Page 19

I pull my eyes back to the chart and swallow hard, adjusting myself.

Focus, Baz, I tell myself. Use your damn brain and concentrate for once.

The question I have not been able to answer is what the curve is a curve of.

I pull the intake records toward me from where they live in a stack at the end of the desk. Decades of Mortis records in my own hand, secretly copied out of the registrar’s book two winters ago when I was supposed to be preparing lectures.

The registrar keeps the original ledger locked in his office. Every body that comes through the Mortis gates is logged, whether it be the plague-dead who get shipped to us by the barrelful, the ordinary dead the school pays undertakers for, or the occasional donation from families who want their relatives put to good use, making them fulfill some final purpose. All of it is recorded by the school. In for study, in for the bone archive, in for teaching, in for the Keeper walls. Nothing comes into this school by accident.

And every one of those bodies is accounted for again when it leaves, released back to those families, interred in the sea wall as a bone saint, broken down for materials, or cataloged into the collection. The Mortis has used its dead for five hundred years and has gotten rather good at the paperwork.

Which is why the gaps in the records are so damn puzzling.

In goes a body. Out goes a body.

Or doesn’t.

The Mortis uses its dead, of course. It’s a necromancy school. There are expected losses, such as a specimen broken down past the point of logging, a bone absorbed into a working, the occasional clerical lapse. And careless students break things all the time. The losses in ordinary years are within what the method requires.

But…the losses in plague years are not.

I take the candle closer. 1814. Seven bodies in that never came out. 1762. Five. 1703, which was the Great Mortality…nineteen. The plague before that is before the ledgers can be fully trusted, but there’s a note from the archivist of the time, in the margin of the oldest intake book, that reads more than we accounted for. He didn’t sign it. Whoever he was, he knew enough to write it and also knew enough not to put his name under it.

Why the missing cluster from the plague years?

I pick up the pen and I write the word in the margin, under the chart, the same word I’ve written there since July: why? In another month there will be a column of whys along the edge of the paper, a little stacked prayer to no one in particular, except perhaps my brain.

I straighten up. My back makes a clicking noise, my muscles groaning from the strain. Getting old isn’t for the weak. Sometimes I wonder if living on a floating city on the sea is taking years off my life, if I would have been better off in Auremonte with its dry climate and sunshine and crisp mountain air. Then again, I’d have to deal with dragons and a religious cult that wants me dead, so I know the answer to that.

I take my coat off and hang it over the chair.

And there it is. The scent of her again. Not on the coat, but on me, somehow. The warmth and the sweetness and whatever that resinous thing was underneath. Saffron? I was over her shoulder for most of the second half of the class. Close enough to catch it wafting off her hair but not close enough to earn the right to still be smelling it an hour later.

Curious.

I sit down.

I pull a fresh, blank sheet toward me and dip the pen. I write her name across the top.

Greythorn.

Then I stop.

I don’t know what list I’m making but I’m making it anyway. Observations, student by student, bone by bone, grave by grave. The right sort of record. Clinical and correct. Educational. The kind of thing a professor keeps on a student whose method is unusual. I’ve kept such a sheet on Caine. I have kept one on Winterbourne, briefly, before I gave up and admitted I had nothing to say about her that wasn’t essentially just watch her closely.

But I don’t start with technique. I start with the moment her head came up when my hand came off hers in the cemetery, as if she’d heard something I hadn’t said. I write that first. I underline it, as if that will help.

Then I write the technical notes. Her reading of the radius, how her phrasing was so formal and borrowed. The way her eyes widened in panic when I asked her how. The island accent that disappeared when she was concentrating and came back when she wasn’t.

I write radius and my pen pauses over the page. What I’m actually thinking about is her hands on the bone, those delicate long fingers with short, worn nails, a small scar on the pad of her thumb. A seamstress’s hands. I noticed them in the crypts on Monday and have been pretending I didn’t since.

I write phrasing and my pen pauses again. What I’m thinking about is the hollow of her throat when she looked up at me after she’d read the radius. The way her hair had tumbled over her shoulders like fine red wine. The small, startled rise and fall of her collarbones framed by her bodice, the firm swell of her breasts.

Clinical, I remind myself. This is purely clinical.

I write island accent and keep writing.

Three pages in, the window behind the desk has started to grey.