By the eighth hour of the night watch, the heat from the salt-kiln had filled Entry hall 003 with an even, golden comfort, but the fire inside Yan Zhiqiu’s veins was burning out of control.
Her forehead was slick with a thin, oily sweat that smelled of sulfur and sour fever. Her lips, earlier pale and blue from the ocean’s freeze, had turned a cracked, dry scarlet. She tossed her head from side to side upon the wool pillow, her dark hair tangling in damp coils across her cheeks, her throat producing faint, disjointed murmurs that Qiao Ming could only partially decipher through the crackle of the hearth.
“...the seals are broken...” she whispered, her dry tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth with a dry clicking sound. “...the Great Sects... They set fire to the star-crucibles... Father, don’t open the bronze doors... The ash is coming down from the sky...”
Qiao Ming did not try to hush her. In the deep mountains and along the sunken reefs, the elders taught that a fever must speak its terror before it can break. To silence a delirium was to lock the poison inside the soul’s chambers. That let the heat scorch the internal organs until the spirit fled the shell.
