Litany of Winter

Severin reached the armory before first bell and found Hans Schultz leaning over the issue counter with his blond hair tied back and a strip of inventory paper in one hand.

Hans looked up. His good blue eye moved over Severin’s black coat, the sword at his hip, then the patch covering the marked left eye.

”Well, look who we have here,” he said. ”They finally let you dress like one of us.”

Severin set his field satchel on the counter. ”You sound a bit disappointed.”

”Just a little. I had money on you wearing gray forever.”

The quartermaster pushed a wrapped bundle toward Severin before either of them could continue. Bandages, lamp matches sealed in waxed paper, spare cord, two candles and a folded oilskin surrounded a small stoppered bottle.

Severin knew the shape before he touched it, and the bitter taste came back at once.

Hans noticed. ”Ha. That one look familiar?”

”Unfortunately. You made me drink it while I had a fucking hole in my stomach.”

”Would’ve gone easier if you’d stopped fighting me.”

”Maybe because I was bleeding to death?”

”Exactly. Very inconsiderate.”

Severin picked up the bottle. Dark glass hid the bitter liquid inside. The label carried a red medical stamp and a line of Vhaldrik he could read slowly enough to understand the important part: emergency use.

Hans tapped the bottle with one finger. ”Remember, this won’t mend anything.”

”Yeah, yeah. I remember you saying it.”

Severin put it into the outer pocket of the satchel. The quartermaster added two narrow glass vials with screw tops. Fine gray powder clung to their sides.

”Silver dust,” Hans said. ”Take both.”

Severin turned one vial in his fingers. ”What does it do?”

”Scatter it where you think something passed. It catches what it disturbed.”

Severin slipped the vials into padded loops beside the draught. Hans gave the rest of his equipment a quick check, then closed the satchel and pushed it back toward him without repacking anything.

”Ready?” Hans asked.

Severin lifted the strap over his shoulder. ”Ready. Also, you’re the one who disappeared, not me.”

”I was working. Now let’s move.”

They left Kronvaal in one of the Order’s motor carriages while the city lamps were still burning.

The road climbed through wet fields and bare orchards. Sleet had fallen during the night, but the maintained road stayed mostly clear, runoff moving through stone channels cut along both sides. Imperial milestones appeared at regular intervals, black lettering sharp against white paint. Severin understood more of the words than he would have a month earlier.

Hans spent most of the journey reading the thin report on his knee.

Severin looked out through the rain-speckled glass. ”Anything useful?”

”Three reports, four finds. No missing people, and no cattle large enough to explain the amount.”

”So the butcher’s been checked, I’m guessing.”

”Yes. Twice.”

Hans folded the report.

The village occupied the side of a long hill, its houses built in ordered rows around a narrow central road. A small Eternal church stood above them behind a stone retaining wall. Below it sat the municipal office beside a schoolhouse. Farther down, a public wash building drew water from a covered channel. Red imperial plaques marked the post office and police station.

Nothing about the place looked neglected, which made the bucket on the municipal office table seem worse.

A village administrator in a stiff brown coat had covered it with folded canvas before Severin and Hans arrived. A local police officer stood by the window, while the village physician waited across the room with his sleeves rolled to the forearms.

Hans showed a sealed paper. The administrator read the stamp, not the text beneath it, and returned it immediately.

The administrator answered in Vhaldrik, slowly enough for Severin to catch most of it.

”We checked the register twice. Everyone is accounted for. The local police searched the farms beyond the village boundary as well. No unexplained absences.”

”What about livestock?” Hans asked.

”Nothing that explains this. Two chickens went missing last week, likely a fox. One pig was slaughtered six days ago, but we checked the butcher’s waste.”

The physician lifted the canvas, and Severin caught the smell a moment later, dulled by the cold room.

A wet coil of intestine lay in the bottom of the bucket among pink membrane and dark clots. Mud had dried along one side. A narrow splinter of pale wood had caught in a fold.

The physician pointed without touching it. ”This one was found at dawn, in the runoff beside the washhouse. Yesterday’s was behind the baker’s yard. The first two turned up near the butcher.”

Hans crouched beside the bucket. ”And the butcher says none of it is his.”

”He says it louder every time someone asks.”

”Could he be lying?”

”He could. But this isn’t pig.”

Severin looked at the physician.

The man kept speaking in Vhaldrik, faster now, and Severin lost some of the medical terms.

”It’s human bowel. I can’t tell you whose from a bucket like this, and I won’t pretend I can. But I’ve assisted with abdominal surgery and postmortems. This is human.”

Hans looked at the administrator. ”Who died recently?”

The administrator frowned. ”Recently?”

”Anyone buried in the last two weeks.”

The man crossed to a cabinet without another question. Inside were numbered ledgers bound in dark cloth. He found the current volume, checked the index and opened to a page marked with a black ribbon.

Three deaths in fourteen days: an infant who had not survived birth, an old woman buried twelve days ago, and a sixty-eight-year-old widower who had died of pneumonia three days earlier.

The first entrails had been reported the following morning. Hans read the dates twice before Severin moved to the wall map.

Four small red pencil circles marked the find sites. The butcher’s shop sat on the lower road, with the baker’s yard farther east. The washhouse lay downhill near the blue line marking the covered runoff channel, which ran down from the upper slope, passed behind the church retaining wall and split near the center of the village.

”All of them are on this,” Severin said.

Hans came over. ”On what?”

Severin pointed to the blue line. ”The drain.”

The administrator leaned closer. ”The main runoff.”

Severin traced the line with one finger without touching the paper. ”The butcher’s here. The baker’s farther down, and the washhouse is farther still. If the channel was running harder, that could explain why the later finds moved downhill.”

Hans looked toward the window. Rain tapped against the glass.

”The churchyard?” he asked.

”Above the retaining wall,” the administrator said.

Hans shut the ledger. ”Show us.”

The churchyard was better kept than half the streets Severin had slept on in Blackhaven. Gravel paths divided rows of dark stones, each grave edged cleanly despite the rain. The newest burial lay close to the rear wall beneath a temporary wooden marker.

Its soil was wet and settled, with no claw marks or signs that the grave had been opened. The only boot prints remained on the path used by mourners and the caretaker.

Hans walked around the grave once. Severin checked the wall, the path and the drainage cut running beside it.

”If someone dug him up,” Severin said, ”they put everything back neatly.”

Hans glanced at the rain-dark soil. ”And in this weather.” He held out his hand. ”Dust.”

Severin pulled one of the screw-top vials from his satchel and passed it over. Hans crouched near the drainage cut, shook a little gray powder into his palm, then cast it lightly across the stone.

Most of the powder settled, but a thin stream snapped sideways. Severin stepped closer.

The particles gathered along the lower edge of the retaining wall, settling into scratches too regular to be weather damage. Hans scattered another pinch, and the dust drew toward the same line, outlining a rectangular joint beneath the moss and mineral stains.

”That’s been moved,” Severin said.

Hans studied the scratches. ”Recently.”

The caretaker, an elderly church servant who had followed them at a distance, shook his head.

”There shouldn’t be anything there.”

Hans brushed moss away with the back of his glove. ”There is.”

The administrator stared at the exposed stonework. ”Old drainage access.”

Hans looked at him. ”You knew about it?”

”I knew there were older channels under the hill. The municipal plans show several that were sealed when the retaining wall was built. This opening isn’t on them.”

Severin crouched and found an iron ring recessed behind the stone lip. It took both of them to shift the slab. Mud sucked at its base before it gave way with a grinding scrape.

Cold, wet air carrying rot came out of the opening as Hans took the lantern from Severin and lit it, then held it inside.

Stone steps descended beneath the churchyard. The first six were clear, but a dark smear marked the seventh.

Hans looked at the administrator. ”Keep everyone out of the churchyard.”

The man nodded immediately.

”And no police down here unless we call for them.”

The administrator nodded again.

Hans passed the lantern back before drawing his short sword. Severin unsheathed his own, and they went down.

The passage was barely wide enough for two men shoulder to shoulder. Water ran in a shallow groove along one wall, black with soil from the hill above. Old brick gave way to rough stone after twenty paces. Roots pushed through the ceiling.

Then Severin saw the wood. Broken boards lay across the drainage groove ahead, pale on the inside and dark with varnish on the outside.

Coffin boards.

Hans raised the lantern, revealing a hole torn upward through the packed earth above them, with splintered wood hanging from it. Soil had collapsed around the opening, exposing the underside of a coffin.

Its bottom had been broken inward, and something pale sagged through the gap.

Severin stepped closer until he could make out a human arm hanging loose at the shoulder.

The body above had been opened through the broken coffin floor, with cloth dragged down into the passage alongside loops of torn tissue. Its abdomen was a dark cavity, with too little left inside.

Hans stopped beside him.

”It’s getting to them from underneath,” Severin said.

A scraping sound travelled through the passage, and both men turned.

The lantern light reached perhaps thirty feet before the tunnel bent, and something crossed that bend low to the ground.

Fast.

Severin caught a glimpse of glossy darkness and a hooked limb folding the wrong way. Several small crimson points clustered where a face might have been, then vanished with it.

”Keep the lamp lower,” Hans said quietly.

Severin lowered the lantern as Hans tightened his grip on the short sword and stepped ahead of him.

Farther down the passage, the crimson points appeared again.

Closer this time.