Master Melter Gretz

#On the Master Melter's Station

"He holds the east curtain wall together." — Master Melter Gretz, Bastion-Przemyśl, A.S. 194

The Sacred Ledger holds, of this woman, one name, one rank and one encounter, and the encounter is mine. Her name is Gretz. Her rank is Master Melter, the senior working station of the Saint-Bone Melter's trade, above the Kiln Tenders and Batch Scribes and well above the Ash-Hands and Slake Runners, who breathe the worst of the dust and wear the worst of the burns. Her post, when I met her, was a kiln yard at Bastion-Przemyśl, the Wire Orchard, the Carpathian fortress that holds the western passes of the Sagittal Line against the crowned ridges of Atheron's host.

I toured that yard in A.S. 194. I am a Hieromnemon of the Synod, and I have stood in the smoke of the Church's censers for most of my life. The Master Melter handed me a lump of cured mortar and asked me to smell it.

I did. It smelled of hot chalk and old prayers.

"That's the leg of Saint Ephraim the Lesser," she said. "He holds the east curtain wall together."

I put the lump down carefully. She laughed.

That is the whole of the personal record. No one has shown me a forename, a parish register, a letter of appointment or a date of first service, and I will not manufacture them, because a dossier padded with invented particulars is a forgery with good manners. What can be documented is her station, and a station, examined closely enough, shows a good deal of the woman who holds it.

#On the Slaking Station

The Codex portrait of Gretz places her at the slaking station of Kiln Yard 7, and anyone who has stood in a kiln yard will understand that this is a statement about rank.

Slaking is the point where calcined bone meets water. The meeting is violent. The powder that left the kiln as the residue of a saint takes up the water with a hissing roar, throws off steam and heat, and swells in the pit as if something in it objected to the arrangement. Pour too fast and the slake bursts. Pour too slow and the paste sets unevenly, and uneven paste becomes weak wall, and weak wall in the Carpathian sector is a matter for the casualty clerks. The chant cadence governs the water. Veterans count heartbeats. Apprentices, by the trade's own account, scream.

The tools are a broad iron slaker for working the reaction, kiln tongs and rakes, protective wraps, and a respirator issued by the Bureau of Engineering to a specification written by someone who has never stood downwind of a bone kiln. None of this is ceremonial equipment. The slaker is an iron paddle, the wraps are cloth, and the respirator is a broken promise.

The station is the one apprentices must master before they may touch a batch seal. A Master Melter stands there because she can work the most dangerous minutes of the process at the pace the hymn demands, with steam in her face and her arms over the pit, and keep the cadence when the reaction tries to set its own.

The portrait shows her forearms cracked and whitened with caustic dust, in steam and orange kiln light. I enter that as the portrait's testimony. I did not examine her arms. A Hieromnemon does not ask a Master Melter to roll up her sleeves, and she would not have done it if I had.

#On Provenance, Mortar and the Master's Seal

The rank carries a ledger of its own. The Master Melter supervises the batch, and each completed barrel leaves the yard under a wax seal that names the kiln, the date, the operator and the ward-line compatibility, which tells the receiving mason where in the fortification that mortar may go. Masons, wardwrights and trenchline crews read the seal and trust it. If the seal lies, the wall finds out first and the Bureau of Purity second. Master Melters carry their authority in the bone-ring, an iron band etched with the batch numbers of the cycles they have supervised. I did not read hers.

Five offices bear on every barrel she signs. The Bureau of Tithes published the Saint-Bone Melting Acts in A.S. 96 and so made sanctity a deployable asset. The Bureau of Rites governs the litanies, the cleansing and the quiet hour that comes before the burn. The Bureau of Engineering governs material, and it published its mixing ratios in A.S. 147, to the general indifference of the kiln yards. The Bureau of Purity enforces and investigates. The Bureau of Relics and its Relic Authenticators answer for provenance and custody, which is to say for the question of whose bone is in the crate.

Classification is the knife-edge of the trade. Fragments that are surplus, damaged, disputed or unassignable are renderable. Fragments that are named, venerated or politically owned are protected, and a Melter who renders one becomes an example, which Purity teaches across a generation of kiln yards.

Which brings me, with some reluctance, back to Saint Ephraim the Lesser.

A leg with a saint's name on it is exactly the sort of fragment the trade's own rules would set aside. I hold no record of its tier, its authorization, its authentication or its custody. I do not know whether a Relic Authenticator ever signed for it, whether it came to the kiln with some lawful release, or whether it was Ephraim's leg at all. I have only the Master Melter's statement, made to a visiting cleric in her own yard, and a lump of mortar that smelled of chalk. I did not file the question. The east curtain wall had already set.

There is one more thing the operator's name on a seal answers for: black-lime bloom, the mortar that leaves the kiln looking sound and darkens on the wall. The Bureau of Rites has denied it by memorandum, and its causes are argued among Melters after dark. No record ties Gretz to any instance of it. I mention it because when a Purity Fume-Inspector arrives at a darkened wall, the operator's name is the first line he reads.

#On Her Character, and on the Cost of the Trade

That leaves the laugh.

I have considered it at more length than any Master Melter would think it deserves. The Bureau of Purity would want to read it as evidence of private unbelief. It is evidence of a laugh. A woman who works with the remains of the blessed every day showed a state theologian what his doctrine looks like at the bottom of the pit, watched him handle it like a reliquary, and found that funny. I can't say she was wrong to. She did not mock the saint. She named him, credited him with a curtain wall, and handed him over for inspection, which is more courtesy than most shrine-keepers get from the Synod.

The trade jokes about everything except black lime, and the humour of the kiln yard is dry because everything in the kiln yard is dry: the dust, the throat, the skin on the knuckles. I record her laugh as that kind of humour. I record nothing about her soul, which was not on offer.

The cost of the station is general and documented. Lime burns scar the forearms white by the second year. Slaking accidents and chronic dust cause partial or total blindness. The bone cough starts as a rasp and ends as a rattle, and the Bureau of Mercy treats it with rest, clean air and transfer to duties that do not exist within the profession. Then the chalked eyelashes, the heat tremor and the cracked white knuckles. These are the profession's injuries. I do not assign any of them to Gretz, whom I met once, in a yard full of steam, for the length of one lump of mortar.

Whether she still works Kiln Yard 7 in A.S. 201, whether she still works at all, the Ledger does not say. Her last documented appearance is the encounter recorded above, and I will not write her an ending the record has not supplied.