Sometimes sinners got scummed because they’d earned their plague at their neighbors’ expense, and those trespasses had come home to roost. And sometimes sinners got scummed because their neighbors wanted Crows to wade around in filth while they watched.

From the collection of onlookers Fie found when she turned round, she wagered it was the latter.

But that body wasn’t about to drag itself onto a pyre. She’d wrapped her arms hand-to-elbow in rags, yet she hadn’t wagered on fishing a corpse out of a sewer. “We need a cart,” she announced. “And firewood. That’s our viatik.”

“You’ve got his mat,” another man said, sporting a Sparrow butcher’s pattern-work apron. “Drag him out on that. Firewood’s at the gate. You can have his teeth for viatik.”

She gave the man a snide look before remembering it was wasted behind her mask. “Aye, I’ll drag a leaky sinner all the way through your city, right on by all your livestock and all your markets, and then I’ll wait for that plague beacon to light back up for the rest of you. I want a cart.”

“I see one sinner and three bone thieves. Carry him out.”

Fie bit her lip. She couldn’t risk the lordlings touching a plague body. A gate to the eastern road yawned on the other side of the channel. Maybe she could haul the body that far herself.

Then the Pigeon man nodded to the Sparrow and jogged off. The Sparrow butcher hid a smirk behind a hand.

Something else was coming.

“Fie—” Tavin started.

“I’ll handle it,” she interrupted. There was no time for lordling nonsense. She had to get them out before the Pigeon courier came back.

“On your own?” Tavin whispered.

“Aye, Pissabed,” she said, “on my own. Stay up here.”

She marched down the steps. The mint in her mask’s beak couldn’t overpower the foul stench of plague and dung, so she sucked each breath through her teeth.

“There she goes,” someone laughed above. “Told you. Crows are right at home in the scum.”

Fie set her pack down on the steps, pulled the filthy sleeping mat to the sinner, then took hold of his nearest arm and yanked. The man didn’t budge.

Instead, he screamed.

Fie dropped him faster than a hot coal. A cloud of flies spewed up. A terrible chill swept down her own limbs, fingertips buzzing; the broken sword swayed at her side like a noose.

Still alive. Somehow, the sinner was still alive. And that meant one thing.

When, not if.

A needle-thin rasp faltered from the man’s bloody mouth:

“Mercy.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

DEAD GODS’ MERCY

The first time Fie tried to take hold of the broken sword, it slipped free and clattered down the stone steps, resting against the sinner’s side.