The shore of the Styx-Khorat didn’t look like water. It looked like molten black glass, heavy and thick, sticky. It slid through the deep-sea limestone gorge with the sluggish, sickening driving force of cold black molasses.
Ren Vale stopped at the edge of the crushed dark rock embankment, his boots sinking an inch into greasy, dark silt that smelled of stale canal mud, rotten alum, and dissolved memories. The air above the river hung thick with greasy, glowing vapor. A pale violet haze that clung to the damp stones and coated his throat with the bitter taste of copper filings. A bubble rose from the black depths and burst against the surface. Each time, a faint, whispering gasp drifted upward, like the last sigh of a drowning clerk.
“Don’t touch the water,” Necro-Scribe Ren warned, halting the hand-cart with one ink-stained hand. His dark black glass glasses reflected the oily sheen of the current. “That’s not water-system runoff, little brother. It’s melted death-estate litigation. The dissolved spiritual residue of five million defaulted souls, ground down by the pressure of the upper strata until their memories have lost all form and become pure ectoplasmic sludge. One drop on living skin will leach thirty years of childhood memories before you can wash your hands.”
