The ascent from the Leper Wells into the lower parish of Oakhaven was a climb through three hundred years of stone-built decay.
Ren Vale hauled himself up the rusted iron rungs set into the upright drainage chimney, his boots slipping on wet patches of white lime-chalk. His left shoulder burned with every pull, the bruised ribs from the train crash protesting the strain, while beneath his lambskin apron, his chest throbbed with the sullen, toxic heat of the Exclusion Axiom.
Thirty paces above the quarry floor, the chimney ended at a heavy cast-iron check grate that opened into the narrow alleyway behind St. Jude’s Chapel of the Cisterns.
Ren paused three rungs below the grate, pressing his forehead against the cold, wet limestone.
The air drifting down through the iron slots was different from the stale sulfur salt water of the Wells. It was crisp with the winter night, sharp with the smell of chimney soot, horse manure, and cold mud.
And laced with something else.
An odor so sweet, so cloying, that the moment it touched Ren’s wet inner skin, his stomach convulsed in a violent, dry heave.
Myrrh. Consecrated beeswax. Frankincense boiled in silver oil.
To any ordinary citizen of the Grand Duchy, the scent was the comforting fragrance of the holy church—a sign of safe hall, order, and divine protection.
To Ren Vale, it smelled like an open vat of boiling burning acid.
His throat seized. A sharp, chemical agony flared across the milk-white blisters on his chest, sending jagged needles of pain shooting through his collarbones into his jaw. His vision swam with spots of blinding violet light. His pulse spiked to a wild, fluttering rhythm in his ears.
Exclusion Axiom #2: Zero Divine Grace.
The law was total. By burning the path of the holy physician to manifest Brother Ren, Ren had cut his soul from the sacred hum of the Basilica. Consecrated ground didn’t merely reject him. It actively attacked his biology, treating his nervous system as an invasive rotting rot.
Ren gritted his teeth until his back teeth creaked. He reached into his satchel, pulled out a thick linen rag soaked in bitter animal fat and ox-gall, and tied it firmly over his nose and mouth. The foul, oily grease formed a crude clockwork barrier against the airborne sacred incense, dulling the sense shock enough for his lungs to drag in ragged, shallow breaths.
He pushed the iron grate upward.
The metal groaned, lifting two inches. Ren scanned the alley.
It was an hour before midnight. A freezing sleet was falling, turning the cobblestones into sheets of black glass. St. Jude’s Chapel loomed over the alley like a crouching stone toad. Its stained-glass lancet windows were dark, its slate roof shedding cold water into rusted copper gutters.
Across the alley sat the target. A low, timber-framed apothecary shed with a battered shingle bearing the painted sign of an iron mortar and pestle.
Ren hauled himself through the opening, dropping the grate silently back into its stone collar. He crossed the slick cobblestones in three swift, silent strides. His back was pressed against the sodden clapboards of the apothecary shed.
He tapped on the rear delivery hatch: two short raps, a pause, then three quick taps—the universal knocking code of the Low-Khorat black market conservators.
A slide scraped back. A pair of watery, suspicious eyes peered through the iron-barred wicket.
“Shop’s closed,” a dry, raspy voice hissed from within. “No sales after the evening bell. The Justiciars are quartered at the Red Boar. They hang anyone caught trading without an Inquest permit.”
“I don’t need herbs, Deacon Martha,” Ren whispered through his greased rag. He kept his hood low. “I need chemical solvents. Four ounces of rectified grain alcohol, two ounces of distilled gum arabic, and half a pound of dry sulfur powder.”
The eyes behind the wicket narrowed. “That’s scribe’s stock. Not apothecary goods. Who sent you?”
Ren reached into his apron and drew out his Reforged Ivory Bone Awl. He turned it in the shadows. That let the silver metal ring catch the dim light of the alley street-lantern.
The deacon gasped softly. “A keeper. An unlicensed rat from the capital. I heard Voss’s train went off the rails into the Blackwater. They say a scribe stole something from the Contraband Archive.”
“I’m paying in coin, Deacon,” Ren said, his voice flat and dangerous. “Three animal fat candles, consecrated church stock, four hours’ burn time each. And this.”
Ren slid his hand into his satchel and withdrew a small, folded piece of parchment. It was a blank, authenticated tithe-exemption receipt he had lifted from the Voss sanatorium files, complete with an un-cancelled office stamp.
The deacon’s breath hitched. In Oakhaven, an exemption receipt was worth six months of grain taxes.
The bolt on the lower hatch slid back. “Get inside. Quickly. The sleet is freezing the mud.”
Ren stepped into the cramped, overheated rear workshop of the apothecary.
The air inside was thick with the scent of drying belladonna, bitter pine-resin, and alcohol. A single animal fat lamp burned upon a scarred wooden counter littered with glass retorts and brass scales. Behind the counter stood Deacon Martha. A hunched, elderly man with nicotine-stained fingers and a frayed black wool cassock.
The old man moved toward a shelf lined with dark glass bottles. “Rectified spirit is expensive. Ninety percent proof. It’ll strip the varnish off a church pew.”
“I need it to clean wounds,” Ren said, leaning his back against the timber door.
The deacon paused, turning with a dark glass bottle in his hand. His gaze drifted down toward Ren’s chest.
Ren’s linen tunic was damp with sleet. Where the wet cloth pressed against his skin, the outline of the milk-white blisters was clearly visible. But worse than the blisters was the reaction occurring between Ren’s body and the room.
On the wooden counter, sitting beside the brass scales, was a shallow stone stoup filled with Holy Water, placed there by the church inspectors to bless all medicines before sale.
As Ren stood three paces away, the water in the stoup began to tremble.
Hssssssss.
A thin wisp of acrid, white vapor rose from the surface of the holy water, as though a red-hot iron had been plunged into the stone bowl. The clear water curdled, turning cloudy and grey, releasing a faint smell of burnt sulphur.
Deacon Martha froze. His watery old eyes bulged with sheer, animal terror.
He dropped the bottle of spirits onto the counter. His hands shook wildly as he backed away toward the rear wall. His knuckles knocked over a rack of glass vials with a bone-shaking clatter.
“God preserve us,” the deacon wheezed, his face turning the color of skimmed milk. “You... The holy water is boiling. The grace is curdling in your presence!”
“Give me the spirits, Martha,” Ren said, his voice dropping into an icy, lethal register.
“You’re an Anathema!” the old man shrieked, reaching toward an iron bell-pull on the wall that connected to the chapel guardroom. “The Choir of Dawn spoke of this! A walking void! A soul that devours the light!”
Ren didn’t hesitate.
Before the old man’s trembling fingers could close around the bell-rope, Ren lunged across the counter. His ivory bone awl struck the oak boards with a bone-shaking crack, its silver needle piercing the wooden frame a fraction of an inch from the deacon’s wrist.
Ren leaned across the table, pulling down his greased rag.
His face was pale, his silver-flecked eyes burning with cold, desperate fury. Beneath his open collar, the blisters on his skin were weeping white lymph. It smoked faintly in the presence of the consecrated chapel walls.
“If you pull that rope,” Ren whispered, his breath hot and ragged, “the Justiciars will come. They will find me. But they will also find the forged tithe receipts in your locked floorboard, the contraband opium in your mortar. The four barrels of un-taxed church grain behind your woodpile. I’m an indentured keeper, Deacon. I read ledgers for a living. I knew what you were stealing before I crossed your threshold.”
The deacon’s hand trembled on the rope. Sweat poured down his wrinkled jowls.
“Take the bottle,” the old man whimpered, his eyes fixed on the silver metal ring of the awl. “Take the sulfur. Just... Get out. Don’t touch me. If you touch me, the grace will rot my bones.”
“The exemption receipt is on the counter,” Ren said, his voice flat.
He swept the heavy bottle of ninety-percent grain alcohol and the tin canister of sulfur powder into his satchel with his left hand. He withdrew his bone awl from the wood, slid it back into his belt. Then he backed toward the rear door without turning his eyes from the scared apothecary.
He pushed the door open into the freezing sleet.
The cold air hit him like a physical blow. It cleared his burning lungs of the choking scent of myrrh. He sprinted across the black cobblestones, dropped through the open iron grate. Then he pulled the cast-iron frame shut over his head with a dull, hollow clang.
He slid down the wet iron rungs into the darkness of the Leper Wells. Then, Ren looked at his right hand.
The skin across his knuckles was bright red, covered in fresh, burning hives from the surrounding holiness of the chapel workshop.
Vane was right. Brother Ren was right.
The surface world was closed to him forever. There was no going back to the sunlight, no walking the paved streets of the upper cities. He was trapped in the underground dark, a fugitive whose very flesh was an affront to the gods of the realm.
He clutched the bottle of alcohol to his ribs. Then he dropped into the sulfur muck of the lower sump, heading back toward the kiln.