But the thing that spoke through me isn’t finished. I sensed it pulling back through the Veil, satisfied but not sated. It found a crack in the barrier—a doorway it can use again. And if I run, if I leave without understanding what I unleashed...
More people will die.
I drag myself upright, bracing against the rough stone wall. My legs are unsteady, my head throbbing with the rhythmic ache of blood loss, but I’ve endured worse. I’ve survived worse.
The Undercroft stretches before me, a maze of tunnels and hidden chambers where mourning witches have sought refuge for centuries. Safe houses marked with symbols only practitioners recognize. Caches of supplies hidden in hollowed-out stones. Old texts and whispered histories, passed down from teacher to student through generations of those who speak for the dead.
Answers hide in this darkness.
The Ashwalker. The dead have not forgotten.
I need to find out what that means. I need to understand what I’ve awakened.
And I need to do it before the thing beneath the city stops whispering and starts screaming.
Above me, through layers of stone and bone and ancient grief, I hear the first bells begin to toll. Not marking the hour—marking a death. The Crypt-Keepers have found Ira Genn.
The hunt has begun.
I wipe the blood from my face with the back of my hand, leaving dark smears across my pale skin, and move deeper into the dark.
THREE
DROKHAR
The Ash Pits never sleep.
I stand at the edge of the largest pyre, watching flames consume the day’s dead. Three cartloads arrived at dawn—bodies collected from the poorest districts, corpses too expensive to bury and too dangerous to leave unburned. The fire crackles and spits, sending sparks into the smoke-hazed sky. The smell is familiar. Bone char. Burning flesh. The chemical stink of ward-herbs meant to prevent the dead from rising mid-cremation.
Twenty years I’ve stood at pyres like this one. Twenty years of watching bodies blacken and curl, of listening to fat sizzle and bones snap in the heat. The smoke rises in columns so thick they blot out the stars on clear nights. Tonight, the sky is already gray with ash, the permanent haze that hangs over this place visible for miles in every direction.
Travelers use it to navigate toward the city. A beacon of endings.
I don’t count them anymore. The bodies.
Early in my career, I kept meticulous records. Names when I could get them. Descriptions when I couldn’t. Small details that proved the dead had once been people—a scar on a cheek,a missing finger, a faded tattoo of a lover’s name. I stopped after the first thousand. The numbers became burdens I couldn’t carry, and the details became faces that wouldn’t let me sleep.
The faces still find me anyway. Every night, when I close my eyes.
The heat from the pyre washes over my face, familiar and fierce. I’ve developed a resistance to it over the years—to the heat, to the smell, to the sight of flesh becoming ash. My forearms are laddered with burn scars from reaching into flames to ensure the dead stay down. My knuckles bear the same marks. The occupational hazards of a man who refuses to let anything crawl back from the fire.
A junior death warden approaches from the compound. Kell, barely nineteen, still young enough to flinch when the corpses twitch in the flames. His boots crunch on blackite—the soil here is so saturated with cremated remains that it’s changed color and texture, become its own substance. He stops three paces behind me and waits.
Good. He’s learning.
“Report.”
“Disturbance in the Mourning Crypts, sir.” His voice is steady, but I catch the tension beneath. The careful control of a man trying not to show fear. “City guard responded to screaming about two hours ago. Found a body. Woman, torn apart. And—” He hesitates.
I turn my head. Enough to see him in my peripheral vision. The firelight catches the sweat on his brow, the pallor beneath his tan. “And?”
“Restless dead, sir. Reports of screaming that went on for hours before the guard arrived. Magic thick enough to leave scorch marks on the walls.” Kell swallows hard. “The guard tried to investigate, but they found... they found a body that was still moving. Still talking.”
Still talking.
Revenants don’t talk. They moan, they scream, they make sounds that might once have been words. But they don’t speak with coherence. Not with intent.
“Why did they call for me specifically?”