The abandoned potter’s kiln sat like a bloated stone beehive in the northern elbow of the Leper Wells, half-swallowed by hundreds of years of calcium runoff and creeping black mold.
Its arched chimney pipe opened into an ancient quarry fissure where the air was cold and dead. He smelled of sulfur salt water and damp clay. Inside, the chamber was five paces across. A circular stone bench, once used by long-dead convicts to turn heavy throwing wheels, served as a barrier against the drafts that whistled down from the drainage shafts.
Ren Vale knelt in the soot beside the brick hearth, his carved mammoth bone awl turning slowly between his ink-stained fingers.
Across the circular floor, Mira lay wrapped in two damp wool blankets upon a bed of dried rushes they had bought from a blind weaver for four copper bits. Her breathing was slow, deep, and miraculous in its quietude. The sound chime in her chest remained silent. Beside her pallet, standing on the uneven flags, sat the battered lead purification basin that Brother Ren had carried out of the mirror.
In the center of the kiln, the conflict between economics and asceticism had reached an impasse.
Vane Vale stood before the hearth, his velvet frock coat draped over an overturned clay vat to dry. In his white linen shirtsleeves, his manicured goatee bristling with anger, he flicked the lower beads of his brass pocket counting frame with rhythmic fury.
“Twelve ounces of salt lard,” Vane snapped, his thumb snapping a bead upward with a sharp metal clack. “Six yards of boiled linen wrapping. Two pounds of dried split peas. One clay jar of elderberry vinegar to clean the pus from the flat stone slabs. That’s the baseline subsistence cost for twenty-four hours in this underground sewer.”
He paused, turning on his calfskin boot to glare at the opposite wall.
There sat Brother Ren.
The monk was not sitting on the dry stone bench. He knelt directly upon the cold, mud-slicked bedrock, his bare, linen-wrapped feet tucked beneath his scarred thighs. He had refused both the stool and the dry sacking Vane had offered him. In his scarred hands, he held an iron paring knife, painstakingly peeling the blackened skins from wild parsnips they had scavenged from the underground drainage beds.
Through the ragged collar of his burlap habit, the three crystal-clear spurs of smoky quartz jutted from his right collarbone, their faceted edges catching the meager amber light of the peat fire. Dark, thick, sticky crust ringed the base of each crystal spike. But Brother Ren’s scarred face remained as placid as a frozen pond.
“A soul doesn’t eat ledgers, brother,” the monk murmured, his voice soft as falling soot. “The earth provides what the body needs to endure.”
“The earth provides typhoid and dysentery!” Vane roared, slamming his counting frame onto the clay vat. “Look at your shoulder! You’re growing a fancy crystal garden out of your own collar bone! Do you know what happens when quartz seeds in human osteocytes? The bone calcifies along the marrow line. In twelve days, your arm will drop off like a dry pine bough!”
Brother Ren didn’t blink. His scarred thumb guided the iron knife with clean, steady care, paring a ribbon of white root into a cracked clay pot. “If the arm falls, the ground will receive it. The girl breathes. That’s the only balance sheet that matters.”
“It’s not the only balance sheet!” Vane snarled, stepping across the kiln until his kidskin gloves were shaking inches from the monk’s nose. “You’re a running debt! Every wound you absorb consumes three thousand calories of body repair! If you turn yourself into a brittle quartz statue, who carries the water? Who holds the iron water gate when the court guards bring up the river dogs? Ren can’t lift ten pounds without his ribs screaming. I’m a master merchant, not a pack mule!”
“Vane,” Mira called from the pallet, her eyes half-open beneath the blanket. “Stop shouting. The kiln echoes. My ears feel full of gravel.”
Vane froze. He drew a sharp breath, smoothed the ruffles of his damp shirt cuffs. Then he turned toward her with an expression of aggrieved dignity.
“I’m attempting to introduce basic fiscal discipline to an unhinged lunatic, Mira,” Vane said. He lowered his voice to an agitated stage whisper. “Your brother—the holy one, the barefoot tragedy—wants to offer his marrow to every coughing beggar in the Wells. If he does, we’ll be bankrupt and dead before the next full moon.”
“He doesn’t want to offer it to everyone,” Mira said, turning her head slowly. Her left hand reached out and rested against the rim of the lead basin. “He wants to offer it to me.”
Silence settled over the kiln. It was broken only by the crackle of burning peat and the distant, rhythmic drip of sulfur water from the quarry ceiling.
Brother Ren laid his paring knife down upon the parsnip root. He lifted his head, his silver-flecked grey eyes meeting Mira’s gaze. In the flickering firelight, the deep, hollow lines of grief carved into his young-old face were agonizingly clear.
“I can take the root, Mira,” Brother Ren whispered. His voice was laced with a desperate, trembling tenderness. “The crystal in your shoulder... It’s only sleeping. The frozen stillness shock will wear off when the heat drops tonight. The needles will push into your heart-sac. Let me take the whole of it. My chest has carried pestilence across four provinces. My ribs know how to bend around iron.”
“No,” Mira said.
The word was small, but it struck the stone walls with the weight of an iron anvil.
Brother Ren flinched as though struck across the mouth. “Mira, you don’t understand what the glass does when it closes on the throat. It’s not sleep. It’s four hundred days of screaming behind an unmoving jaw.”
“I know what it’s,” Mira said, her voice steady and cold. “I’ve felt it since my twelfth winter. But I’m not an invoice, Brother. And I’m not a debt to be passed to your ledger.”
She lifted her right arm from beneath the blanket.
In the dim light, the smoky quartz caught the amber glow of the fire. The crystal was flawless, smooth as river ice from her knuckles to her mid-forearm, merging into her pale skin in webbed patterns of semi-clear stone. It was heavy, unchanging, and undeniably terrifying.
Yet she raised it without trembling, resting the stone wrist against her knee.
“This arm is mine,” Mira said, looking directly into the monk’s eyes. “It’s the price of Ren staying free. If I let you swallow it into your own meat, what am I? A stolen life living in an empty house. I’d look at your broken ribs every morning and hate the air I breathed. Is that what I did to you in your world?”
Brother Ren’s scarred lips parted. A single tear tracked down his hollow cheek. It caught the firelight before dropping into the dirt between his knees. He lowered his head, his forehead touching his scarred palms.
“Yes,” the monk whispered into the dust. “For seventy years, you wouldn’t speak my name.”
“Then don’t ask me to do it again,” Mira said softly. “Peel the roots. We need broth.”
Vane cleared his throat loudly. Even so, his fingers trembled slightly as he picked up his brass counting frame from the vat. He turned his back to the hearth. He stared intently at the soot-stained bricks, his voice artificially gruff.
“A sound executive decision,” Vane muttered. “A full body transference of a Stage Three glass-like condition would need ninety pounds of salt pork and six gallons of healing wine to sustain the living host. We don’t possess the working capital. The proposal is formally rejected.”
Ren watched them from the hearth, his ivory bone awl held tight in his fist.
His own chest was throbbing. The white, skin-burning blisters where the Justiciar lantern had struck him were weeping a clear, watery fluid that smelled of scorched linen. The Exclusion Axiom was a silent iron collar around his neck. The Basilica’s divine light would never heal him. Any miracle cast upon his flesh would act as a fatal poison.
He looked down at the scrap of thick parchment on his knee.
With his awl tip dipped in violet dark oak-ink, he began to sketch the outer edge of the Leper Wells, mapping the drainage chimney pipes, the water gate gates. The deep shafts that led upward into the foundations of the Basilica of Dawn.
“We have three days before the choirboys realize the lower water gate didn’t drown us,” Ren said. His voice breaking the was heavy silence. “If we stay here, we starve. If we go to the surface, my skin rots under the street lamps. We need to know what the Basilica is doing with the glass-like patients they take from these tunnels.”
Brother Ren raised his head from the floor, his tears drying against his scarred skin.
“They don’t take them to heal them, Ren,” the monk said quietly. “In my world, before the schism... The cathedral had a third basement beneath the crypts. They called it the Cistern of Miracles.”
“And what was in it?” Ren asked.
“Copper pipes,” Brother Ren said, his voice dropping to a hollow whisper. “Pipes connected to the throats of seventy dying children, siphoning the deep ring of their marrow to feed the holy light of the grand dome. The light of Dawn isn’t a gift from God, little brother. It’s a machine that burns human glass.”