Lead rosary

A rosary counts prayers, and down here prayers count for nothing: suffrage helps the souls in Purgatory, and in Hell lead stays lead. The note over it says just that, and the game takes it at its word: it is not devotion but metal, and its only use is the Miserere’s. Laid against the lamp in the bag it melts, and four beads come away from it.

Melting it costs light: the flame that frees the beads is the one you see by, and it drinks ten seconds of oil for every rosary. With less than that in tank and reserve together the lamp will not melt it, and the rosary stays whole; if the four beads have no room in the bag, the rosary goes back whole and the oil is not touched. It is the second thing in the game you lay against the lamp, after the oil, and the page under H writes it like a recipe: rosary and lamp, four beads and a little oil.

They lie where the loose beads used to lie. Five along the stream in the antehell, rolled down from the rank that runs behind the banner; four at the foot of the walls, carried there by the Styx; four along the banks of Malebolge; three on the ice of Cocytus, which fall back down the pit thirty eight seconds after you take them. At the gate of Dis, whoever has fewer beads than it takes finds rosaries enough for ten laid on the bank.