Chapter 273: Midnight Visitor

At the Williams family dinner table, oatmeal had been retired.

Mother roasted lamb chops—crisp on the outside, tender on the inside—and served them with mashed potatoes and the pickled vegetables their neighbor had brought over.

Evelyn had washed her glass jar from the Royal Grand Hotel several times.

She had filled it with her homemade milk pudding and set it right in the center of the dining table, looking immensely proud.

"Look." She turned the jar to show their mother the griffin crest.

"Doesn't it look even more noble with my pudding inside?"

"Your pudding is already noble." Margaret placed the thickest lamb chop into her son's bowl.

Over the few days since coming home, Richard had unpacked his luggage and cleared his old clothes out of the wardrobe.

He also helped his father fix the backyard wooden gate that always stuck.

Rogers leaned against the doorframe, studied it for a long time, said, "The nail's crooked," and then pulled it out to re-hammer it himself.

That morning, Richard went out after breakfast.

Summer in Briston was as gray as ever, the coal smoke pressing heavy on the rooftops.

The sun hung behind the forest of chimneys, so starkly white it gave off no warmth.

The city had a background noise.

The iron wheels of coal carts, the relentless day-and-night vibrations of the spinning looms, the rising and falling breaths of tens of thousands of people—all of it sank beneath the streets, bleeding together into an inaudible hum.

People who lived here long enough stopped noticing it, just as they stopped noticing their own heartbeats.

Once he spread out his [Perception: Calm Observation], Richard could hear it.

Over these past few days at home, that background noise had changed.

Half a pitch lower, half a degree damper.

The lumber in the funeral parlor's backyard was piled two layers higher than when he left, the scent of freshly planed pine overpowering the coal smoke.

The corners of the notice in the pharmacy window reading "Iodine and hemostatic gauze temporarily out of stock" had curled in the sun. It still hadn't been taken down.

Richard walked back slowly.

As he passed Mrs. Weir's door, she was draping a gray cloth over the windowsill to dry.

"Mrs. Weir, how is Mr. Davidson doing lately?"

Mrs. Weir's hands paused on the gray cloth.

"He passed. Last month."

"...What date?"

"I don't remember clearly. The twenty-something? When his daughter came, you'd already left for the Imperial Capital."

Mr. Davidson lived in the third-to-last house at the east end of Slag Alley. He was a retired textile worker.

In his early sixties, he walked with a cane but came out every afternoon to sit at the mouth of the alley and bask in the sun.

"What about Old George the tailor next door?"

Mrs. Weir fell silent for a moment.

"He passed too. The month before last."

Richard stood at the mouth of the alley and listened to the pulse of Slag Alley once again.

Burns, Davidson, Old George.

All old men of Slag Alley, poor men. Men no one would much care about when they passed.

An old man coughing up blood, a retired textile worker, a tailor.

During dinner, while clearing the bowls, his mother casually mentioned it.

"Burns's funeral arrangements were handled by Mr. Reeve from the North District Mutual Aid Society. He's quite a nice man; he didn't charge much."

"Mutual Aid Society?"

"A society for the poor. You pay a penny a week, and if something happens to the family, the society provides a coffin and hands to help."

Margaret stacked the bowls. "Keeps them out of the parish's hands, so they don't end up tossed in a lime pit."

Richard nodded and committed the name Mr. Reeve to memory.

A small packet of sage sat on his desk. He had bought it in the Imperial Capital, its paper string still tied.

Since tomorrow was Sunday, he figured he would bring it to the Branch Office.

Old Biggs always mixed sage into his black tea.

He planned to go to the Branch Office tomorrow to find Old Biggs, talk about the Imperial Capital, and share his thoughts on reading the handwritten copy of Divination and Spirit Vision.

But a sudden, indescribable sense of unease settled over him.

Before he had left last time, Old Biggs had said something.

"A couple days ago down by the little river at the east end of Slag Alley, I saw a black dog. Crouched there staring at me for a good long while... Even a black dog finds a man like me unlucky."

A black dog—an omen of bad luck.

Richard clutched his Runestone in his hand. He didn't toss it, but he already faintly knew what the result would be if he did.

Still water spread out beneath his feet, rippling into the distance circle by circle.

He was waiting. Waiting for news he didn't want to receive.

The night deepened.

His sister's footsteps padded around next door for a while before quieting down, and the sounds from his parents' room faded as well.

Slag Alley plunged into the smoke-blackened night.

Richard sat cross-legged on his bed, practicing Tide-Shifting Breathing.

His inhale dragged out like a long slope, his exhale contracted into a short wave, and he held his breath right in the gap between the waves.

His grandfather had warned that his entire body would feel wrong for the first month—swollen lungs, a tight throat, and night sweats.

But the four nodes of [Body] smoothed out the vast majority of that discomfort.

All that was left was the awkwardness of needing to go up a size in clothes.

The tree of light behind his sternum rose and fell with the waves, its leaves swaying more gently than before.

At the windowpane: tap, tap, tap.

Richard's Tide-Shifting Breathing didn't break, but his hand had already reached the Ebony Revolver inside the nightstand.

He sent out a thread of Spirit Vision, letting it slide outward along the wood grain of the window frame.

Someone was standing outside the window.

The ether fluctuation was deliberately undisguised—a heavy, gray mass suspended right outside.

It was edged with a few flecks of old light: two or three of the Seven Spirit Lodging Vessels.

He put Ebony back in the drawer and got up to open the window.

Mrs. MacNeil wore a gray dress, its hem hovering just off the ground.

Two incredibly faint shadows floated her through the window, setting her down without a sound.

She raised a hand and wiped it across the glass, pulling down a thin veil that locked all sound inside the room.

Richard looked at her face.

Her complexion was gray, her brow tightly furrowed.

The dry scent of Ashcore Grass clung to her faintly, masking another odor beneath it... the smell of lime water from the morgue.

"Mrs. MacNeil, why are you..."

She skipped the pleasantries.

"Bigelow has passed away. The official word is cardiac arrest."

Richard stood by the window, still holding the kettle he had been about to take downstairs to boil water for tea.

He kept his head bowed. It took him several seconds to process the sentence he had just heard.

Old Biggs doing magic tricks, a Copper Penny flipping between his fingers.

Flipping it a third time and making it vanish, before pulling that sentence right out from behind his ear.

"Even a black dog finds a man like me unlucky."

That small packet of sage on the desk, its paper string still tied.

The leaves of the tree behind his sternum all sank at once.

Richard forced down the third beat of his breath, swallowing so hard his throat tightened.

"When did it happen?" he asked.

"The night before last. The groundskeeper opened up early in the morning and found him slumped over the registry."

Mrs. MacNeil slipped something from her sleeve and pressed it into his palm.

It was a Copper Penny, polished bright, the Queen's profile worn almost completely flat.

"Bigelow packed up all his things. This single coin was left under a note."

"Your name was written on the note."

Richard clutched the penny.

The copper was cold. He held it for a while before it finally warmed up.

The warmth came from his own body heat. He knew that, of course.

But as the pad of his thumb pressed against the worn groove, he couldn't shake the feeling that the heat was coming from somewhere else.

The room was quiet.

The night wind poured in through the window, making the curtains billow slightly.

Richard began to use the method Old Biggs had taught him.

'Touch' was the spring, 'Hold' was the palm.

He pressed his Inspiration onto it and held it there.

A wisp of residual ether lingered on the surface of the copper.

Incredibly faint, incredibly shallow. Like an oil lamp burned down to its very last drop, leaving nothing but a trace of charred warmth on the wick.

Within that trace of residue, there was no fear, and there was no pain.

It was an indescribable, quiet sense of 'letting go.'

He had placed the very last thing in his hands exactly where it belonged.

Then he sat back down in his chair alone and closed his eyes.

Richard's Inspiration lingered on it for a long time.

"Before he died, how did he leave a trace like this?"

"That's why I am asking you to come along."

Mrs. MacNeil leaned against the window frame, fishing a gray wax stick from her pocket and twirling it between her fingers.

"There's an old rule among Madam Marie's disciples," she said. "When a brother or sister passes, their fellow disciples collect the body."

The medium's tone slowly hardened.

"The ones who get lost, the ones who fall, the ones who never return... Teacher never goes looking for them.

If she did, she could search the entire continent and never finish."

"The only thing I can do is collect their bodies."

"Haul them onto the table, examine them according to the rules, keep what should be kept, and burn what should be burned."

"Over all these years down in that morgue, how many people has Bigelow run that exact procedure for?"

She slipped the wax stick back into her pocket.

"Tonight, it's his turn."

Richard gripped the Copper Penny tightly.

The edge of the coin dug into his palm. It stung a little.

"Let's go."

He absently shoved the small packet of sage into his pocket.

He hadn't thought much of it at the time, only realizing he had pocketed it once they were heading downstairs.

Slag Alley was in a deep sleep. The two of them walked north in absolute silence.

In the late hours of the night, only gas lamps lit the streets of Briston.

Conscription notices were pasted across the mouth of the bridge tunnel, the smell of starch paste covering the stench of urine.

The newspapers ran daily stories on the Hemus Island situation. The city folk didn't talk about it out loud, but they were working fast to hoard salt and candles.

When they reached the underground morgue at the North District Branch Office, the sharp odor of lime water wafted up from the stairwell.

Mrs. MacNeil pushed the iron door open ahead of him, its hinges letting out a dry groan.

The lights inside the Branch Office morgue were always kept on. It had been like this when Old Biggs was around. He used to say, "The dead don't like the dark."

The stainless steel table sat dead center in the room, and someone was lying on it.

He was wearing the dark brown tweed coat he had owned for years, buttoned all the way to the top.

His leather shoes were polished, the laces tied neatly.

Richard walked up to the edge of the table.

Old Biggs's face looked more peaceful than it ever had in life.

His right hand rested on his chest; his left hand hung loosely by his side.

Richard reached out and placed his hand over the older man's.

The skin was ice-cold and stiff.

A thread of Spirit Vision seeped out from his fingertips, trailing down the back of the hand.

The subcutaneous tissue, the blood vessels, the fascia on the back of the hand... everything on the physical plane had stopped.

Going a layer deeper: the ether Micro-circulation.

Richard's Inspiration traced the main circuit along the inside of Old Biggs's forearm.

For someone who suffered a true cardiac arrest, the circuit should have "extinguished naturally."

But Old Biggs's circuit hadn't faded gradually.

Richard's Inspiration stopped dead when it reached the left side of the chest cavity.

The flow of ether snapped right there, clean and sharp.

This circuit had been pinched off right in the middle.

The heart had stopped as a result, and the man died with it.

Richard recognized this method.

The Silence Spell. He had been practicing it himself.

If the intensity of the interference was amplified tenfold and concentrated entirely on the primary node of the heart...

To the outside world, it would look exactly like cardiac arrest.

No external wounds, no signs of struggle, no lingering traces of an ether outburst.

The autopsy report would just write it off as a heart attack.

Richard lifted his head. Mrs. MacNeil was standing on the other side of the table.

The two of them exchanged a look.

"You read it," Mrs. MacNeil said.

"The Silence Spell."

Mrs. MacNeil pulled an enamel tray out from beneath the table.

A full set of autopsy tools was already laid out on the tray—the exact set a certain someone had always used.

"Does Squad Leader Wentworth know?" Richard asked.

"Wentworth is out of town on business." Mrs. MacNeil selected a scalpel from the instrument case.

"With the situation over on the Hemus Peninsula, the Imperial Capital has already started requisitioning personnel.

More than half the Branch Office is gone, and the remaining few are swamped."

She wiped the blade of the scalpel against her apron.

"During war preparations, who has the time to investigate a common medical examiner's heart attack?"

"Then his death will just be written off like this?"

Mrs. MacNeil shot him a look.

"I didn't say it was written off."

"Only that official channels are a dead end."

She rested the scalpel vertically against the edge of the enamel tray, tip pointing down.

"That's why I came to you."

"There are some things I might not catch all on my own."

Richard withdrew his Spirit Vision and planted both hands on the edge of the table.

The metal of the iron table was freezing.

"Let's begin."

Mrs. MacNeil unfastened the man's buttons, one by one.

The moment the final button came undone, Richard saw it.

Right over the sternum, there was a sutured scar on his skin.

The edges of the incision were half-healed, fresh tissue creeping halfway across, but it hadn't fully closed.

He had sewn it up himself, many days prior to his death.

"This cut..." Richard's voice grew strained. "Did he do this himself?"

Mrs. MacNeil reached in with a pair of forceps.

The sutures were medical catgut tied with surgical knots; the technique was highly professional.

Mrs. MacNeil used the forceps to pick open the half-healed incision, then switched back to the scalpel.

The blade trailed down the incision, parting the subcutaneous tissue and slicing into the layer just above the sternum.

Stitched directly behind the sternum was a small oil-paper packet.

The edges of the oil paper were sealed with wax, its four corners tied to the periosteum of two separate ribs with silk thread, secured incredibly tight.

Mrs. MacNeil snipped the silk threads with her forceps and extracted the oil-paper packet.

She set it on the enamel tray and used the tip of the scalpel to pry open the wax seal.

The oil paper unfolded, revealing a stack of papers inside.

Back then, Old Biggs had said, "The safest thing in Briston is me."

At the time, Richard had thought he meant, "No one would bother harming a man like me."

Now, looking at the opened chest cavity, looking at the incision the man had carved into his own flesh...

He finally realized that Old Biggs had been talking about his physical body.

To ensure the authorities filed it away as a "natural death," the killer would never come back to inspect his corpse.

And aside from the killer, who would ever cut open the chest of a man who had died of natural causes?

Only his fellow disciple.

Mrs. MacNeil stood by the table for a long moment.

She reached out and brushed a stray lock of gray hair back from his forehead.

"What a fool."