Chapter 3: The Bone on the Black Market

The chandler's lane stank of tar, and the door at its end stood ajar. The night had given Erlich nothing but a dead fence's name, and he'd turned it over until dawn like a stone with something ugly underneath it. The finger bone in untrained hands. An artifact to pull power from it. A man frightened enough to murder his own broker and vanish.

The room over the shop was up a ladder-stair with no rail.

Godwin went first, spear leveled. Erlich followed. Leofric brought up the rear, knife out and torch unlit.

The door at the top stood a hand's-width ajar.

Godwin put his shoulder to it. The room beyond was dark and close, a single shuttered window, and the shape that turned from the far corner moved wrong — too stiff at the shoulder, one arm dragging. Peto. Dead a week, the color of spoiled milk, still wearing the shirt he'd died in. A dark stain spread across the chest where something sharp had gone through.

He came at them without sound, arms lifting, fingers hooked.

Godwin drove the spear-haft into his ribs and slammed him against the wall. The corpse bounced off the plaster and came again, reaching. Erlich stepped around Godwin's shoulder and drove the blade through the back of the neck in one stroke. Peto dropped. The body hit the floorboards and lay still among the wreckage of his lodgings — bedding torn from the pallet, a floorboard pried open, a small strongbox cracked and empty.

Leofric shoved the shutter wide. Light fell across the mess. "Well. Someone got here first."

"Someone killed him here." Erlich crouched, tilting the dead fence's chin with the sword-tip. The wound in the chest was neat blade-work, not a bite. "Then they searched the room. Then they raised him and left him to keep anyone else out."

Godwin turned over the broken strongbox. He brought it to his face, then held it out. "Smell this."

Erlich took the box. The scent hit him at once — burnt copper, acrid and thin, clinging to the splintered wood like smoke to wool. The reek of mana burned through an artifact not meant to hold it. He'd smelled it before on a trinket they'd confiscated in Eastmark, and it had meant the same thing then: someone drawing power through something that wasn't theirs.

"Mana residue," he said. "The bone was in this box, and someone was pulling on it through an artifact. Channeled work, not performed at the burial plot itself — the bone feeds the trinket, the trinket does the raising." He set the strongbox down.

"And Peto could name the buyer." He straightened. "The necromancer killed the only witness who could lead back to him, then raised the corpse to make certain. Covering his trail with his own product. Our best lead is dead on the floor and we put him there twice."

Leofric nudged the body with his boot. "So the bone's gone."

"The bone went south. Peto brokered the sale on the waterfront — the buyer didn't take a boat. No coaster heads south along this coast into empty scrub. He walked out of town overland with a dragon bone and a demon's trinket and more will than sense." Erlich cleaned his sword on the dead fence's tunic. "And he's frightened enough to murder anyone who points back at him."

Godwin rose from the strongbox. "Then the trail's cold."

"The trail's south." Erlich looked at the body, then at the window and the bright scrub beyond. "A bone comes through Magyar a month ago. A few weeks later the dead start walking. Every one of the dead we've cut down came out of the southern scrub."

He was down the ladder before the others moved. Godwin stood at the window, watching the scrub bleach white under the climbing sun. Somewhere in that emptiness a frightened man was walking south with a dragon bone and a demon's trinket, and behind him the dead were rising. Leofric's boots scraped on the rungs as he followed Erlich down.

"The cemetery tonight," Leofric said from the doorway. "If we're lucky, something rises and gives us a heading."

Godwin did not answer. The body on the floor was already turning the room sour. He looked at Peto's ruined chest one last time, then left the dead man to the dark.