The Drowned King Returns

Chapter Nine: The Mortician's Son

The burners never reached full heat.

Leopold Graves didn't see it happen. He had turned away from the window the moment the flames caught, as he always did. In forty years he had never once watched a man burn. He considered it vulgar, a lapse of professional dignity. He climbed the stairs to his office with his hands folded behind his back, already composing the death certificate in his head.

Inside the chamber, the roar of the burners stuttered, coughed and died. The blue flames shrank to nothing. The steel walls ticked as they began to cool, and the hiss of gas fell silent.

Upstairs, in the narrow service corridor behind the chapel, a broad-shouldered man with a gray beard tucked a pair of bolt cutters back inside his black overcoat. The severed gas line dripped beside him.

His name was Bishop. Twelve years ago he had been a special-forces commander with three medals and a report on the Ravell family's weapons contracts that he never got the chance to file. They had buried him alive in a crate bound for Black Toll, and his family had mourned him at an empty grave. Tonight he had been sitting in the fourth row of Graves's chapel, playing a hired mourner.

Leopold Graves hired his mourners through an agency, and it had cost very little to replace half of them. When the shooting started, the woman checking her nails and the man watching the clock had never moved from their pews. Every one of them had been erased by someone in this city. Every one of them had come home on Nash's boat.

The dead had come to their own funeral.

In the chamber below, Nash felt the heat fading from the walls. He found the ash chute at the far end, a square hatch meant for raking out what remained after a cremation. He braced his back against the steel and kicked. The latch held on the first kick and gave on the second. He squeezed through, slid down a short sooty shaft and dropped into a dark room that smelled of dust and paper.

He found a light switch.

He was standing in a vault. Steel shelves ran from floor to ceiling in every direction, lined with thousands of identical gray boxes, each one labeled by year. Nash pulled one down and opened it. Death certificates, hundreds of them, each with a carbon copy and a small handwritten card clipped to the corner. A name. A date. A client.

It was a second archive. Black Toll recorded who arrived, but Graves had recorded who paid and who lied for them, keeping duplicates of every death certificate he had ever forged. This room held forty years of Kingsreach's sins.

There was a desk in the corner, old oak with a green lamp. Nash sat down behind it, took another box from the shelf, and began to read.

Ten minutes later, the vault door swung open.

Leopold Graves stepped inside, peeling off his white gloves, and stopped dead. Fitch came in behind him and nearly walked into his back.

Nash didn't look up. He turned a page.

"Your handwriting's very neat," he said. "It makes this easy."

Fitch made a sound like a trapped animal and bolted for the door. He got exactly two steps before a huge hand closed on the back of his collar and lifted him off his feet. Bishop had come down the corridor behind them without making a sound. He carried Fitch back into the vault like a sack of laundry and dropped him on the floor in front of the desk.

Nash finally raised his eyes. He looked at Fitch, and said nothing at all.

Fitch lasted perhaps five seconds under that stare. Then the words came pouring out of him. "I told them. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't know what else to do. The night I got out of the cell I called the emergency number, the one the wardens gave us in case the island ever fell. Nobody answers it, you just talk. I told them the Drowned King was alive and in Kingsreach. I described you." He was shaking. "They know. The Ninth Account knows you're here."

Nash absorbed that in silence. He had expected it, but expecting a blow and taking one were different things.

Graves had recovered his composure. Slowly, he reached into his coat and drew out a small silver pistol, and leveled it at Nash's chest.

Bishop shifted his weight. Nash raised one finger, and Bishop stopped.

"You won't fire that," Nash said calmly.

"You seem very sure."

"I'm sure of one thing. A man as careful as you doesn't serve a master he's never met, not for ten years, not unless he has no choice." Nash closed the box in front of him. "So I went looking for the reason. I found it in the island's ledger. Ten years ago, the Ninth Account sent a parcel to Black Toll. Nineteen years old, the only son of a respected funeral director. The instructions said to hold him indefinitely, as insurance for his father's loyalty."

The pistol trembled, just slightly.

"Kit," Nash said. "Your son. You've been tending an empty grave for him at St. Ansel's for ten years. Fresh flowers every Sunday. You buried him yourself, and you've been doing whatever they tell you ever since, because you hoped that if you obeyed long enough, they might send him back."

"Don't," Graves whispered. "Don't you dare."

Nash took a phone from his pocket, tapped the screen and slid it across the desk.

A video call connected. The picture swayed with the wind, then steadied, showing a stretch of rusted dock and a gray dawn breaking over the sea. A young man stood there, thin and pale, with an old scar running through one eyebrow. He peered into the camera uncertainly, as if someone had told him who was watching and he didn't dare believe it.

"Dad?" he said.

The pistol hit the floor.

Leopold Graves, the Mortician, the man who had buried half of Kingsreach, made a sound no one in that city had ever heard from him. His knees gave way, and he went down on the stone floor of his own vault with the phone clutched against his chest, sobbing like a child. On the screen, his son was crying too, saying "Dad, Dad, it's me, I'm okay," over and over.

Nash let him weep. Bishop looked away.

It was a long time before Graves lifted his head. His face was wet and gray, and suddenly very old, but his eyes were clear. He set the phone down gently on the desk, as though it were made of glass, and looked up at the man he had tried to burn alive an hour earlier.

"My crews," he said hoarsely. "My coroners. My records, my secrets, everything I have built. It all belongs to you now, Drowned King." He bowed his head. "I ask only one question."

"Ask."

"Who would you have me bury first?"