The rain in the city of Ghalis did not wash away the filth; it merely gave it a new sheen. Dr. Silas Vance adjusted the heavy leather straps of his beaked mask, breathing in the suffocating aroma of dried lavender, cloves, and myrrh stuffed into the beak. It was meant to keep the miasma at bay, but Silas knew better. The sickness ravaging Ghalis did not travel in the foul air. It was in the water, the soil, the very bedrock of the city. They called it the Chime.
Silas stood in the center of a squalid tenement room, his heavy rubber apron slick with rain and darker fluids. On the bed lay the baker’s wife. She was screaming, a high, continuous sound that grated against the stone walls. Her right arm had ceased to be flesh. From the fingertips to the elbow, it had calcified into a jagged, translucent structure resembling rose quartz. The crystals were still growing, pushing through the skin from the marrow outward in a spray of blood and shredded muscle. When the shards rubbed against one another, they produced a sickening, melodic tinkling sound. The Chime.
“Hold her down,” Silas barked to the weeping baker.
Silas withdrew his surgical bone saw. Medical tinctures, leeches, and prayers had failed for months. The only known treatment for the Chime was immediate, brutal amputation before the crystalline root reached the heart.
The baker threw his weight over his wife’s chest. Silas applied a tourniquet high on her bicep, ignoring her thrashing. He placed the teeth of the saw against her healthy flesh, just above the crystal line, and began to cut. The woman’s screams intensified, but Silas detached his mind from the horror. He sawed through meat, hit the bone, and bore down. Suddenly, the saw caught. A loud CRACK echoed in the small room.
Silas pulled the saw back. The teeth of the heavy iron blade were snapped off. He peered into the bloody wound. The bone itself had already turned to solid, impenetrable diamond. It was too late. The infection had raced up her skeleton.
“Merciful gods,” Silas whispered, stepping back.
The woman’s screams abruptly stopped. Her eyes rolled back into her head, and a violent tremor seized her body. With a horrific tearing sound, a massive cluster of glowing pink crystals erupted from her sternum, shattering her ribcage outward. She went limp, the soft tinkling of her newly crystallized organs echoing in the silent room.
The baker collapsed to his knees, weeping into his hands. Silas packed his ruined tools in silence. He left a vial of poppy tears for the man’s grief and stepped out into the pouring rain.
He moved quickly through the winding, empty streets, paranoia gnawing at his mind. He was not hurrying to escape the rain. He was hurrying because his young apprentice, an orphan boy named Lior, had begun coughing up fine, glassy dust that very morning. Silas had traced the infection back to a single source: the aqueducts flowing from beneath the Grand Cathedral of the Weeping Saint. The church had sealed its doors weeks ago, abandoning the flock. Silas knew the answers, and perhaps the cure, lay within those sacred, forbidden walls. He would save Lior, even if he had to carve the cure out of the High Bishop’s chest.
