The face that rose through the sulfur foam was forty-two years old, frozen in the cold amber of a seven-year-old office transfer.
It wasn’t bloated or distorted by river rot. The water had washed away the soot of the postal roads. That left the skin pale, clean, and unnervingly smooth across the high cheekbones. The temples were frosted with iron-gray hair that clung in wet, dark strands to the forehead. The nose was crooked. It was broken in an apprentice bout thirty winters ago at the Cloudford freight depot and set imperfectly by a country barber. Along the corners of the dark eyes were the deep, webbed laugh lines carved by twenty seasons of squinting across snow-blind northern valleys.
It was Deren Vey.
Yet the eyes that looked up through the cast-iron grating were not the eyes that had looked across the supper table at Cloudford.
They were wide, vacant, and fully unblinking. The irises were a flat, solid hazel, lacking the moist, flickering humanity of a living gaze. In the sickly green glare of the copper bridge beacons swaying overhead, they reflected the light like polished discs of black glass, registering the iron bars, the swirling foam, and the faces of the two land-mappers above with the clockwork indifference of a sight sighting lens.
