Chapter Two: The Dead Do Talk, Sometimes (But They Never Have Anything Nice To Say)

For Death comes to he who Builds not

And Binds his Soul with Chains of Iron

Woe unto the Destroyer,

For the Gatekeeper shall not let Him pass.

-Tenets of the Master Builder

Like everything else in Old Quarter, the local Watch House is ancient, crumbling, and seriously lax in security. The captain here is a joke: he spends most of his time blind drunk. His watchmen aren't much better, and Old Quarter is the catchall for the dregs of the City Watch. Which, considering the Watch's typical standards, makes them dregs indeed. Even so, I need to be careful; I'm not sure even my reputation would survive an embarrassing arrest by a bunch of gormless Old Quarter guards.

Getting in isn't a problem: by sunset, most of the OQ Watch is smashed. I could probably stroll in wearing a pink ballet costume and feathers, and they wouldn't notice. Don't think I'm not tempted, though I manfully resist it. As the single greatest thief this City has ever known, I probably ought to try for some dignity. Anyway, I haven't got a ballet costume.

I go in via the privy window. This Watch House doesn't appear to have much of a budget for cleaning services; it's a good thing I have a strong stomach. With the guards supposedly on duty up front singing or snoring, it's a simple matter to slip down the hall to the door that leads to the cellars and the morgue. It's unlocked. Which is really kind of pathetic. I've broken into–and out of–plenty of Watch Houses in my day, including Headquarters on one memorable occasion, and none of them have been what I'd call a challenge. But this–this is just sad.

"Morgue" is a pretty fancy term for what is little more than a damp, moldy cellar. It's plenty cold, though, which I suppose is the only pressing requirement for corpse storage. There aren't any guards on duty down here. What a surprise. I don't bother with sneaking much once I shut the cellar door behind me.

Surprisingly, it's wired with electricity, albeit only a single, harsh light dangling on a wire from the groin-vaulted ceiling. As a rule, I dislike electric lights: they aren't easily extinguished at a distance, and eat up the shadows in an extremely inconvenient fashion. This time, however, I'm not too concerned: I'll need all the light I can get to examine the corpse.

As this is the Old Quarter, the corpse I want isn't the only one currently cooling in the Watch House cellar. There are several shroud-draped forms on a long, wide table opposite the stairs, and a lone covered corpse on a metal gurney in the center of the room. On the wall next to the stairs is a stone sink, and beside it the only significant collection of shadows, barely big enough for a man my size. If all else fails, I suppose I can borrow a shroud and pretend to be a corpse. It isn't like the guard here would notice one extra. Not a terribly appealing idea, though.

Odds are good that the body I'm looking for is the one on the gurney, in all its lonely splendor. I cross to it and pull back the shroud–and only just manage not to reel backwards in horror.

I've seen plenty of corpses in my misspent life. As mentioned previously, I usually only get worried about the animate ones intent on eating my brains. But this...Builder preserve me and the Trickster hide me, this one is enough even to tie my cast-iron stomach into knots.

Someone has meticulously and methodically carved nearly every inch of the victim's skin. And, judging from the amount of gore dried on his skin, most of it was done while he was alive. Not a pleasant way to go. In fact, on the list of extremely horrible ways to die, it's right near the top, I should think.

Gritting my teeth and trying not to imagine what the process must have felt like, I pull the sheet the rest of the way off and begin looking for something–anything–that will tell me something more than 'crazy killer with a knife.' That blood-written glyph has to mean something. I stare hard at the pathetic lump of former humanity, and slowly realize that, beneath the crusted blood, the cuts and slices aren't random. They form, in fact, something that looks disturbingly like–surprise, surprise–Keeper glyphs. I close my real eye and zoom the vision of the mechanical one in for a closer look. I recently did a few favors for the Hammers (though it was mostly to keep them from hunting me down and torturing me to death for stealing a relic of theirs–for the Keepers, mind you), and one of them liked me well enough to offer me an adjustment on my eye. It still doesn't see in color, but it captures light a lot better, gives me a clearer picture than it did previously. The picture it's giving me right now makes me wish I'd found something better to do with my evening.

It doesn't take long to find the tattoo on the man's wrist. I never got one–I left before anyone could inflict that bit of nonsense on me–but it was all the rage among the other novices my age. The man's name doesn't matter–I know what he was, now. It seems the Keepers haven't left the City after all–or, at least, not all of them. And something is killing them off, horribly. Again.

Fantastic.

It's difficult to make out beneath the blood–and I don't dare clean off the area, since even a drunk OQ guard might notice that–but the pattern of cuts on the center of the corpse's chest looks disturbingly like one of the glyphs that represents death. Specifically: the one that represents unnatural death and entropy. I bend closer, trying not to breathe the smell of death and blood clinging to the corpse, and allow my real eye to take its turn.

It's similar, all right, but even beneath the crusted gore I can tell that it's just slightly wrong. I tug the glove from my left hand and reach out to lay my fingers very lightly over the torn flesh. The corpse's flesh is cold and rubbery, and the dried blood and rough edges of the wound feel harsh as sandpaper. Don't ask me why I did it. I certainly don't go around touching carved-up corpses just because. I'm not even sure what I expected to happen. Nothing, probably, other than a case of the heebie-jeebies.

I manage not to yelp in alarm as the key-mark on the back of my hand glows like a sullen coal. It doesn't hurt, but pain would be preferable to the sudden, chilling influx of knowledge that floods me.

The glyph carved into the corpse is incomplete, incorrectly transcribed. But it still has some power, and it reeks with dark intentions, greed, malice...I remember, then, what I had seen in the Hag's lair, written in her own hand: that there were others like her, who sought what she had, but lacked the Glyph of Transfiguration to complete their power. Someone is using this Glyph of Entropy with similar intent–to gain power, or prolonged life, all the usual stuff–and going about it all wrong. For which the Builder might be thanked, if I were in the habit of thanking Him, because if it was ever gotten right, things would go very bad indeed...

Footsteps on the stairs inform me I'm out of time. I tug the sheet back over the mangled corpse, and, as lamplight puts in an appearance in the morgue's doorway I duck swiftly into the pool of shadows near the sink. The odd angle of the old basement promises to keep the shadows intact, even with the added presence of a lamp to the electric light. I only need a very small amount of deep shadow, and a lot of luck in such a cramped room. Luck...and Keeper training. I let out my breath slowly, focusing my will on becoming not here. It's probably an unnecessary precaution, trotting out the training like this, ut as I said: I don't think my reputation would stand up to being caught by this bunch. Best not to take chances.

Surprisingly, the newcomer is a woman: tall, with a graceful, heavy frame. Not a guard, either; she's dressed in ordinary clothing–vest, blouse, plain leather trousers and boots. Her hair is white-blonde–and from where I am it even looks to be natural. Unusual. She carries no weapons, and wears no jewelry beyond a pair of plain silver hoops in her ears. A perfectly ordinary citizen, withal, neither wealthy nor poor.

An ordinary citizen has no more business here at this time of night than I do.

She pulls back the shroud covering my corpse of interest, and stands a moment looking down at it. Not wincing, or changing color, or doing much of anything except frowning faintly. She moves around the slab then, changing her angle of view–and presenting her back to me. I ease my blackjack from its loop on my belt. Enigma she might be, but she's intruding on my time, and I don't fancy hanging around waiting for her to go away. I'm tired, and confused, and I dislike the combination. Hitting someone on the head is an extremely appealing prospect right now, and hitting an inconvenience on the head always cheers me right up. I'm not picky about gender, either. A woman can kill me just as dead as a man, and they're twice as likely to go for help rather than proving how tough they are by taking me on alone. I tense, waiting for the optimum moment, when her attention will be fully on the corpse and not on anything else, like a not-terribly-small man rushing up behind her with a blackjack.

Then she picks up the dead man's wrist, the one with the Keeper's tattoo, and lets out a soft "ah," and I hesitate. That sounded like a noise of recognition. I sink back deeper into the shadows, but keep a grip on the cosh, waiting to see if any information might be forthcoming. She seems the type who might think out loud.

Later, I will wish heartily I'd knocked her out right then and been done with it. Hindsight is such a burden.

She moves back around the slab, turning her face back into my line of sight as she pauses by the corpse's head. Hers is not a beautiful face, but there is something in the wide-set eyes and full mouth that might make something like it. It reminds me, for a brief moment, of Viktoria. I shove the thought, and the accompanying stab of old pain, from my lost eye and elsewhere, away. The woman leans down, apparently studying something on the battered, torn features of the body. She even tilts her head so she's practically nose-to-nose with the dead man, nearly close enough to touch. I can only see one of her eyes from this angle: opened wide, almost luminous beneath the harsh electric glare, it's the same color as the sea under a winter sky. Then I notice that her lips are moving, and realize why the wintry imagery sprang to mind. She's whispering something, words I cannot catch but which send chills crawling over my skin. She straightens, slowly–and I see what looks like a thin stream of white mist curling from the dead man's lips to hers.

The hairs on the back of my neck stand right up. What the hell?

As she straightens fully, the thin vapor hovers in the air above the corpse. "Mist" is the best word–the only word–I care to apply to it, but it curls and twists in a way no ordinary mist ever did and it does not dissipate. It's barely visible in the lamplight.

"Can you hear me?" Her voice is soft, cool, velvet-dark.

The mist seems to thicken.

"I want to help you. Please answer my questions."

The mist twists further, and at last, on the very edge of my hearing comes a sigh. Try...

I feel as though icy water has just been dumped down my back. This is beyond creepy. This is lost-in-haunt-infested-ruins-and-me-out-of-holy-water-territory.

"Thank you." The woman seems to brace herself. "What is your name?"

Keeper...

"Yes, I know. Your name?"

No...

She sighs. "Very well. Do you know me?"

The mist writhes, and a bone-chilling hiss fills the air. Guardian...

"Yes."

No...

"I am here to help you find peace. Please help me."

The vapors grow thicker, and for one, awful moment I swear I see a face there. Broken silence...

"I don't understand." At last her tone of voice changes, losing its deep calm, becoming slightly brittle. With frustration? I know the feeling.

He seeks...takes that which is not his...

Oh, Builder, I hope that isn't a reference to me. I've had enough murders pinned on me recently by the Keepers.

Prophecy...comes...

"Please." Now there is open pleading in her voice, and though the light is poor and the cellar is freezing I can see sweat standing on her forehead. Whatever it is she's doing, it's difficult. "I don't understand your words. Can you be clearer? I promise, by the cause I serve, I will not detain you much longer. Soon you can rest."

No rest...prophet...he must stop...

And then the mist is gone, and the woman sags forward, bracing herself against the metal gurney, breathing as raggedly as if she'd just run from Old Quarter to the Docks and back again. My hand aches, clutched around my blackjack so hard I'm surprised the bones haven't snapped. I draw in a slow breath, and force my fingers to relax.

So, this mysterious woman is calling herself a Guardian. Interesting. I'd seen references to "Guardians" in ancient Keeper texts, back in my novice days. Ghost stories, mostly: the sort of thing you might tell on a snowy night to scare yourself and your friends out of sleep.

She pushes herself upright, moving like an old, old woman. She reaches for the lamp and turns toward the stairs–and pauses. I tense, ready to pounce if she shows the slightest suspicion. I'm not thrilled at the idea of tackling her, not if she really is a Guardian. Luck smiles, however, and the woman disappears up the stairs. I stay where I am, marveling once again at how my life can get so complicated so damned fast.

A horribly butchered Keeper is bad enough. A stranger who may or may not be a member of a mythical order of necromancers–that's enough to make me seriously consider declaring myself a Pagan and moving out to the Wild-Lands.

I return to my hideout, in the faint hope that sleep will afford me some escape, and perhaps a chance to dream up some solutions. It's a failed hope: sleep makes like a thief and escapes, taking my longed-for peace of mind tucked away in his sack. The moon is on the wane, about halfway to dark, providing light enough for any drunk staggering home, and shadow enough for any creature of the night. Unwilling to remain alone in my depressing room, I take myself and my dark thoughts for a walk on the Thieves' Highway, the rooftops of the City. You can get anywhere in town without ever setting foot on the cobbles, if you know the paths. I know them very well.

Considering the earlier events, I'm not terribly surprised when I find myself on the rooftop of the building that hides the Keepers' Stonemarket Library. The door-glyph that originally granted entry has vanished like all the others, but one window in particular is perfectly real, and still accessible to someone like me. I even keep a rope stashed behind a loose stone on the roof, in case I need to get in.

The Library is as empty as the Compound, and the silence here is, if possible, even broodier. I find myself shivering as I cross the echoing halls; I feel strangely exposed and vulnerable here, though the lamps are extinguished and the shadows are deep. Maybe it's only the ghosts–or my own, unwanted feelings of guilt.

Blood still stains the floor of the main library, where so many Keepers fell weeks before, slaughtered by the Hag when I freed the child Lauryl's spirit and stripped Gamall of her disguise. The stains are black marks in the moonlight filtering from the oculus. I hadn't known about the massacre until it was too late. Even if I had known what was coming, I'm not sure I could–or would–have done any different; I'd promised LaurylI would free her tortured soul. I may be a thief, but I generally don't make promises I don't intend to keep–it's one of the habits that's kept me alive over the years. Keeping that particular promise, however, had led to a slaughter for which I am indirectly responsible, and I'm still not sure how I feel about that.

Many of the shelves are broken, their contents–so precious to the Keepers–spilled across the floor. Marks are burned into stone and wood, signs of the futile attempts of the Keepers to defend themselves from their enemy with glyph-magic.

I bend to retrieve a book from the floor. A few pages, ripped loose from their stitching, slide to the stones with a soft hiss. They, like the remaining pages, are blank, without a trace that anything had ever been written there. I set the book aside on a table–still miraculously upright–and reach for another. It proves as empty as the first.

I become conscious of a sudden, aching desire to talk to Artemus. Builder knows, my relationship with him had often been as strained as with any of the other Keepers, but of all of them he was the only one I might have called 'friend,' and meant it. As the Keeper who found me, and the one who more or less raised me, I know he must have been hurt when I turned my back on the Order, but for all that he never showed me the mistrust or contempt the others did. Looking back, I realize that he always seemed to trust me beyond reason–that he was the one who turned to me when the Keepers proved unable–or unwilling–to involve themselves in the events threatening the City. He'd been the only Keeper I trusted to tell me more than half-truths. He might have told me more about what is going on now, how to deal with this strange aftermath.

But Artemus is dead, murdered by the Hag so she could steal his form. I don't even know when he died; he disappeared some days before the final confrontation, and I still don't know if the Artemus I spoke to in Gamall's lair was truly him or not. Perhaps 'father' might have been a better word for him than 'friend,' but it's far too late now for anything but regret. I'm on my own, and for the first time I'm actually sorry about this fact. Before, there was always Artemus, whether I wanted him or not.

I emerge from my thoughts to discover that I have, against all reason, been tidying the chaos: picking up books, retrieving scattered, torn, empty pages, stacking them neatly on the surviving tables. It's that old Keeper training: some part of me that can't bear to see books, even empty ones, so badly treated. Or perhaps it's only my body's way of dealing with the grief. I'd experienced something similar after the Soulforge, coming face to face with Viktoria's sacrifice in the days following its destruction. Like Artemus, she'd meant more to me than I'd cared to admit, and it was only after she was gone I'd discovered how much her absence hurt. I've spent my whole life trying to avoid such attachments, and still the damned things reach out to snare me like a web.

Sudden anger heats my blood, and I turn, intending to sweep the stack of useless books from the table–but as my marked left hand brushes the topmost cover, the heat of anger becomes something else entirely. I have just enough time to register the fact that the key on the back of my hand is glowing with white hot light before my senses scatter like roaches before lamplight.

I wake up face down on the flagstones. They're very cold. Slightly more comfortable than my current mattress, but cold. Heavy, angular shapes pressing against my hands and arms and nudging gently against my aching skull tell me that the stack of books from the table had, at some point, fallen on top of me. I roll onto my back, allowing myself only a soft hiss as every muscle in my body shrieks in protest. I know I'm alone in the Library, but a thief's instincts don't allow me to indulge in any louder noises.

I don't stay on my back very long: books and stones do not a comfy bed make. With a monumental effort of will I manage to sit up. My good eye is blurry, unwilling to focus; the eye socket that holds my mechanical eye feels like it's harboring a red-hot coal. I shut them both and cradle my head in my hands, very gingerly, and try to remember what happened.

I have nothing but a few confused, fragmented images–so fragmented I can't even form a conscious picture, only vague impressions of doom and wrong. The worst part is, I can't even determine why I find it so hard to focus; my head hurts, sure, but I've had worse injuries. The first few hours after Viktoria, acting on the Trickster's orders, tore my eye out come to mind, and I'd managed even then to clear my head enough to think and sneak my way out of the Pagan god's crazy mansion. I'm not even dribbling blood everywhere this time.

At length I feel like opening my eyes again, and to my relief real and artificial both cooperate. I shift my weight, preparing to reach for the table edge and haul myself upright, when something catches my attention: one of the books, lying open near where my left hand had been. Only it isn't blank anymore: in the faint moonlight filtering from the oculus overhead I can make out the shape of a single word, scrawled large upon the page. I reach out, pull it close enough to read, and feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up.

Prophecy, it reads.

It's written in my own hand. Glancing down, I can see ink–it has to be ink, surely, though I cannot tell in this light if it is black or blood-red–spattered across my fingertips. A few inches away is the spilled ink bottle and the broken pen.

I stare down at it for a long, long time, thinking nothing in particular beyond the faint, whimpering wish that I were someone else right now. But sitting around doing nothing has never been something I'm good at, and finally my brain kicks into motion. The ghost–or whatever that was–back at the morgue had spoken of a prophet to the woman. I have no idea how to go about finding her, but I can think of another source that might at least point me in the right direction.