Dawn came too soon.
Evander had spent the remaining hours of night reviewing intelligence reports, adjusting plans, and preparing contingencies for a dozen different scenarios. By the time gray light began seeping through the hidden ventilation shafts of his underground domain, he had slept for exactly zero hours and felt surprisingly awake.
Death magic had its benefits. The need for sleep was one of the first things to diminish as a necromancer grew in power.
He emerged from the underground through a different passage than the one he had entered, a precaution that had saved his life more than once. This exit deposited him in the cellar of a bakery three streets from his official residence, owned by a woman who believed her benefactor was a wealthy merchant seeking to preserve his privacy. The coin he paid her monthly ensured her discretion and her willingness to pretend the cellar door didn't exist.
The morning streets of Valdris bustled with the chaos of a city waking. Merchants hawked their wares, children ran shrieking between the legs of harried adults, and the church bells tolled the first prayer hour. Evander walked through it all like a ghost, present but apart.
He stopped at a street vendor for a meat pie. Not because he needed to eat, but because appearances mattered. A healer who never ate, never slept, never showed normal human weakness would eventually attract attention. So he forced himself through the motions of humanity: chewing food that tasted like dust, making small talk that meant nothing, wearing the mask of Dr. Evander Ashcroft so thoroughly that sometimes he forgot where the mask ended and the man began.
His residence waited as he had left it: wards intact, no sign of intrusion, the careful mundanity of a successful healer's home. He climbed the stairs, unlocked his door, and stepped into the sitting room.
Bones was sitting in his favorite chair, wearing a hat that Evander had never seen before.
It was a magnificent hat. Broad-brimmed, deep crimson, adorned with three white feathers and what appeared to be a small silver bell. It perched on Bones's skull at a jaunty angle that somehow conveyed smugness, despite the wearer's complete absence of facial muscles.
"No," Evander said.
Bones tilted his skull in a gesture that meant: But look at it.
"Absolutely not. That's Cardinal's red. Where did you even get that?"
A shrug of skeletal shoulders. A gesture toward the window.
"You stole a Cardinal's hat."
Another shrug. A complicated motion of phalanges that conveyed: It was just sitting there. Unattended. On a Cardinal's head.
Evander pinched the bridge of his nose, a gesture he had developed specifically for dealing with Bones. The skeleton had been his first successful reanimation, raised when Evander was thirteen, barely a year into his training, from the corpse of a traveling merchant who had died in a ditch outside the city. Something had gone wrong with the ritual. Or possibly something had gone very right. Instead of the obedient, mindless servant that necromancy should have produced, Evander had created... Bones.
A skeleton with personality. With preferences. With an inexplicable, all-consuming obsession with hats.
"If the Inquisition traces that hat back to us—"
Bones waved a dismissive hand. Impossible. Changed the feathers. Added the bell. New hat. No one will recognize it.
"That's not how evidence works."
But the skeleton had already moved on, adjusting the hat's position with the careful attention of a society lady preparing for a ball. The bell jingled softly.
Evander gave up. He had learned years ago that arguing with Bones about hats was pointless.
"We have work to do," he said instead. "The Inquisition ship. The mystery operative. I need eyes on them that won't be detected by holy wards."
Bones's skull swiveled toward him. A question in the tilt: You want me to go?
"You're the only one of my servants who can pass for fully living in bright sunlight. The Masked are good, but they still have tells, the way they move, the temperature of their skin. You're just bones. Glamour up, and you're invisible."
A pause. Then: What about the hat?
"Bring a different hat. Something subtle."
Bones's posture conveyed the deep offense of an artist asked to compromise his vision.
"Bones."
Fine. A gesture toward the corner of the room, where Evander now noticed a trunk he didn't remember owning. The skeleton opened it to reveal dozens of hats in every style, color, and level of absurdity. A collection that must have taken years to accumulate.
"Have you been storing those here this entire time?"
Bones selected a simple brown cap, the kind worn by dock workers and laborers throughout the city. He placed it on his skull with visible reluctance, the magnificence of the Cardinal's hat clearly weighing on his nonexistent soul.
"Information only," Evander instructed. "Don't engage with anyone. Don't start any fights. Don't steal any more hats."
A long-suffering sigh, conveyed through the angle of skeletal shoulders.
"I mean it. This operative is dangerous. We don't know their capabilities. I need reconnaissance, not confrontation."
Bones rose from the chair, his glamour shimmering into place, transforming bare bone into the appearance of a weathered laborer, complete with rough clothes and callused hands. Only the eyes gave him away to those who knew what to look for: too still, too empty, windows into something no longer human.
"Be careful," Evander said.
The skeleton paused at the window he had apparently entered through. A gesture: Always am.
"You stole a Cardinal's hat while he was wearing it."
Another gesture: He shouldn't have been napping during prayer hour. His fault really.
And then Bones was gone, slipping out into the morning light, just another anonymous worker in a city of thousands. Evander watched until the glamoured figure disappeared around a corner, then turned his attention to the day's other concerns.
His clinic opened in an hour. There would be patients waiting. There always were. The poor of Valdris had learned that Dr. Ashcroft never turned anyone away, never demanded payment they couldn't afford, never judged or condemned. Word had spread through the Warren and beyond, creating a steady stream of the sick and injured who trusted him with their lives.
None of them knew what he really was. None of them could.
He changed into fresh healer's robes, checked his medical bag, ensured the hidden vials of necromantic remedies were properly secured. The reflection that stared back at him from the mirror looked tired, pale, unremarkable. Exactly as intended.
The walk to his clinic took him through the Market District, past the morning bustle of commerce that kept the city alive. He bought herbs from an apothecary, bandages from a textile merchant, alcohol for sterilizing instruments. Normal purchases. A normal routine.
The clinic occupied a narrow building wedged between a cobbler's shop and a tavern, its sign depicting a stylized caduceus. Evander had chosen the location carefully: close enough to the Warren to serve the poor, far enough to maintain a veneer of respectability, near several exits in case he needed to disappear quickly.
A line had already formed outside.
Twenty people, perhaps more, waiting with the patient misery of those who had nowhere else to turn. Mothers with sick children. Workers with injuries their employers refused to treat. Old men and women whose families couldn't afford Church healers.
Evander's people.
He unlocked the door and ushered them inside, beginning the routine that had defined his days for the past decade. Examination. Diagnosis. Treatment. Moving from patient to patient with the efficiency of long practice, dispensing medicine and advice and the rare touch of death magic when conventional means fell short.
A girl with a broken arm, set and splinted, with herbs for the pain.
A man with a wound gone septic, lanced and cleaned, the infection drawn out with a careful application of power that looked like nothing more than skilled technique.
A grandmother whose heart was failing. This one required more. Evander sent the woman's family outside, ostensibly for privacy, and placed his hands over her chest. He could feel the organ struggling, the muscle weakening, the death that crept closer with every stuttering beat.
"You should have come to me sooner," he said quietly.
"Couldn't afford it," she wheezed. "The Church healers wanted twenty crowns. Twenty crowns! I haven't seen twenty crowns in my entire life."
"The Church charges what the market will bear."
"The Church charges what keeps the poor in their place." The old woman's eyes, cloudy with age, found his with surprising sharpness. "But you're different, aren't you, Doctor? You don't turn anyone away. You don't ask questions about what we believe or how much we can pay." A thin smile. "Some of us wonder why."
Evander said nothing. He focused on her heart, on the failing muscle, on the death that lingered at its edges. With infinite care, he gathered a thread of power. Not enough to raise alarms, just enough to strengthen what remained.
The heart steadied. The breathing eased. Color returned to gray cheeks.
"There," he said, withdrawing his hands. "That should give you more time. Come back in a week, and I'll see what else can be done."
"What did you do?" The grandmother stared at him with wonder and the faintest edge of fear. "I felt something. Like... like cold water flowing through my chest."
"Just a technique I learned in my travels. Nothing to concern yourself with."
She studied him a moment longer. Then, slowly, she nodded. "I won't ask questions, Doctor. But I want you to know, if you ever need anything, the Warren remembers those who help us. We're not as powerless as the nobles think."
"I'll remember that."
He helped her to her feet and guided her to the door, where her worried family waited. Their relief at seeing her improved washed over him: tearful smiles, clasped hands, a father's voice cracking as he whispered thanks. Evander accepted it with practiced humility and moved on to the next patient.
The morning blurred into afternoon. More patients, more treatments, more careful applications of forbidden power disguised as medical skill. By the time the last person left, the sun had begun its descent toward evening, and Evander ached with a fatigue that had nothing to do with physical exertion.
Using death magic drained something more fundamental than energy. It consumed the warmth of the soul, the connection to life that made a person human. Every time he reached into that cold well of power, he came back a little less than he had been. A little more like the dead he commanded.
He was locking the clinic door when he felt it.
A ripple in the awareness that connected him to his servants, the thousand threads of control that stretched across the city like a spider's web. Something had disturbed those threads. Something had touched one of his Watchers with force enough to destroy it.
Not an accident. Not chance.
Someone had just killed one of his ghosts.
Evander went very still. The thread that had snapped was near the harbor. Near the Inquisition ship. Near wherever Bones had been sent to gather intelligence.
He extended his awareness through the remaining threads, searching for his skeletal servant. For a long, terrible moment, he found nothing, and the cold fear that gripped him was sharper than any blade.
Then: a response. Bones, still intact, still animated, but... hiding. Concealing himself with a skill that Evander hadn't known he possessed.
Hiding from something that had just torn a Watcher spirit to shreds with a single touch.
Evander turned and began walking toward the harbor, his steps quickening with every block. The mask of Dr. Ashcroft fell away, replaced by something colder, harder.
Whatever this new Inquisitor was, they could destroy bound spirits. That alone made them more dangerous than anything Evander had faced in fifteen years.
And they had no idea he was coming.
