Not long after Nathan had fled the house, a figure stood standing in front of the door.
He came on foot, an unusual choice for a man of his standing, but Vane preferred the anonymity of a long walk.
’I can’t let the royal family know about me’ Vane thought ignoring the inconvenience he had to face without a carriage.
Carriages had drivers, and drivers possessed inconvenient memories. They were sure to remember which quiet, sun-starved yards a well-dressed gentleman visited on a grey afternoon.
Over a tailored travelling coat, he wore a high, austere collar, and in his right hand he carried a physician’s leather case that held no instruments known to modern medicine.
He knocked in the precise rhythm Perrin had taught him. Two light taps, a pause, one heavy.
Silence answered.
Vane stood in the narrow, mud-slicked yard and listened.
’That’s strange, where is Perrin?’
He placed a hand flat against the door.
The latch gave way under his palm, unfastened. He pushed it open.
The smell struck him first. The cold metallic scent of blood hung in the air.
He stepped inside, shutting the door softly behind him.
His eyes narrowed at the sight in front of him. Two vast, dark pools of blood had spread across the stone floor, meeting in the middle before creeping toward the central drain. Within them lay the two men Vane had come to see.
Perrin lay face down, his throat split wide, his warm, kindly mask forever stripped away. And Hask, or what had once been Hask, lay collapsed near the wooden crates. It was a shape roughly the size of a man, but it was no longer a body.
Vane crouched beside it, pulling his coat tail clear of the blood, and examined the remains.
It was grey.
Not the grey of putrefaction or char, but the dull, lifeless tone of centuries-old wood. He retrieved a slender iron probe from his case and gently pressed it into the center of the mass. The moment the metal touched it, the form collapsed inward with a dry, hollow whisper, puffing a cloud of fine ash into the cold air.
There was no moisture left inside. No marrow, no fat, no blood, even though blood pooled all around the floor beneath it. He turned the probe, sifting through the dust, his brows drawing tight together.
It was not the ruined flesh that made his pulse begin to hum.
’Their souls are gone.’
Vane sat back on his heels, oblivious to the damp stone beneath his knees.
He was an alchemist by trade and a practitioner of the forbidden arts by private necessity. He had spent three decades learning to read the invisible residue the dead left behind. A soul did not simply vanish when a throat was cut. It lingered; it frayed like torn silk, leaving a distinct, readable resonance in the physical vessel for hours. He had cataloged a thousand of them.
Here, there was nothing. Both men had been thoroughly scoured. Life force and soul had been torn violently out of the flesh and consumed, leaving only a hollow husk to crumble under its own weight.
’Fascinating,’ Vane thought, his breath catching in his throat. ’Is this... a Necromancer’s handiwork?’
The word felt ancient and heavy, even inside his own mind.
True Necromancers did not exist. They had not existed for as long as the Empire had drawn breath. The instinct to eradicate them was older than the high temples, older than the Awakening itself, and it was absolute: a child born with the mark of the grave was put down the moment they drew their first breath of magic.
The same way dark mages were hunted. The same way Vane himself would be executed if the High Clerics ever discovered the volatile formulas hidden in his cellar.
Necromancers were never permitted to grow. They were never allowed to reach a second tier of strength. They certainly never lived long enough to perform a slaughter like this.
Yet here it was. Two men completely harvested. One turned to cold ash from the inside out, left in a locked storeroom in the gut of the Low District.
Vane rose slowly, his heart hammering against his ribs with a dark, intoxicating rhythm he hadn’t felt in decades.
’Death magic.’ True, unadulterated Death magic, the primal aspect itself, the force the grand libraries swore had been wiped out two hundred years ago during the War of the Heavens.
It had stood in this room today. Hours ago.
And it had walked out the front door on its own two feet.
Vane looked from the mound of grey dust to Perrin’s opened throat, and then, very slowly, his thin lips curved into a smile.
"Well," he whispered to the empty room. "Aren’t you a magnificent thing."
Thirty years he had spent buying miserable scraps from back-alley butchers, and the ultimate prize had just slaughtered his suppliers and left its footprints in the blood. He felt no anger toward the boy who had done this. Perrin and Hask were merely tools, and tools broke. He thought only of the living conduit of a power that could hollow a man’s soul in a heartbeat, and what an ambitious mind could achieve if he could catch it, dissect it, and make its secrets his own.
He would have to be careful, of course. A weapon that could erase a grown man could just as easily erase him.
But Vane had never once turned his back on an open door.
He leaned down, pinched a bit of the grey ash between his gloved fingers, rolled it, and let it drift back to the stone. He closed his case, locked the latch with a sharp click, and stepped back out into the fading daylight.
Across the district, as the sun dipped beneath the stone walls, Nathan kicked open a broken wooden door.
The structure stood on the absolute edge of the Low District, a leaning, hollowed-out frame of a house where the roof had long since caved in.
No one squatted here; the nearby well had turned sour years ago, leaving the street abandoned to the damp and the rot. He had chosen it precisely because it was dead. No smoke, no neighbors, no eyes.
Kira slipped in behind him like a shadow, instantly pressing her back flat against the interior wall.
She hadn’t spoken a single word since they left the compound.
She had tracked him through the winding alleys at a strict distance of four paces, clutching her piece of stolen bread, flinching every time a raised voice carried over a fence. Nathan had let her keep that distance. Forcing her close would only have broken what little nerve she had left.
He had taken a few things on the way here. He wasn’t proud of it.
A clean shirt and a small child’s tunic off a drying line behind an empty house. A wedge of hard cheese and two bruised apples from a fruit cart while the merchant was busy screaming at a customer. He had moved fast, silent, and felt a cold knot of shame tighten in his gut with every motion.
His mother had raised him better than to steal off a family’s clothesline, and the petty weight of it sat heavy on his chest.
’It’s clothes and food,’ he told himself, jaw clenched. ’It’s survival. I’ll leave coin on their doorsteps when I have it.’
It didn’t make the shame go away. He did it anyway.
Nathan set their haul down on a relatively dry crate in the corner and split it up. He tore the cheese, leaving the larger portion on her side, and placed the sweeter apple next to it. Then he backed away, crossing the small room to sit against the opposite wall so she wouldn’t have to be near him to eat.
"It’s yours," Nathan said quietly, turning his head toward the open window gap. "I’m not touching it. Eat."
For a long minute, the house was silent save for the whistling wind.
Then came the delicate, hesitant sound of a starving child surrendering to her own hunger. A soft shuffle of cloth. The sharp tear of bread.
Nathan didn’t turn to watch. He pulled off his blood-crusted rags and pulled the stolen shirt over his head. It fit reasonably well, and more importantly, it didn’t smell like Perrin’s storeroom. He sat back, letting the girl have her privacy.
When he finally looked over, the cheese and bread were gone. Kira was curled tightly in her corner, holding the apple in both hands, staring at him over the top of it with wide, unblinking eyes.
She wasn’t eating it. Just holding it tight against her chest, as if terrified that enjoying it would make it vanish.
’Seems she’s been with those bastards for a while’ Nathan looked at her for a long moment, at the jagged, self-cut hair, the frail, bird-like wrists, and the guarded, haunted look in her eyes.
He didn’t know how to fix any of it. He barely knew how to keep himself breathing.
Nathan closed his eyes, ’I should check my sea of souls’ he let his head rest back against the damp wooden wall, and allowed his consciousness to drift.