The figure stepped out of the shadow of the archive archway into the amber glow of the emergency copper wall-lamp.
Len’s hand remained frozen against his pocket. His breath was locked in his throat, his boots rooted to the wet flat stone slabs.
The man walking toward him wore the faded green wool coat of the Tern Road postal guild. The cloth was frayed at the cuffs, bleached pale across the shoulders by years of alpine sun. The brass buttons were tarnished to the dark color of unpolished horn. On the left elbow was a square patch of coarse gray ticking. The exact patch Len’s mother had cut from an old flour sack and stitched onto the sleeve by animal fat candlelight when Len was five years old. She used uneven, double-looped linen thread because her fingers were stiff with winter chilblains.
The man wore the face of Deren Vey.
It wasn’t a rotting corpse or a semi-clear specter drifting through stone. It had the solid, heavy, tactile physical presence of living flesh. The skin of the cheeks was wind-burned and weathered, mapped with the fine, crow’s-foot wrinkles Deren had developed from thirty years of squinting into mountain gales. The dark brown beard was trimmed unevenly on the left side, exactly as Deren had always trimmed it with the crooked barber’s shears he kept in his postal shaving roll.
