Reaper

Chapter 4: City of the Dead

In the Crux, where the wet earth rejected corpses, the dead had their own city. A black maze of moss-covered tombs and statuary.

Cold fingers walked down Ava's back as she crossed under the cemetery's arched gate, beneath the leering gazes of granite gargoyles and dragons. As always, her stomach rolled as the homes of the dead loomed up around her, rows and rows of silent stone. Nausea burned up her throat.

Deeper in the night, at the furthest edge of the cemetery, lost in the encroaching woodland, her family's tomb waited. Her mother's bones lay within, still bricked up in a vault for the newly deceased, ten years past their time for cleaning, blessing, and bagging.

Unlike those stored on the shelf above. Warmire Longbane, seventeen years gone, his remains mouldering in a sack tied with one of his wife's hair ribbons. He hadn't survived his first week in the Crux, his wounds too severe, his spirit broken.

His guilt and his young, traumatised daughter's needs too much to bear.

Chest tightening, Ava looked to the sky, its faded stars. How many more days would pass before she could forgive him?

"If you were any more tense, Longbane, you'd splinter like a two-bit bow." Tythorn drew level with her, stride matching hers, something she was yet to grow used to—or comfortable with. "I'd have thought you at home with the dead. Are you concerned one of your colleagues might have missed one of the cursed amongst the night's fallen? A vampire, or revenant out to settle old scores."

Ava hooked back her coat, exposing the dagger and collection of stakes sheathed at, or shoved into, the top of her mid-thigh boots. "Any such oversight can be easily fixed."

Tythorn lifted both brows, eyes taking a tour a downward. "This is no time to seduce me, Longbane."

Despite the dread in her gut, Ava felt the corner of her lips twitch. The elf's charm might be nothing more than a cynical tool or reflex, but he knew how to wield it. "If blades were all it took, your nymph friend would look less forlorn."

Tythorn sighed. "First a person feels pity. Next, he or she is naked, gasping, and claiming to have seen all seven gods. Whatever melancholy Fox suffers, she's found a way to live with it. Her wife, a fertility acolyte, considers such encounters charity for the needy—a kind of spiritual and educational outreach." The elf shook his head. "Earth nymphs, always encouraging the practice of creation magic."

Ava found herself fighting back an actual smile at his disgust—a battle she won the second she spotted two shadowy figures. The Bones Keeper and his teenage assistant, unloading a cart of bodies. If the pair were outside and busy...

A certain someone would be inside, unsupervised.

With a Whym inquisitor not ten paces away.

On a burst of speed, Ava ducked into the Bones Keeper's workroom through a side door, avoiding polite greetings and delay. Shooting out a foot, she kicked over an empty wash bucket on the way in. Its clatter was an insult to the night's quiet. A sharp warning.

"What in the seven blazes?" At the far end of the candlelit room, a squat figure in Death Watch black lurched about, almost upending the trestle table beside her and the naked corpse on it. "Longbane! You blighted wretch! You out to stop an old woman's heart?"

"It'd take more than a tipped bucket to still your rotten core, Milrag." Smile tight, Ava jerked her chin towards Tythorn as he joined her. "Meet Inquisitor Sol. He knows a lot more effective ways to silence a heartbeat. Just show him some depraved miscreant and he'll gladly demonstrate."

At the end of the room, the witch's milky gaze widened. Fear. Just a flicker. In the tatty, soiled folds of the woman's robes, a gnarled hand—and whatever it held—disappeared into a pocket. Some small piece of death secreted away: a few clippings or samples. Of the alternate names for death wardens—reapers and ghouls—the woman before her aspired to the latter.