Dimia felt a weight on her chest. Found it difficult to breathe. She opened her eyes in panic and two little paws shot out and she closed her lids again just in time to avoid being scratched directly on her eyelids.

"Ow!" she shrieked and realized that it was a cat on her chest. The striped animal must have been watching Dimia's twitching eyes as she slept and when she opened them it pounced. She tossed the cat off of her as someone ran over.

"Are you hurt?" It was Shroomer.

Dimia put her hands to her tender eyelids and saw no blood on them. "Not too bad... he didn't scratch deep."

"Little monster," the medic said.

Monster, thought Dimia. Erstule had used that word to describe Bramble as well. People leapt to that term too readily. Anyone unlike themselves were labeled monsters. The cat jumped back up onto Dimia's bed. Shroomer shooed the feline but it did not budge.

"No, it's all right," said Dimia. She rubbed her fingers to draw the cat closer. "What's its name?"

"Scratch. After a good friend who's no longer with us. Here..." Shroomer went to a cabinet and got out a shred of unicorn jerky. He handed it to Dimia.

The little girl held out the piece of dried meat. Scratch came over to hungrily lick and chew at it. With her other hand Dimia stroked its fur. "Who does he belong to?"

"No one but himself," said Shroomer. "He followed us to Fort Nothing from near Marrow and then hitched a ride here. Perhaps he even hails from your home town. He certainly has an affinity for you."

Dimia rubbed behind Scratch's ear and the cat began to purr. The girl was happy to have a new friend to help her grieve the loss of another. She thought of poor Bramble in chains, confused and scared. She had to find him, whether it would be to rescue him or snuff out his misery.

"Now that you're awake," said Shroomer, "I have some news for you."

Dimia sat up in her bed to hear what the medic had to say. Scratch purred in her arms.

"You're heading out tomorrow, to Camshire." Shroomer handed something to her. "And I have a mission for you."

She took the object in her hands. It was a locket, lovingly crafted.

"It belonged to Halo," the herbalist said. "Open it."

Dimia opened the hinged pendant and saw the portrait of a lovely woman on one side with the most curious eyes and determined poise. Opposite her were twin girls with gold flowers in their hair.

"That's Halo's family," said Shroomer. "In his hurry to leave, Halo had to leave this behind. Return it to his wife Mulia in Sablewood. Ask her to help you. This writ should be all you need." He handed her a small scroll. "I'm excited for you. You'll be safer in Camshire. You can start a new life there, cast a new die. We'll celebrate tonight. I'll whip up some Shroomer's Special for the occasion."

"Does it have pork in it?" Dimia asked.

"No. Pheasant."

She nodded. "I'd like that." Went back to petting her new friend.

Shroomer smiled and tousled her hair and walked off. Dimia's gaze fell back to the woman in the locket. So this was Halo's wife, Mulia. Dimia had allowed a pale fantasy to linger in the back of her mind after meeting the handsome Reaper in that forlorn church, a whimsical faerie tale with him as groom and her as bride. Seeing his wife's face brought home the fact that the stars would never permit such a turn of fate, especially considering her young age. It was a silly notion, anyway. It almost embarrassed her now to think of it. Dimia felt as if she had gone from child to woman in the intervening time. And she never really thought she would be happy to simply settle down and raise a family and grow old. She had tasted adventure and it was now in her blood. Dimia had things to accomplish. Return this locket to Mulia. Find and rescue Bramble. Bring Skelen to justice. Discover Halo's fate. Help fight the hobgoblins who killed her last few friends from Marrow. And learn more about the secrets of the runes. Falling stars, there was an entire world to discover. She was going to Camshire, the greatest city of the Nation. Who knew what surprises awaited her there?

— • —

It was said that at the centers of many rakshasa cities were magnificent parks public and private that featured lush hanging gardens and babbling fountains and roaming exotic birds. Camshire had instead for its own heart a grim necropolis. A lone figure walked the paved pathways of that immense boneyard. The nightsman wove through a jumble of tombstones and monuments that shone like teeth and bones in the pale moonlight. The signs over the multitudinous gates of this place simply said 'Camshire Cemetery' in wrought-iron letters but the sprawling boneyard was more commonly referred to by the metropolis' people using other names. 'Grave City,' 'The Grey Mile,' 'Deadville,' and such, depending on who the asker asked. And where they asked. Many of the graves and mausoleums were marked by stone figures meant to represent their occupants' ancestral heroes. It was believed by a good number of these gullibles that their pantheons of idiosyncratic forebears had become demigods in their starry domains and could bless their descendants and curse their foes. Blocks of marble and granite had been wrested from the cold earth and hauled here to be chiseled into the likenesses of familial proxies each with their own strange eccentricities and accumulations of nonsense symbology. Distant forefathers held shields engraved with unsettling hellfaces and inscriptions of murky glories of lost times. Stone effigies of mothers had fawns at their teats and thorns at their feet and rivers of blood painted under their eyes. Also featured in the morbid collection of hewn rock were sinister gargoyles meant to scare away graverobbers and ghosts. This lone dark figure who strode through the night was not deterred by any of these stony scarecrows. A glimpse of the walker's face in that pale celestial moonglow revealed that it was Jinx the Reaper wrapped in that black cloak and moving with suspicious purpose through the domain of the dead.

To one end of this gigantic boneyard were the twinkling lights and spires of Camshire's richer districts and to the other was the rambling blight of the poorer ones. Five distinct and walled wards met at this immense cemetery. All spectrums of socioeconomic class ultimately made equal here in death no matter the size of the monument in which one's name and epitaph was engraved. But while cold mortality was certainly one thing that the aristocrat and beggar had in common this barren and sacred site also served as a convenient and vast buffer to physically separate Camshire's wealthy residents from the poor. Whispers told that the bodies in many of these crypts and coffins had been runed and armed so that the city's rulers could resurrect an undead legion if there ever was the need to quell a rebellion from the masses on the 'wrong side of the crypts.' That legend proved perhaps less likely to be true when the Diluvians succeeded in their coup against the Julian monarchy many years ago and no soldiers emerged from their graves to defend the crown. Perhaps even the dead had all now joined the Diluvian party.

Most of the cemetery was crowded with a jumble of tombs haunted by vagabonds and crypt-sitters and other people so desperate they had no choice but to make a home among the deceased. But the fenced section walked by Jinx was kept clear of those who did not belong there by the guards who manned its gates and patrolled its grounds. Jinx, however, did in fact belong here. He was actually the owner of one of these plots, a family crypt of respectable size. The name engraved upon the mausoleum's weathered stone door was 'Fadington.' Jinx had bought the secluded tomb at auction along with all the contents inside it. The crypt had apparently been abandoned or forgotten by its original family over the years. Perhaps the last of its members had succumbed to the plagues that so crippled the city. The price Jinx got the tomb for was a bargain as far as such properties go but still not had for cheap in this quieter and more in-demand section of the cemetery. It had drained Jinx all of his savings and then some. He now owed much of his future Reaper earnings to the Diluvian banks. But it had been worth the price. It gave him space to study the book in private. There were no windows in that sepulchral vault. The surrounding boneyard was still and peaceful. The dead made for good neighbors. They were quiet and did not pry. Most convenient of all, the corpses in the mausoleum provided him with the raw materials to ply his taboo work. For most of those who bought such crypts on auction, dealing with the bodies was an unpleasant necessity. For Jinx, they were a boon. He had started with frogs and other animals but now it was time to take things further.

Jinx unlocked the tomb's many latches with a ring of keys. There was enough space within for a man to work in and that was its true purpose. Once the rune man was inside the vault and had the door closed behind him he bolted another battery of locks on its interior face. These Jinx had to install himself for he couldn't risk laborers wondering why he would want locks in the inside of a tomb. They would possibly report him. The people were ever more suspicious of mages and traitors and anarchs. It took much labor but thanks to his service as a Reaper Jinx was fit and capable enough to do the work.

He lit his lantern and set it on a stone shelf that had been cleared of its urns and dead flowers. Jinx then turned to a stone sarcophagus at the center of the room, the resting place of this family's ancient patriarch. Upon that flat stone lid was the sorcerous tome that Team 3 had taken from Skelen when they captured him in the tower near Marrow. Jinx had snatched the codex up in the confusion surrounding the Battle of Fort Nothing and its chaotic aftermath. With Rancent dead all the arcane duties then fell to Jinx, and so he journeyed to Camshire with the captured necromancer and his cryptic manual under his charge. Even Skelen thought the necronomicon had been destroyed thanks to a lie told him by Rancent. No one alive knew the codex still existed save Jinx. When the Diluvians took Skelen away to their secret donjons Jinx was not permitted to see him again. He would not allow the same thing to happen to the book. Skelen had only gone so deep in his readings. His simple mind only got so far as to learn how to make the dead move again. To make them walk, to make them follow, to make them kill. But the psychedelic fungi and the strange way Skelen's brain worked had also allowed him to unlock the secrets of consciousness itself, even if he did not truly understand them. The speaking golem was proof of this. Jinx took advantage of the long ride to try and talk to the necromancer, to find out what he'd learned. But Ogerius was also in that caravan and kept a close eye. Further, Skelen was reticent and insane and difficult to converse with. And now he had no tongue at all.

Better to learn from the tome, the source itself. But that was not such an easy task, either. The ancient people who had authored the codex went deeper than the mere automation of bodies. They meditated upon True Necromancy, the study of dead souls. Some nights Jinx found himself lost in its writings, hypnotized for hours. He'd heard stories of magi who had been found starved to death before their spellbooks, so transfixed were they by their secrets. Jinx knew there were risks upon risks in doing this work. The tome itself was dangerous. Sorcery was dangerous. The Diluvians were dangerous. The fascists would chop him into pieces and burn what remained if they found out, and the masses would be no kinder. He found the city charged with more fear and paranoia and suspicion than ever before. The Inquisitors had eyes everywhere.

Jinx tried not to think of the Fadingtons, the people who once gave life to the bodies he now put to such morbid purpose. He engraved the runes that would make their withered muscles twist and pivot. But the Reaper had dealt with cadavers in school and in the field countless times before. It was no unfamiliar thing. This was not to mention how up close and personal he had gotten to Skelen's reanimated brood of rotters. To see this man—in black robes working on cadavers and sorcery at the witching hour, in a dim tomb in the middle of perhaps the world's biggest graveyard—one would not think him afraid of death. But the opposite was the truth. Since Jinx's return to Camshire his mind had been crowded with nothing but reckonings with mortality. Shortly after his return he went to a theater to see the Moonlight Players' rendition of Igmar Tewth's Kharmalon. ("A King deserves the most special of wines," went the king's asssassin-to-be, "the most special of meats, the most special of queens, and, above all... the most special of deaths." A promise Bedeli and his conspirators delivered upon when they marched Lord Nelm into the castle kitchens to be hung on a hook and butchered and cooked and served to the lowest beggars. What came out their ends was no different than any other dung, no matter its royal origin.) During the bloodiest scene of the production Jinx scrambled outside to vomit in the rain-slicked alley. The play's makers had used animal gore to achieve realism during the battle scenes—of which there were many—spraying the pigsblood across the stage in wide crimson arcs and draping the actors who played dead in the glistening entrails of sheep. The Players so expertly recreated through sight and sound an environment of war and slaughter so convincing and overwhelming that Jinx wondered if they used sorcery for such ends. If he were not conducting his own private practices he would even have considered reporting them to the Inquisitors for investigation. The irony. No man trusted anyone with sorcery save himself. Understandable, considering the havoc a lone gifted and disciplined mage could wreak. All the Nation's practitioners were caught in a strange sort of stalemate. They were the only ones able to recognize the others' handiwork but, equal as criminals in the eyes of the law and people, were sworn without the utterance of an oath to a mutual secret society with no true name or roster.

The human leg laid out on the table before Jinx had been shorn from its body to minimize any trouble if Jinx were to lose control of the thing. Unlike Skelen, the Reaper was quite sterile and methodical in his approach. So he had been taught by his schoolmasters. Jinx had all his instruments laid out before him in their proper places. Fine surgical tools and tattooing needles. Jars of ink and chemicals. He had carved nearly all the intricate glyphs required to give unlife to this severed limb. Soon Jinx would be able to complete the final precise strokes that would animate the thing.

The Reaper himself was unsure of his own deeper motives for his plunge into these dark undertakings. Perhaps his efforts were some twisted attempt to conquer his own inner dragons. If there was any way to master death itself, it was this, the study of necromancy. But the Reaper knew he must be cautious in his acquisition of this forbidden knowledge. First he had to master these simpler runes and cantrips before moving on to more advanced studies of the tome. Jinx remembered the lesson of Rancent's death. Haste could be deadly. His mind could be shredded if he moved too quickly in his attempt to understand the truths sequestered in those pages. Sorcerers were trapped in a balancing act between risk and time. The human mind could only store so much and sleep could wipe a mage's mind clean of a previous day's progress. A frustrating pursuit, but the rewards could be worth all that trouble. Perhaps even the secrets of lichdom were contained within the old writings of that necronomicon. If Jinx's estimation of the tome was correct, immortality itself could be within reach.

— • —