Metal Sickness

Overview

Metal gives the peoples tools, coin, and gilt, and it takes something back from those who work it. Metal sickness is that price, paid slowly. It has three common kinds, known by trade names: the smelter's gripe of lead, the gilder's shakes of quicksilver, and smoke-sores from the fumes of roasted ore. None is quick, and all are taken for the ordinary wear of a hard trade until it is too late.

Cause

Lead poisons when its dust and fume are breathed at the smelter or the glaze-kiln, and when it is drunk: from lead pipes and cisterns, from jugs and dishes glazed with it, and from sour wine or vinegar kept in lead, which takes up the metal and tastes sweeter for it. Quicksilver gives off a poisonous breath when it is warmed, as gilders do to fix gold to a surface, and poisons the hands that work it. Some ores, roasted, give off a smoke that poisons the smelter and the ground downwind. All three build up in the body over months and years.

Who It Strikes

It strikes trades: smelters and refiners, gilders and mirror-makers, glaze-potters, alchemists, and instrument-makers who work quicksilver. Households that drink from lead or glaze take it without knowing, and children take it worst, for it dulls them as they grow. Dwarves, dense and durable, bear a dose longer than a Human but not forever. The Wrought, who are made partly of metal and do not eat, drink, or breathe, are spared.

Signs and Course

The smelter's gripe begins as tiredness, headaches, and a sour stomach, then cramping colic and costive bowels. A dark blue-grey line comes on the gums. Later the wrists weaken so the hands hang, and in the end come fits, failing wits, and madness; a lead-dulled child learns slowly and may never catch up.

The gilder's shakes begin in the hands, a fine trembling that ruins close work, then spread to the face and tongue. Gums swell and bleed, teeth loosen, and the temper changes: the sufferer turns shy, quarrelsome, and quick to weep or rage.

Smoke-sores show in the skin: dark patches, thickened palms and soles, banded nails, and sores that will not heal, with numb feet and a slow wasting.

Contagion

It does not pass between people. A whole workshop sickens because it shares the work, a whole household because it shares the jug.

Treatment and Its Limits

The cure is to stop: leave the trade, break the glazed jug, drink from wood or clean stone. Good food and rest help the body shed it. Purge Poison draws some out, but metal settled deep in the body returns, and Cure Affliction needs many treatments for a condition so deep-rooted. A madness grown over years is seldom fully mended. A worker of Smelter's Test can say which ore or alloy is safe to work and which is not, which prevents more than any healer cures.

Mortality

Metal sickness kills slowly and seldom alone. Smelters and gilders who stay at their trades die younger than their neighbours, of palsy, wasting, fits, or a fever their bodies can no longer fight, and some die mad. Those who leave early mostly live, many with a tremor or lost teeth.

Lore and Belief

Smiths say the metal is jealous and wants its worker. Gilders speak of their shakes with a grim pride, as a sign of long service. Many folk think the sweet taste of wine kept in lead a virtue. Others blame the smelter's illness on spirits in the ore, and some holds will not open a seam that has "breathed bad smoke" before.

In the Medieval Era

In the Ironspine, where smelting smoke hangs over the passes, the Dwarves know the gripe and the smoke from long experience: they roast ore downwind of the holds and turn smelters to other work after some years. Gilders, glaze-makers, and instrument workshops of the towns and the far-side harbours know the shakes as their trade's own sickness. Healers treat the colic and the sores and seldom name the cause; the households drinking from glazed jugs are never told.

Where It Appears

• The Ironspine
• Forge Magic
• the Writers' Guide chapter Stone and the Deep