The second watch of the deep night brought no cooling to the glow-stone base, only the deepening struggle of mortal blood against the venom of the reef-wounds.
Qiao Ming stood before his low work-table of weathered black walnut, his bare feet planted firmly against the ribbed floor flags. On the table sat his heavy granite mortar, eight inches across, hollowed out from a single nodule of dark quartz-bearing stone that had tumbled down from the upper sea-cliffs before the world was drowned. In his right hand, he held the pestle of dense dark rock, its surface polished by the friction of thousands of healing preparations.
The willow bark had checked the outward fire of the skin. But the deeper infection—the cold, greasy rot that settles into the marrow when sea-silt enters a deep jagged cut—needed a medicine of greater thickness. In the harsh water-mapping environment of the House, a land-mapper learned early that mortal bodies could not survive on pure water alone. They needed the dissolved minerals of the deep earth to replace the electrolytes leached out by the osmotic pull of the salt water.
From the cedar storage recesses, Qiao Ming retrieved three specific jars.
The first contained dried maidenhair lichen, scraped from the high, moisture-slick roof ledges of Entry hall 018 where the ceiling-clouds condensed against stone-hard copper veins. The lichen was pale grey-green, brittle as dried parchment, smelling faintly of clean rain and metal copper. It possessed the rare property of binding heavy metal toxins in the…
