The last plumes of white stone vapor drifted away over the broken roof tiles of the garden sick room. Then, the sunken basin of Ash Reed’s treatment courtyard lay exposed in the grey afternoon light. An eighty-foot bowl of tilted flat stone slabs coated in two inches of warm, greasy sulfur silt. Before anyone at the basin rim had even finished wiping mud from their eyes, Mina and Pera were already moving the wounded into dry shelter.
Having brought Maren, Tov. Vey up from the outer gatehouse cart as soon as the guardian subsided, Pera and sixteen-year-old Tarek carried the three hospice litters into the intact southern treatment room—a stout stone-walled ward built on higher ground above the broken porch—while Mina and fourteen-year-old Lin guided Joren inside to a clean straw cot away from the draft. Within four minutes, all four patients and Joren were behind a solid cedar door with warm bricks at their feet.
Out in the mud of the drained courtyard, however, the political reckoning of the eruption was just beginning. The Bronze Aperture Court rider—his slate-grey enamel breastplate dented across the ribs where the guardian’s stone forearm had clipped him. A ribbon of dark blood drying down his left temple. Staggered out from behind the cracked porch pillar. He pressed one gloved hand against his bruised side. He splashed across the warm silt toward the low granite stone stand in the center of the basin. There, his dropped brass deep ring metal tube lay wedged between…
