Restless Nights

Three Rangers stood in the dark off Fisher's Row and let the dead man come to them.

He rounded the chandler's corner and kept coming, one foot dragging wet cobble, the other slapping down flat and loose. A week underground had painted him the color of old tallow. Netting still tangled his left wrist where the gravedigger hadn't troubled to cut him free of it. The face that edged into the torchlight wore the slack, chewing expression of the newly risen — jaw working at nothing, head canted at an angle no living neck could hold.

Erlich stepped out of the alley mouth with a short spear in one hand and nothing in the other.

"Legs first. Then the head."

Godwin was already off the cobbles — broad across the shoulders, quick on his feet, the contradiction that made him worth his commission. He hooked the dead fisherman's ankle with the spear-haft and swept the legs sideways. The corpse hit the stone and immediately began clawing upright, fingers scraping at nothing. Godwin planted a knee in the small of its back and pinned it flat.