Chapter 399: The Final Hunt

Beneath the porch of 13 Chelsea Road, Gerard buttoned the collar of his hunting jacket, one by one.

The butler stood half a step behind him with a lantern, not daring to make a sound.

The estate was empty. In a house this large, he was the only Hunter left who could still move tonight.

That was just as well; there was no one to stop him.

Gerard slid his hunting knife into the leather sheath at his waist, turned, and descended the steps.

The butler opened his mouth, but in the end, merely raised the umbrella a little higher over Gerard's head.

"No need." Gerard didn't take it. "A little rain will keep my head clear."

He didn't take a carriage.

He could lay out the Branch Office's citywide defense map with his eyes closed.

Tonight, every available hand had been diverted to the major districts densely packed with churches, leaving the old city east of the river completely empty.

No one dared approach the worst hole in that old city.

During the great plague of 1665, nearly a hundred thousand people in the Imperial Capital had died.

When the churchyards overflowed, the government dug massive pits in the east of the city, packing them flat with alternating layers of corpses and quicklime.

Two centuries later, a public cemetery was built over the site. They planted two rows of firs and named it Bone Mound Garden.

The pits had long since gone cold, but tonight was different.

Gerard reached the garden gate and stopped.

The iron gate hung ajar, too rusted to shut.

Inside, the two rows of firs stood pitch-black, and beneath them lay a dense sea of tombstones.

On the eve of the Day of Mourning, the entire city had been out delivering wreaths to their dead.

With no room left in the churchyards, some people had simply laid their wreaths over these unclaimed, ancient graves.

Ring after ring of white chrysanthemums, black crepe, and paper crosses covered the two-hundred-year-old headstones.

The new grief pressed down, layer by layer.

Gerard expanded his Spirit Vision.

In his Spirit Vision, all that newly piled-on grief sank straight to the lowest pit.

As the pit breathed, it was soaked and swollen once again by the heavy deluge of fresh grief pouring down tonight.

Standing at the gate, Gerard smelled the plague.

He drew his knife.

At his age, every spark of blood ignition a Hunter burned was a spark lost forever.

He kept that fire clenched tightly in his hand, refusing to waste a single ember.

Tonight, he was saving it all for the very end.

When the horn sounded, he would pour out every ounce of fire he had hoarded his entire life in a single burst.

Dying before the lord of the hunt would clear his debts. Ashford House would secure the honor of a city martyr, making the path smoother for their descendants.

Worth it. At least, he felt it was.

He pushed the iron gate open.

The breathing rhythm of the pit skipped a beat. It had noticed him.

Gerard stepped inside, and the darkness beneath the firs swallowed him.

The clearing ahead was the dead center of the old pit.

Wisps of white mist were drifting up from the ground.

Within that mist, things were standing up.

Gerard leveled his knife.

Tonight, he was waiting for the horn. Before it arrived, he could practice his old trade for a bit.

Four human silhouettes emerged from the white mist, carrying a canvas military stretcher.

Their faces were black.

Fearing infection, the gravediggers of 1665 who carried the dead had smeared their faces with coal tar.

Two centuries later, in his Spirit Vision, that layer of tar had congealed into a solid mask fused to their faces.

Several corpses were piled haphazardly atop the stretcher.

Limbs dangled from the edges of the canvas, swaying back and forth with the carriers' steps.

They walked very slowly, keeping to the rhythm of a funeral dirge.

Gerard stepped forward and brought his blade down, cleaving straight through the center pole of the canvas stretcher.

The tangled pile of corpses crashed to the ground, scattering into a heap of soaked rags and shattered bone.

Without the stretcher, the four carrying silhouettes froze in place.

They were corpse-carriers. Without their burden, they had no idea what they were supposed to do.

As Gerard drew his knife back, he casually dragged the edge across the nearest one's throat.

The tar mask cracked down the middle, leaking black smoke that dispersed in the rain.

Gerard ignored the other three and bypassed them, heading deeper in.

Soulless things could never catch a living man.

A young Hunter would have hacked every foul thing to pieces for peace of mind, but at Gerard's age, conserving every ounce of strength was carved into his bones.

Countless arms abruptly thrust up through the muddy surface of the clearing.

Back when the pits were packed with layers of corpses and quicklime, some of the victims had been thrown in before they had even breathed their last.

They snatched at Gerard's boots, trying to drag him into the earth.

Gerard stopped.

The blade lit up, glinting with a barely visible red glow.

Wherever the blade passed, the white-crusted arms retracted into the earth from their roots.

For a Major Adept of the Moon-Hunting path, clearing out these formless, low-to-mid-tier evil creatures was like chopping vegetables.

The horn had not yet sounded, but the breathing of the pit had changed.

The white mist in the center of the pit was twisting into the hunched silhouette of an old woman carrying a broom.

Gerard leveled his knife once more.

This one was on a completely different level than the stragglers from before.

When the Vikings crossed the sea, they brought her with them.

They called her Pesta—the Plague Hag.

The old archives were clear: if she walked into a village carrying a rake, half the people would die.

If she carried a broom, she would leave not a chicken or dog alive.

Right now, she was leaning on a broom.

Gerard's grip on his knife slowly tightened.

The blade flared a blinding, searing red.

It was no longer the tired blade of an old man conserving his strength; the steel was wrapped in the fierce radiance of a Hunter in his prime.

Gerard stepped into the mist at the pit's edge and cleaved straight at the broom.

First strike: the handle of the broom cracked.

The old woman turned. She had no features on her face, only a mass of dripping mist.

She tried to tighten her grip on the broom.

The second strike cleaved the hand dragging it.

Third strike: the broom snapped.

The severed broom and the silhouette of the old woman holding it dissolved into the mist at the edge of the pit.

The breathing of the pit slowly faded away.

Gerard stood in the middle of the mess, leaning on his dimmed hunting knife, panting.

Right at that moment, the sound of a horn approached from the distance.

Gerard slowly straightened up, leveling his knife across his chest as he funneled the last of his strength into his limbs.

He had gone on hundreds of field missions in his life, but he had never arranged everything this neatly.

He had even paid for his own funeral in advance.

The coffin, the grave, the funeral carriage—nothing was missing. He had even left the meal money for his pallbearers tucked inside an envelope.

A Hunter ought to handle his final act with dignity.

Gerard leaned on his blade, straightening his back.

After forty-nine years on the hunting grounds, arriving at this final step tonight, he was going to die with dignity.

The horn grew closer.

Tens of thousands of mounts trampled across the pathless earth, the dense, frantic thunder of hooves making the two rows of firs in Bone Mound Garden shudder.

Gerard closed his eyes and opened them again, ready at any second to burn the last bit of his ether.

He waited for that endless darkness to tear a rift in the night and swallow his old bones.

The sound of the horn reached the garden walls, and then... it skipped a beat.

Then, the sound began to retreat, pulling further and further away.

The horn grew fainter and fainter, finally thinning to a thread and cutting off in the far distance.

Gerard's eyes widened.

There was no rift. Nothing had come.

He leaned on his knife, standing motionless in the center of the mess.

...

St. Michael's Old Tower stood along the riverbank. No one had gone up it in a hundred and twenty years.

The bell at the top of the tower had been forged nearly three centuries ago. Its ring of inscriptions had been so weathered by the elements that only a single phrase could still be read:

Pro innominabili sonat (It tolls for the unspeakable).

This bell had no hammer.

A man was walking up the spiral stone staircase inside the tower.

Old Phillips braced a hand against the freezing stone wall, holding a thermos of tea in the other.

Over the past two weeks, he had done everything he was supposed to do.

Stepping beneath the bell, Old Phillips stopped.

He set the thermos down by his feet and stared up at the hammerless bell.

For the Day of Mourning, every church in the city rang their bells in simultaneous remembrance.

Thousands upon thousands of people were observing moments of silence, reciting hymns, and praying for the dead at the exact same moment.

It was a net larger than anything else, one that wedged open a tiny crack in the door between life and death.

In a hundred alleys, midnight knocks rapped against doors.

People opened their doors. Outside stood soaking-wet silhouettes, calling out the names of the people inside in excruciatingly familiar voices.

"It's me. Let me in."

Old Phillips stepped further beneath the bell, positioning himself dead center.

What this bell took was the bell-ringer's own name.

The inscription, "It tolls for the unspeakable," truly meant, "It tolls on behalf of the unspeakable."

Old Phillips had made his decision long ago.

He didn't want to simply be taken away. He was going to ring the bell himself.

He closed his eyes and breathed his own name into the bell, syllable by syllable.

Then, he began to toll it by the ancient rites of the death knell.

Tonight, he was sounding the death knell for all the dead in the city.

The first strike fell. The bell had no hammer, and it could not physically chime.

The name Old Phillips had breathed into it transmuted into sound.

Down by the riverbank, a pack of night-watch dogs suddenly pointed their snouts at the tower and let out a long howl.

The true purpose of a death knell was to drive away the evil entities clinging to a departed soul.

Once a death was formally announced, the dead could no longer pretend they were still alive.

As the first strike fell, the words "It's me" simultaneously stuck in the throats of the shadows down those hundred alleys.

The half-opened doors stopped dead.

As Old Phillips struck the second time, he felt himself become a fraction lighter.

He struck with a steady rhythm. Outside the doors of the living, row upon row of guests suddenly flickered.

When the seventh strike fell, Old Phillips had to brace himself against the bell's rim.

The dripping-wet guests faded away, one by one, outside those thresholds.

In the drawing rooms of Mayfair, Chelsea, and Bloomsbury, ladies stood gathered around Phonograph Wax Cylinders and card tables.

They suddenly realized the voices singing and answering their questions had vanished.

The wax cylinders fell silent, the knocking on the card tables ceased, and the pencils slipped from their fingers.

Eighth strike. Old Phillips coughed; more and more of him was being drawn away.

Only the final strike remained.

The ninth strike was the final strike for sounding another's death knell.

Tonight, he was sounding his own death knell.

He breathed what little remained of his name into the bell.

The ninth strike fell.