I was turning to announce my abandonment of our night’s effort when it happened. It started when the brick she was balancing on gave. That give became a slide, and no grip nor ladder was there for Bella’s flailing arms when she disappeared in an awful splash. When I found my footing and lifted her, flies that had been pulled down from the surface burst skyward while Bella cried and vomited and covered me in pure foulness.

  Curse my soul, part of me wanted to laugh. I exhausted our waterskins trying to clean her. To no avail, I could only obey her frantic request, popping open the nearest manhole cover, keeping my concerns to myself when we emerged onto a trafficked avenue.

  A new concern rattled me the following morning when I discovered Bella hadn’t gotten out of bed.

  “You’re boiling,” Though this was so, she shook as if lying on a block of ice.

  “I’m going to die—that, or turn into a ghoul.”

  “Don’t speak of such things.” I retracted my hand from her forehead. Her paleness made it too easy for thoughts of either ill fate.

  Her eyes glazed, her head jostled. “Have I been a good person, Boz? Am I now?” She said, “I saw her, Bosgaard. Her golden face.”

  “Saw who?”

  “Tersiona.”

  Bella’s spill had rendered her sick as anyone I’d ever envisioned her attending. Her fever had her seeing the Goddess of Good, and before long she engaged in protracted talks with similar hallucinations above our bed or dwelling inside the bowl of soup I’d made for her.

  I had wanted to go over the night’s route, a far better one that should send us over what appeared to be a pile of ruins. Then it was a straight shot to City Cemetery. But now I was unable. My offer to bring her to an infirmary only made her cuss and writhe, confirming my long-held belief that she knew what abject conditions she’d always toiled in. I sat beside her and clasped her fishy hand. She moaned incoherent fears about a cruel world, us fiddling with priests, fiddling with ghouls, death itself. After a while, she tired, leaving me able to pry myself from soaked sheets.

  Her words did not leave me as I labored. Chalk sticks cinched in bags, both lanterns filled again with oil, both maps rolled and sealed in separate map cases made of bone. Redundancy calmed a nervous mind. I would be going below alone tonight, as I’d done most of my life. This time I would be leaving her to bake in her illness. The spike and plummet of her fits did not make this easy.

  My hands shook when she wailed about dying and heaven and what might be crawling out from under our bed to take us there. Like a lever on a drawbridge, my breathing would slow and cool when she partially regained her senses.

  Eventually, I fixed my thoughts on Bella pulling through. Even as I hiked my pack onto my shoulders and kissed her goodbye, I saw strong life still flickering. Her eyes no longer as crazed, my lips still pressed against clammy heat, but it wasn’t the inferno I’d felt only hours before.

  “You are leaving me?” she moaned, lifting a hand to point at the door.

  “We can’t afford not to get this route figured out. I can stay if you want.”

  “No. No, go. I could use the quiet.”

  Having moused about the place without so much as letting lanterns clank, I resented the remark, though given her condition it was easy to forgive. “You’ll be better in no time,” I said, “probably just a bad fever.”

  “You know nothing!” she snapped. “I don’t tell you about lifting lids or shoving a shovel.” The insults which followed were hard to ignore. I’d made soup for a turned-harpy. Wincing out the door, the last I heard of her was her trailing off a list of her own dreary symptoms.

  *

  Back down in the sewer, I was immediately of a sounder mind. She was just sick, dreadfully so. In my own moments of irritated rage, I’d also unsheathed my share of harshness.

  Amidst the arches, her words morphed into trinkets of their own charm. It bemused me, how she could be so soft, like a fairy, yet so full of hellfire. This was good for my morale, I suppose, for soon I was lost again.

  Flustered, I followed the chalk marks I’d made until reaching my starting point. I kept failing to reach City Cemetery, but I was learning more with every failure.

  To get my bearings, I carefully lifted a cover. My spirit joyed, not just at the night’s refreshing coolness, but at all the tombstones that walled in my view. Though on the opposite end of my goal I had found the edge of the cemetery.

  The walls here were thicker. Adjoining sewer-tunnels far less. These grounds housed the dead, and space had been made to accommodate. Despite fewer tunnels, I still managed to get hopelessly turned around. Perhaps the maps themselves were incorrect. I aimed to confirm this by lifting another cover. Doing so, I should have cheered, for my frustrated path had actually taken me closer to the Chapwyn mausoleum. Instead, the sight almost sent me scrambling down and backwards, staying my celebration.

  After those snatchers had been caught, it was common for a time to see encampments of armed families or paid henchmen astride protected graves. One such mercenary was directly in front of the cover I’d raised, listlessly leaning against a tombstone, waiting for any reason to use his battle axe.

  Having scampered back, I told Bella my discoveries, and my excitement doubled when her color began to return and malaise lift. Then she relapsed.

  Her illness blew hot and cold, lasting for days. It also breathed new fire into why we needed to strike it rich. Bella knew her affliction, and the necessary syrups and serums I bought cost us a chariot.

  Only two nights before Bishop Vhulviel was to be entombed, I slogged back down for another chalking session. Bella’s last bout had turned into a cough and renewed contemplations. Her Chapwyn talk would not have twisted me so if it weren’t for my disgruntled feelings over—well, by then I could tell you the street corners above which arch sweated grime and which sewer arch was dry and bare. What I could not do was arrive under the manhole next to the damn mausoleum.

  I’d frontiered into a new tunnel somewhere under the Maedraderium and stewed in my frustration. My thoughts were on Bella, though I forced them back to my wretched navigation. There was no god, no gods either. And if there were, they must have enjoyed watching me suffer, for they gifted me nothing.

  Then I tripped over a jewel-laden gauntlet.

  I knew right then that I should have been plundering the dead differently. The wealth I’d left untouched while opting for convenience and cautiously avoiding the tombs of the rich. But where had this ornate piece of armor come from?

  I covered my lantern. When I found no moonlight oozing in, I was unable to confirm my suspicions. In the world above, someone must have been murdered—a rich someone— afterward being thrown down so one of his gauntlets could somehow wiggle free and roll away.

  I uncovered my lantern to gaze upon another delight. A necklace gleamed, its brilliant white reflecting off bricks lathered in slime.

  I put the necklace in my pocket, and as I salivated over what I was sure to find next, I discovered I was facing the entrance to another tunnel. At the base of this new passage, the slabs that had been my walkway were covered with fresh dirt. Loose bricks, some broken, lain strewn about. Roots hung from its ceiling, a ceiling far lower than where I stood. Crude and malformed, it was like the tunnel Bella and I had seen leading from that coffin.

  I crept to its edge. Blackness refused to give way until I was able to strain, far in the distance, yet another glimmer.

  I entered to a worsening odor, one that made the sewer entirely less irksome. I’d thought at first the culprit had been found. At the toe of my boot, an arm lay ripped free from some corpse, one presumably missing a necklace. Maggots undulated and flexed, and amongst them were marks on the ripe forearm suggesting a once-tight gauntlet. I dropped that very thing, scrambling to wipe my hands, before picking the gauntlet back up and burying it deep in my bag.

  I was no physician, but I had seen many effects of trauma. I lurched forward to stare at teeth marks near the armpit. This arm hadn’t just been torn; it had been bitten. Every detail was there, right out of the pages. All that was needed were cackles and pointy ears. Ghouls—they were with me.

  Turns out eaters of the dead care nothing for their meal’s decorations. Despite my senses, I continued onward, picking up dropped pins and jewelry. It wasn’t entirely insane. I’d listened a long while, waiting without so much as shifting my boot, straining into blackness to hear the digging of earth, the scratches of approaching claws. There’d been nothing.

  But collecting more forsaken wealth was not the only reason I pushed on, nor even the main one. This ghoul path was leading directly across the cemetery and toward the mausoleum. If they’d broken the walls behind me, they may have done the same ahead.

  The smell thickened. There were moments where I was required to crawl on my hands and knees, experiencing for the first time an earth that not only provided loose bones, but things that wriggled.

  A sudden fall landed me on fetid bedrock, destroying my lantern in a light-blighting clatter. My nostrils seethed and singed. I’d face-planted into a pile of dung. I could try to describe it, how it was too large to be a man’s and that I knew what decomposing shat I flung from my cheeks and chin while I puked more violent than murder. But it would do the nightmare no justice. Just know you can smell nothing worse, for I never had.

  I scrambled for what I’d hoped was up and out of that foul pit. Doing so led me into another tunnel. Bereft of light, I crawled inside just deep enough to furiously apply my waterskins and begin fishing for my spare lantern.

  It took only a moment to hear the echoes. Someone was talking.

  My better judgment suggested that I remain without light. I held no desire to traverse that pit again, and my situation improved when I crawled forward, toward the voice, and found my hands patting the fluted grooves of a fallen pillar.

  The map had indicated ruins, and I had found them. But any deliberations, any good plans revisited, any joys that I might have felt were obliterated when the voice returned.

  A city sewer worker was an encounter I’d somewhat anticipated, though by the latter nights I was creeping about in places that appeared entirely abandoned. But where I crawled now was another ghoul tunnel. Not just for its characteristic stench or burrowed walls did I know this. When I peered over the pillar, I still saw nothing, but a voice not coming from a man’s throat growled and gloated.

  “You worm in here,” it said, sounding like the scraping of rusted metal, “and think there won’t be consequence! For such loitering?”

  I was looking out over something like a miniature arena. It had survived the collapsing of pillars and walls that now lay toppled around the upper rim. I knew this because there was light here, though dim. As my eyes adjusted, from high up, a tiny window appeared in the dirt ceiling. Through it glowed the light of the moon.

  I knew where I was. There is a massive headstone out in City Cemetery; though laid flat on the earth, its peculiar architect cut into its design a real window. Though thick and opaque, though I’m sure at first the headstone pushed against only harmless dirt, the ghouls had burrowed all the way up to its glass, and were now using it.

  “Bring ’em out!”

  What I saw both terrified and delighted. I wanted to run. I wanted to flee. I wanted to peer over farther and gaze upon these creatures. Human enough, the way you imagine them is probably close. Long arms. Sinewy legs. Bald heads sporting the ears of an elf. In the waning moonlight, their jaws reminded me of hyenas at a zoo, though these were fearfully unchained and from such jaws came shrieks of hideous laughter.

  “Yes, yes,” the tall one lusted, “bring them out so they can see mother moon one last time.”

  This tall one giving the orders must have been Paltumorr. A full head above the rest, his grey hide was lank and lean. His wretched, spider-like limbs all connected to a saggy torso, grown soft and bloated from centuries feasting on catered bits. His subordinates, ghouls of no less ugliness, dragged out other ghouls whose own limbs appeared to have been bitten off. Paltumorr’s captives, I wagered, were Glibbmor Ghouls. This was confirmed when the wiggling wretches were dropped on the stone floor where the moonlight glowed the hardest.

  “Use the sewers, do you?” Paltumorr said. “You Glibbmor scum invade my territory? Well, know we’re in your mannish tunnels now too. Enjoy the moon, boys. For the sun rises.”

  The Glibbmor Ghouls screeched. Paltumorr’s chanted in a hoarse chorus: “Pal—too—more, Pal—too—mooore.”

  I backtracked. There was no way I could proceed further and expect to keep my life or sanity. So I backtracked, careful not to disturb a rock or loosen a gnawed-on bone from its fissure in the earthen wall. Able to avoid pits or worse, revisiting a chewed-off arm, I at last returned to the sewer, its familiar bricks the dearest of friends. I contemplated sealing the entrance, but with no mortar or time, I abandoned such thoughts and tied down my mind to continue in my original course.

  Soon I found what I hoped with all my soul was the needed intersection. I turned right as the map had suggested. As dawn began to ache, the storm drains through which its light burned became spaced out by an encouraging cadence. At a slight bend to the left, I found myself staring at a statue lying amongst sodden leaves—a saintly woman, torn from a headstone. I had found it!

  *

  No water and no sleep made for a tough walk back. I followed my marks, giddy when I’d come upon a landmark now committed to memory. By noon, I made it back to the drain nearest our apartment, our starting point for the morrow’s great task.

  If there was ever a sign of our success, it was not fine dishes in our pantry, but that we could afford a place near Nilghorde’s main Chapwyn temple. We lived close enough to their headquarters to be awoken four times a year by the banging of their gong. Coming from above, I recognized the hymns of an indoctrination ceremony.

  For all its stupendousness, what I saw then I had a harder time believing as real than what I’d witnessed only hours. A “miracle”—though still wan, her hair marred by a sweaty pillow, Bella had risen from her bed, and from the concealment of the storm drain I watched her walk past and enter the church.

  I waited for a break in traffic and climbed out onto the street.

  Covered in grime, I fit well with the poorest of poor, taken to their knees. As I shouldered through, I watched Bella make her way to the front and get ushered up to the altar. Having been one of the very few humans to actually see, hear, and smell ghouls, I welcomed the confines of the church and its goers. Maybe I would even inform the Chapwyns of my discoveries, perhaps starting a ghoul-clearing campaign…but only after we’d cashed in on their bishop and rid ourselves of graveyards.

  By his ornaments, the man who held Bella’s hand was a high priest. He escorted her into a back room, infuriating me the moment the door closed. While I lingered, my discomfort was made all the more pathetic when I imagined every possible version of what could be transpiring behind that wall of golden leaves and white velvet.

  She did not exit those private chambers to rejoin the mass, and the burning incense almost put me on the floor. I hadn’t slept since I couldn’t remember, but I took the long way home.

  *

  I awoke from a deep sleep that bore disturbing dreams. I’d first wandered in the underworld before weaving into the second nightmare standing before me now, dressed in a Chapwyn surplice.

  “What of their all-male clergy?” I asked, hoping to prod her from her musings on a fantasy world bent on egalitarianism.

  But she wouldn’t bother. “They must be quite gallant to women under their wing.”

  “Bella, that money-sucking cult is as ridiculous as you are! Are you going to tell me—” She held out her hand. In front of my nose, she dangled a large and archaic key. “…And that is?”

  “Our way in, silly.” I gaped. “Those priest’s,” she said, “their offices are as labeled as any shelf at Bileprine.”

  “He left you?” Knowing the answer: “To go grab oils, leaving you to read that infernal passage about rebirth and so on?”

  She nodded. “There were maybe a dozen keys to that mausoleum. We won’t be depriving them access—just one body from it.” What had chained her to the bed had left us. Her spark having returned, she added, “Maybe priests are too busy, or maybe some interpret the scriptures differently, but, to me, we—you and me—we can be more Chapwyn-like here than in any other way. You were right, Boz, and their wealth will serve the world better in hands of those who still feel hunger.”

  “Take the decorations too?”

  “As much as we can fit in our bags.”

  Sickness had boiled her a mastermind. We kissed and embraced like I had been plagued by fire, and only more kissing could help. After, we formally abandoned the notion of tunneling under to, maybe, get inside by the time we were displaying as many grey hairs as any corpse. Now we could simply sneak up and use a key.

  The only consideration remaining was how to get there. Come nightfall, the cemetery would be crawling with watchful eyes and eager blades. Bella first cast me aside with disbelief, one that I remedied by giving her the necklace I’d found and retold my tale until she eventually grew quiet and shuddered. I now knew warring ghouls were maneuvering in the sewers. Yet their reluctance to pop out in front of men armed with sword and dagger, as I would be, left us willing to risk a final trek below.

  *

  A brisk morning maligned then crawled through the red-hot hearth of afternoon. At sunset, we descended, following my chalk marks until peering out we beheld the mausoleum. The congregation had already begun to disperse, and as the first stars began to shimmer, the last of the church departed.

  I popped the cover off, sliding it quietly aside as we climbed onto the cobblestones. In the still hours between moonset and the sun’s first rays, we slinked to the door. The thrill of Bella’s key working ran through me.

  Soon I was to hear and feel the tumbles and click of the lock unlocking. But I experienced neither. In a discovery that almost sent me to the granite holding my sides, they’d forgotten to lock the door!