After brief hesitation, Rosa stooped to the casket and delivered her kiss. Her expression remained no less granite than the elder Lady Kiradin’s. But Malachi had known her too long not to recognise the conflict swirling in her eyes.

Then the line shuffled forward once more, and Malachi with it. By the time he stood before the gold and black corpse, Ebigail, Rosa and Sevaka had moved on. Incense prickling at his nostrils, he stooped to kiss the golden brow.

“Goodbye, my friend,” he breathed.

As was now his habit, Malachi didn’t take a direct route to the surface. Where the black stone of the ancient city surrendered to granite colonnades of repurposed streets, he detoured into the unprepossessing chambers that bore the antlered crest of the Satanra family. There he stood for a time among the statues, head bowed, surrounded always by the shuddering, gnawing rumble as kraikons laboured below to open up new chambers for the never-ending bounty of dead.

He stared up at a familiar face immortalised in cold marble. “It’s been a while, Father. I’m sorry for that. Seems the faster I run, the further I fall behind.”

More and more, Malachi thought it important to pay homage to his parents and their kin while he still lived to do so. After all, when his last day came, he’d be interred a Reveque – such was the price of marrying into a family of the first rank. An honour, but one Malachi resented, for in his heart a Satanra he remained.

“Thought I’d find you here.” Hadon Akadra stepped between the spread-winged serathi statues guarding the threshold. “Funerals have a way of stirring up memories.”

Malachi regarded him warily. “True enough.”

Hadon gulped from a hip flask and proffered it to Malachi. “Here. Drowns the taste of that wretched incense.”

It made for a strange peace offering, but then fate had not been kind to the Akadra family. Hadon was the last and eldest of seven siblings, all of whom had been taken before their time. And then there was Viktor’s mother. She’d scarcely been Malachi’s age when the Raven had taken her. What was the saying? All stood equal before the grave.

“Thanks.”

Malachi took the flask and spluttered through a pine-bark and juniper mouthful of the fiery krask spirit. The older man regarded him with stony-faced amusement.

“A poor generation we’re raising if they can’t hold their drink. Your wife not with you?”

“We agreed not to burden the children with the interment. They’ll make hallowed farewells soon enough. Lilyana wants them to keep their innocence a while longer.”

Hadon harrumphed and slipped the flask away. “What are you and Abitha up to?”

Not a peace offering then, but a prelude to interrogation. “Why should we be up to anything?”