The abandoned cloister of Saint Jude sat perched on a narrow granite shelf three miles above the smoke of Low-Khorat, half-swallowed by alpine juniper scrub and wild mountain ivy.
It was an ancient, roofless stronghold of grey flaky rock blocks, built during the First Dynasty as a mountain hospice for traveling scribes. In the center of the courtyard, beneath the skeletal branches of a dead cedar tree, a small stone hearth flickered with the warm, crackling light of dry birch logs.
Night had fallen over the mountains. The vast sea of lights from the liberated city glittered in the valley below like a fallen star-pattern, while above, the cold mountain wind whistled through the ruined stone arches.
Ren Prime sat upon a wooden bench beside the hearth, leaning his head back against the rough stone wall.
His right arm was freshly bandaged in clean linen soaked in cold willow-bark tea. But the dark violet discoloration beneath his fingernails was permanent. The Eighth Exclusion Axiom—Ink-Rot Poisoning in Blood—had permanently settled into his blood-flow system. Whenever his pulse quickened, he could feel the acid-burning acid of the Sovereign Vitriol tingling in his tiny blood vessels like tiny needles.
Across from him, Scribe Ren was sitting on an overturned flour barrel, carefully cleaning the silver nib of his pool quill with an oiled silk scrap. His midnight doublet was dusted with hearth-ash, his wire-rimmed bifocals perched on the tip of his long, high-born nose.
