Sacred Flesh by Robin D. Laws

Author:Robin D. Laws
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9781844160914
Publisher: Games Workshop
Published: 2004-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

A choking odour roiled up from below, cutting off her words. She reeled as the smell unfurled, by turns reminiscent of rancid butter, then honey, then dust, then wine, then rotting flesh. Manfried had withdrawn a cloth from his pocket to hold it over his mouth and nose.

Ursula and Dema hauled an increasingly resistant Elsbeth down thirteen stone steps to a round chamber, in the middle of which stood four copper vats. Each of the vats sat atop a grate, three of which were filled with liquid. Steam rose from them and billowed out toward Manfried; they were the source of the complex, awful stink. The vat closest to the stairs boiled and hissed. Just south of these a stone slab, about six feet long, rose up from the floor just past waist height. A man-sized washing tub was recessed into the uneven rock floor next to the far wall. A small dark archway could be seen opposite the stairs that led to a darkened chamber.

A pair of sisters slaved over the boiling vat, sweating in their heavy habits, perspiration slicking their faces. The first, young and plump, her face still round with baby fat, might have registered as comely, were it not for a dense cross-hatching of scars that marred both her cheeks. She brandished a wooden paddle, which she held over one of the vats, as she peered intently into it. The second had baleful, slate-grey eyes. She reminded Manfried of a dried apple jammed onto a stick.

The baleful sister interrupted her stirring. “We are not ready,” she said.

“I told you to be ready at any time,” replied Dema.

“I did not expect it so soon.” She took an unhappy appraisal of Elsbeth’s condition. Manfried could not be sure if her defiance arose from sympathy for the abbess, or a more basic truculence.

“Hop to it,” Dema said.

Baleful stood her ground. “We have not harvested.”

“Then harvest,” Dema countered.

Baleful gestured to Elsbeth with her paddle. “It upsets her.”

Elsbeth had slumped into Ursula’s shoulder. Manfried hoped she’d gone unconscious, but she propped her head up and opened her eyes. “That’s right, Mechthild. You mustn’t.”

Mechthild turned back to her vat.

“Am I not still the superior of this abbey?” Elsbeth asked, her tone more pleading than commanding.

Mechthild bowed her head. “It’s a sinful thing, you know, to want to die. You’ve no right to leave us, not until Shallya takes you.”

“It is unnatural!” Elsbeth nearly toppled off the stairs, but Ursula caught her in time. She wrapped thick arms around the abbess’ frail midsection. Elsbeth sagged. Ursula cooed and petted her head, crackling off shards of desiccated hair.

“It is holy,” Ursula whispered. “When you are better, you will see it correctly.”

“I will not be better for long.”

Mechthild and Dema bustled, along with the plump one, toward a darkened archway. Manfried, wishing to be spared Elsbeth’s pitiful whimpering, followed. Mechthild turned to glower forbiddingly at him, but he ignored her and nonchalantly squeezed past the shoulder she stuck out to block him.

He entered a small chamber, its rough stone ceiling forcing him to duck his head.

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