9. The Mourners Arch #3
“Don’t poke the man with the funereal boats,” Genna advised dryly. “Viz has a very low tolerance for drama. He helps because it keeps the Order operating as well as it can and the city quiet. Let’s not give him a reason to think we are the noise he needs to silence.”
She stepped neatly between them, breaking the tension with a deliberate pivot. “Speaking of noise. Did you manage to silence the Goldmar name? Or did the Bureau crush you under a landslide of parchment?”
Miles let out a breath, grateful for the lifeline. The memory of their success washed away some of the grime of the corpse-hauling. He straightened his spine, a genuine smile breaking through.
“Ah, well,” Miles said, adopting a faint, playful tone. “I regret to inform you that Lord Gabriel Goldmar is no more.”
Gabriel rolled his eyes, but the corner of his mouth twitched upward.
“Allow me to introduce,” Miles continued, sweeping a hand toward his partner, “Lord Gabriel Fairfield of Rookgate.”
Genna arched an eyebrow, looking Gabriel up and down. “Fairfield? A little pastoral for a man in a silk brocade coat, isn’t it? ”
Miles caught Gabriel’s eye, and the shared, subversive joy of their secret— Beauchamp hidden in plain sight as Fairfield —bubbled over. They dissolved into giggles like schoolchildren plotting mischief.
Genna narrowed her eyes at them, looking between the two men with suspicion. “What? Is it a pun? I hate puns.”
“It’s perfect,” Gabriel gasped, wiping a tear.
“You are both exhausting.” Genna rolled her eyes. “Fine. Keep your secrets. The Regent will be pleased regardless. Lord Lumeis hates scandals, and the Goldmar name was becoming a liability. Erasing it... it’s good politics.”
The smile faded from Miles’s face. The triumph of the morning suddenly felt thinner, stretched tight over a darker reality.
Gabriel made a soft, scoffing sound. “Of course. That’s what we’re doing, isn’t it?
The Order kills the vampire and his mooks and then cleans up the bodies, so the city doesn’t have to look at them.
I change my name, so the nobility doesn’t have to be reminded of the monster they invited to their parties.
” He looked at the cart ahead of them. “We aren’t fixing anything. We’re just the janitors.”
“We are surviving,” Miles said, though the words felt hollow even to him. “We are clearing the deck so we can build something new.”
“Or just making space for the next mess,” Genna muttered.
The camaraderie of the victory evaporated, replaced by the damp chill of the river. They fell silent as they approached the Mourner’s Arch. The massive stone structure spanned the Aver, its shadowed underside weeping moisture down the moss-slicked walls.
Across, on the muddy bank, Gardmore’s Restorative Services waited, a tall, narrow building of gray stone that seemed to grow directly out of the riverbed, swallowing the light.
As they reached the other side, the cart turned down the ramp toward the water-level service entrance.
Miles followed, the weight of the dead and the weight of the living pressing equally hard on his shoulders.
The cart rumbled to the bottom of the slick, moss-greased ramp. The iron water-gate was raised, revealing a cavernous, echoing space that smelled of funeral herbs, brine, and the metallic tang of ozone. It was a clinical scent, designed to scour the nose of anything organic.
Viz Gardmore was waiting for them, a slim silhouette against the stark white tiles of the interior.
As they moved into the light of the glow-stones set in the ceiling, Miles was struck by how the man resembled his trade.
Viz was tall and skeletal, his skin pulled so tight over his cheekbones it looked like parchment stretched on a drum.
He wore a high-collared black suit that seemed to swallow the dim light, and a pair of magnifying goggles was pushed up onto his hairless, gleaming skull.
“The deceased,” Viz said, his voice devoid of any inflection that might suggest curiosity or alarm. He was stripping off a pair of rubber gloves, his long fingers stained with faint, chemical discolorations.
“Seven. Unprocessed. Old,” Genna hopped down from the cart and introduced Gabriel as Lord Fairfield. Viz already knew Miles and Genna from many missions for the Order.
Gabriel stepped into the light, smoothing the front of his violet coat, looking entirely out of place amidst the industrial grimness of the body-processing floor.
“Ah, the cleaners,” he said, his voice pitched high and sharp.
“It’s comforting to know exactly where the city sweeps its conscience when the floor gets messy.
Do you charge extra for scrubbing the moral stain, or is that included in the bulk rate? ”
Miles shot a dark scowl at his partner. Not now, Gabriel. They were asking for a favor that could land Viz in prison, or worse.
Viz, however, didn’t so much as blink. He looked at his pocket watch, an intricate silver piece that clicked open with a snap.
“Moral stains don’t rot, Lord Fairfield.
Flesh does. We are racing the tide.” He snapped the watch shut.
“The evening is almost upon us, but I assume you want these gone tonight rather than flavoring my cold storage until tomorrow’s ebb. ”
“Gone is the objective,” Miles said quickly, stepping forward. “Tonight is preferable.”
“Then grab a gurney,” Viz said, gesturing to a row of wheeled metal tables. “My staff is occupied with the paying customers upstairs. If you want them on the water, you’ll have to load them.”
The next half hour was a blur of exertion. Miles, Gabriel, and Genna formed a bucket brigade of the dead. They moved the wrapped bundles from the cart to the gurneys, ran them down a short, tiled hallway that echoed with the squeal of wheels, and deposited them in the launch bay.
The bay was a massive indoor dock open to a private canal that fed into the Aver itself.
A dozen funeral vessels already bobbed in the dark water, tethered in neat rows.
Most were modest—wicker skiffs or simple wooden punts—but some were elaborate miniature galleons carved of mahogany, intended for the wealthy of the Spires.
Viz directed them to a line of plain, unadorned skiffs at the far end.
By the time they transferred the last heavy canvas sack into the seventh boat, the square of sky visible through the canal exit had turned a bruised purple. Night had fallen.
“That’s the lot,” Genna said, wiping her hands on her trousers. “Viz, you’re a prince among ghouls.”
“Always pleased to serve,” Viz said, already turning away to direct two uniformed employees who had appeared to begin poling the boats out. “You can go now. We will handle the rest.”
Miles looked at the boats beginning to drift toward the open arch of the canal exit. The current would catch them soon, dragging them toward the Mourner’s Arch and the sea beyond.
“We should watch,” Miles said.
Genna snorted. “You’re joking. Watch the people who tried to kill you float away? Why?”
“Because no one else will,” Miles felt a heavy tug behind his sternum. It wasn’t forgiveness—he didn’t forgive them for what they had done to Gabriel—but it was acknowledgment. “They were soldiers of a sort. Mercenaries. They died following orders, however vile.”
“I’ll go,” Gabriel said unexpectedly. He moved to Miles’s side, his expression unreadable in the gloom. “I’ve never seen a funeral. Not a real one. Madaze never allowed me to watch, not even for one of our own.”
Genna rolled her eyes, but she fell into step behind them.
They made their way back up the ramp to street level and onto the Mourner’s Arch.
The bridge was already crowded. The air was thick with a hush that felt heavier than the fog rolling off the river.
People stood in clusters, huddled against the damp wind, clutching tokens of the dead or holding small lanterns.
They found a spot near the railing, away from the main press of weeping families.
Below them, the black water of the Aver churned, carrying a flotilla of small flickering lights.
The main funeral procession had released their boats upstream; the tiny vessels drifted like a constellation of fallen stars.
And then, from the darkness of the private canal below Viz’s establishment, the seven unlit skiffs emerged. They joined the flow, silent and dark shadows amidst the illuminated prayers of the city.
They passed under the arch. He gripped the cold stone railing.
It wasn’t his first funeral. The sight of boats drifting toward the dark horizon dug up memories he usually kept buried under layers of discipline.
He saw the faces of boys he’d trained with in the Crown Years, boys who died in the mud of the borderlands, preserved by field medics so they could be shipped home to this very river.
He remembered standing on this bridge five years ago for a sergeant who had taken a spell meant for Miles.
The repetition of it, the endless line of boats feeding the sea, felt overwhelming. He blinked hard, forcing the overlay of the past to dissolve into the gray reality of the present. Not tonight. Tonight is for closing a chapter.
He opened his eyes as the boats passed the massive bars of the sea gate, spaced to allow the tide to pull the dead out while keeping any wyrm who thought to make its way up the river out of Averdon proper.
“They’re crossing the line.” Gabriel leaned over the rail.
The seven dark skiffs drifted past the gates, moving into the open, choppy waters of the estuary where the river met the Tenebrian sea.
Suddenly, the water fifty yards out erupted.
A collective gasp sucked the air out of the bridge.
A massive, serpentine shape breached the surface, blacker than the night, its scales gleaming wetly in the moonlight. A wyrm. It was huge, its body a coil of raw, prehistoric muscle.
“Holy shit,” Genna breathed. “You don’t see that every day.”