The brass hand-bell produced a clean, crystalline chime that cut through three days of dead silence.
In the courtyard below, twenty island lords and three hooded Saint-stage elders flinched at the sound. Their fingers froze in the damp loam, dirt clinging to their raw knuckles.
Deacon Vane stood on the porch with his spine straight and his mustache neatly waxed. He lowered the wooden mallet and cleared his throat.
“The seventy-two-hour silence window has concluded,” Deacon Vane announced, his voice carrying smoothly across the stone walls. “The grounds have been inspected and deemed adequately weeded.”
Elder Ignis let out a ragged breath that smelled of suppressed brimstone. He dropped a bundle of thorny sea-nettles into his wicker basket and wiped his muddy brow with a trembling sleeve.
“The pills,” Ignis rasped, his voice hoarse from days of forced muteness. “Bring out Master Ash’s pills.”
Beside him, Elder Vesper and Elder Morwen slowly straightened their aching backs. Three centuries of corrosive Star-Marrow sediment had calcified their joints, making every motion grind like sand between millstones.
They did not complain. They had spent seventy-two hours pulling weeds like indentured farmhands, all for the chance to purchase medicine that could dissolve the deadly poison in their marrow.
