I knew they might head back to my apartment and wait for me there, but it was just as likely they wouldn’t, especially with most of their muscle wounded and the surprise gone. I thought about sleeping somewhere in the street, or tying to get a hold of Rodgar, but the idea fell flat. If they were their waiting for me, Id see them before they saw me, and I didn’t feel like owing Rodgar any more than I had to. Besides, I had been in some tougher spots in the war, and maybe I was itching for a fight.

I made my way down the alley of the block across the street. Lamplight came out of the windows above, danced in puddles and died on the ground. I avoided it and went to the building directly across from my apartment. It was decree housing and of course, it didn’t have a doorman. It was the reason the other buildings on the block had one. Instead, there was a group of guys out the doorway around a dim lamp talking in punching syllables that rattled down the alley. One noticed me as I walked up. He looked at me and was probably waiting for me to walk up to the door, but I hopped up on a windowsill and climbed up to the window of the first landing in the stairwell. The window was open because it didn’t exist. The framed glass panels had long since been hauled off and sold. I pulled myself in as the guys below cracked jokes.

Down the hall, the pipe smoke was almost thicker than the smell. There were at least two people in front of every door in all manners of repose, most of the unconscious variety, and the ones that looked my way didn’t seem too surprised to see a man climbing in the window. There were no lamps to speak of and I moved around the edge of the moonlit stairwell. Someone was groaning somewhere and a chorus of mumbles rose to the skylight. I moved down the hall past the stairwell towards the gaping window frame at the end of it. When I was halfway down the hall, a door opened and a pockmark faced woman leaned out with greasy light to her back and grunted at me.

“Huh?!”

I kept walking and she let out a groan that turned into a snarl and slammed the door. I came up to the side of the window and looked out across the street at my apartment.

There was no one on the street and no parked cabs. The lamp in front of the bared shopfront flickered on its post. I looked down the street and waited. After a while, I changed sides and watched again. I didn’t see anything to make me feel there was anyone waiting, for all that was worth. I went back to the stairwell and down and out of the building. I looked up and down the deep dark of the street as I crossed, but saw nothing. When I got in the alley, I stopped and stood a moment then creeped back out and looked down the street. I didn’t see anyone moving so I went back down to the door.

The doorman was still there. He watched me take a few steps before he took off down the alley and disappeared into the dark. That made me feel a bit better.

I went in and up the stairs. There was absolutely no one outside the doors and that struck me immediately. If I had a knife on me I would have taken it out. Instead, I cat walked up to my door and stopped before I got between it and the light from the window.

I knew Marsten must still be inside. I wrapped my hand in my tunic and tried the latch. It moved freely. I pressed on the door and It gave. No lock and no bar. Maybe he hadn’t seen it, or hadn’t felt the need to bother. I waited a moment to gather myself and focus my thoughts on the layout of the room.

I swung the door open suddenly and stepped in. My hand was behind my shelf and out with the club before the wind from the door had stilled. There was no one in the front room that I could see. I shut the door silently behind me and waited a bit. I didn’t hear anything from the other room so I moved towards it and stopped. My curtain was torn down off the door. I backed up to the kitchen and lit a slip in my free hand without taking my eyes off the bed. I bent to light the lamp on the low table. It wasn’t there.

The table had been moved around and the lamp was on the ground. The room around me revealed its changes like a killer stepping out hiding. A chair shifted, things knocked off shelves and kicked across the floor. All of it was sweeping towards the dark doorway. I could taste the bitter fear on my tongue.

I picked up the lamp and lit it. The light went into the doorway and died. I shook out the slip moved towards the dark room until the lamp lit up a form on my bed.

She was naked and white with her arms half crossed over her chest. Her legs were sprawled apart, with one hanging off the mat and the other bent up under the blanket. She was looking past me and her mouth hung open just enough to show her teeth. Her grey eyes were ghosts of the shining things they had been at the café. The lamp lit her up like a piece of furniture so I moved it quickly and set it on the shelf.

I parted the curtain and kneeled beside her. When my eyes adjusted to the dim light I looked her over. There were bruises on her face and her neck was dark where she had been strangled. Blood from a gash on her hairline had flowed down her face and stained the matt. He probably hit her with something metal, but I never found it.

There were no other wounds that I could see. I brought the lamp closer and looked at her in the light until the sick feeling passed. I set the lamp on the floor and moved her and the blanket around while I looked over the mattress. There had been no bag in the front room and there was nothing in here. I had hoped for a small hand purse, something over hers that was left, though I don’t know why. I never found her clothes either. I picked the lamp up and held it over her just to be sure. She was still staring through the doorway. I covered her with the blanket and went back to the front room.

She must have come to give me a name. I couldn’t think of any other reason she would come this late, unless she just didn’t want to be seen heading to the northside by day.

The door caught my eye. I rushed to it and set the lamp down on a shelf. I took the thick oak and iron plank from behind the bookcase and slid it into the eyes. I sighed and afterwards there was no sound in a million miles.

I sat down on the couch. Ethelyn smiled in my head and my throat tried to push my brain out the top of my skull. I squeezed my eyes tight until it passed. I made myself think of her as a body. A body that could not stay in my apartment.

The only person I knew to call was Rodgar. He would be at home and I had no idea where that was or how to reach him there. I would have to go to Heldar’s place and see if he knew anyone who could get to him at this hour. It would have to be before dawn. Someone would have to get rid of it fast.

I looked back through the doorway. That girl had a family somewhere. She had people who would walk in her procession and watch her candles. She wasn’t the kind to get chopped up and thrown in the sewers and I wasn’t the kind to let it happen. I had to get her to her family and the best way to do that was to get her to the state.

I took a sheet of paper out of a notebook on the table, moved the top panel off the table and took a pen and ink bottle out. I wrote slowly:

Ethelyn

Student at the University of Throne

Renflower street

Killed by a man named Marston

My vision went blurry and I looked up to the ceiling and blinked the tears away. I looked back through the doorway. If I went to the police myself they would take me in for fuck knows how long. I thought about just carrying her down into the common room and telling Martela I had found her there, but I'd still have to talk to the caps. It crossed my mind to leave her out in the alley for someone else to find. That only made me imagine her laying out there all alone and I wanted to jump out the window and dash my brains against the stones just for thinking it.

She would sleep, lay, in my bed tonight. It was the least I could do. In the morning I would pack up everything I needed and leave the note for the police. They could confiscate everything I have here and sell it for the family.

Sure, a few coins worth of old junk from a dead beat, traded for a daughter with all the promise in the world snuffed out by a monster she never should have had to see more than once. I was, I am, an utter worthless wretch.

The feeling of being about to vomit struck me and I had to move. I picked up the slip and lit the other lamps and started to pack. I put my daggers in my coat and took all my money from its various hiding places and put it in the leather belt purse. I put some clothes in my old shoulder bag. One of the shirts showed through the bullet hole in the leather, a hole from the shot that had pierced my breastplate and barely missed my guts.

“Should have got me.” I said to no one. I filled my canteen from the tap and put some stale bread in the bag. Then I stood in the center of the room. The lamplight flickered across all the still things and moved my shadow on the ground. I hated the light for it. I felt that my shadow shouldn’t be moving. I looked at her under my blanket. It was frayed at the edges and I realized I hadn’t washed it in weeks. I cried like a child for a bit then put out all the lamps and lay down on the couch with my oilskin for a blanket and my bag at my side. Despite my long sleep the night before, I hadn’t been this tired since the war. Sleep was instant.

I carried her in my arms and she looked up at me, her grey eyes flashing again. I was taking her to a grave, the best one I could find, with blankets of silk and diamonds. They were looking for me and I had already decided that they could take me when I had her buried. They had sensed this and agreed to it. They would arrest me and kill me after. I was very clever though, and I had decided to lay her down in the Imperial catacombs, those secret ones unseen by anyone, in the complex under the great tower. They raged at this but stayed in the edges of my vision, dark armored shadows with bloody angry faces and weapons with blades of fire.

I carried her down a street with people on all sides. They yelled as I ran, over the bridge, closer and closer to the great tower with its perfect plane of shadow facing me. I ran up the great steps and the solid stone doors groaned open. Inside was a shaded courtyard of old gnarled trees, which I knew had been planted by the hand of the first emperor. The vines that grew everywhere were covered in thorns the size of daggers. As I ran up another wide rising mass of steps, the vines reached for me, but I was too fast for them. I ran up to the great tower and a door opened seamlessly from its stone face. As I moved towards it a dragon roared above and I could feel it jump off the top of the tower and come down for me.

I ran with the fear burning me like fire and leaped through the doorway. Inside there was only darkness. As I fell through it, I wrapped myself around her. I stopped falling and light poured in from crystals set in the walls. The ceiling was so high that clouds formed and a light rain fell. There were rows of strange carved blocks all around. I ran down the open way between the rows until I found an open slot in one of the blocks. I knew this was where the greatest of the dead were buried. I lifted her body and now it was covered in gold and silks glittering with gems. I set her in the slot on a bed made of the pelt of an animal I had never seen before. When I looked at her face, I realized it was Liana. She looked at me as if she had never seen me before then the face of the stone slid over the opening and shut her in.

I heard the armored shadows laughing as I beat my fists against the stone. I yelled her name over and over. My hands were beaten down to the bone and my flesh hung off them like the sleeves of a priest. I reached out with my mind, hoping that she would feel my longing through the void, and suddenly I had the sensation of being watched. I became hysterical with fear. The beating on the door woke me.