Osprey, Crane’s yellow-robed apprentice, was a full-figured young woman with curly black hair. She sized Briar up through eyes a darker shade of green than his own, nodded, and jerked her head at the door. Briar followed, as did all of the other workers.
The men actually showed him the scrubbing procedure, since the women cleaned up in a separate cubicle. It worked much like the bath in the tent the day before, which was almost comforting. Briar recognized medicinal herbs and oils in the rinses as well as the soaps, ones he knew well. Better still, this washroom was warmer than the tent had been. As the sun’s early rays struck the high glass walls over the shrouding drapes, the whole building began to heat up.
Once they were clean, Briar and the young men donned treated caps, robes, masks, gloves, stockings that tied over the knee, and slippers. Everything in the boy’s size lay under a slate with his name chalked on it. Once more he got a sense of Lark and Sandry in all that he put on. It gave him heart, as it had done in Urda’s House.
“I don’t envy this lad,” a young man commented. “He has to work in the Master’s private workroom.”
“Don’t get comfortable,” advised another man, tying on his mask. “Nobody lured into his lordship’s private lair has lasted a whole day. Some of us outer workroom slaves have endured a week or more.”
They led him into a big room fitted with cabinets, braziers, counters, water kettles, and a vast tub that held steaming water by a glass wall. Once he had adjusted to the glitter of magic that lay over it all, and the heavy scent of cleansing oils and washes, Briar was fascinated. All the floors and walls were hard-glazed tile or marble except for the longest glass wall and the ceiling. When Briar knelt to inspect a drain in the floor, a youth said, “Every night when we’re gone, they fill both the inner and the outer workrooms with steam. It carries special chemicals and oils, to purify everything. All our cabinets are tight-fitted to keep water out, and we leave the glass and porcelain on the counters to be cleansed. It costs, but his Lordship dedicated his personal fortune to this greenhouse.”
Osprey told Briar who everyone was, pointing to each as she gave the name. “No sense in memorizing them, though,” she said, her black-fringed green eyes dancing over her mask. “Most of them will be gone in a few days.”
“Please, gods,” chorused her crew. They were laying out bottles, trays, measuring spoons, and countless other mysterious objects Briar couldn’t name.
“When he ejects you from the inner workroom, come have supper with us at the Table of the Useless in the dining hall,” suggested a man called Acacia. “There’s what, twenty now? We had to move two tables together last night.”
Briar stared at them. He felt as if he’d been magically transported to a foreign land where he spoke none of the language. One day ago he’d been trapped in a damp, gloomy house where people raved in fever dreams and those who cared for them did so in tight-lipped silence. Now he was in a room filled with light, air, and warmth, among people who joked as if the blue pox were inconvenient, as if there were life away from sickbeds and the biting scent of willowbark tea. Only when he noted the speed at which they worked, writing labels, filling bottles and jars, loading wire racks with glassware, scrubbing, mincing bundles of herbs, did he think these people knew that things were desperate at Urda’s House and the other infirmaries.
At a wall beside an open doorway—to Crane’s “lair,” he assumed—two gloved, robed, and masked figures labored in silence. Briar moved close to watch as they drew liquid through narrow holes in sealed jars, dripping it into inch-deep wells in a thick crystal plate.
“They have the scary job,” Osprey said quietly in Briar’s ear. When he looked at her, she explained, “They infuse the disease in those jars. The samples we get”—she pointed to stacks of familiar-looking metal boxes near the two silent workers—”are steeped in a special liquid. It draws out the essence of the disease, then fades. Only the blue pox remains. Samples from each patient go into a row of seven wells, three such rows to a tray. That goes into the other workroom for his lordship to play with. Out here we all handle the disease. People tire quickly on that task, and we don’t dare make any mistakes. Our robes aren’t airtight. One little droplet would be deadly.”
“They dish out blue pox?” whispered Briar, not sure he’d understood her properly.
“It’s not the pox that kills people, you know,” said Osprey, watching the pair as intently as Briar. “It’s the fever that comes with it.”
“I know,” he replied bleakly.
Osprey glanced at him. “Wait—didn’t someone tell me it was you and Dedicate Rosethorn—? At Urda’s House?”
Briar nodded. Slowly he walked over until he could see the liquid as it was poured. This was the enemy that killed Flick, drooling in pale gold strings from tiny glass ladles.
“Come on,” Osprey said when he moved away from the jars. “Here’s the inner workroom.” She motioned toward the open doorway next to the blue pox workers.
If the outer workroom was grand, the inner was enough to stagger a boy from Deadman’s District, once he could see through the blaze of magic that shone everywhere. Two walls were entirely glass; two were covered with valuable procelain tiles that reached from the marble floor to the glass roof. Long counters ran down both glass walls and a third of the longer tiled wall. Every other inch of wall space, even under the counters, held watertight cabinets. Only the tall cabinets against the long tiled wall had no doors. On their shelves rested the crystal trays used for blue pox samples.