The Weight of Limestone

“Two rival anatomists, one chair, and a nun who brings them corpses that are still breathing.”

At the College of San Lázaro, an old lazaretto on a Galician estuary that reeks of quicklime and four thieves' vinegar, the anatomist Brais Mújica de Lema opens a corpse and finds his own signature cut and, beside the spine, a sliver of limestone inscribed in the hand of Julián Caunedo, the rival who has been gone from Galicia for seven years. The next day Caunedo returns to contest the only chair. Both men hide galvanic experiments the Church would send to the stake, and Sister Benigna de la Maza, the nun who supplies their dead, keeps both their notebooks.