When Dimia's consciousness returned the first thing to greet her was the stench of her own vomit admixed with that of the sewers and the dead. Mercifully there was some light from torches and melting candles placed on broken ledges and inserted into cracks. Dimia got her sorts. The trauma she'd suffered. The physical ordeal of riding under Bramble's arm as he carried her deeper under the city through a forever of darkness. The mental anguish of not knowing what the golem's intentions were. Her captor remained silent through the journey except for its animal grunting and panting. Dimia emptied her stomach many times along the way as she faded in and out of consciousness. Her head throbbed and she felt near death. And was ready for it, if that was Fate's choice. She welcomed an end to this suffering. She wanted to sleep forever but felt cursed with unrest as if she were herself one of Skelen's rotters.

The chamber they had arrived in was slanted and shattered and dripped with slime and shitwater. Hints of ancient symbology blanketed the eroded stone. Structures with purpose. Urns and fallen shelves. A ruin of a ruin. Old catacombs shattered by the recent rupture that had rocked the capital. Dimia's tutor Yulis had taught her that the metropolis perpetually sunk and its citizens constantly built new structures atop the old ones. Camshire was deep with cities, one stacked atop the other. There were whispers of whole communities that lurked down here in these reaches abandoned by society, those who wished to go unseen.

Dimia gasped for through her adjusting eyes she saw that there were dead bodies lined against the walls. All the revenants stared at her in silence. Some had shields and weapons, ancient soldiers prodded from their subterranean graves. Others were simple dead, commoners given unlife and robbed of their eternal rest. One of these stood at the center of the room in funereal wear that was smeared with dung and slime and blood. It was the thin pale boy she had seen at her window before Bramble had come for her.

"Put her down," the cadaver said in a hoarse voice that rattled with loose teeth and decayed cords and a disobedient tongue.

Bramble did as commanded and released Dimia. She sunk to the wet floor, her legs numb. The girl coughed badly and felt a stake of pain in her chest. The pervasive sickness of this place was working itself into her. "Who are you?" Dimia managed. But she somehow knew in her heart who this was even if he did not bear the man's face.

"It is Skelen," the corpse answered. "But this body before you... is only my voice."

Movement above. Dimia looked up to see a figure step out onto a crumbling balcony. It was a face she had longed to again confront and watch the life slip from as she drove a knife into his breast. Her most hated enemy, her nemesis, slayer of her family and people—Skelen the Stitcher. His true mouth did not move. He only wore a thin smile upon his lips to accompany the voice carrying from the undead Speaker at the room's center. Skelen was using the corpse as a mouthpiece like some twisted ventriloquist.

"I still live," the Speaker said. "But I need another's tongue... to speak with. My captors... took my own." At this Skelen held up a pale hand and mimed scissors snipping before his open mouth to demonstrate the removal of his tongue. The necromancer was charading his own words that were spoken by another's body's mouth. Sorcery was madness, Dimia concluded. The warnings were right. "Perhaps the Diluvians... pickled it like a pig's... as your father would have done had he gotten his way, along with his conspirators in Marrow."

To add to the surreal scene, Skelen raised up his arms to reveal why his hand had appeared so oddly white. "The Diluvian butchers also... took my hands," said the Speaker. "So I had to get... new ones." Skelen opened and closed his fingers. His hands had indeed been hacked off—only to be replaced by new ones, stolen from some cadaver and stitched onto the mage's singed stumps. "It is a world... of butchers. These Diluvians... the swinesmiths... me."

"What do you want from me?" Dimia asked.

The disfigured necromancer walked down the broken steps to the lower floor. Stood before the girl and stared from eyes shot with madness. Dimia found herself unable to move. Had Skelen brought her here to finish what he started? Kill the last survivor of Marrow? All this time Dimia had been prepared to cut the mage down in revenge as soon as she ever set eyes on him but now after her many ordeals, culminating with Bramble's betrayal and her gauntlet through these awful tunnels, she realized that his death would not bring her peace. Only one thing probably would ever do that, and that was her own death. So let it come, she thought. She resigned herself to it. Wanted it, even.

"If you mean to kill me," Dimia said, "I only beg you leave me dead."

Skelen's eyes filled with melancholy. His own lips frowned with sorrow as those of his undead Speaker parted to answer in his stead: "I don't wish to harm you, child." Skelen stepped closer and put his cold stolen hand to Dimia's cheek as his vassal finally voiced its master's true desire: "I want your forgiveness."

— • —

As with any night in Camshire, it was one for the spinning of webs. The spindle rats wove their nightly traps in the alleys, seeking to snare small prey. Ogerius continued to spin a case, seeking to snare Reapers. He pored over the scrolls of laws and codes and soldier's letters and testimonies that were spread out before him in his rented study. Slowly he continued to build a mounting case against the secret program, planning for his summary to the court martial triumvirate. He'd dismissed his staff long ago. Let them to their wives and younglings. His work pulled at him like a tide. He knew the Reapers had their uses. But they and their commanders should not go unchecked. He had seen the toll of such power before. This, his final and ultimate presentation, the crowning gleamstone of his case, would recount the various known Reaper transgressions such as those committed by Team 3 at Krakenbone and Marrow and Fort Nothing. The other teams had their dirty sheets as well that needed airing. That pattern of crimes and mutinies were a web of their own, as were all things that surrounded the Reapers. Their operations were steeped in utmost secrecy. The word 'black' was apt. And Ogerius' own case was not invulnerable. Other men on his team had vanished or supposedly taken their own lives, if the authorities were to be believed. His chief digger Zelekil had been hounded by the Inquisitors until he was found in a canal, chewed to bits by the invasive carnivorous fish that had been dumped into their shit-choked waters. One of his top researches, Noakes, had been murdered in Fetterstone Prison in the line of his work. The Warden's men claimed Noakes had been overpowered and snuffed by the inmates in a riot attempt, but the Ogre had other suspicions. He'd since learned that the prisoner Noakes had insisted on meeting, one Varga Skinner, was now on the loose and suspected of murdering several children. Webs upon webs. Depravities untold.

There was a flash of movement outside the window. Something on the rooftops across the street. Probably hooligan anarchs, taking a thrill in climbing Camshire's highest structures while high as demigods on their smite. Some were said to use outlawed runery to better leap and grip and run, unaware or uncaring of what the forces they toyed with would ultimately do to their mortal vessels and brains.

As Ogerius peered out the window he heard a creak on the floors behind him. He turned and was surprised to see standing in this rented and clandestine quarters in this late hour—Commander Rooster himself, his neck still a violet flower from the rock that had smashed it, thrown by Ogerius' own hand.

"We must go, now," Rooster said in an awful croak. "They mean to... kill you. We may differ on much... but I could not stand by."

Ogerius' eye went back to the window. Sure enough, there were sleek figures running the eaves. A glint of metal. Rooster spoke true. Ogerius backed from the portal.

"Come," urged Rooster in that terrible rasp. "I have a wagon ready in the stable below. We must hurry."

Ogerius frantically shuffled the papers into leather cases. "You are a man of honor, Garmund. To rescue the one who did you so much har—"

Rooster raked a sharp blade against Ogerius' corded neck and drained him onto the mounds of papers and reports before him. A throat for a throat. Harm had been done, and done in turn. Rooster had decided that if he was going to sanction the murder of the Ogre it would be his own hand to do the sinister work. Satisfaction finally delivered, not with stone but by knife. Not in the broad of day but under the cover of night. The Reaper way. Grattus had been right—this had been a matter best solved with a blade.

Rooster stepped back and cleaned his knife. Slipped out just as easily as he had come. The unit of Reaper urban assassins that had accompanied Rooster here had easily picked off those of the compound's guards who could not be previously relieved of their posts by threat or coin. Rooster went into the weeping night. The Ogre was no longer his mess. It was theirs. The black-clad killers descended upon the place and hacked Ogerius into pieces and coated the segments with the spittle of cockatrice. Their rune man Echo threw a glyphed blanket atop the dead officer's remains and chanted words that existed before mankind ever did. The lumps beneath the spellwoven rug began to diminish in form as the fabric grew wet with boiled blood and commenced to smoke. When the blanket was black and heavy with dampness and lying nearly flat on the floor Echo rolled it up and packed it away. All that was left of Ogerius was a black puddle on the floorboards, the rest of him dissolved away.

At Echo's elbow was a new recruit, folded into the Camshire unit by the Inquisitors. He had before been a Reaper of another team's number but his code name went unadjusted: Jinx. Placed here by Wral in a master stroke of manipulation, gaining access to this enigmatic Reaper team. Jinx had been startled to learn who his first target would be. He knew Ogerius from Fort Nothing, had accompanied him on the journey here to Camshire with Mad Skelen in tow. They'd not conversed much in their travels and parted ways here in the city, where the winds were indeed uneasy, and now Jinx was unexpectedly complicit in the decorated veteran's assassination. Jinx never cared for the Ogre, but to be a part of his murder was another thing. There was little choice but serve his masters. Wral's invisible talons were at his hexed heart, ready to still it upon the slightest disobedience.

The operatives collected the Ogre's bloodsoaked troves of evidence and damnation and fled. The assassins made their way across the rooftops toward the landscape of tetanic mazes of pipes and ducts of the Rustgardens. There in that wilderness of dripping and rusted aqueducts the unsanctioned unit of Reapers burned the gore-soaked blanket in an iron barrel over which they warmed their murderous hands.

— • —

Blacwin took Merek's offer and had the rune man ink his Reaper tattoo. He had previously put off such action for fear of being permanently branded with a sign he did not believe in—but he had no regrets now as Merek drove the needle into his flesh from his recovery bed and marked him for life with Snake and Scythe. Blacwin would embrace his Reaperdom. Climb the ranks and change the system from within. And to the Pits with being 'half' anything. Blacwin rejected any brand such as 'human' or 'ylf.' He was a 'person,' whole and pure as any other. He realized he knew of no label for all such beings of like face and limb, to include all thinking souls whether man or ylf or hobgoblin or djinn. Was 'humanoid' the word to describe them all? It mattered little. Blacwin needed no label with which to be judged. He simply was. But continue to hide it he must, or death. His hand was dealt and now it came down to how he played the bladed cards. Forced to walk the divide of self-respect and self-preservation, fated to live out his days an outsider whether it be within or out of society's fragile circle.

"Lie honestly," Risper (whom Blacwin wished well, still unaware of his fate) had told him during his Reaper instructions but Blacwin had learned that lesson long ago. He seethed at those who made a liar of him from birth. Hated those who hated him. But what then of those like Cowrie? She had not judged him—she was warm and kind and knew the few words to say in their fleeting time that Blacwin most needed to hear. That he was a good man and was right about his ways. Though... she knew Blacwin as a murderer, true—but not a 'taint.' Perhaps only the one was forgivable and not the other, even to her. Blacwin did not raise such questions when Cowrie visited him in the night and applied salves as his tattoo healed and they traded hushed words through the tumbling hours. They shared stories and dreams and fears and kisses as the unkind future waited. In Blacwin's future currents were threats not yet understood or known. But for this last night the sick and hungry world was forgotten and it was only him and her in all the cosmos uncomprehensible.