The Pitcher of Purification

Some jobs begin with coin. This one began with thirst.

A caravan limped into Tyr at dusk, painted in dust the color of old bones. Half their beasts were dead, the guards were sun-cracked and shaking, and every waterskin they carried stank of rot and copper. They claimed they'd drawn from three different wells on the route. All three had gone bad in a single week.

In Athas, bad water kills faster than steel. Rumor blamed raiders, sorcery, curses, and one very specific old woman with one eye and too many teeth. None of that mattered to the merchants. Their outposts were failing, their laborers were dropping, and their ledgers looked like obituary scrolls.

The contract reached Phoenix Dawn by dawn. Lord Habren Taal, a man who could count every grain in a granary but not every life under his roof, offered a clean purse for a simple outcome: find who was poisoning his wells, end it quietly, and restore the water.

Vis took the job with Nox and Evi. Evi wanted to test a hypothesis about contamination patterns. Mina wanted to break someone over a knee. Vis wanted to see the wells before the templars did, because templars had a way of solving mysteries by lighting villages on fire until the truth crawled out.

The first well sat in a farming hamlet called Serekh's Rest, ringed by mud walls and thorn-fence. The people there had tied cloth over their mouths to block the smell. Children watched from rooftops with hollow eyes. In the center square, the well water looked clear as glass.

It wasn't.

Vis dipped two fingers, touched his tongue, and spat immediately. Bitter-metal, then a numbness at the gums. Old poison, alchemical, not fresh. Whoever did it knew exactly how much to use--enough to sicken and weaken, not enough to kill instantly and trigger a full military response.

Evi lowered a thread-thin silver rod into the bucket and whispered over it. The rod blackened in spirals. "Layered," she said. "Not one toxin. Three. Mixed to survive boiling. Whoever did this has training."

Mina looked at the families clustered nearby and cracked her knuckles. "Good. Trained people break just like untrained people."

Vis spent the evening where he always learned most: not with officials, but with those who cleaned up after them. Stable hands, ditch diggers, runners. He bought stories with cheap wine and better listening. By midnight, three details repeated across every version: cloaked riders at moonrise, blue-lacquered jugs unloaded near each well, and a mark burned into those jugs--a circle split by three downward lines.

He'd seen that mark before. Not on merchant crates. On old temple stones in the wastes, from before the kings had crowns.

The second well was outside a quarry camp two days east. Same taste. Same numbness. Same mark, carved this time into the stone lip itself, small and neat and fresh. Whoever did this wanted someone to notice. Not just fear, but a message.

On the third night, with the moon high and mean, they watched the road from behind a fallen obelisk. Four riders arrived wrapped in bleached cloth, leading pack crodlu with ceramic amphorae strapped to either side. No torches. No talk.

They worked quickly, pouring from narrow-neck jugs through reed funnels and scraping runes in wet clay around the rim. Not raiders. Ritualists.

Mina moved first because patience had never loved her. Vis caught her wrist before she could rise. "Wait," he whispered. "If we hit now, we get four hands. If we follow, we get the head."

She glared, then nodded once, sharp as a knife.

They shadowed the riders into broken badlands where old wind had carved the stone into teeth. Near dawn, the group entered a fissure masked by hanging thorn-vines and faded prayer ribbons. Inside, the air cooled. Water dripped somewhere deep, steady and slow.

An underground cistern opened before them--ancient masonry, cracked but intact, with channels feeding out toward half the settlements on that route. In the torchlight, carved reliefs showed priests raising vessels to the sky, pouring into basins while kneeling crowds drank.

At the center stood a woman in ochre wrappings, shaved head painted in blue ash, voice carrying through the chamber like a knife drawn from leather.

"They fed fat men first," she said to the dozen followers around her. "They measured thirst by ownership. We return balance. Let all taste what the poor have swallowed for generations."

She raised a glazed pitcher from a stone plinth. Plain shape, old clay, no jewels. But the air around it felt wrong--cool and clean in a room full of dust and bitterness.

Evi barely breathed. "That's not decorative," she murmured. "That vessel is warded. Old, old warding."

The woman tipped poison from a flask into the pitcher, swirled once, then poured into a basin. The liquid came out clear.

Evi frowned. "She just purified it."

"And then," Vis said, watching her hand move to another basin, "she'll dose the channel separately."

She did. Clean water for her followers. Tainted runoff for everyone else.

Vis had seen enough nobles to recognize the shape of hypocrisy even when wrapped in revolution. He gave Mina a look. She understood and began tracing sigils in the dust, preparing a silence ward. Mina flexed her fists. Vis checked exits.

Then he stepped from shadow with palms open.

"If this is justice," he called, "you've got strange standards for who gets to drink."

Steel hissed from scabbards. The ochre woman smiled without warmth. "The little knife from Tyr," she said. "Branded and leashed by guildmasters. Come to lecture me on chains?"

"No," Vis said. "Just on logistics. Poisoning labor camps doesn't topple merchant houses. It fattens undertakers."

Her followers surged. Evi snapped her fingers and the chamber went mute--no shouted command, no chant, only boots and breath and impact. Mina met the first attacker with shoulder and axe haft, sending him into a pillar hard enough to fold. Vis slid between two others, cut a hamstring, disarmed the second, and kicked the blade into the cistern.

The ochre woman moved faster than she looked. She flung a powder line across the floor; where it landed, stone blistered and smoked. Alchemist and zealot both.

Vis circled left, forcing her away from the plinth. She read him, laughed, and grabbed the pitcher with both hands.

"You think this relic belongs to your lords?" she hissed.

"No," he said. "I think it belongs to thirsty children."

She hurled a vial at his chest. He twisted late. Glass broke against his shoulder, burning cold through cloth and skin. His arm went numb to the elbow. He dropped his knife.

She closed distance with a hooked blade, aiming for throat. Vis caught her wrist with his good hand, slipped inside the arc, and headbutted hard enough to split her lip. She bit her own blood and spat a curse in a tongue he didn't know.

The hooked blade flashed down anyway.

He answered with older words.

Not loud. Not dramatic. A whisper into pain.

His blood ran from the burned shoulder and slicked their joined hands. He pushed will through the contact the way he'd done in other desperate moments--through fear, through memory, through the need to not die here in a hole full of bad choices. Her muscles seized. Not forever. Long enough.

Evi reached them in three steps and ended the debate with the flat of her axe to the temple. The woman folded without grace.

When sound returned, only three followers still stood. Two threw down weapons. The third ran and slipped on wet stone into Evi's waiting ward-lines, where he convulsed once and slept.

No one cheered.

Mina bound wounds while Vis inspected the channels. The poisoning was more elaborate than spite: clay cartridges packed with reagents, designed to dissolve slowly over days. He and Evi worked until their fingers cramped, hauling out cartridges and scraping runes. EvMinai hauled bodies and groaning survivors into one corner and made very clear no one was leaving yet.

At sunrise, they tested the plinth pitcher properly.

Evi poured in ditch water black with algae and grit. It came out clear.

She poured in brackish well sludge. Clear.

She poured in water laced with a diluted toxin sample from the cartridges. Clear, and inert under silver test.

Vis stared at the vessel a long time. In Athas, this was less an item than a quiet miracle.

The ochre woman, awake and tied, watched him and laughed through split teeth. "You'll hand it to Taal," she said. "He'll sell cups of mercy at market rates."

Vis didn't answer. Because she might be right.

They brought prisoners and evidence to Tyr, but not the pitcher. Officially, it was listed as "destroyed during recovery efforts" in Evi's report, accompanied by three pages of technical language likely to induce sleep in anyone with authority.

Lord Taal complained, threatened, then recalculated when he realized the wells were running clean again and his caravans were moving. He paid in full, docked for imagined damages, then added a quiet bonus after Evi presented proof that his own factor had been skimming purification salts for years and reselling them at famine prices.

Vis left that part of the bonus in Serekh's Rest--new ropes, new buckets, and wages for a permanent well-watch that answered to the village, not the estate.

The pitcher he kept under cloth in a locked chest for a week, touching nothing but bandages and sleep. On the eighth day, he carried it before dawn to the guild garden, where Lumi waited among pale flowers and morning dust.

"You're worried it's cursed," she said.

"I'm worried it's useful," he said.

She smiled like someone who had buried too many optimists. "Same thing."

Together, they set terms: no sale, no rent, no noble contracts. The pitcher would be used where thirst was leverage--refugee camps, labor barracks, caravan holds after raids, plague tents, and any alley where someone had to choose between dirty water and no water.

Vis still carried knives. Still lied when lying kept people breathing. Still woke some nights with the taste of iron in his mouth and old chains in his ears.

But now, in a world that called mercy weakness, he owned a clay vessel that turned filth and poison into water.

He considered that a weapon.