The damp cellar smelled of stale canal mud and rotting pine shavings.
Water dripped from a rusted iron pipe overhead, hitting a chipped baked-clay basin with a rhythmic, hollow plink. Every third drop splashed cold, salty moisture onto Lin Ke’s bare forearms, chilling the skin where his outward glass spirit veins ran close to the surface.
Their allotted Conclave quarters in the lower district—the Rust Market—was a decommissioned coal cellar beneath a three-story brick tenement.
There were no spirit-stone fire bowls. No fragrant cedar screens. Only rough-hewn stone walls sweating saltpeter, two greasy oil lamps that hissed with poor-grade animal fat, and the distant, grinding rumble of the city’s drainage pumps churning wastewater beneath the floorboards.
Apothecary He sat in the corner on an overturned nail keg, grinding dried willow bark with a dark rock pestle. The old healer’s fingers were stained dark yellow from tobacco and resin, his bushy gray brows knit in a permanent scowl.
“Seven days,” He grumbled, not looking up from his mortar. “Seven days until the trial court guards drag us out by our heels. And the boy brings us to a flooded basement where the dampness will give me marrow-rot before the matches even begin.”
