The Weight of the Limestone

The quicklime did not flare; it began to seethe from below, with a lazy murmur like thick stew at the bottom of an earthenware jar. On the split table, the blue flame went on consuming the alum without raising a single wisp of smoke, but that laboratory prodigy had stopped mattering to them. The only real thing was the blow on the other side of the gate: an oak beam dropping plumb between two forged iron staples. Without fury, without running. Sister Benigna de la Maza had shot the bar with the same methodical hand she used to lock the pantry after counting the jars of preserves. Then her footsteps died away down the corridor, swallowed by the stone.

Julián Caunedo did not let go of the copper forceps at once. His frock coat sleeve was rolled up to the elbow and his fingers were rigid on the metal. There was no panic in his face; there was the offended stupefaction of the official who has a beadle slam the window shut in his face. A professor of his rank could not conceive that a nun in wooden clogs might close off his academic career with a simple oak bar.

"There has to be another latch on the outside," he muttered, without looking at Brais. "Nuns never build anything without a second right of way. It's a matter of cloister ordinance."

"There's no latch but the drainage pit, Julián," Brais replied. "And you know as well as I do where that ditch comes out at high tide."

The air no longer came easily into the chest. It weighed of damp earth and four thieves' vinegar, stirred together with the alkaline vapor rising from the central pit, where three barrowloads of lime were waiting for the seasonal whitewash. On a wobbly stool, Brais's morocco portfolio, with Caunedo's notebook inside it, was beginning to gather a fine white dust.

Caunedo opened his hand. The forceps fell onto the flagstone with a copper tinkle and rolled until they stopped against the toe of his polished boot.

"You left the three-pointed compass in the lower sacristy," he said suddenly, with an absurd harshness, wholly detached from the barred door. "The one with the ivory arms. It'll be spotted with verdigris in this damp."

"It was patinated brass, Julián. Let it go."

"It was Dieppe ivory, you fool. I bought it at Donato's auction."

He put his hand to his waistcoat and rubbed his watch chain with his thumb, a mechanical habit of the cloisters whenever a clerk was slow to deliver a document. Beside the pit, the alum brine kept dripping from the waxed sheet: a regular tap on the bottom of the zinc bucket, ever more widely spaced, as if the liquid refused to let go of the dry muscle.

It was not heat yet. Nor suffocation.

It was the weight of the living stone waking as it swallowed rot.

"The tide draft," Caunedo said, and his voice cracked on a high note, like chalk screeching on a slate. "The runoff trapdoor is under the third table. Only one person can slip through before the vault fills with vapor."

"Two can fit if we push the slab together."

"Two cannot fit, boy. Your vanity won't fit alongside my files."

He threw himself on Brais with the furious clumsiness of an old animal cornered in a slaughterhouse. His nails, yellowed by tartar baths, dug into the lapel of Brais's frock coat with a sound of tearing cloth. They both fell against the rim of the pit. The lime rose in a warm cloud, fine as flour but searing as crushed embers, closing their throats at the first gasp. Brais tried to push him off by the jaw with his palm, but the numbness in his fingertips—the flaw that had been ruining his scalpel work since winter—kept him from getting any grip on that sweating face.

They rolled among the beechwood trestles. Caunedo was crushing Brais's breastbone with his knees, groping with his right hand for the handle of the rib saw that had been left jammed halfway through the ribcage on the next table. The metal screeched in the dry cartilage and the vibration rang through the vaults like a cracked bell.

"Let go, you lout!" he bellowed, spitting grey phlegm onto Brais's neck. "I have the prothonotary's signature! They won't bury me with hospital meat!"

Brais managed to pin his wrist against the stone ledge. They panted a few fingers apart, breathing the same foul air that burned their throats with a taste of pure lye.

"Shut up and push!" Brais shouted into his face, coughing up blood and limestone. "Push the slab or we'll both cook in here!"

Rage lent a disproportionate strength to his flabby shoulders. He tried to heave himself up by throwing all his weight onto the tilted table, without noticing that the cracked marble top rested on two trestles eaten through by saltpeter. There was a dry crack, like a green branch snapping under snow.

The second body—the waxy trunk, hardened by brine, that lay on the next table waiting for the second trial of the examination—slid heavily down the tilted slab.

It did not fall toward the aisle.

It pitched sideways with the stiffness of an oak timber and landed dead on the iron trapdoor that led to the tidal sewer. The impact jammed the exit under ten arrobas of mummified flesh and splintered planks. As the base gave way, the skirt of Caunedo's frock coat caught on the hook from which the zinc bucket hung. Brais saw him flailing in the white void, clawing for a hold on the smooth stone that was already sweating drops of acid condensation.

A slide of white dust buried him to the waist at the bottom of the open pit.

"Brais!" he howled, and his cry had nothing left of lectern or rank, only the bare nakedness of a man who feels the quicklime biting through the soaked wool of his breeches.

Brais tried to take a step toward the rim, but the sole of his boot slid on the cadaveric grease spattered across the flagstones. The air in the room was no longer enough to fill two chests.

The trapdoor stayed motionless beneath the stranger's body.

And in the gloom that the lime was turning a sepulchral white, nothing remained that could be called help.