The Cistern Pact

Sister Benigna's note had arrived at dawn, folded inside the breviary the nun handed back to Brais in the refectory without a word: an hour, eleven at night, and a place, the old cistern of the Poor Clares. It did not say what for. It did not need to.

Had anyone measured the distance from the orchard porch to the mouth of the cistern—though no one in his right mind walked the grounds of the Poor Clares with a surveyor's tape—he would have reckoned a depth of nearly thirty yards of blind stonework. The descent was made by feel, holding the skirts of one's frock coat to keep from brushing the corners where saltpeter bloomed like a whitish, damp down. The spiral staircase had twenty-four granite steps worn hollow in the middle; on the ninth, a crack in the edge forced one to throw all one's weight onto the left leg, a mechanical stumble Julián Caunedo performed with a dry click of his crippled knee. Neither of them lit the dark lantern until they had reached the brick floor. The iron-bound oak door that closed off the dry cistern had no ordinary keyhole, only a wrought bolt with three filed notches that required lifting the leaf with one's knee while sliding the latch to the left.

"The hinge still scrapes," Caunedo said in a low voice, wiping his upper lip with the grimy sleeve of his English broadcloth coat.

"Because the damp rots the wood and widens the frame," Brais replied, testing the roughness of the iron with the pad of his index finger. His fingertip was so calloused by alum that he could barely feel the edge of the metal.

"They ought to grease it with lard."

"The nuns don't waste lard on what they can't see."

The cistern no longer held a single drop of water, but it kept the muddy, cold density granite retains for centuries. In the center, where the settling pit made a round hollow three feet deep, they had set up a packing table on two wobbly stools. The stagnant air did not smell of carrion, but of the suffocating mixture of quicklime seething silently against the green slime of the walls and the four thieves' vinegar the lay sisters soaked their rags in so as not to vomit during vigils. Around the edges, huddled against the arches as if seeking the shelter of the shadows, rested eleven coffins of rough, unplaned pine, without crosses or baptismal marks of any kind. On their lids a crust of white dust, thick as dried brine, blurred the contours of the wood.

The echo took far too long to return.

Sister Benigna de la Maza was not praying. She stood beside a cast-iron brazier that smoked lazily with holm-oak charcoal and dried rosemary, her hands hidden in the sleeves of her ash-colored habit. If she felt the cold rising through the soles of their boots—Brais's insteps ached after the walk across the stony ground—she gave no sign of it. She merely shifted her gaze from the shadows of the arch to Brais's hands.

"You're late, Don Brais," she said, and her voice did not echo in the vault, deadened by the lime as if the stone itself were lined with felt. "The magistrate's coachman has had to circle the convent wall three times to avoid the night watch."

"Estuary mud holds back the wheels of any carriage," Caunedo retorted, stepping forward two paces. "And we don't charge for hurrying, Sister. We charge for sewing up what others tear."

Sister Benigna did not blink.

It is worth noting—a detail Brais took at the time for a mere domestic oversight, and which memory would later place in a harsher light—that on a walnut chest lay two notebooks bound in marbled paper. One had its corners chewed by silverfish and its spine reinforced with black sheepskin: his own protocols for nerve stimulation, the same notebook the Visitor had carried off under his arm the night before. The other, wrapped in oilcloth stained with copper rust and tied with greasy twine, unquestionably belonged to Caunedo; Brais recognized the cramped, angular hand on the label, and from the way Caunedo stared at it he knew it had not been handed over willingly. The nun ran the tip of a pair of forge tongs along the edges of the covers, barely a caress of blackened metal on dry paper.

"The boy has not yet turned eighteen," she murmured, nodding toward the back of the cistern, where a stretcher covered with a raw linen cloth rested on two zinc tubs. "He died at the hour of none. Consumption emptied his chest before the priest could give him the viaticum with due unction. The magistrate will not let the hearse cross the bridge to the San Jerónimo vault with a carcass that coughs up blood until after it has expired. Not while the entail depends on a last breath attested before the chapter's scrivener."

Brais went over to the linen. The cloth was stiff, steeped in that pasty cold flesh gives off when the humors have stopped but the animal heat has not yet left the deep viscera. When he lifted a corner, the murky light of the lamp revealed the boy's sharp profile: the pinched nostrils, the yellow wax of the temples and the grimace of suffocation that pulmonary consumption leaves behind. The lividity in his back was only beginning to settle into purplish blotches.

"It's impossible," Brais said. "The alveoli must be collapsed with tubercular caseation. If we put the galvanic probes into the brachial plexus to force the chest to contract, all we'll do is tear the intercostal muscles. There'll be no bellows. It will sound like a split wineskin."

"Your colleague has fewer anatomical scruples, Don Brais," the nun replied, keeping the tongs on the spine of his notes. "And he knows what fuel for the Holy Office's stove costs."

Caunedo did not look at the nun.

He kept his eyes fixed on his own fingers, slowly bending and unbending his right thumb, as if testing a joint that threatened to lock at any moment. Brais knew that gesture all too well; it was the butcher's reckoning of whether the knife will reach the marrow before the edge dulls. If Caunedo had suspected that Brais carried the purified salt of antimony in his pocket—

"The bellows can be mended with a silver cannula in the trachea and a pitch plug in the glottis," Caunedo said suddenly, in the drawling tone he used in lecture disputes. "You blow spirit of nitre into him before closing the battery circuit. It will be enough for him to open his eyes and prop himself on one elbow when the scrivener pokes his nose in at the carriage door. Two minutes of voluntary spasm. Three at most. After that, let the earth swallow him if it likes."

"And if the eyelids don't answer the facial nerve?" Brais asked, turning to face him. "You know perfectly well consumption burns the grey matter before the collapse. You'll get nothing but a hideous convulsion, a lockjaw that will shatter his teeth in front of the witnesses."

Sister Benigna held the tongs to the bed of embers. The iron tip already glowed a dull cherry red beneath the soot.

"Faith demands clean miracles; necessity settles for breathing monsters," the nun pronounced, and for the first time that night her thin lips parted in a straight line that was neither contempt nor pity, only cold convent accounting. "You have until the bell for matins to wire the boy's tendons and give him back enough pulse to hold a pen. If by dawn the magistrate does not have his heir's signature on the sealed document, these two ledgers will burn in this very pit, and the Chancery bailiffs will learn what flesh you fed the lazaretto's crucibles."

No one answered.

The only sound in the dry cistern was the thick, distant dripping of cadaveric grease seeping from one of the upper vats, a rhythmic tick on the zinc, as if measuring the time they had left before they turned to ash.