If anybody asked, Argiey would have insisted that on some days it should be unlawful to get out of bed. Those cold autumn days, with rain that was thick enough to make him open an umbrella, but thin enough to make him feel a coward for doing so. Days when all he wanted was to stretch his feet by the fire, lazily sip a tumbler of caraway brandy, and leaf through a two-bit rag filled with dreadful stories.
But nobody asked Argiey. In fact, as luck would have it, a customer rolled in right as he was ready to call it a shift and head home. With a resigned sigh, he trotted to the back room and dug out all the equipment he had packed away, knowing full well he’d be working a solid hour late.
The man forcing him to do so wasn’t much worth the effort, either. Some loafer who’d been lucky enough to live forty-odd years on a diet of wine and empty promises. As Argiey helped the threadbare excuse for a coat off of him, the man flopped around like a pig in the mud and stank like two of them.
First things first, once the customer was in place, Argiey set up the three-legged stand and attached the lightchamber to it, meticulously twisting all the screws to tilt it toward the haggard face. When he found the correct angle, he slid a clean plate into the slot and opened the lens cover. Afterward there was nothing to do but leave it for the next quarter of an hour while the picture developed, only making sure that both the box and the subject stayed completely motionless. At the very least, the latter was never a concern. If there was one thing the dead were good at, it was being still.
When Argiey first saw a lightchamber a few years earlier, he was convinced some form of thaumaturgy—if not necromancy—was involved in its mechanism. The fact that it worked with ordinary chemicals only made it more unnerving. It created a likeness hauntingly close to reality but drained of all color, as though the box somehow stole a piece of the subject’s very life essence. Argiey had no qualms about operating the device, but it would be a dry day on the sea floor before he willingly stood in front of it himself.
Either way, his customers didn’t have to trouble themselves with any of that. Their worries lay far in whatever distance their eyes stared into, blissfully unaware of the grief they left behind for their loved ones—and for the exhausted coroner they pressed into overtime.
While the lightchamber did its sinister job, Argiey went to the writing desk and pulled the flask out of the bottom drawer. He didn’t stock caraway brandy at the office, so plain old pit bitters would have to do. His joints and the chair creaked in perfect unison as he lowered himself into the seat and scanned the papers before him.
Shortly after they were alerted to the dead body, the city guard also apprehended the man that the victim had been last seen with. The suspect admitted to having an “altercation” with the deceased, but denied so much as spitting on him, let alone causing him harm. According to his confession, the victim had stumbled back and fallen down a long flight of stairs, breaking his neck in the process.
Argiey tugged at the scruff of his sideburns and emptied his drink, waiting for the hourglass counting down the fifteen minutes to run out. Then he put away the lightchamber, took up his leather gloves, and returned to the corpse. It was time to hear the other side of the story.
If there was another thing the dead were good at, it was keeping secrets—some longer than others. At first, the victim seemed to corroborate the suspect’s tale. His neck was definitely broken, and his face had a large, flat bruise on the side where it might have hit the ground at the bottom. But as Argiey’s mentor had explained all those years before, sometimes the things that weren’t there told the whole truth.
When someone rolled down a flight of stairs, they didn’t only end up with one bruise. Forearms, elbows, hips, and sides all had plenty of sharp bones to knock against the steps and leave dark reminders of the impact. The victim’s limbs, however, were as pristine as the day he’d been born, only a deal hairier.
Checking inside was nothing but a formality. All ribs were intact, and none of the organs showed any sign of injury. With well-honed motions, Argiey stitched up the body along the cut, washed his hands, and took a good few minutes to write his opinion with penmanship that wouldn’t insult the judge who read it. All in all, short work. He might even have an hour or so to himself at home.
The thump from the back room was barely audible. Argiey tore himself away from the paper and glared at the door, half wondering if he had imagined it. In response to his doubt, a second thump came, accompanied by the faint rattle of metal.
He finished up his paperwork undisturbed, capping it off with the official seal of the South New Montres Deadhouse. He filed it away in his drawer, cleared all the nibs and inkwells away from the desk, and with the measured steps of someone who had done nothing wrong, proceeded into the back room.
It was pitch black, with Argiey’s frame blocking most of the meager light that stretched in from the workroom. Sinking to his knees, he ran a hand along the floor toward the wall. Most of the deadhouse lay well below ground level, but some rooms—including this one—had the occasional window between the ceiling inside and the pavement outside. One of these windows was cracked open, and directly under it was a heap of rags. Argiey used these rags to wipe down slabs and stuff any crevices of bodies that needed stuffing. They also did an excellent job of muffling the sound of whatever was dropped through the window.
Grasping stiffly around in the blind cold, his fingers happened upon the satchel first. He ran his thumb over the coarse leather to feel out the coins inside. One, two, three. . . and four. All the right size. Argiey pocketed the money, then dug into the pile of cloth again.
The package was as small and nondescript as all the others. Slightly bigger than his fist, wrapped in cloth and tied with numerous thick strings. No label, no markings—nothing to indicate its contents, whatever those were. Argiey neither needed nor wanted to know. His part in the process had been settled years earlier, and he had no intention of broadening it.
Good thing he hadn’t moved the body from the slab.
Not bothering with proper equipment, he used his knife to rip up the stitches at the crotch end. He pulled apart the seam enough to make an opening, shoved the package inside, then sewed it back up. Finally, he left two inches of the thread to hang loose and tied a hoop on it—as per the agreed code.
He took a step back and surveyed the corpse. No one would ever suspect that anything was special about it, unless they knew what to look for.
A series of faint clicks echoed through the empty workroom as Argiey closed the quartz lights one by one, until darkness enveloped all but the smoky oil lamp he held. The front door locked with a resounding fall of the latch, putting a firm barrier between Argiey and his work. Clammy autumn rain splashed under his boot up the steps to the street, where the city of New Montres spread into the night.
Somewhere in that city, a man had died earlier, taking a hundred secrets to the grave. Argiey had made sure he would take one more with him. If only for a while.
