I’m starting this after the matter, as that’s what they say we’re supposed to do. I used to think these little diaries were all about fame and letting us insignificant folk know there were bigger things in the world beyond our gray streets and propped-up walls. I suppose I know better now. At some point I realized they’re warnings. So if some night the blasted thing takes me, I’ll still be able to explain how I met my end and maybe prevent it from happening again.
It’s here as I write this, the red glint betraying its hunger. Not for food, or drink, or blood, or anything half-sane like that—it’s far beyond those things. You might need to know that, especially if I’m past giving warnings.
It didn’t start like one of her novels, no matter what she might say now that it’s all over. The evening had brought me around to the Old Horn, the oldest public house in Ardis, a mangy den the owner claimed was constructed in an age when all men were kings and all geese shat gold. How the wreck of sagging beams and cracked mortar looked mangy was something of a wonder, but a wonder the taproom brought off nightly with its threadbare wall hangings, tattered hawthorn wreathes, and dusty bear pelt splayed above its narrow fireplace. The cluttered decor, along with a years-old haze of cheap spice cigar smoke, unintentionally but effectively baff led noise in the narrow pub, making it a favorite den for those with the contradictory needs to converse and not be heard.
I hadn’t thought of it then, but the setting did seem like something she’d come up with; a heroine, daring the city’s underbelly to track a moon-mad rake, vengeful corpse, or some such. But while Kindler’s heroes always had a pack full of tricks and talismans suited to their noble intentions, my evening’s agenda seemed to match what little rattled in my tired satchel: a few coins pinched earlier that day, a few useful splinters of metal, a chipped wharfman’s knife, and a battered book—its embossed cover still holding a bit of color upon the words Her Wounds Never Bled and Ailson Kindler. I remember nabbing the book from my mother’s library the night I made my escape—it being one of those everyday ironies that seem all the more prophetic in retrospect. Regardless, it was nothing to me at that moment, and my thoughts were on more pressing and less romantic topics.
You had to buy at least one drink or else the hatchetfaced barkeep would get wise and have you tossed out in the street. Sidling up to the bar, I ignored his scrutiny of my freshly pinched coins and took in the night’s crowd. Slim pickings.
Nothing but a pair of clerks in patched coats, a pesh dealer trying to hide his own shakes, some over-painted wharf wives with bleary-eyed beaus, and a conclave of students leaning so close they might be trying to read each other’s thoughts—two fellows and a sliver of a girl. The sure coin was with the clerks, who were practically f lashing their coppers with a second round of drinks. But the easy coin hung off the scruffiest student’s belt in an old-fashioned hip pouch. The purse looked malnourished, but there was easily enough to cover the price of my drink and, Desna willing, a meal before the last peddler closed up for the night.
Suspiciously accepting my under-filled mug of water and ale suds, I sought out a bench with its back to the students and took a seat. No reason to rush my drink, as they didn’t look to be headed anywhere anytime soon. Through the smoke and lazy murmur of the room’s muff led conversations, I could just make out the whispers behind me. Chalk it up to what my father always called my “elf ears,” harking to some probably imaginary ancestor in our family tree.
“—and bowled him right over, just in front of him. If he’d left the counting house a moment earlier, he said it’d been him lying face down in the street instead of ol’ Parrigd,” said the biggest of the students—or perhaps a laborer’s apprentice, judging from his anvil-like frame.
“I’d heard it was the countess’s daughter… the one with the piggy eyes. Opaline, I think. That half-heifer, looking out the coach window and laughing behind them fat, piepoking fingers.” The sharp-nosed girl needled every vowel to a whine. “It’d be just like them, too. Don’t care who they roll over so long as their coffers are full and they can waddle out of this cesspit whenever they please.” There was a moment’s silence, as if the speakers waited for the third to chime in with his volley of news and curses, but it didn’t come.
“You’re taking this well, Garmand,” the anvil rumbled. “He was your boss.” Only a pointed silence answered. “If he’d been anything to me, I’d do something,” the girl boasted with a shrill arrogance, inviting challenge. “You wouldn’t see me in here dripping tears in my—”
“Is that what I’m doing?” The scruffy student interrupted with surprising steel in his voice. “And would it unman me if I did shed a tear or two? I worked alongside that old man for nearly eight years, fed both of us with coin from his purse, and have nearly enough hidden away to get out of this place thanks to him. Doesn’t his death—his murder— maybe warrant a tear or two? Or, in all your experience, are you past regret?”
I could hear the girl bristle and sniff loudly, probably unused to holding her tongue, but doing so all the same. “Anyway,” Garmand continued, his voice taking on a thoughtful distance, “you’re not wrong. Something like this calls for more than tears and words. I was there when the guard peeled Mister Parrigd off the street—even saw where the coach’s wheels rolled out his blood for five paces before fading off. They all said it was one of the countess’s coaches. Even the watchmen did, as if that ended the matter. Parrigd might as well have been a crow picking in the gutter, just a bump and not worth a moment of guilt. He didn’t have any people either. So who knows what’ll happen to his body. The Watch is more likely to just roll him into the river than give him over to the church for a proper burn.”
“So what’s for it, then?” the girl accused after a space, trying to recover pride from his slight.
“Not much, sadly. Less than Mr. Parrigd deserves, but I think I might have something in mind. I need to talk to some fellows if there’s any chance of making it work. And we might need Sayn’s boat.”
“I’ll take you anywhere you need, long as it’s after dusk,” said the big one, apparently the boatman Sayn. “But I can’t say it’s much for getting out of town. I can’t take it off the Tears and side streams.”
“We won’t need to wait long or go far, I hope,” Garmand said. “I want to take care of this tonight, while my nerve’s up. I’m just waiting for the right sort to come in. There’s a ratty guy I’ve heard about, and I’ve seen him in here before. I think we could make a deal with him. But I still need to think it out.”
The students’ little drama devolved into mumbles of plots, what-ifs, and curses against the Venacdahlia name. It seemed like the three had been though a bad patch today, and I thought about turning my eye toward the clerks across the taproom ordering up their third round. But their talk of making deals made me imagine silver instead of copper weighing down Garmand’s exposed pouch. Though I had sympathy for their hard times, their story wasn’t anything novel in Ardis these days. If I wasn’t the one who made their day worse, it would just be someone else. So why deny myself a meal? I made my move.
I feigning checking my boots and coughed to mask any sound. My dagger f lashed, and the coins were in my hands with hardly a rustle. My fingers had danced this dance often enough that it was an easily rushed routine, sliding the coppers—damn—into the lip of my boot, replacing my blade, and straightening nonchalantly as though nothing had happened, all in that half a moment. I casually finished my drink, and after another moment, stood to leave, careful to keep any hint of a smirk off my face, wearing instead the typical downtrodden stare the pub’s patrons would expect and ignore. Stepping lightly to avoid jostling the coins sliding beneath my heel, I ref lected on what a fine stop this had been and considered adding it to my weekly rounds.
That’s when a grip like a pair of smith’s tongs clasped my wrist.
I should have stuck to my weekly rounds.
“Ho there, missy,” came the boatman’s gritty voice. I turned, trying to disguise nerves with outrage at the rough hand on my arm. All three at the table were looking at me, the girl sneering, Sayn half standing, his hairy hand locked on mine. “Not as sly as you thought, huh? I think you owe us a round with those coins you’re stinking up.” I knew I couldn’t pull away. Maybe I could scream like he was accosting me, but no one around looked the hero type. Maybe if I—
“No, they’re hers,” Garmand said calmly, interrupting my escape plans and surprising his companions, who turned on him as though he’d gone mad. He produced his pouch and fingered the extra opening I’d just added. “Have a seat, miss. If you’re as talented as you just demonstrated, you might be even better than the one I was waiting for.”
He gestured to the unoccupied fourth seat. “At the very least, hear me out. I’ve got an idea that could buy us each our way out of the city, avenge a friend, and slap the aristocracy across the face—all of which must sound better than getting hauled off to the Watch. But tell me, does your skill end at cutting purses?”
The skiff didn’t run aground. It ran a-grave.
A tombstone jutting out of the water halted our journey and we pulled the sad little boat ashore, rubbing away handfuls of f laking white paint with every tug. The black water lapping against half-submerged tombstones sounded like the lake was trying to hush us, as though it didn’t want us to wake the untended dead it had crept upon. In morbid curiosity, I peered into the languid waves, wondering if I could make out an unearthed coffin or a drowned skull, but the cloudy night helped the lake keep its secrets. Looking inland hardly helped calm my imagination. Evercrown Cemetery. Here Garmand sought his revenge on the living by way of the dead.
The cemetery rose upon a low hill, where naked autumn trees grasped heavenward, their curled finger bones doing little to hide dozens of small structures scattered randomly between them, as if tossed by some gargantuan hand. Thousands of discrepant silhouettes vied to be more ominous then their neighbors, holding aloft ornamental wings, urns, or obelisks, while larger shapes hulked like ghoulish giants collecting bones in the dark. The trees and wild grasses rustled in the chilly breeze, their roots seeming to draw up the smell of the dead, their haze of motion disguising anything that might lurk amid the graves. I could make out the nearest of these tombstones, their memorials lost in shadow, but each seeming to bear ominous promises for trespassers.
Hoping not to excite my imagination too much with my first step upon the burial grounds, I looked back the way we’d come. The few lights of the sleeping city f lickered across the lake called the Tears, so named for the elaborate burial processions that crossed it to reach the city’s mausoleums. Only royalty and nobles were buried here, those who could afford the honor of such costly rites. All others were burned to ashes. Such was a pauper’s fate, but one nearly everyone in Ardis expected. Such was also the crux of Garmand’s scheme.
Gathering us a few strides away from the shore, a cask of oil and two crowbars under his arm, Garmand spoke hurriedly and in hushed tones.
“This is going to be simple: corpses for a corpse. We find the Venacdahlia mausoleum, break in, and burn everything we find. We keep it small. We’re not trying to start a blaze that will have the Watch running. If there’s time, we gather up the ashes and put together a fine little memento for the countess. We clear?” It was exactly as we’d agreed after leaving the Old Horn.
“And tomorrow we wake up rich men with big houses and fat wives. That’s how this all ends, right?” Sayn’s tone was arch. Garmand frowned. His sister, Liscena, cursed.
“No,” Garmand replied. “Tomorrow we wake up just like we always do. The countess, her daughters, and half the inbred nobles in town, though—they wake to find their forefathers going back a dozen centuries gone, the ones who gave them that noble blood nothing but ashes. All burned up, just like we’re going to be when we pass on.” His tone took on an optimistic enthusiasm. “And maybe, like you’d expect from folk with no sense, the nobles gussy up their dead like they’re headed off to the opera. So we help ourselves to a little of that, hock a few trinkets, and finally get out of this place on their coin. Seems like justice to me.”
He nodded at me. “All that, but only if you’re as good as I hope you are.”
“I like my turnout better!” the burly boatman chuckled. Liscena rolled her head. “Can we get on with this?” It took nearly an hour to find the resting place of the county’s rulers, the Venacdahlia mausoleum. We searched without light, fearing the attention it might attract on the exposed hill. Broken f lagstone paths, twisted roots, and spidery ground creepers hid among the shadows of tombstones, making the cemetery so treacherous to traverse that in places we had to crawl amid the ornamental mourners and deathly effigies. We found our aim near the end of a walk that wound up from the eastern gate, squatting near the hill’s summit, commanding a lordly view of the Tears and the city beyond.
Angels prayed at the tomb’s corners, years of grime giving them the wings of crows. Artfully twisted pillars circled the small, temple-like structure, and the dead eye of a shattered, stained-glass pediment window stared down. A tarnished bronze door barred the way inside, its surface etched with a f light of surprised-looking green cherubs in mottled armor, a large keyhole piercing one’s breast like a spear wound.
Not waiting for a cue from my evening’s employers, I found my makeshift picks and kneeled at the door, trying to avoid making eye contact with any of the angelic mourners. The Venacdahlias earned their reputations as skinf lints that night—two twists of the metal slivers and the tumblers gave way. I fumbled with the lock for several moments more, underscoring the worth of my participation. Eventually I stood and, with a casual hand, swung the mausoleum door wide.
Although the burial chamber was open and lofty, the air within was close, with the thick smell of dust and old rot. I’d expected that. I’d even expected the hairy black spiders and other less distinct shadows that f led our intrusion. But I hadn’t expected the foreboding, the feeling of blasphemy that rained down from the vaulting, the accusations of eyeless sockets glaring through the lids of dozens of burial alcoves. We were trespassing in the home of the dead, and though they couldn’t physically stop us, their indignation loomed even past death’s veil. We had hardly paused to take in the dilapidated monument for a moment before Garmand moved to the bier at the chamber’s center and set down the crowbars and cask of oil.
“Start with the high alcoves and pull down what’s inside. We’ll burn them in piles.” His instructions were matter of fact, though his shifting eyes belied his disquiet. “If you find anything valuable, it’s yours to keep.”
I helped them, and—being the easiest to lift—even tugged down the remnants of some of Ardis’s historic rulers myself. I didn’t make any friends among the historians that night—to say nothing of the country’s nobility. It had fortunately been some time since any Venacdahlia had been buried here, so we were mostly contending with dry remains, and what we were tossing down looked inhuman enough that we could fool our consciences for the time being. Within minutes Garmand was pouring on the oil and we had a modest blaze going, the smoke of old rulers wafting up through the broken window and invisibly out into the night. The lurid light f lickering through crackling skulls did little to lessen the foreboding weighing in the pit of my stomach. Somehow the hellish light seemed ominously prophetic.
Here and there we’d find something worth pocketing—a brooch, a pair of earrings, a gold-capped walking stick— but it was Liscena who first laid eyes upon the dagger. “Whoa,” came her f lat interjection, escaping with such dumb surprise that we all turned in curiosity. She had just wrested the lid off a low alcove, not far from the fire. Inside, something caught the light and danced like a serpent’s tongue in the corpse-fueled flames.
“It’s mine!” Liscena snapped as we crowded close, doubtlessly not even sure what “it” was. Cautiously, her brother reached into the alcove and tugged forth a corpse unlike any we’d defiled that night.
On the dusty marble of the mausoleum floor lay a withered form in a grim military uniform, its chest seemingly crushed under the medals weighing upon it. Its high-collared coat shone with gold thread, broad epaulets, and silver clasps. At its hip, a gilded saber jutted from an elegant ebony scabbard. But although the corpse was interred with the honors of a leader, it was obvious it didn’t receive such esteem in life’s final moments. Four vicious wounds marred the body, the open buttons of the jacket and shirt revealing a ragged path from the face, neck, and collar to the center breast, which rot had deflated like an emptied wineskin. There, from the sternum, as though the murderer had tired mid-crime, jutted the handle of a silver-bladed dagger. Yet more remarkable than the fact of the apparent murder weapon being interred along with the victim was the dagger itself.
Although the blade hid within its morbid sheath, what was visible bore an exotic elegance reminiscent of treasure-laden Katapeshi palaces. Delicate f lourishes adorned the hilt, but the handle appeared to be carved from a single miraculous crimson stone imprisoned within a web of delicate gold filigree. Proud and deadly, it was the weapon of royalty—and, apparently, the slayers of royalty.
An impulsive girl, Liscena already had her hand around the pommel, yanking before anyone else made a move. Thinking back, I’m not sure whether it was the girl or the corpse who screamed first.
The dagger didn’t come away cleanly, but rather burst from the corpse like a secured stopper, spilling the thief backward. A geyser of something like luminescent entrails erupted forth from the unplugged wound, an ephemeral burst of upward-roiling ethereal humors. Gushing from the dead man, the torrent of nether fluids refused to rain back down, accumulating and writhing in the air above the corpse, hanging there in defiance of gravity and sanity. And with the glowing viscera exploded a terrible sound, a depthless intonation from an indistinct distance. A noise that grew evenly in volume, as if it falling up into the crypt from the pit of the world.
A moment later, a grotesque apparition hung above the empty carcass, a knot of churning, unnatural organ-stuff glowing the unsteady green of a flickering altar votive. With revolting deliberateness the mass churned and took shape, as if worked by the hands of some invisible fiend. Limbs, garments, a withered visage rent by slashes—each took shape until the thing floating there was a spectral copy of the husk below. And all the while the sound came, issuing from the form like a scream heard through a shattered window, the horror-stricken source hidden at some unworldly remove.
When the phantasmal form moved, the four slashes marking its disfigured body stared like a vertical row of empty sockets, taking us in even as they unleashed that terrible, voiceless howl.
I can’t say who made the first move, but terror gripped us each in unique ways.
Garmand was at his sister’s side in a blur, shouting something as she gaped dumbly, brandishing the long, silver blade of her prize. For my part, I realized I was backpedaling as the crypt’s doorframe came into view, managing to halt myself before my shuddering limbs carried me further. Sayn’s terror took the boldest route. Hardly stepping back from the phantom, he hefted a discarded crowbar and, with a bellow, sent it spinning end over end toward the thing.
Were the vaporous corpse a creature of bone and flesh, surely it would have shattered from the wild gusto of the blow alone. As it was, the bar clanged upon the vault’s far wall and skittered into the dark.
Like a blind thing, the ethereal carcass’s head snapped to where the tool had cracked the aged mausoleum stone. In a series of jerks, it turned its neck in the direction of Sayn’s bellow, directing its own howl toward the big man, the slash across the thing’s face connecting its empty eye sockets in a single cyclopean hollow. Awkwardly, like a thing unused to moving, the spectre wrenched forth the saber of faintly glowing ghost steel at its hip. Slashing a weird gyre before it, the dead thing propelled itself, blade and body, toward Sayn.
The boatman stumbled backward in the face of the armed shade, obviously rethinking the impulse not to f lee as a swipe of the spectral blade transfixed him. The ephemeral saber emerged bloodlessly from his chest, seemingly nothing more than an illusion. Looking down upon his unwounded body, Sayn’s face reflected his surprise and the beginning of a smirk in the instant before he collapsed.
A gasp from Liscena drew the deadly wraith’s attention. Garmand yanked his sister off the ground bodily, intending to f lee, but halted as the spectre came to hover a step between them and the door. Valiantly, he moved between the thing and his sister. As he did, the howling reached a hollow crescendo.
“Ferendri,” a name echoed in the moan, the sounds stretched long in accusation, filling with the loathing of bitter years.
Garmand’s eyes went wide with confused recognition, and the shade’s saber fell upon his brow in a slow stroke, as if knighting him with some grievous authority. The young man fell backward into his sister’s arms, the light in his eyes guttering.
As the sounds of Liscena’s despair filled the vault, the spectre’s howl faded. Somehow the moan seemed to pull back into the thing, revivifying its vaporous shape. Its withered frame straightened, filling the tatters of its uniform with a tall, lean body. Long legs, now booted and unfurled, drew together in military posture. Gnarled hands worked with new dexterity, one tightening upon the grip of the saber—now appearing freshly polished— the other f lexing as if stretching vaporous muscles. Its impacted face healed, reforming in the memory of a sharp chin, stern mouth, angular cheeks, and steely eyes, the imperious features of a lord in his prime. When it was done, the thing was no longer a corpse, but a severe, knifelike man, now with only three deep gashes marring his neck and chest. His eyes immediately fixed upon Liscena, now looking very small with her face buried in her dead brother’s locks. Nothing more than a child, but a child holding his murder weapon.
I didn’t realize I’d made a sound, but that’s when the phantom turned his eyes upon me.
“Madam.”
That was all the dead man said as he nodded genteelly, the slow word echoing in a voice incongruously civil considering the dead lips from which they issued and the corpses cooling upon the marble. It was mundane and matter of fact, an everyday courtesy made terrifying by the voice of death.
With that, my horror-stricken mind lost control on my straining limbs which, unfettered, spirited me away into the dark.
I’d strolled past the tall, lime-colored townhome and its hedge-garbed fence countless times, often craning to catch a glimpse of the famous resident. I’d never had any reason to enter, though. Yet when my screaming legs brought me to the gate that night, things were terribly different.
I easily surmounted the spiked iron barricade and, hardly treading upon the dewy grass, was up the lion-flanked stairs and upon the creaking, whitewashed porch in an instant. My knocks seemed to echo within the heavy oaken door, and I noticed for the first time that my knuckles were bleeding.
No answer.
I banged again, harder this time. Faster. As if my urgency might influence fate on whether or not the antique townhouse’s resident was at home. No answer still, but maybe the creak of a floorboard within. The words came rushing out all at once. “Ma’am! Hello? I need your help. I’m Laurel Cylphra—I’m looking for Ailson Kindler. We’ve done something terrible.”