Chapter 4: The Hand She Mustn't See
By the time they came out of the mine, dawn had already broken.
The instant sunlight hit his face, the cat merchant squinted and his ears folded back. He had spent too long underground, and his eyes hadn't adjusted yet. Gran, on the other hand, barely reacted. Dwarves were used to switching between light and darkness.
“You smell,” Gran said.
The cat merchant lowered his head and sniffed his cloak. It carried the sweet, cloying scent of the living ore vein, mixed with the sour tang of stone-eating bug gastric fluid and the peculiar, old-drain stink of Ghostspring Moss. He wrinkled his nose.
“I need to process the ingredients before I head back.” He patted his leather satchel. “Stone-eating bug gastric fluid won't keep for long, and neither will Ghostspring Moss. If I don't process them within six hours of harvesting them, they'll lose their potency.”
“How long will it take?”
“Two hours.” He paused. “But I need somewhere quiet, preferably sealed off. Lend me a corner of your forge.”
“The forge is full of people.”
“Then the storeroom behind your house.” The cat merchant's tone was casual, but his gaze at Gran was not. “Gran, you'd better not watch what I do next.”
Gran was silent for the length of several steps.
“My granddaughter's life is more important than my curiosity,” he said.
The cat merchant gave a faint smile. “You say that every time, but you sneak a look every time.”
“Not this time.”
They returned to Gran's house. The cat merchant went to check on the girl first. She was still asleep, her breathing even finer than yesterday, like a spider's thread on the verge of snapping. He pressed his fingers to her pulse and counted several beats, his brow drawing together slightly.
“We don't have time to take it slow.” He stood up, his tone changing—quick and precise, like he was cutting medicinal ingredients. “Where's the storeroom?”
Gran led him to a stone chamber behind the house. Mineral samples and old tools were piled inside. It wasn't large, but it would do. The cat merchant set his leather satchel on the floor and took things out one by one: a copper box, an oilcloth bundle, empty bottles, a short-handled scraping knife, and something he hadn't brought out before—a palm-sized stone mortar with fine runes carved into its base.
“Close the door,” he said without turning around.
Gran pulled the stone door shut.
The instant it closed, the cat merchant's expression changed.
Not into seriousness—it brightened.
His eyes gave off a faint glow in the dim stone chamber, his pupils narrowing into vertical slits. The two tails beneath his cloak rose at the same time, and the others underneath moved as well, but this time he didn't hold them down. No one could see him. He didn't need to hide.
He opened the copper box. The stone-eating bug gastric fluid lay quietly inside, yellow-green, with a layer of extremely fine bubbles slowly bursting across its surface. The wax-bone membrane had already been eaten nearly paper-thin by the corrosiveness. He had to hurry.
He opened the oilcloth. Ghostspring Moss's gray-green color looked like a patch of moldy skin in the stone chamber. He leaned closer and sniffed it—rank, with a hint of sweetness, the scent of death fermenting.
“Not bad quality,” he murmured, with a kind of pleasure in his voice that would have made anyone else uncomfortable. “The black edge is very even. That means the death energy it absorbed was continuous, not the result of a massive one-time death... Slowly dying, little by little.”
He placed the Ghostspring Moss in the stone mortar and gently crushed it with the back of the scraping knife. He couldn't use much force. The moss's fibrous structure was fragile, and crushing it too finely would destroy its active ingredients. His movements were extraordinarily precise, every stroke using exactly the same amount of pressure, like he was playing a rhythm only he could hear.
Once it had been ground into a fine powder, he used the tip of the scraping knife to pick up a little and rubbed it between his fingers before putting it in his mouth to taste.
Bitter. Then numb. Then a deep, bone-seeping coolness.
He nodded.
The next step was the most crucial. He added the Ghostspring Moss powder to the gastric fluid in the copper box bit by bit, stirring three times with the scraping knife after each addition—twice clockwise, once counterclockwise. The gastric fluid slowly changed from yellow-green to gray-white. The bubbles vanished, and the liquid became like watered-down milk.
“Done.” He poured the prepared medicinal solution into an empty bottle. The glass made no hissing sound—the Ghostspring Moss had neutralized the gastric fluid's corrosiveness. He held the bottle up to the ore lamp. The liquid was translucent, with extremely fine gray threads slowly drifting inside it, as if they were alive.
Those were the Ghostspring Moss's active fibers. They would enter the lungs with the medicinal solution, find the ore crystals, and guide the gastric fluid's remaining components to dissolve them bit by bit. The process would be very slow, taking about three days.
Three days. Exactly as long as he planned to stay in this little town.
He put away the excess materials, wiped the stone mortar clean with the oilcloth, and carefully scraped away every bit of Ghostspring Moss powder that had gotten onto the runes. Then he pressed the tails beneath his cloak back into place, leaving only the two visible.
He pushed open the stone door.
Gran was leaning against the wall outside with his arms crossed, looking at the mountain face across from him. He really hadn't peeked.
“It's ready.” The cat merchant held up the bottle. “Have her drink it. It'll taste very bitter, but don't dilute it with anything. That would destroy its medicinal properties.”
They went inside. The girl was awake, propped against the headboard. A pair of enormous eyes stood out against her gray-white face as she stared toward the doorway. When she saw the cat merchant, her eyes widened even further—not with fear, but curiosity.
“Your ears are really pointy,” she said. Her voice was raspy, like sandpaper scraping across wood.
“Because I'm a cat.” He crouched beside the bed and held out the bottle. “Here. Drink this.”
The girl took the bottle and sniffed it, her whole face scrunching up. “It stinks.”
“Things that stink are what cure illnesses.”
“Grandpa says that too.”
“Your grandpa is right.”
The girl hesitated, then tipped her head back and drained the medicinal solution in one gulp. Her expression went through a series of violent changes—first she squeezed her eyes shut from the bitterness, then she opened her mouth from the numbness, and finally she shuddered from the cold.
“That's so gross...” she whispered, but she didn't spit it out.
The cat merchant reached out and pressed his palm to her chest. He closed his eyes and felt the medicinal solution travel down her esophagus into her stomach, then spread through her body as her blood carried it along. The active fibers of the Ghostspring Moss spread through her lungs like countless fine tendrils, searching for the ore crystals.
“Found them.” He opened his eyes and looked at Gran. “Seven. The largest is in the lower lobe of her left lung, and it's almost blocking the bronchus. A few more days, and it would have been too late.”
Gran's hands clenched into fists, then slowly relaxed.
“Three days.” The cat merchant stood up. “In three days, all the ore crystals will dissolve. She'll cough up some gray phlegm—that's the ore-crystal residue, so don't be afraid. Once she coughs it all up, she'll be fine.”
He paused.
“But she'll be in a lot of pain during those three days. As the ore crystals dissolve, they'll irritate the walls of her lungs. She'll feel as if something is crawling around in her chest. She'll cough, she'll hurt, and she'll run a fever. All of that is normal.”
“What can I do?” Gran asked.
“Stay with her,” the cat merchant said. “Let her know someone is there.”
With that, he turned and headed outside. When he reached the doorway, the girl called out behind him.
“Mr. Cat.”
He looked back.
“What is your name?”
He froze for a moment. The question was like a little stone falling into a very deep well. It took a long time before he heard the echo.
“...I don't remember,” he said with a small smile.
The girl tilted her head, her expression serious. “Then can I call you Mr. Cat?”
“Sure.”
He stepped out of the stone house, and sunlight struck his face again. He squinted and stood there for a while.
Lolo had come over at some point. The rightmost of her three transparent heads gently nudged his hand. He looked down at her. All six of her eyes were fixed on him, her expression seeming to say, What did you do this time?
“I saved a child.” He rubbed her head. “With a method that wasn't exactly clean.”
The leftmost head of Lolo's sneezed.
He smiled, then touched the chest jewel.
This time, he said nothing. He simply kept his hand there for a long while.
The jewel was still dull and gray, without luster or warmth.
But he felt as if something inside it had moved, ever so slightly.