We skirted a culvert and waded through a sliver of marsh. The night had come swiftly as I’d snored and drooled. During which, Snier reminded me, he’d paced all over our stoop until at last I emerged with our crowbar and short-handled shovels. My tools, of course, were now tucked away in my bag.

But the moon and stars this night were remarkably shy. Hiding our larger tools was probably as unnecessary as scaling the roots of an old oak to make our way through a hole in the cemetery fence.

Snier and I had met on a similar night. When Snier had fled to Nilghorde, his better judgment swayed him to put the sex trade on sabbatical. Snier had said his suspicions were confirmed when it trickled down that the Ward had ransacked every boy brothel. In fact, he’d told me a whole lot, which as we slinked past the first of several guardhouses, my amused mind replayed his grandest story yet:

Without a coin in his purse, Snier had said, one evening he’d sat and watched as a funeral procession went by. The clamor had been clad in jewels. Gold plates weren’t sealed in some vault, but being banged by a parade of mourners.

Breaking into mausoleums was easy enough for a competent thief, and Snier surely was. But too many were in parts where antsy, spear-kneading watchmen marched about. Though it never ceased to make his skin crawl, the safer bet was the endless sea of graves.

Some graves are forgotten as soon as they are lowered, not even a shovel’s load covers some of the more extreme cases. Others are in the outskirts of any given cemetery, usually the side where overgrowth seems bent on reclaiming the land for the wild.

One night, Snier wanted to try his luck in the Maedraderium. To him, as to most of us, the Maedraderium was a small city of twinkling lavish homes for those far beyond the ability to appreciate it all. Hoping to wash himself and bicker to no one about the heaviness of the coffin he’d given up on, he said he’d followed the gurgling of a nearby fountain. He went around one mausoleum wall just to slam face-first into another—his words. He wondered how a wall could have felt so warm on such a cool night. Then an arm pinned him flat to the ground.

His kicks pitter-pattered against not a wall, but a man’s chest. Snier said his dagger was smacked away like a troublesome nat. Screaming may have alerted an eager watchman. Prison seemed like a dream by comparison, but his mouth was sealed shut by the man’s large hand.

It was broken at the tip, but a thick knife flashed in caught starlight. As the knife rose higher, maybe it was his lust for beauty that pulled Snier to see the ornate casket behind the man on top of him. Yes, behind this man, this unrepenting fiend, a casket sat pulled out of the earth, and it sat unopened.