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Friede tried to scream, but no sound came out.
She blinked open grit-glued eyes, lungs spasming, until a jet of water seethed out from between her locked teeth. It spattered onto the floor with an echo so loud she thought her skull had shattered.
In cold, aching pieces, Friede’s world coalesced into legibility.
The gray web of her lace shawl was snarled around her shoulders and arms, pinning her like a caught fish. She coughed, and more water splashed into the face of the broad figure crouched over her, holding her upright, their chest flush and shuddering against hers. Her mouth tasted like mud, teeth slimed with weeds.
She still felt hands clasped around her throat, but there was nothing there now. Just a memory, rising to the surface with bloat.
Friede coughed again, hard enough her bones creaked, and finally dislodged a stubborn cake of muck and more black water. Then she screamed.
The figure above her sobbed. He made short, birdlike keens between the tears that dripped from the tip of his wide nose onto her cheek. Something about those shining brown eyes of his unspooled a taut thread inside her. Damp curls curtained his eyes, and she wanted, instinctively, to brush them aside and look him full in the face, sure she would be warm again if she did.
“Bastian?” she croaked.
The sobs cut away with a sharp gasp. Then slowly, as if it hurt, he smiled. It was so lovely, and warm, and sad a look that Friede felt as if she was drowning all over again, rigor mortis clamping a possessive hand on her lungs.
She tried to remember what came before this, to follow those immaterial hands locked around her throat to a source, but like gazing into a dark, rippling pool, she beheld nothing. She remembered only pain, panic, and animal terror. The kind from nightmares, indistinct but omnipresent, pricking at every thread of her consciousness and spreading out into boggy dimness.
In every direction, that darkness. A bottomless cold.
Those hands, tightening.
She jerked in Bastian’s arms, fighting restraint. Past the edges of her sodden nightgown, her reflection stared owlishly from a constellation of slow-blooming puddles, hair and eyes turned white as bleached bone. Another scream bubbled on the back of her throat and froze on her tongue. Friede choked it down, struggling for words instead.
The only ones she could dredge up were no, no, no.
“You’re all right,” said Bast, gently swiping the muddy hair from her face with cold hands.
He should have been warm. Why wasn’t he warm?
His breath clouded the air before her with thick plumes, but she couldn’t feel it, only his pulse drumming hard through their flush chests. A beat she couldn’t keep. There was nothing left in her but cold.
Friede shrank away from the words. But she was caught in Bastian’s arms, caught in her body, caught under the sapping weight of water and truth.
It was her turn to sob, then, though no tears answered the call. She had only that quiet litany. No, no, no.
Try as she might to wish away the thought, there was no mistaking the dark, cold place she’d come from. Just as there was no mistaking the musty corridor she lay in now, where candlelight cast into stark relief scores of bones nestled neatly in alcoves. Thousands upon thousands keeping silent vigil.
Resurrection was the only reason the dead came to these catacombs in this age.
Friede fought to peer around Bastian. The comfort she’d found in the high ridge of his shoulders had soured; now it was one more layer keeping her cloistered, bound. Moving her neck was like rolling a heavy stone, but as she heaved it aside, she noticed for the first time the second figure tucked into the gloom.
Eluned, the Anchoret, held Death’s skull between two wrinkled hands. Though pallid from years of confinement, her skin still held the telltale flush of life. In sharp contrast, the hallowed bone of the skull could have been a shard of obsidian carved from the night itself.
When Friede met her gaze, the other woman swept the skull into its shroud and turned away, retreating into a dim doorway as if bashful of the attention. Or perhaps ashamed. Could she sense Friede’s pain as Death worked through her to wrestle her soul back to form? Did she even care whether she wanted to return or not? Or was she perhaps just as much of an unwilling vessel?
Friede tried to cry out after her, but her crushed throat forbade words. Was this part of Death’s exchange? Her voice for her soul? She shuddered violently at the thought. She’d had no say in the bargain.
Bastian didn’t appear to notice her struggle. He pressed his forehead to hers, still weeping, his smile now the sole beacon in the dark.
“Thank you, merciful Death, thank you,” he whispered. The cold, clouded words fell over her like snow.
Hands immobile, Friede leaned harder against him, willing him to look at her, but he wouldn’t. He rocked to and fro slowly, eyes shut in reverence, until their bodies were veiled in the thin fog of his soft-uttered prayers. “Praise All-Eternal-Death who restores life to the dead. Praise All-Eternal-Death who restores life to the dead …”
Friede stared past him into the dark and waited for tears that refused to come.
Alight rain gauzed the air on the morning of Allhallowsmas, and through tall glass windows it cast the interior of the bone-church a moldering greenish-gray. The stormy sky sickened all the shadows inside the nave. Friede sat straight-backed at the grand piano, caged in the brightest spot on the floor to be found, though still too strangled to be called light.
She kept her gaze fixed on the head cleric, poised for her cue. Flexing her fingers against the creeping cold, she tried and failed not to think of the dank corridor of her resurrection, separated from her by only a few meters of stone floor below her feet, and only a handful of months. She was as aware of that time as she was of the rigid links of bone and tendon that strung together her hands where they dangled above the keys, eager to be put to work.
Rector Volf shivered behind the pulpit. His simple black uniform was too old and weathered to fend off Cairney’s chill any longer, but the priest — older and equally weathered — refused to requisition a new one for the decades Friede had known him.
Their eyes met. Volf sniffed loudly and nodded. Friede brought her blue fingers to the keys.
The first few notes were always the sweetest; their thrum cut through the constant low murmur of water trapped between her ears, down to the bone. She danced her fingertips across the piano’s ivory teeth as if feeding herself piecemeal to the keys, letting the melody luxuriate until not a shred of quiet remained. Until she could forget for just a little while what she had become.
She wasn’t alone in her reverie. Music was beloved, especially to the dead. The vibrations of a viola’s strings could bring phantom warmth to bloodless fingers. A swelling crescendo, caught at just the right moment, mimicked a heartbeat in the chest. A cello’s low rasp filled one’s throat like breath. All things the living savored and the dead craved — mourned, even. Although none would ever admit to the blasphemy.
Only when Volf looked on the verge of lapsing into sleep standing up did Friede relent. The last notes of the requiem rang from the ossified walls up to the arches with their glut of cobwebs, lingering so long in the air they seemed to almost gain form and encrust the congregants like frost.
Some dramatics were to be expected, today of all days. The thinning of the veil was palpable in the air.
When silence finally shrouded the small congregation, Friede took advantage of the brief interlude to study the dead man.
Julius Delvin was the most colorful thing in the room by far. A few weeks ago, he’d retired from his position teaching arithmetic to children and adolescents in the wind-chafed schoolhouse where Friede taught music, though death had forced her on sabbatical. Now he reclined on a long stone slab, ...
