The silvered glass of the Speculum didn’t shatter into flying shrapnel. It dissolved into a drifting veil of grey, weightless ash.
A wave of sub-zero cold rushed out from the eight-sided gold-silver metal frame, washing over Ren’s blistered hand and freezing the puddle of stale sulfur water at his knees into milky ice. The smell of burning paper filled the narrow water tank. Not the rotten-egg stink of coal fires or the grease of animal fat, but the solemn scent of ancient incense, beeswax tapers, and scorched thick parchment scripture.
In the center of the mirror, the silver depths collapsed inward like a dying whirlpool.
On the silver plane of the Speculum of Forfeited Paths, the divergence collapsed into permanent ash. Forfeited future: The Ascetic Hospitaller of Dawn. Showed up summon: Brother Ren (The Disgraced Saint). Mastered craft: Martyr’s Osmosis (Body Wound-Transference). Exclusion Axiom: Zero Divine Grace. Consecrated light burns flesh. Holy water acts as burning acid. Prayers curdle. Sacred ground inflicts body rejection.
The words didn’t echo in Ren’s ears. They branded themselves across his mind with the terrifying finality of a carried out mortgage.
From the swirling cloud of grey ash, a pair of bare feet stepped onto the freezing silt.
They were wrapped in frayed strips of coarse linen, yellowed and stained with dried drainage along the soles. Above the feet fell the hem of a raw, unwhitened, ragged burlap habit. It was tied at the waist with rough hemp rope.
The man who emerged looked thirty-five years old. Even so, the hollows beneath his cheekbones belonged to someone who had lived through hundreds of years of famine. His jaw bore the same stubborn line as Ren Vale’s, but his skin was a landscape of living trauma.
Across his neck, climbing from beneath his coarse collar toward his left temple, ran jagged, purple-black keloid scars. They were the clear track-marks of absorbed rotting rot. Plague carbuncles, gangrenous black rot, and burning acid burns pulled from other bodies and forced to heal within his own meat.
In his left hand, the monk carried a dented, lead-plated purification basin, its rim crusted with dried ash and baptismal settled mud.
The monk looked down at his own calloused hands. His grey eyes, flecked with silver like Ren’s, carried a terrifying, hollow gentleness.
“The air here,” Brother Ren whispered, his voice like dry leaves scraping across flat stone slabs. “It smells of fresh iron. And fresh sorrow.”
“Oh, God,” Vane Vale gasped from behind the crate.
The Merchant of Guilt backed into the stone archway, his ivory-tipped cane raised defensively, his gold-trimmed pocket counting frame clutched against his velvet lapel like an amulet. His manicured goatee twitched with gut-deep disgust.
“Look at him,” Vane hissed, trembling with high-born horror. “No boots. No ledger. Not even a pocket for a handkerchief! He’s wearing thirty pounds of unwashed burlap and carrying a plumber’s bucket! Ren, you idiot, you total pauper—you have summoned a skilled beggar!”
Brother Ren didn’t turn toward Vane’s outburst. His gaze drifted past the shouting merchant until it landed on the shivering girl curled upon the cedar crate.
His breath caught.
“Mira,” the monk murmured.
He moved across the water tank without a sound, his linen-wrapped feet making no noise in the wet mud. He dropped to both knees beside her, heedless of the freezing silt soaking through his habit.
His scarred fingers reached out, trembling wildly. For three inches, his hand hovered over her cheek, scared that touching her might shatter the fragile illusion of her breath.
“You’re so small,” Brother Ren whispered, tears welling in his hollow eyes. “In my world... When the crystal reached your neck, I was too slow. I held back three days because I feared the pain. When I finally laid my hands upon your throat, the quartz had rooted into your heart. I saved your breath. But you lived for eighty years without a voice, staring at my scarred hands with hatred.”
Mira opened her eyes. The fever was burning through her cheeks. The sound chime in her chest was shaking so fast it blurred the edge of her vision. Yet she looked into the scarred face of this older brother without fear.
Her warm left hand lifted weakly and tapped the battered rim of his lead basin.
Clink.
“You talk too much,” Mira whispered, her lips pale. “Just like Ren. Just like the velvet one. Did none of you learn to carry a cup of warm broth instead of speeches?”
Brother Ren let out a choked breath that sounded like a sob, then smiled. The smile transformed his ruined face, filling the gloomy water tank with deep peace.
“I have no broth, little sister,” he said softly. “I have only this.”
He laid his bare right palm against the crystal-clear needles protruding from her collarbone.
CRACK!
A bone-shaking blast wave rippled through the water tank. The high-pitched chime in Mira’s chest died instantly, replaced by a deep, wet rasp that tore out of Brother Ren’s throat.
The monk’s eyes rolled back. The purple-black keloid veins across his neck flared with angry violet soft glow. Beneath his habit, his shoulder muscles corded in violent spasms as the quartz needles on Mira’s skin withered, retreating half an inch into her flesh like dying thorns.
At the same time, through the burlap on Brother Ren’s right collarbone, three sharp spurs of smoky quartz punched through his meat, blooming like frosted glass flowers soaked in his own dark blood.
He didn’t cry out. He simply leaned forward, his forehead resting against the cedar wood of Mira’s crate, his breath hissing through clenched teeth.
“Body transference,” Ren Vale breathed, his careful mind analyzing the exchange with terrifying clarity. “He didn’t cure the sclerosis. He signed a contract of living substitution. He wrote his own tissue into the deed as debtor.”
“He wrote himself into a lunatic asylum!” Vane shrieked, waving his cane. “Look at his collar! He’s sprouting quartz! Do you know what a surgeon charges to extract stone-hardened marrow? We don’t have the coin for two patients! We don’t have the coin for a cabbage!”
Before Ren could answer, the iron drainage grate ten paces down the under-road drain blew inward with an ear-splitting screech of snapped metal.
BOOM!
The rusted bars tore free, tumbling into the sulfur pool. A blinding shaft of radiant, consecrated light flooded the water tank. It swept away every shadow with sterile bright glare.
Through the breach lunged two massive, silver-collared mastiffs, their leather harnesses bearing the radiant sun-burst of the High Basilica. Behind them strode four Justiciar New students in polished steel breastplates over snow-white tabards, their steel crossbows leveled into the chamber.
At their head stood a Justiciar Sergeant, his face hidden behind a visor of silver filigree. He carried an air-powered heavy steel crossbow charged with a four-pronged quarrel tipped with consecrated silver.
“In the name of the High Judge!” the Sergeant roared through his ringing helm. “The uncontained glass-like monster is located! Scribe and accomplices, submit to the holy irons or be cleansed by the fire of Dawn!”
The radiant beam of the Sergeant’s holy lantern swept across the floor, striking Ren Vale full in the chest.
The newly forged Exclusion Axiom ignited instantly.
Sssssssss!
It felt like a flask of packed burning acid hurled against his chest.
Ren’s linen tunic scorched into black embers. Beneath the cloth, his skin blistered into painful white welts across his collarbone and neck. His throat closed in a violent burst. The air entering his lungs tasted of skin-burning ash and boiled lye. He fell to one knee, coughing up dark, frothy blood that sizzled as it struck the wet stone.
Zero Divine Grace. The sacred light of the gods had permanently rejected him.
“Ren!” Mira cried out, struggling against the crate.
“Heretic flesh,” the Sergeant said coldly. “His very soul curdles under the gaze of Dawn. Cleanse the root!”
The Sergeant pulled the trigger.
THWACK!
The heavy steel crossbow snapped with air-powered fury. The four-pronged silver quarrel tore through the misty air. It whistled with a high, holy hum, aimed dead at Ren’s throat.
Ren’s limbs were numbed by the chemical agony burning through his nerves. He couldn’t lift his bone awl. He couldn’t roll away.
A shadow in coarse burlap swept across his vision.
Brother Ren didn’t draw a weapon. He stepped directly between Ren and the incoming bolt. That turned his right shoulder into the quarrel’s path with casual indifference.
THUNK.
The four-pronged silver quarrel punched four inches deep into the meat beneath Brother Ren’s right collarbone, burying its barbs in bone. Consecrated silver fire flared around the wound. It hissed as holy incantations tried to purge the impure flesh.
The monk didn’t even grunt. He stood perfectly still, looking at the silver-masked Sergeant with calm, unblinking grey eyes.
“The metal is cold,” Brother Ren whispered gently. “The intention is colder.”
He reached up with his scarred left hand, closed his fingers around the shaft. Then he wrenched it from his shoulder with a wet tear.
Dark, sluggish blood welled from the hole, dripping down his habit into the lead purification basin he held beneath it. But as the blood flowed, the purple-black keloid veins around the wound pulsed. The silver fire from the bolt was drawn into the dark scars, put out by the sheer volume of absorbed mortal agony already housed within his meat.
The wound didn’t heal. It simply ceased bleeding, closing into a fresh purple keloid ridge.
The Justiciar Sergeant took a step back, his boots splashing into the water. “What... What manner of demon are you? Sacred silver can’t be swallowed by mortal meat!”
“I’m no demon, brother,” the monk replied, his voice terrifyingly soft. “I’m merely the man who chose to remember what you paid to forget.”
From behind the archway, Vane Vale poked his head out, his pocket counting frame clicking like an angry cicada.
“Ren!” Vane screamed. “He can take moving impact! The madman has zero damage depreciation! Blow the water gate while the choirboys are wetting their steel pants!”
Ren fought through the blinding pain in his scorched throat. He forced himself upright, dragging air into his blistered lungs, and found his carved mammoth bone awl.
He lunged toward the rear wall. There, a massive iron water gate held back the lower drainage runoff of the Leper Wells. Millions of gallons of thick, rotten-egg wastewater dammed behind an ancient stone valve.
Ren drove the silver needle of his awl directly into the cracked thick parchment check seal on the valve wheel.
Clause Nine: Emergency water-pressure release!
Execution: Void the binding mortar!
He dragged the ivory point across the old parchment, channeling his own agony into the glyph.
SNAP!
The stone valve fractured with the roar of a cannon. A wall of black, foul-smelling drainage water and limestone silt erupted into the water tank. That five-foot wave swept through the chamber like an avalanche of mud.
“Fall back!” the Sergeant screamed as the torrent slammed into his ranks, drowning their lanterns, knocking the mastiffs into the muck, and sweeping two crossbowmen off their feet.
Ren lunged to the cedar crate, scooping Mira’s light frame into his left arm. Brother Ren moved beside him, planting his broad body like an iron breakwater against the rushing flood, shielding both Ren and Mira from the debris.
“Down the lower water gate!” Ren choked out, coughing sulfur spray from his burning throat. “The drain leads into the leper caverns!”
Vane splashed wildly through the waist-deep water, his ruined velvet coat floating around him like drowned seaweed, his pocket counting frame held triumphantly above his head.
“If my counting frame rusts,” Vane howled over the roar of the flood, “I’m billing the Almighty!”
Together, the four of them plunged into the dark throat of the lower aqueduct, swallowed by the underground depths of the Martyrs’ Basin.