The grease beneath the tram kitchen stove had cooled into gray animal fat, solidifying around the pipe rim of the waste pipe like candle wax in a cellar draft. The iron line dropped twenty feet through crushed shale and melted rock waste into the main drainage trunk of the lower basin. But the air rising through the strainer carried a faint, humid warmth that didn’t belong to wastewater. It smelled of scorched stone oil, damp copper filings, and old turnip peelings rotting in stale water.
Len Vey sat on an overturned lard crate near the woodpile. His teeth was clenched as he wrapped clean linen around his left forearm. The three puncture wounds from the first midnight still cried thin, yellowish fluid through the horsehair stitches Doma had pulled through his skin thirty-six hours ago. Every time he bent his wrist to test the tension, the raw edges of the torn flesh pulled tight against the knot. It sent a hot, sickening throb into his elbow.
He didn’t have the luxury of letting it rest. In Rookvale, an idle hand was an invitation to the cold, and the cold was never empty.
On the scarred butcher’s table beside him lay the damp, gray paper they had pulled from the Survey Registry archives on High Street before dawn. The document was an official certificate of mortality, its margins eaten away by damp mold, bearing the heavy purple wax seal of the Country Land-mapper’s Board. It recorded the death of Deren Vey…
