Ask me six months ago and I would not have been certain that High Cromlech existed. I knew it only as a vague half-imagined place of zombie factories and the aristocratic dead. A place where the ghouls are hungry.

Then Silas tells me that he has been, that he has lived there-and I believe him. But still, his descriptions are more dreamlike than exact. Only the most nebulous and austere visions.

And now I know a second person who is familiar with that place? And not a traveler this time, but a native?

I realized that I was pressing the artery in Doul’s pulse hard. Gently he disengaged from my fingers.

"It’s a misconception," he said, "to think that High Cromlech is all thanati. The quick are there, too." (I am listening intently to him now, trying to detect his accent.) "We are a minority, it’s true. And of those born every year, many are farm-bred, kept in cages till they’re of strength, when they can be snuffed and recast as zombies. Others are raised by the aristocracy until they come of age, and are slain and welcomed to dead society. But…"

His voice petered out, and he became introspective for a moment. "But then there’s Liveside. The ghetto. That’s where the true quick live. My mother was prosperous. We lived at the better end.

"There are jobs that only the living can do. Some are manual, too dangerous to risk giving to zombies-they’re expensive to animate, but one can always breed more of the quick." His voice was deadpan. "And for those lucky enough, for the cream-the livemen and livewives, the quick gentry-there are the taboo jobs that the thanati won’t touch, at which a quick can make a decent living.

"My mother made enough that she chose to put herself down, so that she could have herself embalmed and revivified by the necrurgeon. Not high caste, but she became thanati. Everyone knew when Livewife Doul became Deadwife Doul. But I was not there. I had left."

I do not know why he told me all this.

"I grew up," he said, "surrounded by the dead. It’s not true that they are all silent, but many are, and none are loud. Where I grew up, we used to run, the boys and girls of Liveside, pugnacious through the streets past the mindless zombies and a few desperate vampir, and the thanati proper, the gentry, the liches with sewn-shut mouths, with beautiful clothes and skin like preserved leather. More than anything I remember the quiet.