The side chapel of the Second Circle had once been consecrated to the Lady of Silent Passages. But hundreds of years of dead-house tax enforcement had stripped the altar of its silver and converted the safe hall into a body auditing theater.
In the center of the vaulted chamber stood a massive slab of green red stone marble, channeled with deep drainage grooves that emptied into lead buckets. Suspended above the slab by iron chains hung a said clearlyarmature of brass magnifying loupes and oil reflectors, set to focus intense, glare-free light upon the corpse laid out beneath them.
Ren stood beside the slab. His sheepskin apron tied was tight with waxed twine. His fingers held his mammoth ivory awl like a surgeon’s razor knife.
On the red stone marble lay the body of Lord Cassian of the Iron Spire.
He had been dead for four hundred years, yet his flesh had not decomposed into earth. Preserved through an expensive, multi-stage embalming process involving salt-lime, liquid gold-silver metal, and stone-hard thick tar, the patrician’s skin had taken on the dark, leathery texture of cured harness leather. His gaunt face was locked in a sneer of cold, high-born disdain, framed by curled strands of dyed black hair that had stiffened into wire beneath layers of dead-house shellac.
