The heap of grey lead ash upon the central altar of the Senate of Skulls was cold. But it was hollow.
Ren Vale stood upon the third tier of the eight-sided dais, his breathing ragged, the mammoth ivory awl held loosely in his right fingers. His tunic was stiffened with dried sweat, crushed lime, and the stinging iron-gall slow leak from his inner veins. Beside him, Vane Vale poked the tip of his polished ebony cane into the mound of collapsed metal.
The metal ring struck empty flat stone slabs with a sharp, echoing clink.
“A molt,” Vane murmured, his thin mustache twitching with undisguised skilled revulsion. He adjusted his velvet cuffs, which were stained with grey sulfur soot. “A fraudulent bankruptcy filing disguised as a forced payout. The old butcher shed his canonical plate like a diseased crayfish shedding a cracked back shell. He didn’t dissolve, Ren. He slipped down the private high-pressure chimney pipes beneath the drainage grate while the rubbings were blinding the galleries.”
Necro-Scribe Ren knelt beside the altar, his black glass glasses catching the faint, leftover violet glow of the star-iron rubbings. His finger-bone metal pen scraped a trace of black ectoplasm from the edge of the bronze drainage grille set into the floor behind the altar.
