Read Chapter 22: The Assassin's Blade

The manor house smelled of woodsmoke and roast meat, and Thomas Blackwood hated it for that. Men feasted above while plague villages starved.

He pressed himself against the cold stone of the cellar corridor, the silver scalpel slick in his fist. The tunnel had emerged behind a wine rack in what he guessed was the butler's pantry. Sounds drifted down—boots on floorboards, low voices, the clink of pewter. The chaos from the orphanage had bought him minutes, maybe less.

He moved.

The ground floor gave him a serving corridor, narrow and dark, that ran behind the great hall. He passed a door that stood ajar—through it, a glimpse of Sir Richard's table, half-cleared, a hound gnawing a bone beneath it. No sign of the man himself. That meant he was elsewhere. Likely overseeing the hunt for a dead physician who refused to stay dead.

Thomas forced his legs forward. The apothecary's daughter. Nell Carter. He'd seen her cell. He'd memorized the route the gravediggers had sketched in dirt: bedchambers above, kitchens below, and between them, a storage room off the eastern stair. It was there the girl had been held. It was there he would find a trace of her.

The eastern stair was unguarded.

That alone made his stomach turn.

He climbed slowly, testing each tread, the stone cold through his worn boots. At the top, a corridor with three doors. The first was locked. The second, locked. The third—

It opened under his hand.

The room was small and windowless, lit by a single stub of candle on a stool. A straw pallet in the corner, rumpled. A bucket, empty. And on a small table, a round loaf of bread, still warm enough to soften its crust.

Fresh bread.

Someone had been here within the hour.

Thomas crossed the room, fingers brushing the pallet. Still faintly warm. He counted heartbeats—too many, too few—and then his boot struck something soft.

He looked down.

The sexton lay on his back, half under the pallet, his eyes open to the ceiling. His mouth was slack, but his lips had a blue tinge, and a thin thread of blood had dried from the corner of his mouth. A faint, bitter smell clung to him—almonds, cut with something rank.

Poison.

Thomas crouched. He knew this man. He'd buried half the village under Sir Richard's orders, dug the empty graves with his own hands, wept over them when he thought no one watched. And now he lay here, a third mouth too full of truth.

Nell had been moved again. The bread told him that. Someone had brought it, found the sexton dead, and dragged the girl out before the body could be discovered.

Or before it could talk.

Thomas felt for a pulse anyway. Cold. Long gone. He closed the sexton's eyes with two fingers, a habit from another life, and slid his hand beneath the man's tunic. Nothing. No note, no key. But his hand brushed a lump at the belt—a small leather pouch, cinched shut.

He drew it open.

A single key, iron, ornate. Not a door key. Something smaller. A chest, perhaps. Or a lockbox.

Thomas pocketed it and straightened.

Behind him, a floorboard creaked.

He spun. Two shapes filled the doorway. Guards—wet from the storm outside, their torchlight throwing their shadows long down the corridor. The bigger one grinned with yellow teeth.

"Thought you'd be clever, sneaking back to the dead man's nest."

Thomas didn't answer. He lunged for the window—boarded, useless. The second guard stepped forward, blocking the door. Torchlight glinted off a blade.

They had swords. He had a scalpel and a key.

The first guard came at him. Thomas ducked under the swing, slashing low, feeling the blade catch cloth and something warmer. The man grunted, staggered. The second guard swung high, and Thomas threw himself sideways, rolling across the pallet, coming up against the far wall with his back to the boarded window.

Two guards. A dead sexton. A locked door between him and the stair.

"Sir Richard said you'd come back," the wounded one spat, pressing a hand to his ribs. "Said you were like a rat, always finding your way back to the corpse."

"Then he knows his vermin," Thomas said.

He threw the stool. It caught the wounded guard in the knee, and the man went down with a howl. The second guard hesitated a heartbeat too long, and Thomas used it.

He didn't run for the door.

He ran for the window, hit the boards with his shoulder, felt one give. He hit it again, and the nails screamed as the board tore free. Cold air rushed in.

Below, a two-storey drop to a cobbled yard. And beyond that, the dark mass of the gardens, the church tower, the crypt.

They'd catch him in the open.

The second guard swung. Thomas twisted, taking the flat of the blade across his ribs, pain flaring white. He shoved the guard back, spun, and dove through the window.

The fall knocked the breath from him. He hit the yard hard, rolled, tasted mud and blood. Above, a shout. He forced himself up, staggered toward the garden wall, and threw himself over it as an arrow thudded into the wood where his head had been.

He landed in a rose thicket. Thorns tore his sleeve, his cheek. He lay still, chest heaving, listening.

Voices. Feet. The clang of a bell from the church—the alarm.

Sir Richard had been waiting for him.

Thomas pressed his palm against the key in his pocket. An iron key for an iron truth. He had the gravediggers. He had the tunnels. He had this key, to what he did not yet know.

But he had no food, no allies in the village, no Nell Carter, and a bounty on his corpse that was growing by the hour.

He crawled through the thorns, away from the manor, toward the graveyard. The crypt mouth gaped in the dark, a black tooth in the hillside.

Behind him, the manor blazed with torchlight. Men fanned out, calling to each other, beating the hedgerows.

He reached the crypt door and slipped inside, pulling it shut behind him.

Silence. The smell of earth and the dead.

He stood in the dark, catching his breath, the silver scalpel still in his grip. He could hear them outside now, boots crunching gravel, muffled shouts.

Then, from deeper in the crypt, a sound.

A scraping. Rhythmic. Deliberate.

Thomas turned, scalpel up. The dark pressed in.

A voice, low and amused, came from the shadows by the far wall.

"Physicians," it said. "Always poking where they shouldn't."

Thomas did not move. The scraping stopped.

"You're the one they're all shouting about," the voice said. "The one who won't die."

A figure detached itself from the dark. A woman, gray-haired, in a torn wool dress. She held a trowel in one hand, earth-crusted.

"The name's Agnes," she said. "And you just woke up every dead thing in this village."

Thomas lowered the scalpel an inch. "You're from the gravediggers' crew."

"I'm from a lot of places," she said. "But right now, I'm the only one left who can dig a grave without Sir Richard knowing about it."

She pointed the trowel at him.

"You want the girl," she said. "I know where she's going. The tithe barn's a lie. There's a ship at the cove. Comes for the full moon. Carries cargo north."

"Cargo," Thomas repeated.

"People," Agnes said. "The ones he doesn't want to bury."

Thomas's jaw tightened. The sexton's poison. The empty graves. Nell Carter, moved twice. The key in his pocket, cold and heavy.

"How many?" he asked.

Agnes glanced toward the crypt door, where bootsteps thudded past. "Tonight?" she said. "Enough to fill a hold."