The Drowned King Returns

Chapter Eight: Graves And Sons

Every empty coffin in Kingsreach passed through one place.

Graves & Sons stood on the corner of Sexton Street, a handsome old building of black stone with a slate roof and tall mahogany doors. It was the oldest funeral home in the city and by far the most respected. Mayors had been buried from its chapel, and so had judges, bishops and bankers. When a great family lost someone, it was Graves & Sons who came to the house in their quiet black cars, and they handled everything with perfect discretion.

That discretion was the whole business. Behind those mahogany doors, Leopold Graves ran the city side of Black Toll. He forged the death certificates and owned the coroners who signed them. He controlled the dockside crews who carried drugged men and women out of the city in crates. On the island, his name had been a whisper even among the wardens. In the Kingsreach underground they simply called him the Mortician.

Eight years ago, he had buried Nash's empty coffin. And tomorrow night, his crews would collect Elara and Ivy.

Nash had known the name for two years but never the face. Every parcel that reached Black Toll came through the Mortician's network, yet Graves himself never set foot on the island and never spoke to the wardens directly. Tonight, Fitch had made sure he no longer had to guess where to look.

He walked through the mahogany doors at midnight, alone.

Soft organ music drifted from the chapel. A private funeral was under way, which was strange enough at this hour, and Nash knew why before he reached the chapel doors. An hour ago, Moth had read him the island's incoming manifest. One adult male, collection from Graves & Sons, midnight.

The chapel was lit by candles. Twenty mourners sat in the pews, dressed in black, heads bowed. At the front, on a raised platform draped in velvet, a polished oak casket rested on its stand, closed and covered in white roses.

Nash walked slowly up the aisle and studied the mourners as he passed. Nobody was crying. A woman in the third row was checking her nails. A man near the front kept glancing at his watch. They held their heads at the right angle and their hands in the right places, like actors who had been paid for two hours and were counting the minutes.

He stepped onto the platform beside the casket.

The organ faltered. A thin man in a black suit rose from the front pew. "Sir, this is a private service. I'm going to have to ask you to..."

Nash swept the roses aside, wedged his fingers under the lid and wrenched it open.

The lock snapped with a crack. Inside, laid on white satin, was a man in his fifties, gray-faced and breathing in slow, shallow pulls. His tie was crooked, and there was a fresh needle mark on the side of his neck. Nash knew his face from the morning news. Gerald Arden, city councilman. That very morning he had cast the deciding vote against a Ravell zoning bill worth hundreds of millions. Tonight he was scheduled for the boat.

Nash lifted the unconscious man out of the casket and laid him gently on the front pew.

The mourners stopped pretending.

The thin man pulled a pistol from his jacket. Behind him, half the congregation came to its feet with knives and batons and guns, and the side doors banged open as more men poured in from the corridors.

The first wave reached the platform together, and Nash met them.

He took the gun hand of the thin man and broke it against the casket's edge, then used the man's body as a shield while a second fired wild into the velvet. He kicked a pew over into the legs of three men coming up the aisle and dropped onto them as they fell. A knife came at his ribs, and he turned it into the arm of the man holding it. Within a minute the front of the chapel was a wreck of overturned pews and fallen candles and groaning men. Nash stood among them, breathing evenly, as hot wax dripped onto the carpet.

None of it surprised him. Fitch had run to his master. The manifest, the midnight service and the casket with the councilman inside had all been left out on the table like bait. Nash had known it was a trap the moment he heard the name Graves & Sons. He had come anyway, because it was the only door that led to Ivy.

Slow applause sounded from above.

He looked up. On the small chapel balcony, where the organ pipes rose toward the roof, stood an elderly man in a beautifully cut mourning coat. He was slim and silver-haired, with a neatly trimmed beard and white gloves on his clapping hands. Beside him, his head bandaged and his eyes wild, stood Fitch.

"Remarkable," said Leopold Graves. His voice was soft and refined, the voice of a man used to speaking to the grieving. "Truly remarkable. Fitch told me what you were, but I confess I didn't quite believe him. The boy I buried eight years ago, now master of the island. Do you know how many men have tried to take Black Toll over the years, Mr. Redfern? Not one of them lived to regret it."

"You can come down here and talk," Nash said.

"Oh, I think not." Graves rested his gloved hands on the balcony rail. "I would much rather make you an offer. You hold the island and its secrets. I hold the city, its coroners, its records, its docks. Separately, we are dangerous men. Together, we would own every secret in Kingsreach. Every family, every judge, every vote on every council. No one could ever touch us." He smiled pleasantly. "All I ask is one small courtesy. Tomorrow night, my crews collect a woman and a little girl. You simply let the collection go through."

Nash looked up at him for a long moment.

"No," he said.

Graves sighed, as though a client had chosen the cheaper casket. "I was afraid you would say that." He reached beneath the balcony rail and pressed something.

The floor beneath the casket stand dropped away.

There was no time to jump. The trapdoor split open under Nash's feet, and he fell into darkness. He hit steel hard, rolled, and came up on his knees in a narrow chamber barely wide enough for a coffin. Above him the hatch slammed shut. Bolts slid home.

Somewhere close, a valve hissed. Nash smelled gas.

A small rectangle of light appeared in the wall beside him, a window of thick glass. On the other side, in the furnace room below the chapel, Leopold Graves stood with his hands folded behind his back, watching with polite interest.

Behind Nash, the burners ignited with a roar, and the steel walls began to glow.

"Every man I bury," Graves said, "stays buried."