization tray tipped forty-five degrees over the front edge of the cast-iron stove plate. A solid, gleaming curtain of three gallons of boiling well-water—mixed with a swirling shower of red-hot willow coals blown from the open firebox beneath it—curved outward into the smoky air directly above fourteen-year-old Lorn’s upturned face, bare throat, and thin linen shirt.
In the outer-city medicine room on Willow-Lane in Oran, Seyun had held the animal fat lamp for his sister more than once on winter nights. Meanwhile, she dressed iron-foundry workers and dye-vat apprentices who had taken three gallons of boiling water across the face and chest. He knew, without needing a single word of medical explanation, what that falling sheet of scalding water would do to the fourteen-year-old village boy who had spent the last five days happily mixing goat-hair lime-mortar in the yard and carrying water buckets up the ladder for a widow’s roof.
Within two heartbeats, the boiling sheet would blind both of Lorn’s eyes, strip the skin from his throat and chest, and fill his gasping windpipe with scalding steam.
