The dressing of the wound on the stone terrace of Station Three was an exercise in cold, procedural endurance.
Nessa Vale had built a small fire of dry pine shavings inside an iron grease-bucket, using the flames to boil a pint of fresh water from their canteen. She washed the torn forearm step by step, flushing away the sulfur grit and clotting blood until the yellow, shredded ends of the flexor carpi radialis were clearly visible against the white bone of the radius.
Tomas didn’t cry out. He sat with his back propped against the stonework low roof wall. He gripped his ash quarterstaff with his uninjured right hand until his knuckles were white as animal fat. His jaw was clenched so hard his back teeth ached.
Every touch of the boiled vinegar was like a branding iron laid against the raw nerve endings. It sent sharp, electric spasms through his neck and shoulder. Sweat poured down his face, dripping from his chin onto his soaked wool coat.
Sile Rook sat beside him, his own burned shoulder wrapped tight in lime bandages, using his right hand to plane two four-inch splints from a dry cedar baulk with his pocket knife.
“I’ve seen this wound twenty times in the border wars, Tomas,” Sile said, his gravelly voice low and steady. “Hooked blades don’t just cut. They chew. The tendon fibers are torn like frayed hemp rope. Even if the best bone-setter in the High Spire stitches the skin with gold wire, the gristle will heal into a hard, stiff knot.”
Nessa placed the cedar splints on either side of Tomas’s forearm, wrapping them with six layers of boiled linen and securing the assembly with waxed leather thongs. She adjusted the tension until the wrist was locked at a fifteen-degree upward angle—the functional resting position of a porter’s hand.
“Sile is right, Tomas,” Nessa said. She looked into his eyes with unsparing, cold and exact honesty. “You’ll permanently lose thirty to forty percent of your grip strength in this hand. You’ll never be able to close the middle and ring fingers into a tight fist again. In cold weather or when the damp rises from the river, the scar tissue will ache down to the bone surface.”
Tomas looked down at the braced arm. The hand looked strange, pale, and alien, resting in its cradle of cedar and oiled linen like a broken tool. He tried to flex his fingers.
The thumb responded, moving with stiff, stubborn friction. The index finger bent halfway, trembling with painful strain. The middle and ring fingers barely twitched, held captive by the cut tendon cords beneath the leather wrap.
Across his field of vision, the amber slate of Last Claim materialized, not with a triumph, but with the cold, impartial bookkeeping of physical law:
The ledger recorded the truth of human carriage. Advancement in this world was not bought with easy magic. It was paid for in calories, joint strain, and permanent body loss.
“Sixty-five percent,” Tomas whispered, his voice steadying as the first nausea passed. “A sixty-pound load carried thirty-five pounds on the right and twenty-five on the left. A cart driver balances the wagon with what he has, not with what he wished was in the bed.”
He reached out with his uninjured right hand, gripped the low roof wall stones, and pulled himself to his feet.
His boots bit into the granite flags. His knees trembled for three heartbeats, then locked solid. The weight of his pack frame settled against his lower-back spine, balanced by the chest stay.
“The well is waiting,” Tomas said, nodding toward the dark drain tube shaft. “Lower the lantern, Nessa.”
Before allowing him to step over the granite coping of the well-mouth, Nessa and Sile helped Tomas re-rig his leather haul-harness to compensate for the crippled left forearm. Taking a three-foot length of flat, one-inch saddle webbing from the spare tackle bag, Nessa fashioned a figure-eight wrist loop that passed behind Tomas’s braced radius, crossed over the heel of his palm. Then she ended in a forged iron cargo-ring resting against his working left thumb. By shifting the main load-bearing point from the cut finger tendons directly up into the intact bone structure of his elbow and shoulder girdle, the webbing allowed him to snub a taut rope or steady a ladder rung without pulling against the fresh silk stitches.
Tomas tested the new rigging by hooking the iron ring around the cross-bar of the well’s rusted check cage and leaning his full hundred-and-eighty-pound body weight backward against the strap. A dull, deep throb radiated from the bruised bone-skin of his radius up into his armpit. That made the sweat bead fresh along his temples. But the cedar splints held the wrist rigid at fifteen degrees and the leather webbing took the strain without slipping a fraction of an inch. Around the wharves of Bellwether, veteran draymen who had lost fingers to crane chains or barrel chimes worked for twenty years with just such a strap-and-ring harness. A carrier’s trade didn’t end when the flesh was scarred, so long as the spine and the balance remained true.
Sile Rook dragged a heavy timber baulk across the granite flags with his uninjured right arm, wedging it tightly against the base of the iron check cage to serve as a snubbing post for the forty-foot tarred hemp hoist-line. His left shoulder was locked still beneath the thick white crust of wet lime plaster and vinegar-soaked linen. Even so, the old watch captain looped the running end of the rope around the timber with a single-handed boatman’s hitch, bracing his hobnailed boot against the low roof wall so he and Nessa could haul the dead-weight together once Tomas freed the instrument below. Every breath in the sulfur fog tasted of boiled vinegar, scorched wool, and wet iron. But the three of them worked around the open well-head with the silent, linked care of a canal repair crew under flood conditions.
Before stepping onto the top iron rung, Tomas knelt by his open haversack and rearranged his tools for single-handed access at the bottom of the shaft. He lashed his three-pound mason’s hammer to a short leather wrist-lanyard on his right cuff. He tucked the cold chisel point-down into the outer breast pocket of his wool coat where his right fingers could draw it without fumbling. Then he clipped a heavy forged carter’s cargo-hook directly to the front D-ring of his belt harness. In a four-foot stonework metal tube five feet below the terrace floor, there would be no room to set tools down in the anaerobic silt and no second pair of hands to steady the chisel. Meanwhile, he snapped the cast-iron mounting pins.
At the edge of the landing steps, Sile used his boot to shove Dren’s abandoned flatboat twenty yards out into the sluggish southward current so that no returning mercenary could use its hull as cover against the platform, after first salvaging a coil of dry hemp cord and a spare horn lantern from its bow locker. The old watchman then settled back against the granite coping with his hooked pruning blade resting across his sound right thigh, his gray face grim and watchful as he paid out the first six feet of slack on Tomas’s chest-line.
Nessa looked at him for a long moment, seeing the total, unbending resolve in his gray eyes. She didn’t argue. A true land-mapper respected the load-bearing limits of stone and the unbending spirit of the carrier.
She picked up the bullseye lantern, lit the wick from the grease-bucket. Then she stepped to the edge of the well.
“Sounding depth is nine feet,” she said. “The bottom is silted, but the bronze housing is visible.”