I laid her on her side of the bed and went through her satchel. After, I went through our drawers and chests.

  With a handful of silver, I laid beside her. She’d never once spoken about her burial wishes, an amazing feat considering the nature of our usual talks. She may have wanted a spiraling funeral pyre, an obsidian mausoleum, to be hacked to bits and fed to the night creatures she loved so dearly.

  I kept her for days. Telling myself I was waiting on Irion worked for a little while. He was, after all, the only family member she’d ever introduced me to, and proper burial was I figured a family affair. But he never came, and as a day or two passed that reasoning melted away. Not being able to say goodbye stood firmly in its place.

  To clean her meant moving her to the kitchen table. I walked around her studiously, solemnly; death had managed to steal many of the features we are so accustomed to.

  An urge entered me as I circled the table. Pulling apart her legs, now heavy and cold, I positioned myself. In all the sexual voyages between us, all the desecration of graves, and juices spent, I’d never done this. How could I? She had on occasion teased me of my appetite, and joked I was capable of such “selfish indulgences.”

  As usual, she was right. I entered a place that was always so inviting and warm, now a rough tunnel. In the midst of my efforts I heard grunting. I believed for just a moment that I had thrusted her back to life. It was I who grunted, and the moment’s realization came right as I did.

  I wrapped her in a sheet and prepared to enter the streets. Much coaxing and the coins I’d scrounged up days earlier got me a mule to carry Somyellia to the Pauper Morgue.

  Taking her to a place designated for the nameless and faceless forgotten made me ill to the core. Hooded, in midday, I took the laden mule down Red Wolf, over the little white bridges that ran through Nilghorde Commerce, past the Tower of the Waning Moon, and finally through winding roads that made the strange district called the The Dead Kettle.

  Arriving at the front offices of the morgue, I tethered the mule and stared up at the fat man’s nearby tower we’d once raided. Since then it had withered terribly, as if the ultimate perversions once contained within had howled free, leaving the rook beaten by decay beyond the normal brutality of the sun and rain.

  I carried Somyellia through the doors of the Pauper Morgue. The transaction was as brief as one would expect. Then a pair of pale bald men took her.

  Looking at these two, if you saw them you would find them disgusting and queer, and not be ashamed of it. Stubby legs supported flab up to the neck, and pouty bottom lips held spittle ready to drip. It was too easy to see the types of men that had paid Somyellia over the years. Just as easily, to see them mongering over her body the moment my back was turned. Eventually letting go of my knife’s handle, I helped them unwrap her from the sheet.

  “What do you want on the tombstone?” the shorter one asked.

  Throughout the years, I have read dozens of excerpts in poems and books, the ones loaded with saccharine romancing, and I wished I’d used a number of them. Particularly striking was a line out of Songs in Regal Twilight, authored by Vandahl five hundred years before I was born. At the time, though, all I could do was fight back a surge of tears and scribble out what was clawing:

  SOMYELLIA ORDRID

  CAPTOR OF MANY HEARTS, RULER OF ONE

  A Black Lamb In Your Arms Do I Hope To Find You

  “Good sir,” the taller one said, the sending me spinning with about the last thing I expected to hear. “We are looking to replace an employee…very soon. The position requires the ability to read and write.”

  “Skills elusive to many willin’ to work here,” said the short one.

  “We don’t mean to ask you this without regard to the tragedies that befell you,” the tall one said, brushing a hand over Somyellia, “but we need a strong back most urgently.”

  I don’t know if I had death written on my face. Maybe these little trolls, so close to it on a daily basis, were able to see things others couldn’t. This opportunity seemed to fall out of the sky and onto the lap of a man well-adjusted to life’s apathy. This was so harmoniously ideal that my shift to excitement with the smell of Somyellia still on my skin pelted me with guilt.

  Who was she really, though? Mocking her by remembering the version that suited me best held no love or honor. She was strong in life, and surely would laugh hideously at my weakened state. She would have nodded with that haunting nod, then “Do it, lover.” Wherever she was, she had no need for my indecision.

  Yes, this is how I got here. Where I speak to you now.

  Telling them I accepted made them smile—sluggy, melted smiles—and when they told me the wages I almost danced on the ceiling. I wasn’t going to rival the vaults of the ruling, but by my quick arithmetic, in a year I would be able to enroll at the Institute.

  The former mortician was gone in no time. The first few days were shadowing the two waddling managers. My workspace was the morgue itself, vast and set back from the street. Inside, its walls made a stone honeycomb that contained bodies in all sizes and conditions. At its center, where I’d spend most of my time, was the table.

  Above my station, the domed ceiling was a cap of painted glass. Hilarious in its irony, it depicted the poor and pious being whisked away by serene carriers to some orange and golden field. Waiting for them, Tersiona sat in a throne of wheat, surrounded by Ansul and a ring of lesser figures. By day, the ceiling provided a glowing vale of sunlight, and on the nights I chose not to go home, church icons holding books and teapots glared down on my solitude.

  Following a downhill path, my designated cart was to be led to an iron door on the northern edge of the cemetery, an edge well known to me. This door was much like a cellar hatch, bolted on a granite frame leading to the Pauper Vault. The dead poor were dropped to reside forever with carrion, foulness, and things that scampered from the light. Even for me, the stench that belched up from that darkness didn’t only offend the nostrils, but clawed at the skin and smothered.

  Continuing downhill were the graves for those buried with just enough money to avoid the filling pit. And there was Somyellia.

  At the end of my first day, I went down to see her. I sat at her graveside and stared across the sea of weathered stone teeth. Across the vast distance, through the gleaming spires of Laugher’s Lot, I could make out our abandoned house, a speck that was once our grandest meeting place.

  Pain exposes itself when it chooses to, and as most harden with the passing years it becomes an indistinguishable part of life. I leaned against her brand new stone and wept. It’s like Vandahl wrote: “Life is but wild flowers in the graveyard.”

  A void in me was undeniably ripped open after Somyellia left. Perhaps that is why I fell into my work so. I enjoyed the sweating from the lifting, all legal for the first time.

  It became a routine: inspect the day’s load, tend the horse assigned to the morgue, attach her to the cart, throw a body on the table, report, hoist it into said cart, repeat. The short report was more gratifying than any bundle of obscure notes I’d made on my own. Cause of death—best guess sufficed, physical description, name (if known), a few other details, and then on to the next.

  My bosses, I came to find out, were Qells; a once magnificent house that had long rotted away from lordship. They were pleased by my performance. So much so, in fact, that after only a month they never stepped foot in the morgue again. Their time was better spent in the front office, delving into the keepsakes of freshly brought bodies, dealings with cutthroats, and occasionally supporting the coup of some ambitious rising figure.

  Though Snier and Somyellia were gone, I remained in my studio, or I should say my possessions did. The Pauper Morgue became my real home—as the commoners who pass out bread rather than the blade say, “It’s where the heart lies.” Sleeping on a mat of blankets in a favored corner, book in hand, and well-fed from lamplight was my only joy. Street murmurs crawled back to me that, not long after taking employment, an attentive group of urchins took me for evicted or dead. I laugh at the thought of them burgling only to run headlong into my ferine collections.

  Some bodies at the morgue needed dissection to root out cause of death. In no time, I bore witness to the many malfunctions of our vulnerable flesh. Diseases that attached to organs, fiercely and without remorse, always made me miss her something awful.

  The few bodies that were to accompany tombstones I’d separate early. Piling them like a stack of fingered and footed firewood reminded me a lot of Belot’s place. Once filled, the cart would go to the mass grave and I’d play the game of trying to drop them in ways that would achieve the greatest cracks and thuds. Most memorable, I once invoked a peculiar squeal, after which I softly closed the door and backed away.

  My bosses relished the tight-lipped approach. I was met with freedom, more coin, and ample food. My predecessor, I imagined, must have expressed some grievance with their dealings, and I wondered what hill of bones in that subterranean pit he occupied.

  In time, I surmised they thought I killed Somyellia. In addition to being tolerant of murder, with my literary skills and build, they figured me the perfect subordinate. I never confirmed this, but a mind educated by both scholars and the streets cuts through inanity like a robber’s knife.

  Much like a child enamored in summer, I lost track of time. Weeks became months, and those too seemed to fly by with the wave of dead that gave me my livelihood.

  You would have thought Nilghorde would have been desolate in a mere season. No matter the ebb and flow, the city remained as bustling and lively as ever. The occasional stroll to my studio would take me up Red Wolf, examining the living with new eyes. “I wonder when I’ll be seeing you?” I’d sometimes say, a couple of times too loud.

  My so-called experiments ceased entirely. Dreams of becoming a doctor were barely an afterthought. A bill on a dusty shelf.

  Though dead, Somyellia had not left my heart nor my habits. Nights I would wake to see her gliding from a darkened corner of the morgue. It ended as soon as my mind took the step out of the world of dream and into the forever disappointing world we temporarily occupy. It exposed life’s pallid and stagnant nature, a few punishing seasons of hot and cold. These visions were only a phase, possibly due to another phase of mine, one in which a young womanly corpse would be examined for far too long, though never treated to the carnal activities that had closed my one and only love.

  My existence had met a livable rhythm. I’d never expected, or wanted, the sun-soaked slogging of many who claim to live the good life. I knew from an early age I was meant to dwell in other passions. I had money for the few things that interested me. I fought a small war with opium and won, resulting in an additional layer of meat on my hide. I read endlessly, making sure to visit libraries and vendors of the book and scroll. The dead had befriended me, and while sitting among the morgue’s more comfortable nooks I often fell asleep leaned against their silent company.

  *

  On the anniversary of Somyellia’s death, I abandoned my duties to sit beside her grave. The bouquet of roses and lilies I had laid were for the day. The wreath of coiled Orphedilias, for the coming night.

  Staring at her stone, some lettered grooves had been corrupted by a year’s mold. As I scraped the mold with my fingernails, I remembered. It’s funny how the bereaved mind rushes back to the last time we’ve seen the dead when they were not. I was certainly no exception.

  *

  Purpose tends to be a cruel morning, waking you sudden and thorough. My dour harmony, my focused aloneness, was to be disrupted once more, and once more it would come out of nowhere, as is its preference.

  One day, we had a delivery. A giant man, killed by some disease, lay on my table bloated and blue. Normally I would have commenced to working, and the larger than normal corpse would have been in the cart and ready for transport.

  But I walked around the table in the same fashion that I had done with Somyellia back on Red Wolf. This cold mound looked familiar, causing me without effort to mumble near-forgotten words.

  Tension filled the room, was the room, making home places saved for the cobwebs and rodents grown fat on my forgetting to close the back door.

  I knew who this reminded me of, with deathly certainty. I hadn’t thought about him in ages, and he had been as dead to me as the inhabitants of the mass grave.

  For a moment I wondered if it was him. But I was looking down on flabby jowls on top of a weak chin. His hair had been the same color, but coarse and curled. Just to be sure, and with some effort, I rolled the corpse onto his side. No, no giant scar on his back.

  I had completely forgotten about it until using it as an identifier. My father had a deep swathe between his shoulders from a battle in the first campaign he’d ever embarked on.

  He’d told of the ambushing Pelats and their crude, bony weapons. How they had skewered his horse and overwhelmed him. How he had one pinned to the ground, and how a moment before the fatal strike a sneaky Pelats opened up his back in the vain attempt to save his fellow savage.

  Surviving the ordeal with a fresh trophy of tongues and charms, a field hospital repaired Father’s back, and adorning citations followed in his recovery.

  It may have been the thick neck, or some indescribable similarity, but I couldn’t shake what I began to feel. An idea germinated in me, powerful and driven. Closure, something I had never known. It began to squeak and plea from the core of my being.

  The rest of the day was spent in a hurried discontent.

  After days of research in a back room at the Nilghorde Hall of Records, I learned that he was indeed still alive. He must have had squandered his war spoils. The house in Templeton had been sold long ago. Shoeing for a Ward substation, and likely led with a rabid taste for Black Monk, he took up residence in a small loft off Iron Belfry Boulevard. There, most roads and weaving allies remained nameless, and the view cast on a once thriving populace that hadn’t progressed in the better part of a century.

  When I took my covert observations on foot, for a fleeting moment I saw, silhouetted by firelight, a large figure limp past a window. Cloaked in a black hood, I moved like a rat. The few Metropolitan Ward who trotted by were oblivious. But I wanted to be sure my efforts would not be thwarted. I needed perfect concealment, and a moonless night was soon to arrive.

  Then it came. Midafternoon in my mortician’s cart, after a brief stop inside a blacksmith’s, my horse and I rested under the massive Gahlerrion Bridge. Flowing under the bridge was the Moliahenna, or Black Tongue, cutting deep and swift through the heart of Nilghorde and spilling into the sea. At its shores, parked under an abutment, I watched the sunset and scowled at approaching beggars.

  After the sun had completely died and the cold winds began, I reentered the streets. The clopping of the hooves and random squeaks of cart wheels echoed against the bricks of homes and shops. For some reason they all sounded too loud. Irksomely loud even. The glare of a Wardsmen and sideways glances from passing carriages sunk me in my seat. Eventually I passed under the Do-Gooder’s Row statues, and began ascending narrow cobblestone.

  If there had been a moon, around when it would have been at its zenith I crept the cart into the correct alley and cached it behind a withered hedge.

  Hugging the veranda wall and unsheathing my knife, the time had come.

  I was no Snier, but the poor man’s lock before me was no match for the blade that wormed its way between iron and wood. When I felt the click and pressure release, I opened the door, painfully slow.

  From what I had gathered, the bed was upstairs, and in his aged state it was reasonable to wager he’d be asleep. Although moonless, and candles out, I could see quite well. Maybe years spent in dark cellars or matching places had rendered me a brother to the night or the creatures therein. I was staring at a familiar parlor, though it felt a lifetime ago.

  To my immediate right was the fanning display of sabers. Next to them, medals from the Far East, Pelat, and the massacres of Serabandantilith. To my left was a table in front of the very leather furnishings I’d once spilt milk on. My eyes passed closed doors to strain the exact shapes of stairs.

  The distance between the front door and this stairwell was soon over taken. The muscles in my heart raced.

  I had practiced on a particularly warped section of planks in the Pauper Morgue’s office. Placing the tip of my boot on the first step, I pressed my weight onto the wood until assured I could plant myself without a crack or noise. Slowly, with a concentrated dexterity unfound in large bodies, I continued this method until I came to a turn in the stairwell. An arm’s length more, a turn to the right, and I would be facing the final steps leading up to the bedroom.

  Cough!

  I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  He had to be withered with age, battle wounds, and the heavy weight of the bottle. Moreover, I was no boy and had faced younger, more able men in the alleys of Nilghorde many times over. No matter how much one changes, I suppose, we’ll never forget some things, and I came to this realization as I began the first of the last steps. My whole life as a man, I hadn’t so much as considered him. Now I was in his home, knife in hand. I made the final climb.

  He was asleep under the window. To my right, his dwindled fire still gave off enough light to expose how thoroughly his hair had grayed. The bedroom itself was a mess of chests and bottles. Preparing to wade through, I put away my knife and grabbed what I’d bought from the blacksmith. It was a special occasion, and, after all, I was a poet at heart. I pulled a farrier hammer out from underneath my cloak, then I stepped forward.

  Without fail, a board moaned under my boot.

  “In the doorway a figure in black, unknown to you, has come to claim you, old man. I have become strong. The menace is upon you. From the crumbling edges of life I have come for you. You taught me to never shut my eyes. You taught me discipline.”