The Godkiller’s skull rolled off the bone-cart and crushed a Saltborn porter beneath it.
I caught the silver tether before it dragged the rest of us over the cliff.
The tether burned through my gloves. Below, the black sea climbed and collapsed against the corpse’s ribs, each wave breaking into powdered salt that hissed against the white bone. The porter disappeared under the skull’s cheekbone. His boots kicked twice. Then the sea took him.
“Leave him,” said Pell.
She had one hand wrapped around the anchor-spike and the other around her hatchet. Her red hair was plastered to her face with sweat and black dust. She watched me the way sensible people watched a fuse.
“I was planning to,” I said.
I pulled the tether free. The skull rolled another yard, stopped against a ridge of vertebrae, and settled with its empty eye socket aimed at us.
A decent omen, if one enjoyed being murdered by architecture.
The client’s factor stood behind us in a lacquered salt-mask, untouched by the storm. He had hired us for three hundred marrow marks, which was enough money to buy a new body if a person could find one for sale. Mine had already been ruined by my first dive. The left side of me had hardened from hip to shoulder, a pale mineral shell beneath the leather. My fingers still moved. Mostly.
“Is the brain intact?” the factor asked.
Pell looked at the crushed porter. “Ask him.”
The factor ignored her. Nobles and corpses shared a useful quality: neither answered when addressed properly.
I walked to the skull. Its jaw had split when it fell, exposing a gray mass sealed behind three layers of translucent membrane. The Godkiller’s brain had been removed from its body a century ago and stored in a brine vault beneath the Guild’s old courthouse. Someone had fed it enough marrow to keep its memories alive. Someone had also lied about the vault’s condition.
The tissue pulsed.
Each pulse pushed a thread of silver light through the membrane.
“Still dreaming,” I said.
“Can you enter?” asked the factor.
“I can enter a burning house. The question is whether you want what I bring out.”
“The ritual is the only thing that matters.”
He said ritual the way priests said salvation. The word had come with the contract, underlined three times: recover the sequence used by the Godkiller to kill the First Deity. No names. No explanation of who wanted it. Guild law said a client could keep their purpose private. Guild law had been written by people who had never watched a memory turn a colleague inside out.
Next
Vera must cross the black door with a thinning tether while deciding whether Venn’s concealed Saltification—and his evident interest in the pact—makes him a liability or their best clue.
Pell spat over the edge. The droplet struck black salt and crystallized before it fell.
Our fourth diver, Venn Sallow, crouched beside the braincase and began arranging the dive pins. He had a narrow face, a careful mouth, and the stillness of someone saving energy. His coat collar stayed high despite the heat. When he reached for the silver spool, I saw white grains caught beneath his fingernails.
Stage-three Saltification began in the blood. It worked outward through the hands, the eyes, the tongue. By the time a person admitted what was happening, their joints usually belonged to the dead.
Venn saw me looking and closed his fist.
“I cut my palm on the cart,” he said.
“I didn’t ask.”
“That was generous of you.”
“No. It was efficient.”
Pell glanced between us. She knew what I had seen. She had been my anchor in the dive that cost me half my body. She had also been the one who cut the tether when I became too heavy to pull back.
The last member of the crew, Tarrow, raised the bone-frame over the skull. He had the shoulders of a dockworker and the expression of a man who regretted every contract after signing it. Three relic knives hung at his waist, their blades carved from a god’s finger joints.
“Once we’re in,” I said, “we stay together. The memory belongs to the Godkiller. It can change the ground, the weather, the people in it. If you see a door where there wasn’t one, don’t open it. If you hear anyone calling you by a childhood name, don’t answer. If you meet yourselves, kill the copy before it learns your habits.”
Tarrow swallowed. “What if it already knows them?”
“Then die quickly. It will save time.”
The factor stepped forward. “You were recommended as the best stitcher available.”
“I was recommended because the best stitcher available refuses to work with me.”
That was the official version of my disgrace. The less official version involved a royal archive, a dead prince, and my decision to leave three paying patrons trapped inside a memory rather than let them carry a plague back into the city. The Guild called it breach of contract. The city called it treason. I called it Tuesday with paperwork.
I pressed a thumb to the marrow vial at my throat. Refined God-Marrow gleamed inside, no larger than a grain of rice. The dose would let me stitch the team’s minds together for the crossing. It would also encourage the stone in my chest to grow.
My hand paused.
Three hundred marks bought medicine, food, and perhaps six more months before my lungs became mineral. More importantly, it bought the truth about what happened during my first dive. I had seen a white shore inside a dead god’s mind. Something had spoken to me from beyond it. I had forgotten the words, but I had remembered the voice.
I broke the vial between my teeth.
The marrow tasted of hot iron and old rain.
Light ran beneath my tongue. The stone in my shoulder tightened until my arm hung numb at my side. I drew blood with my thumbnail and smeared it across the tether. Silver threads leapt from the line into Pell, Tarrow, and Venn.
The world folded.
For an instant, I stood on a plain of black salt beneath a red sky. The Godkiller’s memory had chosen a battlefield, which suggested vanity. Then the salt beneath my boots softened and dragged me down.
We fell into the brain.
I landed in a city built inside a rib cage.
White towers curved overhead, each rib packed with windows. Behind them moved crowds with featureless faces. Their mouths opened and closed in unison, making the sound of waves. No ocean existed anywhere on the living world anymore, but the dead remembered one.
Pell struck the ground beside me. Tarrow came down hard enough to crack the street. Venn landed upright.
He looked at the city and whispered, “This isn’t the execution.”
“You’ve seen it before?” I asked.
His eyes flicked toward the nearest tower. “I know the shape of a memory.”
A bell rang above us. Every faceless citizen turned toward the sound.
The street rearranged itself. Buildings drew together. Windows sealed like eyelids. At the far end of the avenue, a black door appeared in the wall of a white rib. Three notches had been cut into it, each filled with fresh red light.
The tether tugged toward the door.
That was wrong. The anchor should have remained behind us, tied to the braincase in the living world. Instead, the silver line ran through the city and vanished beneath the threshold.
“Vera,” Pell said, very quietly.
The door opened.
Beyond it stood a shore beneath a sky crowded with unfamiliar stars. Black water rolled against the sand, carrying shapes too long and jointed to be fish. Something enormous moved beneath the surface. Its eye opened far offshore, pale and patient.
The Godkiller had not remembered the sea as a place. He had remembered it as an audience.
A voice came from the water.
Not the Godkiller’s voice. I knew that much. I had heard the same voice during my first dive, before the stone took my leg.
It spoke through every mouth in the city.
“Bring me the hand that lit the first fire.”
The faceless citizens began walking toward us.
Tarrow drew his bone knives. Pell raised her hatchet. Venn remained still, staring at the open door with a hunger he had worked very hard to disguise.
I tightened my grip on the tether and counted the silver strands. Four minds. One anchor. The line had already thinned by half.
The city shuddered.
A tower folded inward, crushing its own windows. The street beneath us split into a widening mouth. Far behind the door, the thing beneath the black water pressed one pale hand against the shore.
The memory was changing around us.
It had noticed our arrival, and it was trying to erase the road back.
I pointed at the door.
“Move,” I said. “We’re going to find out what the Godkiller promised.”