Sister Oda pushed her wire-rimmed spectacles higher on the bridge of her nose, her thumb leaving a smudge of dried celandine juice against the horn frame.
Beneath the brass tripod of the magnifying lens, the white porcelain saucer looked like a salt-pan after a hard freeze. The three drops of fresh blood drawn from Cael Ardent’s arm had hardened into a lattice of brittle, needle-sharp crystals that smoked faintly against the ceramic glaze. Where the drops had touched the porcelain, fine gray lines had been etched into the enamel, as though hot vitriol had been poured into the dish.
In thirty-two years of hospital service—first in the cloistered infirmary of the High Sanctuary, then in the parish clinic behind Saint Jude’s timber church—she had tested blood drawn from timber-fever, swamp ague, gangrenous fractures, and the venom of marsh vipers.
Blood could rot. It could curdle, separate into pale yellow serum, or turn watery with dropsy. But blood that behaved like molten ore, blood that formed geometric facets and burned the glaze of a dish, was not blood at all. It was an industrial compound manufactured by an engine.
She turned her head to look at the man sitting within the iron hexagram.
