He darted his eyes around him, taking in the small room and the crypts stacked in rows all around, three-high to the ceiling. The only exit from the chamber was the tunnel. A yellow glow flickered along its low walls, bobbing and swaying in time with the torchbearer’s gait.
Even closer now, the voices assaulted him, and he realized how much the henbane had left his senses scraped raw. James shook his head and rubbed his hands roughly along his scalp to clear his mind. He focused on the sounds until he distinguished two distinct speakers. One would be a guard, he thought, at the sound of the thick accent. Rambling nonstop, cajoling a silent companion. The other man spoke infrequently, begrudgingly, in tones announcing him of an upper class. So the guard was selling him something. James’s corpse, most like. He knew that many a guard turned a tidy profit selling bodies to teaching hospitals, or worse.
James opened his eyes wide, urging them to adjust to the approaching light. It would do him no good to be blinded by the torchlight. He stood on the hard-packed floor and swept his eyes over the wall of crypts. Desiccated remains emerged from the black shadows. Ashen silhouettes resolved into grimacing faces and empty sockets staring at him, crying a silent warning. He stifled a shudder, grateful that the vault he’d been placed in housed only bones. Reaching in, he took the largest one he could find.
Though its long, smooth heft was reassuring in his hand, he knew it wouldn’t be enough. James scanned the room, spotting a small chamber along the top edge. Just inside the entry, it was one of the first the men would walk past as they entered from the tunnel. James grasped the crumbling brick lip of the crypt, and planting his foot along the centermost vault, he hoisted himself into the pile of bones easily five feet off the ground.
"What was—” the more effete of the two men stammered.
"Ist!” the guard ordered, and their strained silence choked the still air. A sudden clatter of bones was met with a gasp, followed by the sound of tiny feet scuttling along the far wall.
“Just the rats, aye?” The guard spoke again. “Come now, in here.”
The men drew closer, and James found their voices an almost unbearably loud booming in the confined space. He turned his focus inward, forcing his overwhelmed and still sickened body to reconcile with its surroundings. A musty smell like damp wool made his sinuses twinge, but otherwise the chamber was surprisingly void of scent. His breath gradually steadied, sweeping extraneous thoughts from his mind. James eased his knuckles, loosening his fingers around the bone so his grip was firm, but not choking.
“And you claim he’s deceased no more than twenty hours past? ”
The one buying the body spoke, and James found the sound was no longer a shrill assault.
“Oh, aye,” the guard assured him, “he’s fresh yet, and not even stiffened. Just through—”
James leapt just as the men entered the chamber, landing on the taller of the two. The smoothed hair and fine feel to his clothing announced him as the client. James barely hit him, his weapon striking the flesh of the man’s shoulder with a dull crack. The bone in his hand was old and brittle, and James felt it splinter wide up the middle as he struck. The man collapsed, but if it was from James’s blow or merely due to a dead faint, he couldn’t tell.
The guard threw down his torch and was on him at once. James knew instantly that the man would pose a much greater challenge than his companion had. He was shorter than James, but scrappy and tenacious, and managed to land a flurry of punches to his abdomen and side before James got his bearings.
He thought he’d heard a clatter when the other man fell, and hoped he’d carried a gentleman’s sword at his side. Such a blade was intended less for fighting than for show, but anything would be a step up from a dead man’s thighbone. James grabbed the guard around the shoulders and, pinning him in a boxer’s hold, began landing heavy blows on his side, all the while creeping sideways toward the unconscious nobleman.
The guard, though, clearly relied on a fair amount of street-fighting experience. He tore away from James’s grasp and swooped back in to butt him hard on the head.
James grunted as a flare of white light momentarily filled his line of sight. He’d heard his nose crunch, and the iron tang of blood filled his mouth and impaired his breathing. He stumbled backward, tripping over the other man who was still out cold on the floor. James purposely tumbled then, immediately pawing at the nobleman’s side until he felt the ornamental scabbard at the man’s waist.
The smallsword was a pleasant little weapon, shorter than a rapier, and James couldn’t help the smile that spread over his face at the feel of its featherlight weight in his hand. A new fashion from France, such swords were more like jewelry than weaponry for a man, with their slender blades and decorative pommels and crossguards.
Bounding to his feet, he gave it an experimental whip through the air, and laughed then at the joy of wielding a blade that could dip and alight like a bird in flight.
The guard dove toward him, and James ducked back easily. He’d seen the hesitation flicker across the man’s features at the sound of his laugh. “You could run, aye?” James told him, taking advantage of the man’s uncertainty.
Unlike his broadsword, this weapon lacked a cutting edge, its needle-thin outline made for thrusting alone. And, as the man shook his head, thrust James did, hopping forward and forward again to plunge the sword easily into the man’s torso. Gasping a curse, the guard lurched backward and clutched at his wound. He pulled his hands away and stared with disbelief at the blood covering them.
James dragged a sleeve across his face to wipe his own blood from beneath his injured nose. He counted himself lucky that his opponent was a simple turnkey and not a part of the city guard. Though this man clearly wasn’t armed as a soldier would be, he did carry a dagger, which appeared now in his bloodied hand.
The guard rushed at him and then stopped short, seeing James’s poised sword stance and the calm that smoothed his face. Sneering, the man bobbed his hand a few times then tossed up his knife, grabbing the flat of the blade in his palm. Planting a short step forward, he threw.
A clipped grunt escaped James as the dagger stabbed the dense muscle of his thigh. He was calm as he removed the blade and slung it back in a single swift motion.
Squinting, James picked up the torch and limped down the tunnel. The sound of the guard hitting the floor echoed along the stone passageway, his own dagger plunged in his throat.
The ground was cold on his bare feet, which slapped quietly as James jogged through the passage beneath the Tolbooth. Dozens of chambers and tight tunnels spurred from his path, but spying the footprints shuffled into the top layer of loose, dry dirt, he stuck to the original passageway and eventually spotted a narrow staircase cut into the stone.
James scaled it quickly, thinking he could always double back if need be. He came to a landing and braced the flat of his hand on the door there. The cold, corroded iron muted all sound, and James thought he was as likely to find a safe haven as a crowded guardroom on the other side. He startled when the door began to budge, and dove quickly back down the stairs. He flung the torch down the tunnel. It clattered and rolled to a stop, and James hoped it landed far enough away to conceal its light.
He plugged his fingers in his ears at the shriek of rust dragging along stone. A sliver of light cut down the stairs as the door opened. Motes of dust, dirt, and the powder of ancient metal whirled in angry currents, disturbed by the sudden movement. James tucked himself close along the stone wall and waited, tracing his palm expectantly along the thin bracket of steel that comprised his sword’s elegant hand guard. A draft of fresh air carried muted voices down to him, and James mused he’d never thought Edinburgh had ever smelled so sweet.
The door screeched again, not as loudly this time, and James sensed it closing, shutting him off once again from the world. He knew he had but a moment to act. Bounding back up the stairs, James fled into the late-afternoon light, a grin on his face at the terrified shouts of laborers who’d thought a wraith had just escaped the tombs to cross their path. A ghost indeed, he thought, and ran to the one place nobody would find him.
But James didn’t see the man rise from the steps of the neighboring Bellhouse to follow, intent drawing the stranger’s face into tight lines and hastening his stride.
The Scottish could be a suspicious lot, and James knew that, come night, the only folk to be found in the graveyard off Greyfriars Kirk would be grave robbers. The Royal College of Surgeons was expanding, and with the increased demand for bodies, resurrection was a fast-growing trade.
