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  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 flat 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.

  "I found it. 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 epaulettes, and silver clasps. At its hip, a gilt-encrusted 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 dagger. Yet more remarkable than 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 flourishes 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 surely 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.

  "Proud and deadly, it was the weapon of royalty—and, apparently, the slayers of royalty."

  Garamand 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 flee 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 flee, 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 flexing 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, 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 and, 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.

  "Ma'am! Hello? I need your help!" It all came out at once. "I'm Laurel Cylphra—I'm looking for Ailson Kindler! We've done something terrible.
"

  Chapter Two: Decay by Degrees

  What had been a blood smear began to run, dribbling down the whitewashed door, trailing a sticky shadow. Whatever scrape was accentuating my banging with bursts of pain hardly registered as I railed upon the author's darkened porch. I was shouting, but only caught snippets of my own pleas as they rebounded off the stolid door, echoing with the same hollow, desperate inefficacy as my bursts of frantic knocking. The question of how long I would go on banging at a probably empty house began to form in one of the few still lucid districts of my mind. Gradually it dawned upon me, the sickening depth of the desperation that brought me howling like a lunatic at the threshold of a stranger's home. I knew I had nowhere else to go, and the first twinge of a shrinking, helpless sensation began to crowd my fear. I felt it coming at last, a chill panic. I was going to scream.

  The faintest creak of a door latch being withdrawn spared the final tattered remnant of my composure.

  The door opened no more than the finest crack, revealing nothing but a column of absolute dark and the faintest glint of multiple door chains. No sound issued forth—no greeting, no challenge, nothing.

  "Miss Kindler?" I hazarded, straining to see inside. "I'm so sorry to… call… at such an inexcusable hour. I'm Laurel Cylphra, I need—"

  "Something terrible," interrupted a voice like a rusty, slowly drawn knife. I halted, momentarily unsure of what was said.

  "Excuse—" I was cut off again.

  "You were blithering about 'something terrible,' you wouldn't be referring to your manners, mayhap?"

  "I'm sorry to wake you, ma'am, but—"

  "But still you're going on. You've went to greater lengths than a drunk would, and if you're a thief you're going about it all wrong—so what is it? And be brief."

  I understand that I roused the woman, but this reception was not quite what I expected. Somewhat sobered by the chiding voice rasping from the dark, I tried to be both concise and reasonable sounding—goals very much at odds.

  "Yes ma'am. I was at Evercrown earlier tonight, with others. We trespassed upon one of the resting places… the countess's family's mausoleum. We woke something there accidentally, something lingering from one of the crypt's residents. When we tried to flee it… it was terrible. It cut down two I was with. I ran. There was no where else…." I had done well keeping the tremble out of my voice, but choked on the memory of that final horror—of Sayn and Garamand death's and the terror in Liscena's eyes as I fled, leaving her to the apparition.

  "Two with you, eh? Quite a minx. I suppose you've learned better for future trysts, hum?" A dusty chuckle followed from inside.

  I gaped. She was making a quip. I was retelling the most terrifying incident of my life, still shuttering from it in fact, and the only person I could think of to help me, a stranger and a spinster, was making jokes at my expense. Certainly I was imposing. Certainly I was trying to cast my plight in a sympathetic light—or, at least, trying to avoid presenting myself as too much of a criminal. But I expected my reception to be met with something other than dismissal. Perhaps I'd been deluding myself.

  "Oh, come now girl, show some spunk," the disembodied voice chided. "You've had a bad turn and come through it. I'm sorry about your friends, but obviously the Lady has more in store for you. Count yourself lucky and go home. You'll be more thankful for your luck come the morning."

  That said, the door crept shut by the slightest degree. Immediately I slid the toe of my boot into the gap, jamming it open. Did she seriously take me for some churl, some stranger come to her doorstep by accident, hoping for a pat on the head as she prayed to Pharasma for a brighter tomorrow?

  The beginnings of annoyance helped steady my resolve, and I hoped my voice as well. "Ma'am, I came to ask your help, I thought you might—" she cut me off again.

  "If it's help you want, or a crime you wish to report, I can direct you to the Carpenter Street Watch garrison. Otherwise I don't know how you think I can be of service."

  My brows furrowed, as a frustrating possibility came to mind, "You are Ailson Kindler, correct?" There was a long pause, and a sound that might have been a sigh.

  "Yes. Though I favor being held at such a disadvantage nearly as little as I favor being awake this hour," came the eventual retort. At least she was talking; you don't ask the name of someone you're going to slam the door on. I withdrew my boot.

  "I'm Laurel Cylphra. This isn't how I'd preferred we meet, ma'am, but I'm familiar with your writing and your expertise in matters—extraordinary. I'd hoped you might help me figure a way to right what I had a part in putting wrong tonight."

  "Cylphra," she seemed to test the name, searching for its place in some mental file. "Perhaps you should start by telling me what actually happened tonight."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The "accidental" clatter of the tea salver on the marble-topped end table next to me startled me awake. It took a moment to remember where I was, and I took in Kindler's disarming sitting room again. It was what one might expect the tearoom of a spinster in her seventies to look like, with the collected knickknacks and curios of a lifetime displayed amid copious settings of lace and porcelain. Yet, at the same time, it was obvious Ms. Kindler was more than some widow enjoying a slow, melancholy slide toward death. Rather than the portraits of lost loved ones or chinchy collectables, her shelves bore the wildest range of oddities, rarities, and grotesqueries. Upon a shelf laden with heavy books—several bearing Ms. Kindler's own name as author—leered a fierce looking tribal totem, while above it a stand for test tubes supported several vials of slender fluids, gnarled lengths of wood, and silken flowers. Over the mantle hung a sinister and quite sharp looking black spear, along with a faded portrait of four eclectic travelers in the rose garden of a sinister chateau. A sideboard displayed the skull of some fanged monstrosity between pieces of painted flatware, and an ancient looking tome supported a bowl of dried leaves and fruit. Even the tea set from which Kinder absently poured was a weird sort of treasure, bearing the knotting shapes of wingless golden dragons upon porcelain finer than eggshell.

  I remembered retelling Ms. Kindler my story—twice, in fact, after all the questions she'd had—before dozing off. I had the feeling of being interrogated while recounting the evening's incident, not so much because she seemed to blame me for anything or even disapprove of my actions, but more because with each questioned nuance I felt as though I were giving away more than I'd meant. By the end my plays for sympathy had come to little, and I felt like I'd unintentionally presented myself as nothing more than a girl who'd run scared when she'd gotten beyond her depth. That idea pissed me off—mostly because after my actions I couldn't say it wasn't true. The past evening, its recounting, and my hammering conscience had exhausted me so that I'd fallen asleep on Ms. Kindler's stiff settee when she'd stepped out for moment.

  She was more fully dressed than she'd been earlier, her hair pulled back in a loose iron-gray bun, her dress's high collar and long sleeves accentuating her thinness. There wasn't much to distinguish her from any other old maid. She seemed worn and nearly used up. Her reserved, stiffly starched clothing hid most of her skin, but what did show seemed less a part of her and more like wrinkled sheets festooned upon a drying rack too small for them. At some point a sour look had pinched her face and held tight, giving her the perpetually disapproving countenance of a Pharasmin priestess. Altogether, not the imposing adventuress I'd imagined. But the details gave me some hope. Her insistent questioning and even her unappreciated humor revealed a mind still very much active and alert, and through her silver-rimmed spectacles, her gray eyes seemed undulled by the tarnish of nostalgia and regret.

  She put one of her delicate teacups into my hands. It wasn't filled with tea, but rather thick black coffee. I muttered thanks, brushing the sleep from my eyes and taming a few stray hairs.

  "It's well after dawn," she said pointedly, filling her own cup, half from the matching teapot and half from a crystal decanter of brown liquid on the ta
ble. The decanter was nearly empty. "Probably best to be up and about."

  Daintily taking a seat across from me, she scrutinized me patiently, watching me like an opponent in some game or—perhaps more aptly—like an unwelcome guest. I returned her look. A long moment of tea sipping passed.

  "Altogether, not the imposing adventuress I'd imagined."

  "Well?" I finally came to it.

  "Well, that's it it seems," she took a long swing from her cup. "It's been lovely to chat with you, dear, but now it's time to be on your way home. Do call again—perhaps during more respectable hours."

  "Ms. Kindler!" I protested, straightening in my seat, momentarily thinking I'd mistaken my impression of her shrewdness. "What about what I've told you. What of the spirit at Evercrown?"

  "Exactly what I'm thinking of, dear." Neither her tone nor manner changed. "Best to be off. There's nothing to be done."

  "'Nothing to be done?'" I repeated, incredulous, the already forgotten teacup in my hands clattering, spilling a bit into the saucer.

  "If you're truly that concerned, I might suggest taking a bit of a holiday," she continued unvexed. "Do you have family in Caliphas? Or Karcau? Both are really quite lovely this season and I find a bit of time along the water often sooths my nerves."

  "A holiday!? How can—" I began over excitedly, the sound of my own shrill voice in the close room halting me. Pulling in a long breath I paused and tried again, swift but not frantic. "Ms. Kindler, I apologize, but you don't seem to understand. My concern hasn't been for myself, but others. I saw a terrible thing last night. A terrible thing that by all that is right shouldn't be. It's about in the cemetery at my fault and who knows what hurt it might cause. I came for your advice as I've heard tell you've seen and faced down such things before. I need to know how so I can do the same."