A kissing sound came from the empty coffin.
The seventeenth name on the Red Table's list.
Marquess Isen Bale.
The ledger said he had died last night.
Cassian had come to kill a dead man.
It was not the sound of flesh touching flesh.
Two shadows clinging to the bottom of the coffin were licking each other's faces.
One belonged to an old man.
A bent back. Withered fingers.
The other belonged to a young woman.
Her slender neck and thick hair were sharply defined.
There was no corpse between them.
This was the funeral chamber of the Isen Bale estate. The mourners sat along the walls. Only the coffin in the center of the room was empty.
When Cassian leaned over it, the shadows stopped kissing.
They looked up at him together.
A single needle hole pierced each place where an eye should have been.
"It is polite to knock before disturbing the dead."
A woman spoke behind him.
Cassian knocked twice on the coffin lid.
The shadows resumed their kiss.
"There is no dead man."
"That is what makes the funeral expensive."
Rosalyn Mor unfolded a length of black cloth.
Forty-six.
Half her hair was white. The other half was black and undyed.
Seven pairs of scissors in different sizes hung at her waist instead of a sword.
She was a funeral tailor.
A woman who made the final clothes of the living and stitched together the shadows left by the dead.
"Arms up."
"Why?"
"I need to fit your burial shroud."
"I did not order a funeral."
"The dead never do."
Rosalyn tossed her measuring tape.
It coiled around Cassian's shoulders like a living snake, crossed his chest, and stopped at his waist. The silver needle at its end bit into the hem of his coat.
Cassian did not cut it.
"Shoulders, forty-nine."
Rosalyn wrote it down.
"Chest, one hundred two. Right arm half an inch longer."
Last, she looped the tape around Cassian's neck.
A drop of blood welled from the black alignment seam.
The tape drank it.
Rosalyn's hand stopped for a moment.
"Interesting."
"What is?"
"Your neck is thicker than the corpses of yours I saw in advance."
Cassian looked at her.
"My future corpses?"
"Six of them."
"I died once."
"That once is still here."
Rosalyn touched the black seam with the end of the tape.
"The six I saw are not the number of lives you have left. They are only six different shapes your death might take."
She measured his neck again.
One finger brushed the alignment seam.
It was not the touch of a healer or a comforter.
It was a tailor's hand testing the grain of cloth.
"Shall I make the head separately for this shroud?"
"Make one piece."
"You mean to attach it again."
"Do you mean to cut it again?"
Rosalyn laughed.
"My work is not cutting. I put things in order after the cut."
When she drew back the tape, another thin red line remained around Cassian's neck.
Sixty-seven candles burned around the empty coffin. None of the mourners wept.
Stolen novel; please report.
The master of this estate, Marquess Isen Bale, had died last night.
His funeral began today.
There had never been a body.
Rosalyn asked.
"Did Seraphina send you?"
"Seventeenth on the list."
"The princess has a habit of counting people as numbers."
"Undertakers count them by measurements."
"Measurements do not lie."
"The coffin does."
Cassian looked into it.
A death certificate had been nailed to the inside of the lid.
Time of death: midnight last night.
Cause: old age.
Confirmed by three imperial physicians and two priests of the White Church.
Every signature was genuine.
Cassian looked toward the family seats.
Helena, the marquess's wife, sat beneath a black veil. Her face was over seventy years old. She held a bundle of dried wildflowers in both hands.
Cassian asked.
"Where is your husband's body?"
Helena did not answer.
"My lady."
She slowly lifted her head.
"Who are you?"
"Cassian Crow."
"I know that name."
The old woman's eyes rested on his neck.
"My husband said you would kill him."
"The record says your husband is already dead."
"Then that is fortunate."
Helena looked back down at the wildflowers.
"When will he arrive?"
"Who?"
"Isen."
"You said he was dead."
"My Isen is twenty-two."
She smiled.
"He promised to come dancing tonight."
An old maid standing against the wall turned her face away.
A sinmark ran from the corners of her eyes to Helena's temples. Memories had been moved, restitched, and patched with others whenever they wore thin.
Helena's memory had stopped at a ball sixty years ago.
Her aged husband was a stranger to her.
Only the twenty-two-year-old Isen remained her husband.
Cassian looked back at the empty coffin.
The old shadow within struggled to straighten its back. Whenever the young woman's shadow failed to recognize him, he scraped the coffin floor with his nails.
"How old was the marquess?"
Rosalyn answered.
"Sixty-seven."
The same as the candles.
"No body. A wife waiting for her young husband."
"Love raises the price of a funeral."
"Possession, not love."
Helena suddenly looked up.
"No."
Her voice was clear.
"Isen loves me."
For an instant, she looked like a woman who remembered everything.
"He cried whenever I failed to recognize him. So he said he would become young again. He would return with the face he wore when we first met."
The maid caught the old woman's shoulder.
"My lady. Please."
"I asked him to."
Helena looked at Cassian.
"I told him not to leave me alone, whatever the price."
The memory drained from her eyes again.
"But who are you?"
Cassian did not answer.
The maid led Helena from the room. With each step, the maid's shadow grew thinner.
"He ate her memories too."
"Not only her memories."
Rosalyn opened the funeral ledger.
Forty-two servants on the estate.
Average age: thirty-eight.
Nineteen had died of old age over the last three months. Of the survivors, eight no longer remembered their own names. Five had forgotten their children's faces.
The maid, Mara Henn, was twenty-nine.
That morning, she had seen her nursing daughter and screamed that a thief had left a baby in her bed.
Cassian spoke.
"The marquess used his servants' lives to grow young and their memories to make himself twenty-two."
"So his wife would see her husband again."
"His wife asked him to."
"The servants did not."
The kissing inside the coffin grew faster.
The old shadow's back was slowly straightening. Wrinkles appeared on the young woman's shadow instead.
Cassian spoke.
"Someone stitched these shadows."
"Not me."
Rosalyn took no offense. She drew one pair of scissors and drove it into the edge of the coffin.
"The stitches are wrong. They tied a living shadow to a dead man's coffin. Clumsy work. Exact purpose."
"What purpose?"
"To kill the marquess in law."
Rosalyn pointed at the death certificate.
"Dead men pay no taxes. They stand no trials. Their contracts pass to their heirs. But what if his shadow keeps consuming lives?"
"His body is alive."
"Only the law is dead."
Cassian looked down at the shadows in the coffin.
The marquess had escaped trial and debt through a death certificate.
At the same time, he used the shadow bound to the coffin as a conduit, draining his household's lives and memories into his living body.
The empty coffin began to shake on its own.
Cassian's shadow lengthened across the floor. The two within the coffin turned toward it.
Their mouths had seen food.
Black hands rose from beneath the coffin.
It was not a box meant to hold a corpse.
It was an entrance to a vault of stolen memories.
The hands caught Cassian's ankle.
He drew his knife and cut through three wrists.
No blood spilled from them. Silver hair, baby teeth, and wedding rings poured out instead.
Years and memories stolen from servants.
A fourth hand seized his alignment seam.
His throat opened.
I can make them forget.
The adjudicator's voice leaked out with the blood.
The shadows in the coffin opened their mouths to swallow it.
Cassian did not retreat.
Instead, he stepped into the coffin.
"Shadowstep."
An old sin taken from an assassin opened beneath his foot.
A shadow was not a road. It was a gap untouched by another person's sight. One step joined one unseen black surface to another.
Rosalyn was watching him.
So he could not enter.
"Close your eyes."
"I would rather not."
The black hands climbed to his knees.
Cassian turned his knife.
Its point stopped before Rosalyn's left eye.
"Close it or lose it."
Rosalyn smiled and shut her eyes.
Every candle in the room went out.
Cassian sank into the coffin.
His feet touched the floor first.
Then his throat closed.
Cassian breathed in the darkness.
This was the memory vault hidden beneath the coffin's shadow.
It smelled of milk.
Mara Henn's memory.
Glass bottles lined every wall.
They held scenes instead of liquid.
The night she first held her child.
A dawn spent counting her husband's scars with one finger.
The first day she stole bread and ate until she was full.
Memories that kept their owners alive the longest.
Whenever one aged inside the glass, the breath of a young man sounded from the far side of the room.
"Helena?"
Isen's voice.
Cassian followed it.
Masquerade masks lay in rows across the floor. Inside each was written a servant's name and remaining life.
Mara Henn.
Thirty-one years remaining.
Recovery complete.
The face of the twenty-two-year-old Isen was slowly forming on the surface of the mask.
Cassian crushed it beneath his boot.
A man screamed far away.
Every bottle shook at once.
"Who are you?"
"A man who came to see your funeral."
"I am dead."
"There was no body."
"No body means I am dead. The law says so."
The marquess had a young man's voice.
Music sounded behind it.
Strings and laughter. Glasses striking together.
The marquess was not in this room.
The memory vault connected him to a masquerade somewhere else.
Cassian touched the bottle shaking hardest.
A scene opened.
A young man in a white mask stood in the center of a ballroom. A woman resembling Helena at nineteen hung on his arm.
She was not his wife.
She was a maid wearing his wife's memories.
The man gave her wildflowers.
"She will know me this time."
Behind his face hung a banner embroidered with seventeen red rats.
The Red Table's masquerade.
The table had not yet been laid. This was a preliminary ball where the members admired one another's new faces and stolen memories before the formal rite.
Cassian had found his target.
At that moment, Isen turned within the memory.
He looked straight through the glass at Cassian.
"You found me."
The young marquess smiled.
"Then grow old in there."
The light went out in every bottle.
The shadow beneath Cassian's feet disappeared.
Shadowstep required both the shadow he entered and the shadow he meant to leave through.
The room had no exit.
Rosalyn opened her eyes in the estate's funeral chamber.
Neither Cassian nor the shadows remained in the empty coffin.
Only one black thread lay at the bottom.
I can make them forget.
It whispered in the adjudicator's voice.
Rosalyn picked it up, placed it on her tongue, tasted it, then spat it out.
"You do not steal another person's last words."
If she left the coffin open, the memory vault would consume the funeral chamber's shadows too. Instead of pulling Cassian out, Rosalyn decided to seal the entrance first.
She closed the lid.
Then drove in the nails one by one.
The first for the body.
The second for the name.
The third for the shadow that could not return.
Before driving the last nail, Rosalyn spoke to the coffin.
"If you are not out by tomorrow night—"
The hammer fell.
"I will bury your shadow first."