The Grief Engine

Chapter 1: The Weight of a Name

The dead of Lastlight got two things when they died: a hole in the ground, and Wren Castellan's undivided attention.

Nobody else offered them the second part. The temples on the hill took coin for prayers and gave nothing for free, and the Cindergate wardens who patrolled the slum district considered a Hollow's corpse about as interesting as a dropped brick. So it fell to Old Mercy's little plot behind the tannery ”six rows of unmarked graves and a crooked fence” and it fell, most days, to Wren.

He drove the spade in with his heel, felt it bite through the topsoil into the clay beneath, and thought, not for the first time, that this was easier work than being alive in this city. The dead didn't spit at you. The dead didn't call you empty under their breath when they thought you couldn't hear, or loud and clear when they knew you could and wanted you to know they weren't afraid to say it.

"You're leaning on that shovel like it owes you money," said Old Mercy from the fence line, where she was untangling a length of burial-cloth from a bramble with the patient irritation of a woman who had buried four thousand people and still hadn't learned to hate brambles less. "Grave's not going to dig itself, boy."

"Grave's not going anywhere either," Wren said. "It's been here longer than both of us."

"Cheek." But she was smiling when she said it, the way she always did, the corners of her eyes folding into the deep creases put there by sixty-some years of squinting into bad weather. She was the only person in the district who called him boy like it wasn't an insult. From everyone else it came out sharp ”Hollow boy, trash boy, once, memorably, from a Vayne heir's polished mouth, the boy who isn't really there.”

That one had followed him for three years. He didn't blame the words so much as the fact that they'd landed on a crowded street corner in front of half the district, and that nobody had disagreed.

Wren went back to digging. The morning was the kind of grey that Lastlight specialized in light filtered down through the haze that hung permanently over the three collapsing star-realms stitched together above the city, the Continuum's slow-motion wreckage lighting the sky like a lantern behind wet paper. Everyone said you could feel the aether in that light if you knew how to look. Wren had spent his whole childhood looking. He'd stood in fields at dawn with other children, palms turned up, waiting for the tingle of power that was supposed to come to every child of the Continuum sooner or later.

It never came to him. Not a flicker. Not once.

Hollow. The healers had a kinder word for it ”unresonant” but nobody in the slum district used the kind word, and by the time he was seven he'd stopped expecting anyone to.

"You're thinking too loud again," Old Mercy said. She'd come up beside the grave without him noticing, which still happened sometimes, old as she was, she moved through her own graveyard like she'd planted every stone herself, careful and unhurried and completely unafraid. "I can hear it from here."

"Just counting rows."

"Liar." She lowered herself onto the crumbling stone bench that had probably marked somebody's grave before it lost its name, and watched him work with the flat, assessing look she used on gravesites and difficult people in roughly equal measure. "You've dug forty of these with me. You know how deep it goes before I have to tell you."

"Maybe I like being told."

"Maybe you like the sound of my voice," she said, "which is a separate problem, and one I can't help you with." She tipped her head back, closing her eyes against the grey light. "Who's this one for?"

"Old Tam. From the boarding house on Ferrow Street."

"Ah." Something in her face softened, briefly, before the graveyard-flatness came back down over it like a shutter. That was the trick to this work, she'd told him once, you let yourself feel it for exactly as long as it took to say the name, and then you put the shovel back in your hands, because the grief of every person you buried would flatten you in a week if you let it sit. Feel it and set it down, she said. That's the whole art of this job. Anybody who tells you different is selling something.

He didn't know yet how wrong she was. He wouldn't know for another six hours.

The soldiers came through the district gate a little after midday, and Wren knew before he saw the black-and-copper of their coats that something was different this time, because the noise was different. Cartel patrols usually announced themselves with the ordinary racket of boots and bored conversation. This one came through silent, which in Wren's experience was always worse.

"Conscription order," the lead warden said, reading off a slate without looking up from it, "for unresonant labor, district seven, effective immediate." He said unresonant the careful, official way, but the men behind him ”a dozen of them, hands already on truncheons” used the other word, passed between them low and easy, the way men use a word they've stopped thinking of as an insult because they've said it so many times it's just a name now.

Hollows.

Wren straightened up from the half-dug grave, dirt still on his hands, and felt the particular cold that came from watching something you'd feared your whole life finally arrive on schedule. Cindergate had been quietly conscripting Hollows for two years, mine work, they said, or war-engine maintenance, work that didn't need aether-sense, and the people they took didn't write home. Everyone in the district knew it. Nobody had found a way to stop it, because you couldn't organize resistance among people the law didn't consider fully real.

"District seven's behind me," Wren said, before he could decide whether that was smart. "This is the boneyard. Nobody here's fit for your engines."

The warden looked at him properly for the first time, taking in the shovel, the dirt, the half-filled grave. Something like amusement crossed his face. "Everybody's fit for something." He gestured, and two of his men peeled off toward the tannery, where Wren could hear, faintly, the first raised voices of people realizing what was happening to their street.

Old Mercy was already moving, faster than Wren had seen her move in years, putting herself between the soldiers and the low fence gate where three of the district's youngest orphans ”kids who slept in the graveyard shed because it was drier than the alleys” had frozen mid-errand, buckets of water still in their hands.

"These children have nothing to give your engines," she said, and her voice had a warden's own flatness in it, forty years of standing over the dead having worn all the fear out of it. "Take that up the hill to people who can afford to argue with you."

The warden's amusement thinned into something else. "Move aside, old woman."

"No."

It happened fast, the way these things always seem to happen fast to the person it's happening to and slow to everyone remembering it afterward. A truncheon came up. Old Mercy didn't step back. Wren was already moving, already shouting something that didn't have words in it, already too far away, the graveyard's crooked fence and six rows of unmarked stones stretching out between him and the only person who had ever called him boy like it was a kindness.

He didn't reach her in time.

He would spend a very long time afterward ”years, though he didn't know that yet, standing in the grey light with the shovel still in his hand” replaying the half-second where he could have thrown the shovel instead of running with it, could have shouted louder, could have been born with whatever it was that made a person resonant, could have been anything other than Hollow, than trash, than the boy who wasn't really there, in the one moment in his entire life when being something else might have mattered.

Old Mercy went down without a sound.

And something in Wren Castellan ”something that had waited nineteen years for a door to open, patient as a debt collector, patient as the six rows of graves he'd dug with his own two unresonant hands” finally, quietly, began to grow.

End of Chapter One