The cellar smelled of sour bitter pine-resin, drying lye, and decomposing meat.
It was dug deep into the cold shale beneath the Logistics Ward, forty feet down where the mountain’s surrounding heat never pierced. Two animal fat lamps flickered on iron brackets. He cast yellow, greasy shadows across three long rows of wooden cots.
Fifty bodies lay on those cots, covered in raw, unwhitened hemp shrouds.
Meng Shan lowered Lin Ke onto a scarred cutting-open bench. His heavy hands shook slightly with tiredness. Every breath Lin Ke took sent a sharp, stabbing bolt of agony through his shattered left collarbone, the broken bone ends grinding against each other beneath his skin like jagged gravel.
“Sit still, boy,” Apothecary He snarled from the gloom. He carried a wooden tray lined with iron needles, coarse hemp cord, and two flat wooden splints. “If you move three inches, that bone fragment pierces your subclavian artery. I’ll have to put a shroud over your face before the tea gets cold.”
“How many died in the freeze?” Lin Ke whispered through cracked lips, his body shuddering with reflex freezing tremors.
“None,” the old apothecary replied coldly, dumping a bowl of gray, foul-smelling paste onto the bench. “Not a single one died of the cold.”
