The smell of boiling pig animal fat, sulfur, and crushed astragalus root was worse than the demonic foul fog.
Lin Ke was flat on his back, bolted into a heavy iron-wood medical cot in the private solitude ward of the Black Rock Medical Sanctum.
Four heavy ox-hide straps pinned his chest, waist, and thighs to the thick frame. His left arm—from the tips of his blackened fingers to the crest of his shoulder—was packed inside a three-inch-thick sleeve of pungent, bubbling black herbal paste, wrapped tightly in coarse willow-bark splints and tied down with hemp twine.
His right shoulder was locked still in an iron brace that held the arm tight against his ribs.
Across the room, standing beside a smoking copper fire bowl, Apothecary He was stirring a pot of tar-like decoction with a three-foot iron rod.
The old man looked like a demon himself. His eyes were bloodshot, his beard was singed from blowing on fire bowl coals. His hemp tunic was stiff with dried blood, lye, and herbal soot.
“I need to inspect the water chute boilers,” Lin Ke said, his voice flat, testing the tension of the chest straps. “The repair crews are using standard river-clay mortar on the high-pressure steam junctions. If the clay vitrifies under two hundred pounds of pressure, the water chute will blowout by tomorrow evening.”
