For Deliah

The boat

High Executor Hadrec, who commands the Sepulcher and has the manner of a man who has never been surprised and does not intend to start,Hadrec sent me to the Decrepit Ferry on Sunday. A boat was tied up there, low in the water, and the boat was full of the dead. They lay in rows. Someone had been patient with them. From the way it sat it had been meant for Fenris Isle.

I have stood among the dead before. I am one. This was different, because nobody had asked them anything.

One was a woman with a ring on her hand, and inside the band someone had cut For Deliah. I took it. I looked at my own hand afterwards, to see whether I had worn one. It told me nothing.

Hadrec turned the ring over and saidcommands the Sepulcher, the Forsaken’s keep in Silverpine Forest, and he has spent a long time hunting what keeps the gnolls of the Rot Hide on their feet. They are undead, and they have been getting stronger. A banshee called Nightlash had been feeding them with her magic, and Hadrec had Percy end her. The boat at the ferry was the next piece. It was bound, as far as anyone could tell, for Fenris Isle, the island fortress in Lordamere Lake where the Rot Hide hold their ground.

Hadrec read the ring and drew his own conclusion: the dead had very probably come out offrom the mass graves in Tirisfal, and that the Rot Hide were carrying them to the isle. He did not say what for. across the water.

He said very probably in the voice the Forsaken keep for certainly, and please do not ask. He did not say what the dead were wanted for. The Rot Hide, then, take the dead across water to be used. I know a little about that. I was used for a time by someone else, and I do not remember it, which they call a mercy here. I have not decided.

The ring is still in my bag, beside the two catfish. I am meant to carry it to the magistrate in Brill. I have not gone. A magistrate will want a name and a grave, and I have a ring.

The isle

The week before, Hadrec sent me to end a banshee called Nightlash, whose magic had been keeping the gnolls on their feet. It had not kept them off the isle. On Monday heOn Monday Hadrec wanted ichor, the black stuff that runs in the Rot Hide, eightHide. Eight vials of it. The brutes give it up one at a time, which is the only way the brutes do anything.

They put me down at a quarter past twelve. I do not feel pain as I am told I once did. It is a dimming, the way a lamp goes down, and then I am standing on the wrong side of my own body with the water cold around my knees. The cold I feel. I am not sure what that says about me.

The water was the only thing that morning I could feel. [Picture description: A pale ghost wades through grey water toward a wooden jetty, with pines and the stone shape of a keep fading into mist beyond.]

those rothides got me on fenris isle

They got me again at half past. After that I had my eighth vial, and I took the lot to Apothecary Renferrel, who tipped them into something and studied it for a long while. His findings were not conclusive, he said, which in an apothecary means the opposite. He thought the ichor had been made with warlock work and necromancy. He said warlock twice and did not look at me either time. I have learned what a pause is for.

Renferrel serves the Royal Apothecary Society, the order of alchemists the Forsaken keep in the Sepulcher and under the Undercity. Their business is plague, and they were making it long before Percy rose. It is the reason the Forsaken are feared by the living and watched by their own allies.

The Magic Quarter

Renferrel is no mage, so he sent a sample down to the Undercity, to a man in the Magic Quarter called Bethor Iceshard, who is not an apothecary either but knows what magic leaves behind.

This is where the mages are. My voidwalker kept a pillar between himself and the whole district. I will wait here.

Bethor held the vial to the light and said some of the spells in it he had not seen for a long, long time. Then he cast something over it, and a name came out. Thule Ravenclaw. A man who had worked beside Bethor once, and gone over to the Scourge, and made the ichor, and the gnolls with it. Bethor said colleague with no heat in it at all. The Forsaken are good at that. I practised it on the way up, Thule Ravenclaw, and it came out sounding like a man ordering bread.

He gave me a scroll to carry back, so Renferrel could brew something against Thule’s stronger spells. Hadrec agreed that Thule must be stopped, and fitted me from the arsenal. Then he sent me to bring back Thule’s head.

That is the only line in the book I cannot yet cross out.

The wood

That afternoon I went after Moss Stalkers and Mist Creepers in the Skittering Dark, for a different errand, and a Son of Arugal caught me there and held me at a fifth of my health for forty-seven seconds. I counted. A body should not mind losing a fifth of itself when it cannot feel the other four. I minded. I took that as news.

Dalar Dawnweaver had told me earlier in the week what Arugal was. Accepted into the Kirin Tor, Dalar says, and he finds it puzzling, since the man’s casting was as transparent as a blown glass bauble. The creatures that chase me through this forest belong to a man the order that keeps the tower took in. I have wanted thatI have wanted the tower for a week the way other men want a harbour. I am less sure what it would hold for me now. I wrote that down twice.

Arugal’s magic did more than raise worgen. It reached the Royal Apothecary Society too. One of its most promising members, an apothecary named Berard, was cursed by it and is now a mindless servant in the inn at Pyrewood Village, guarding the study where he left his notes. Faranell has asked for the journal in that study. Berard had been studying an ancient plague that once swept through the waters of Lordamere Lake, the lake where Percy died twice that Monday. What Faranell means to do with the findings, he has not said.

The queen, and the hooks

On Wednesday I went to see the queen. I told the little stone so: off to meet the queen

The man on the left had work for me. [Picture description: Percy, Mezzlos and the Banshee Queen stand in a dim green-lit chamber of the Undercity; a man called Morbin Lightbane waits at the left with a quest mark above his head.]

I had expected to feel something. The woman who gathered us when the Lich King let go stood three paces away, and I felt what I feel for most things, which is a small, courteous distance. I noticed that, and I noticed that I had expected to. She stood where she stood.

The man on the left, Morbin Lightbane, wanted twenty-five limbs, and he was particular that they be intact.

The Forsaken do not heal as the living do. In Morbin’s words, “decaying flesh cannot be reknit. Not without replacements.” The limbs are those replacements, to be gathered from the Ruins of Lordaeron and sewn onto the wounded. A risen body is a thing to be maintained, and when a part fails the only remedy is another part.

I looked at my own hands again. They were intact. I thought about that for longer than I meant to.

Then I went down to the Apothecarium. gruesome part of undercity, my favourite place

It is not quite a joke. It is the one room in the city where nobody looks away from what we are.

Zinge, at the bench, working. Nobody else looked up. [Picture description: Chains and hooks hang from a high ceiling in a dim vaulted hall, with bodies hung from some of them; Percy in a purple robe stands below beside the blue shape of Mezzlos, an apothecary at work behind them.]

I do not like the hooks, said Mezzlos. There are more hooks than bodies.

I had gone there to finish a five-day-old errand. Master Apothecary Faranell took six bear hearts and six samples of spider blood from me, which is what he had been waiting on, and paid me five silver and a good deal of conversation. The recipe, he said, was for a plague that would take the Scourge and the living alike, and the paper said it in the tone of a man proposing a picnic. I did not ask whether the dead who walk free were counted among the living or among the Scourge. I am not sure which I would rather be. Then he gave me the second half, a man called Berard’s journal to be found,Berard’s journal, and at the next bench Theodore Griffs was waiting with something highly toxic.waiting.

The Apothecarium is the Society’s laboratory beneath the city. Griffs calls it the most vital organ of the Undercity, the place where specimens are experimented upon. What he wanted from Percy was a sample of a Highly Toxic Strain, taken from a beast called Witherfang in the Ruins of Lordaeron, because its toxins are said to eat through even undead flesh. “I wish,” he says, “to validate these claims.”

The toxic thing was at the end of the bench. [Picture description: Percy at the foot of a stair in a workshop of hanging weights and shelves; at the far right a man called Theodore Griffs stands with a quest mark above him.]

I had not asked whether the dead who walk free were counted among the living or among the Scourge when Faranell spoke of his plague. I do not need to. Griffs wants to know whether it eats the likes of me, and he is sending the likes of me to fetch the sample.

The book

A boat of the dead goes to an isle where a man makes ichor out of them. A hall of hooks hangs under a city where a man mixes bear heart with spider blood. I have a theory that this is one business with two ends. I wrote it in the book, underlined it, and have so far found nothing to stop me believing it. Nobody in the Apothecarium has asked what I think of the hooks, and I have not asked what they are for.

Nobody has told Percy that his two businesses are one. Nobody has told him that they are not.

I notice, reading the page back, that I have ruled the columns. I do not remember learning to. Somebody kept a ledger once, and he had a very steady hand. I should like to know what he was counting.

The ring is in the bag. The head is on the list. Eight vials, one recipe handed in, and a head still owed. I underlined the head. Below it, smaller, I wrote Deliah, and did not underline that.