The sulfur-choked blackwater spat them onto a ledge of rotting limestone like refuse from an uncleaned sewer pipe.
Ren hit the stone on his left side. His shoulder took in the impact before his boots found traction in the slick, decomposing sludge. He kept his left arm locked tight around Mira, hoisting her clear of the rushing torrent that boiled through the drainage under-road drain. Behind them, the iron valve of the broken water gate groaned under thousands of tons of backlogged marsh water, shrieking like a dying beast as the torrent leveled out into a sullen, hip-deep swamp.
Beside him, a heavy splash signaled Vane Vale’s unceremonious arrival. The older man surfaced with a wet, strangled cough. He grabbed his gold-trimmed brass counting frame to his collar like a drowning sailor clutching a spar. His velvet frock coat clung to his wiry torso like drowned river moss, the gold filigree piping tarnished black by sulfur scum.
“Three hundred and forty royal sovereigns,” Vane wheezed. He spat out a mouthful of foul, bitter-salt water. He staggered onto the ledge on hands and knees, shivering so hard his teeth rattled like dice in a leather cup. “That was the tailor’s invoice for this coat. Silk lining. Hand-carded wool blend. Now it smells of pig grease and privy slow leak. I’m surrounded by economic ruin.”
Ren didn’t reply. He lay on his back against the limestone wall, his chest heaving, his mouth open as he sucked in the cold, cavernous air.
Every breath was agony.
The Exclusion Axiom had bitten deep. Where the consecrated phosphorus beam of the Justiciar lantern had struck his chest through his linen tunic, his skin was mottled with raised, milk-white blisters that throbbed with a sickening, chemical heat. It wasn’t the clean, numbing burn of wood embers or the stinging blister of a kitchen kettle. It felt as though someone had rubbed skin-burning lye into his under-skin tissue and set it smoldering. He tried to draw air past his collarbones. Then, his throat seized in a reflex asthmatic burst.
Zero Divine Grace.
The promise he had forged with the Speculum of Forfeited Paths was a total spirit law. By burning the path of the holy physician to draw Brother Ren from the silver depths, Ren had permanently amputated his own soul’s capacity to receive sacred light. To the divine order of the Basilica of Dawn, Ren Vale was no longer merely a secular sinner. He was an ontological repellant, a living heresy whose flesh curdled under the gaze of consecrated power.
A soft, bare foot touched the slick stone beside Ren’s knee.
Brother Ren stood in the waist-deep runoff, untroubled by the freezing sludge that swirled around his burlap habit. In his left hand, he held the dented lead purification basin. He held it steady beneath the slow, rhythmic drip of water falling from the ceiling stalactites. His right shoulder. There, the four-pronged silver heavy steel crossbow quarrel had torn through his meat, was a jagged, swollen knot of purple keloid tissue.
Through the raw, unwhitened burlap at his right collarbone, three sharp, crystal-clear spurs of smoky quartz jutted into the gloom. They were the exact needles he had drawn from Mira’s throat twenty minutes ago. Dark, sluggish blood cried from the puncture sites, staining the coarse fabric black.
The monk looked down at Ren. His silver-flecked grey eyes were calm, devoid of dramatic piety. He held only that bottomless, terrifying gentleness.
“The burn doesn’t shrink,” Brother Ren said softly. His voice rustled like dry husks in an autumn wind. “The light of the Basilica is built upon unbending condemnation. It recognizes only submission or ash. Because you refused their yoke, the light will treat your meat as fuel.”
“I don’t need a sermon,” Ren rasped, coughing into his ink-stained sleeve. A spew of dark, frothy thick spit landed on the rock. “I need grease. Animal fat, animal fat, anything to coat the epidermal layer before the air rots it.”
“Grease,” Vane muttered from the floorboards of the limestone shelf, wringing out the hem of his coat with shaking, gloved fingers. “He wants grease. Let’s summon a master butcher from the mirror, boy! Perhaps an alternate version of yourself who opened a lard shop in the Old Quarter! We can line our pockets with suet while the temple wardens mount our heads on bronze pikes outside the North Gate!”
“Shut up, Vane,” Mira’s voice cut through the cave.
She was sitting propped against Ren’s cedar packing crate, her wool shawl pulled tight around her throat. Her right arm—the heavy, solid limb of smoky quartz—rested motionless across her lap. It caught the dim eerie glow of the cave moss. But her breathing, for the first time in three days, was silent. The terrifying, high-pitched sound whine that had threatened to shatter her ribs was gone.
She looked at Brother Ren. Her gaze didn’t waver from the three crystal-clear thorns piercing the monk’s shoulder.
“You took it,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
Brother Ren knelt before her in the sludge, setting his lead basin down on the stone. He bowed his head so low his forehead nearly touched her small, unpolished leather boots.
“A fraction, little sister,” he whispered. “Only the surface bloom. The roots remain inside your marrow, deep in the bone. My flesh can’t reach the core until you surrender the will to carry it.”
“I’m not surrendering anything to you,” Mira said, her voice trembling with cold fury. “Look at yourself. You look like a corpse someone dragged out of a lime pit. If you think I’m going to sit here and let you die so I can have two warm arms, you’re as stupid as the one in the velvet coat.”
Vane scoffed loudly. “Leave me out of your familial lunacy, girl. I’m the only person in this damp grave with an ounce of commercial sanity.”
“You have zero copper, Vane,” Mira snapped back, her chin lifting. “You said so yourself. That makes you an amateur.”
Vane opened his mouth to deliver a blistering counter-audit, then snapped his jaw shut, his goatee twitching. He turned his face away toward the darkness of the cave, muttering dark curses about the ungratefulness of youth and the depreciation rate of family loyalty.
Ren pushed himself up against the limestone wall, his teeth grit against the fire in his chest. He reached into his leather satchel, his fingers brushing against his careful tools.
His carved ivory bone awl was intact, the polished silver metal ring at its base gleaming dull grey in the damp air. Beside it lay his vial of violet dark oak-ink, miraculously unbroken in its padded tin casing.
“Where are we?” Ren asked, looking past the ledge into the yawning underground darkness.
The cave didn’t end at the drainage water gate. It opened into a huge, hollow karst system that stretched for hundreds of paces beneath the city foundations. Above them, far in the gloom, massive pillars of rough-hewn limestone supported the weight of Oakhaven’s cathedral district. In the distance, faint flickers of yellow lantern light dotted the cave floor like dying stars, with the muffled sounds of human activity—the clang of an iron pot, the low murmur of voices, the hollow cough of a sick child.
“The Leper Wells,” Brother Ren said, lifting his lead basin and rising to his feet. “The Seventh Sump of Oakhaven. The Basilica built its foundations over the ancient quarries where the first stone of the city was cut. When the dust and the quarry damp rotted the miners’ lungs, the priests didn’t heal them. They walled them in from above and consecrated the trapdoors.”
“A leper colony,” Vane muttered, shivering. “Splendid. An entire town district populated only by insolvent liabilities. I suppose they have an active financial exchange where we can negotiate our passage?”
“They have nothing,” Brother Ren said gently. “That’s why they’re the only people in this province who won’t sell you to the Choir for twenty silver pieces.”
The monk turned and stepped off the limestone ledge into the shallow runoff. His linen-wrapped feet splashed through the black water. He paused, looking back over his scarred shoulder at Ren.
“The patrol won’t follow down the water gate tonight,” Brother Ren said. “The Justiciars believe the lower drain pits are cursed by unholy foul fog. They will wait for dawn to lower search baskets from the high cathedral grates. We have four hours of dark to find shelter, little brother. Lean on me. My ribs don’t care about the weight.”
Ren paused. His instinct, forged through years of scavenging for scraps in the cold gutters of Low-Khorat, was to reject all charity. Charity was a contract without printed terms. It was an invisible debt that piled up compound interest in guilt.
Then his knees buckled.
The skin-burning burn across his chest flared white-hot. It sent a violent burst of agony streaming down his left arm. He would have pitched face-first into the freezing sulfur water if Brother Ren had not lunged forward. It caught him by the crook of his elbow with terrifying strength.
The contact sent a strange, cold tremor through Ren’s nervous system.
For a heartbeat, the painful burn on Ren’s chest dimmed, like a glowing coal plunged into cold oil. Across the contact point on Brother Ren’s forearm, the purple-black keloid scars darkened, bulging slightly as a faint trickle of white lymph seeped through the monk’s skin.
Martyr’s Osmosis.
The monk was pulling the surrounding cellular shock from Ren’s nerves into his own body.
“Stop,” Ren gasped, wrenching his arm back with an effort that left him panting. “Don’t... Don’t touch me with that. I pay my own bills.”
Brother Ren withdrew his hand smoothly, his expression calm. “Pain isn’t a currency, Ren. It’s merely a burden that becomes lighter when divided between two backs.”
“In this house,” Vane snapped, stepping down from the ledge with his cane clicking against the stones, “pain is the only currency we seem to possess in abundance. Now pick up the girl’s crate before my boots rot fully through the soles.”
Ren wiped the cold sweat from his brow with the back of his ink-stained hand. He scooped Mira into his left arm, her quartz hand cool and heavy against his shoulder. Meanwhile, Brother Ren lifted the heavy cedar crate with his uninjured arm as though it weighed nothing at all.
Together, the four of them moved deeper into the cave. That left the rushing blackwater behind them as they entered the underground shadows of the Leper Wells.