⭒ DEATH ― kaz brekker ⭒

34 - Azalea

At night, the warehouse district is an eerie, desolate place, though the shantytowns at its eastern edges crackle with life and crowds. The streets are empty save for the guards at their posts and stadwatch beginners walking their beats. Inej, Nina, and I moor the boat in the wide central canal that runs up the center of the entire district. The water's edge is lined with illuminating streetlamps that we make great effort to avoid, staying close and inside the shadows of the warehouses, using the darkness as our cover. We pass barges loaded with lumber and troughs piled with dark coal, the strong scent filling the air. There are occasionally a few men working by lantern light, barrels of rum or bales of cotton. Cargo like this is considered valuable in Ketterdam and cannot be left unattended to late at night. There are puddles with golden hues, illuminated by the lamps, ripples of different colours looking oddly beautiful for something so simple. 

Once we've nearly reached Sweet Reef, the section containing the sugar silos, we see two men unloading boxes from a large wagon by the side of the canal, a single blue-tinged lamp on the side of the cart. The glow looks haunting, as if a ghost is leering over the waters, watching us as we slip past. "Corpselight," Inej whispers, and Nina shudders.

Bonelights are made of the crushed skeletons of deep-sea fishes and glow green, but corpselights burn some other fuel, a blue warning that allows people to identify the flatboats of the bodymen whose cargo is the dead. I can't help but wonder if Kaz was transported under the guise of that eerie blue light, shining over him as he cried as a child, clinging onto Jordie's corpse for dear life.

"What are the bodymen doing in the warehouse district?" Nina asks quietly.

"People do not enjoy seeing corpses on the streets or in canals. The warehouse district is nearly deserted at night, so this is where they will bring the bodies. Once the sun goes down, the bodymen collect the dead and transport them here. They work in shifts, neighborhood by neighborhood. They will have departed by dawn, and so will their cargo," I explain in a hushed tone.

"Why don't they just build a real cemetery?" Nina suggests.

"No room," Inej tells her. "I know there was some talk of reopening Black Veil a long time ago, but that all stopped when the Queen's Lady Plague struck. People are too afraid of contagion. If your family can afford it, they send you to a cemetery or graveyard outside Ketterdam. If they can't. . ."

"No mourners," I finish.

"No funerals," Nina murmurs grimly.

Another way of saying good luck among the Crows. But something more. A reminder that there are no burials for us, thieves and killers, no marble graves or wreaths and dried bouquets for us. There are no mourners to honor our funerals.

Inej leads us further as we approach the Sweet Reef. The silos tower over us like statues of Saints and angels, like monuments of Ravkan kings and Fjerdan druskelle. There's a circle of silos emblazoned by Van Eck's red laurel, surrounded by a high metal fence.

"Razor wire," Nina observes.

"It won't be a problem," Inej reassures and I nod in agreement.

The guards take almost twelve minutes exactly to finish an entire circle of the fence that surround the silos, confirmed when we wait to watch their routine. Inej and I have roughly six minutes to cross the wire as once the guards pass to the west side, it will be too easy for them to spot us crossing between silos, but nearly impossible if we're on the roof. In the six minutes remaining, we'll deposit the weevil in the silo hatch. Nina has a green bonelight in hand to signal when it is clear for us to make the next corssing.

"Ten silos," I say. "Inej, do you want to do four crossing or five?"

"I can do five."

"Are you sure? You just got out of-" Nina protests.