Master Apothecary Marrow picked up his steel lancet with hands that trembled so wildly the blade rattled against the copper dish.
Tomas Reed didn’t blink. His eyes, trained by nine years of watching dockweight scales and calculating five-pound discrepancies in fifty-ton grain barges, were locked not upon the blade, but upon the heavy black wool of Marrow’s right sleeve.
The cuff was wide, cut in the sweeping academic fashion of the Bellwether Medical College. But around the wrist, the wool hung with an unnatural, weighted stiffness. A man who spent his life carrying cloth knew how fabric draped. Wool lined with linen fell in soft, three-sided folds. This cuff hung rigid, held outward by a tubular curved armature of light brass wire sewn into the inner lining.
“Hold your hand steady, carrier,” Marrow muttered through his teeth, his breath sour with stale wine and fear.
Tomas laid his calloused right thumb upon the clean timber of the table.
Marrow struck with the lancet. The steel point pierced the skin, and a bright, ball-shaped droplet of dark blood welled up on the pad of Tomas’s thumb.
Marrow reached for one of Tomas’s clean glass test tubes. He dropped three drops of his clear, colorless burning acid wash into the tube, then held it beneath Tomas’s bleeding thumb. It caught the blood droplet.
