“The woman?”
“Dead. Throat torn out. We’ve covered her, but—” She pauses. Her mouth pulls into a thin line. “The thing that killed her isn’t trying to leave. It’s sitting there. Waiting.”
Waiting for me.
“Any sign of who did this?”
“Mourning magic. Strong. The scorch marks on the walls are from a rite that went wrong—or maybe too right.” Varn’s hand moves to her blade hilt. “The dead woman had a cut on her palm. Blood-price for a channeling. Whoever the witch was, she fled before we arrived.”
A mourning witch. Channeling in the crypts, despite the Council’s laws, despite the standing orders that say such practitioners should burn. I’ve executed dozens of them over the years. Dragged them to the Ash Pits and lit the pyres myself while they screamed about closure, about grief, about the dead who deserved to speak.
FOUR
DROKHAR
The dead don’t deserve anything. The dead are dangerous. The dead need to stay silent.
That’s what I’ve told myself for twenty years.
“Stay here.” I draw my blade. The enchanted iron hums against my palm, eager for work, the magic in the metal responding to the magic saturating the air. “If I’m not out in ten minutes, seal the chamber and burn it.”
Varn nods. She doesn’t argue. She knows the protocols.
I step into the chamber.
The candles have all blown out. The shadows are too deep, too solid, pooling in corners like they’re hiding from the darkness at the room’s center. The grief-residue is thicker here, coating every surface, making the air feel heavy and wet against my skin.
And in the center of the chamber, a corpse sits upright.
Not a whole body. Fragments. Bone shards and scraps of cloth arranged into a rough approximation of human form, held upright by a force that has nothing to do with muscle or sinew. Its empty eye sockets are fixed on the entrance—on me—and its mouth works slowly, grinding bone against bone.
Behind it, a dark shape lies beneath a cloth. The woman. Ira Genn, according to the report. Forty years old. Came to the crypts to speak with her dead son.
She found her son. And her son killed her.
I approach with my blade raised. Standard procedure—destroy the animated corpse, burn the remains, seal the chamber until the residual magic dissipates. I’ve done this a hundred times. A thousand. The movements are automatic, ingrained so deep they don’t require thought.
The corpse turns its head.
Looks directly at me.
And speaks with perfect clarity.
“Drokhar Stoneveil.”
The voice is a boy’s—young, barely old enough to hold a sword. But it carries harmonics that suggest an older presence, a larger one, using this dead child’s remains as a vessel.
I stop. My blade hovers in the air between us, enchanted iron gleaming in the faint light that seeps through the chamber door.
“The dead remember what you did.” The corpse’s mouth moves out of sync with the words, the sound emerging from deeper than its throat. From the shadows themselves. From the grief coating the walls. “The dead remember every pyre you lit without letting them say goodbye.”
Move. Strike. End this.
I don’t move.
“The dead remember—” The corpse’s mouth unhinges, opening wider than bone should allow, and a new voice joins the boy’s. Then another. Then dozens, harmonizing into a chorus that makes my bones ache and my teeth vibrate. “—and the dead want you tolisten.”
I hesitate.