Three animal fat lamps burned on iron hooks above the long pine table in the outer hospice room, their yellow flames reflected in the polished brass pans of Mina’s apothecary scale. Across the scrubbed boards, Mina had arranged seven ten-inch squares of oiled river-linen in a neat row. Beside her sat Pera. The older caravan escort who had been the very first tester disconnected from the Hollow Summit’s common test wire during Daro’s seventh-dawn echo. A thick woolen shawl hung around Pera’s shoulders. Her left foot, which still warmed half a beat before her right whenever cultivated pressure approached, rested on a low heated brick.
In Pera’s lap lay a gray slate covered in chalk columns. While the three other escaped hospice testers slept in the curtained nook at the back of the ward, Pera was reciting from memory the exact physical habits of the seven prisoners still lying around the black bronze pillar at the Hollow Summit.
“Bed Four is Dren, the fuller’s apprentice from the lower weir,” Pera said. She tapped her chalk against the fourth column on her slate. Meanwhile, Seyun held the brass scale’s center ring steady at eye level. “His inward return closes high near the collarbone, not deep in the belly like mine. When the pillar’s hum thickens at dusk, he clenches his jaw so hard his back teeth bleed. His chest skin breaks out in dry heat-welts if you put standard willow-bark paste on him.”
