I made for the grave along with the rest, but as we advanced shadows met us from behind opposing sarcophagi. The first skirmish between the guilds: fists, teeth, and soon the clank and tear of crowbars meeting stubby swords. I had leveled one and was making my way to another. Then I saw her. Bella had come with her group. My vile leader had her pinned down, his dagger rising.

  Without a breath, I beat him with my shovel until his brains were on and under and mixed with the mud as to not distinguish what was man’s and what was the earth’s. By the time I heard the smacks of horse armor, the frenzied tugs at my shoulder had vanished, along with their tugger.

  I never blamed her leaving me. Bella knew what was at stake. Soon, I would too. I made it just over the cemetery wall before being detained and tossed in the Municipal Dungeon.

  Funny how failing to drop a backpack can so drastically alter one’s life. For the paltry charge of possession of grave-robbing tools, there I learned I could still long for the rugged comfort of the woods when opposed with iron bars and a stone floor. I ate when another man said to. I slept in hay turned foul and thanked my appearance more than once when I saw what happened to scrawny lads.

  Bella, she wrote and wrote, about life and love and longing. The letters came until one day they didn’t. I couldn’t pull my heart from my throat. Was she hurt? Did she need my help? Had she found another? Deprived of the perfumed parchment that had connected me to the world, I experienced torment worse than any tainted gruel or bored guard could ever hope to inflict. After a year, I emerged from the dungeon to start again my work and find again my love.

  Sucked back into the Bileprine Boys, slap-dashed with dug-up armor and outfitted with crude weaponry, I learned the IHS Body Snatcher’s Guild had been blamed for the murder of our old leader. What had once been minor feuds had turned into an all-out war. My plight intensified, my hackles raised the higher. Upon my first battle, I learned from the enemy under my boot that Bella had gotten married.

  Distraught, I did my shameful diligence. I found her in a merry little home nestled midblock off Burnt Beetle Lane. Several nights spent peeking through their windows showed me Bella, whose hair had remained short and sporty, though her kitchen apron gave her an appearance I couldn’t readily describe.

  Merry soon gave way. This husband, he not only doubled her age, tripled her in weight, he barked orders and made demanding gestures from their table to the washroom and back again. Cruel are the gods; I bore witness to her spread-leg serfdom for an IHS professor. I wanted to seize the first loose brick and kick open his door, but I held my impulses, for a year caged amongst thieves had taught me stealth. On the third or fourth night, I watched as his critique of her cooking escalated into physical abuse. Abandoning patience—I trust, young man, you’ll keep this next part between drinking brethren—I stormed in and killed that troll with my bare hands.

  After I was able to finally pry squealing euphoria itself off of me, I assured Bella we’d never be separated again and we took the corpse to Bileprine, where it was recognized and I lauded a hero for the second time in one night. “Let’s work for both institutes,” Bella suggested.

  It was improvement at its finest. Not only would I rid myself of unpleasant company, but I’d gain the fairest. No longer pitted against each other, no longer imprisoned by the bar and the wall— or press-gang marriages, as Bella pled that I understand. We’d no longer be under the peering eyes of illiterate guards and husbands who trashed outgoing letters. We would fall off the face of the earth, only to emerge at night to loot the dead and, as she insisted, help the living. In no time, we sat under the spires of an obelisk near the wealthy Maedraderium, arguing over which bones would go to which institute and predicting which would bid the highest.

  To our former colleagues, we were two more cases of snatchers being snatched. They’d warned us about working alone in such warring days, but we’d refused to listen, and our innards must’ve simply ended up fondled by larval doctors. Under this illusion, our purses swelled with coin, and later our new apartment with furnishing fit only for the most successful of lovers. With her knack for spotting a calamity’s symptoms and my dungeon-forged ability to stand the firm negotiator, we rapped on all the doors we’d rapped on before, but now, sound the trumpets, not as faceless competitors from rival guilds, but as the formidable Bosgaard and Bella.

  Success is a funny thing, in that what once drives us gives way to new concerns. We’d feasted on priced snails, fowl from Pelliul, gorged ourselves on Quinnarian wine, made love atop silk and under swaying braids of pearl and gold…and the prospect of losing it maddened me. Dreams of luxury were replaced with nightmares of pallid forests still calling my name.

  She at first ignored my anxieties, then enhanced them with ever-worse versions of poverty when her frustrated attempts at consolation provided me no solace. I was able to eventually convince her we’d end up huddled in a shit-smeared corner of her infirmary if our ambition was to slacken so much as a flake chipped from a bar of gold. Higher risk meant greater reward.

  “Can you believe it?” she said. “Another tunnel.”

  “Climb out of there.”

  I hoisted her off the coffin and out of the hole. Though we were in a work area not as heavily guarded as its Ansul of Chapwyn neighbor, City Cemetery was the most dangerous. There were the Ward-trekked thoroughfares, entire patches of graves lit like daybreak with the help of absent trees and the surprise of a smiling moon, and too, increasingly worrisome, was the discovery of more and more of these tunnels. Bella and I had made City Cemetery our permanent territory, but it seemed we weren’t the only ones.

  I had seen similar tunnels before. Digging down deep enough, hitting the right graves, long halls of packed earth had led to, or away. Though I told myself snatchers of a most ambitious nature had taken to the underworld, such a notion never gave me the gall to get on my hands and knees and see where the tunnels would take me.

  As we lowered Bella’s lantern, the broke-open, emptied coffin wasn’t the only thing peculiar. The tunnel’s collapsing narrowness and scrawled claw marks spoke not of the ones I’d thus far encountered. Who—or what—had dug those had done so with the tact and time suggesting reuse. The one before us was done in haste. Its architect new.

  “If this is ghoul work, we’re relocating to Whisperer’s Plain.”

  “They won’t hurt us,” she said. “It’s said they only attack each other, or set each other up for run-ins with sworders or to be killed by the sun.”

  A ghoul encounter wasn’t what frightened me. For all the myths orbiting them, my upbringing had nailed firm that despite their brutish power and weapons-grade stench, ghouls were cowards. It may have also been a remnant of my upbringing, but the prospect of bumping into the undead didn’t make me toss and turn in my sleep. Being poor again did.

  In the few places where encounters with the underworld were spoken of with the normalcy of farmers exchanging gabs about the weather, the murmurs were all the same: ghouls had always stirred under City Cemetery. Now, for reasons that were slowly becoming clear, they quarreled.

  Still, Bella’s observations had been correct. We couldn’t afford to be ensnared in any of their schemes. Enraged men with blades were a threat to pickers of graves, man or ghoul.

  *

  “Will you not at least consider it?” the flustered adjunct professor from Bileprine said. “They took a vote, twice. They’d want you to do it.”

  I can’t remember his name, or if he’d even given it to me, but this messenger for the Bileprine always reminded me of a pigeon. Amongst his chalkboard-cleaning duties and scurrying under professors who were no longer worried by the threat of poverty, he had more nefarious obligations, like meeting Bella and I in a bleak bar where cemetery mud caked the floor.

  “Look,” he said, “we both know this will hurt business. While the rest of the world hopes ghouls do not exist, everyone unfortunate enough to sit at this table knows otherwise. This flare-up of theirs will pull eyes to the cemetery.”

  Bella joined me in my laughter, reddening further our company. Though he knew his message was a preposterous one, he was still commanded to convincingly deliver.

  “Even if I could sit down with them,” I said, “even if I could guard my hide from their boar-tusk fangs, ghouls have no more honor than their former, despicable human selves had—and, might I add, such forsaken lives are why those tallow-hearted, corpse-eating vermin exist at all. Being the broker of peace between two ghoul chieftains is literally the definition of time wasted.”

  “Then let us think beyond peace,” he brightened, having walked me into a trap. “An alliance with Paltumorr.”

  Disbelief had once consumed me too, but Glibbmor wasn’t the only ghoul to ever own a name. Glibbmor and Paltumorr, opposite as they were alike. Vile, stinking, just one a rock the other a spindly devil. Glibbmor, the rock one, led a pack that dug from graveyard to graveyard. From sources that not even I wished to know, word had risen that he’d wearied of roaming. This did not sit well with Paltumorr, leader of the ghoul clan that long reigned under City Cemetery.

  “If they can’t share corpses like nice boys and ghouls,” the adjunct said, enraging Bella’s snarls with that awful pun, “find us a way to side with Paltumorr. Things were fine before this Glibbmor invaded City Cemetery. You’ve heard the same things I have, Boz. Rumors of mausoleum doors being left wide open. The Ward clattering at the gates like hornets. It’s bad for business.”

  It was true Paltumorr and I now shared common enemies. Ridding the earth and the burrows coursing beneath it of Glibbmor would return both our operations to normal. Normal for Bella and I meant continued payment, and not an increase in the chances that we’d lose the connection between our head and neck.

  “But what am I to do,” I said, “even if such a feat were possible? Confess to the Ward how I’m able to commune with ghouls and how I know of their tunnels?”

  “You’d also be paid to figure such things out.” The payment he proposed was good—very good.

  Bella grew serious. “The IHS also approached us about the ghoul problem.”

  “Yeah,” I said, taking her cue and turning him into a stack of indignant snorts, “and they’re offering double what you Bileprines are.”

  Ignoring Bella, the adjunct leaned in. “We want this…this ghoul civil war over and done with. You will want it over too, Boz.” Then he staggered me with the sum we’d receive if we hauled in the body of “Bishop Vhulviel. The old brimstone thrower just died. And we want him.”

  *

  Walking in City Cemetery the next morning, our cover as mourners in route to a familiar headstone had perhaps been blown by our giggles and guffaws. We’d turned down Bileprine’s offer. I had periodically said no to bolster our stance in future barters, but this last one I’d genuinely felt their absurdity. Besides, we’d said yes to the real task. Due to Chapwyn rituals, we had time to prepare. In one week, the church would place Bishop Vhulviel in an impenetrable tomb—made all the more impenetrable, we learned, by executing its master mason for the convenient discovery of his unforgivable sins.

  As we’d expected, not only had the IHS become aware of ghoul conflicts, but they too wanted the bishop. If legends of his proximity to the supernatural were correct, theories would be tested regarding the housing of the soul in the heart and brain.

  I remembered from the early days that those ascribed to the religion were never cremated. My own ancestors over in the Ansul graveyard were testament to that. Buried due to obscure and contradicting scriptures on resurrection, those hoping to be whisked away by Tersiona’s winged messengers went into coffins, or luxurious tombs, to rot whole.

  We had to employ our utmost caution and ingenuity. Bella’s idea of hiring a skilled thief for the tomb’s locks was high on our list. The bag of gold coming from this haul would require a cart and a strong ox to wheel off. We’d never have to snatch again. I never loved descending worsening layers of stench with a short-handled shovel. Bless religious charity, the bishop would allow me to apprentice as a silversmith, or maybe a juggler.

  Bella did not join in my excitement. She recanted her suggestion, and even began explaining that maybe we ought to respect the sanctity of the good bishop.

  Our daylight sojourn had been rare, but for good reason. We had arrived at the vaulted mausoleum. We were here, despite Bella’s bout of dithering, to conduct our reconnaissance.

  “Look at that,” I said.

  “We’ll never get in.”

  Almost as large as a mansion in the Morgeltine, the tomb’s granite stairs led to iron doors bolted airtight against thick, siege-deflecting marble impartially reflecting the blue of morning. There were enough gables atop this mammoth to hide a score of arrow-ready guards.

  “Maybe the sewers?”

  “You think dead people need to use the privy, do you?” She joined me on a low sarcophagus to stare at a manhole cover in the cobblestone pathway.

  The manhole gave me an idea, and perhaps the beginnings of a plan. From this entrance to the city’s sewers, we were practically under the mausoleum already. Even if the church had considered infiltration from ghouls, the ghouls feared iron, which meant fortifications may not have included considerations for chisels or a hefty crowbar.

  Lost in contemplation, I rambled as I sometimes do: “Did you know Chapwyns are called Chapwyns because they say that’s the surname Tersiona gave Ansul?”

  “What for?”

  “Oh, he followed some instruction, pitied an orphan, kissed a leper.”

  Instructions, indeed. I’d seen what obeying such selfless commandments had done when sick Chapwyn families in the countryside called upon the aid of their gilded leaders. I drummed up dreams of what jewels I’d pry, what vestments encrusted with ruby and gold I’d stuff into my bag—compensation for too many years under the yoke that bled its most devout and best-intended the most dismally dry.

  Bella gasped, stowing her protest for later. I’d scurried over and jammed my fingers under the manhole’s rust-lined cover, lifting it.

  “Someone may have seen you,” she said, lancing me with one of those glances she did before giving me a bout of the silent treatment. “If so, this awful caper’s over already.”

  “Nobody saw. There has to be a way in, Bell. If we—”

  “Boz, I have a very bad feeling about this. Not only does it give me the creeps, but what about the charities these people’ve done? What about all the mouths fed and dreary days inspired because this man wished it so?” After a moment, she put the crown jewel on this rant of hers: “I’m thinking of joining their church.”

  Next her big bleeding heart would hearken pity for the ghouls. “Bella,” I said, following her march out of the cemetery. “You don’t mean that.”

  “Don’t tell me what I do and do not mean.”

  “Bella. Stop.”

  “What?”

  “We do this,” I said, as if putting a saddle on a skittish mare, “it’s the last one. No more robbing graves. With the money, we can build you a new infirmary. A better one.”

  Several pleas of a similar nature later, her face began to slacken. Her eyes lost most of their squint. Galvanized, I added: “We can make our own leper-kissing station.”

  I had become a juggler at last, though of words and promises. “And you’ll be the one doing the kissing, good sir,” she said, “if this goes awry.”

  We walked under the cemetery’s arches and reentered the street. Bella hummed and skipped, in high spirits. Now it was I who worried.

  *

  Word reached us the next day, confirming a number of my fears. Watchmen not only caught some snatchers hours after we’d left, but bellowed how they’d been clued to such scandalous efforts by laughter that could have only come from the rasping jowls of ghouls. Much to the chagrin of Bileprine and the IHS, City Cemetery was swarmed.

  I confirmed this when I braved another daylight trip. The stamping of Ward horses and the calls of their riders down to watchmen leaning on halberds, I lifted the manhole just long enough to slip into the sewer a small statue I’d torn off the nearest headstone. Then I was gone like a hare.

  When I returned home, Bella had them laid across our bed. The Hall of Records held it all, including maps of the sewers and clerks who asked no questions to pretty girls. Nilghorde had suffered generations of fires, collapses, and rebuilds that could entomb a century. As a result, the squiggled lines all overlapped the other in a bewilderment of red and green.

  Night meant little while underground, but it was crucial to anyone above, wishing to go down while living on a busy street. We entered the sewers with a goodbye to the stars, hoping to navigate by lantern and mark our way with sticks of chalk until at last coming upon the statue I’d dropped down.

  I suppose years in our line of work had prepared us. The cramped spaces, the smell, the legions of scurrying rats. Shadows danced and flickered when we’d arrive at turns not shown on our maps or a sudden staircase leading to nowhere. After an eternity of backtracking, we discovered storm drains and avenues for run-off were our lines of green.

  To our good fortune, we’d dropped in through a storm drain and, to my best guess, the piping that ran under the rim of the Chapwyn mausoleum was also for the weather. Though outdated, most city streets were reflected on the map as black lines. Sitting on a wagon wheel that had somehow fallen down and been forgotten, Bella and I double and triple-checked our own street. We at least knew where we’d started, and to get to City Cemetery, we had to utilize several junctions of red.

  Comparing the smell of rotting flesh to rivers of shit is like weighing whether it’s better to be eaten by a shark or a bear. Edges of teetering bricks and flimsy boards left by workers helped us avoid wading through waste, though it didn’t help us find our way.