“Because,” said Yehuda Leib, “that’s what partnership is. And you said in Zubinsk that just bringing us into the Far Country implicates you in whatever we do here, so there’s no benefit to be had in breaking off our partnership now. You’re just trying to intimidate me.”

“I simply cannot believe,” said Mammon, “that you would make such a stupid, careless mistake.”

“It wasn’t a mistake.”

At this, both Yehuda Leib and Mammon fell silent.

It was the first thing Bluma had said since emerging from the Gallows.

“It wasn’t a mistake,” she said again. “I had turned back. I’d lost my way. If I hadn’t heard Yehuda Leib calling my name…”

Mammon let out a heavy sigh. “You are extraordinarily lucky, girl.”

Bluma’s shapeless lips were pressed together, white with pressure. “Thank you,” she said to Yehuda Leib.

“We have to move,” said Mammon. “If word gets out that you’ve come here…”

Yehuda Leib turned the little pram up the street and began to push again.

Only now was he able to look at the corpse of the city all around him.

The hulking shapes of burned-out houses on the outskirts of the Dead City had given quick way to larger buildings—tenements, apartment blocks. Everywhere, doors stood hanging open. Many of the neatly rowed windows above were shattered, their glassy eyes turned into jagged, toothy mouths. Overhead, the slack laundry lines were hung with clothes that had long since gone to abject tatters in the wind, and snow and refuse blew through street and room indiscriminately.

No one was here.

No people, no horses—not even a rat.

No one.

As they moved into the richer and more fashionable portions of the city, their surroundings began to change. Intricate carven masonry adorned the houses, but even it had not been spared its death: the stonework vines and flowers had withered, wilted; soot stained the marble black. Through the broken bay windows, once-fine sitting rooms could be seen to molder, sofas and settees disemboweled of their stuffing, oil paintings worn away to filmy nothingness.

Before long, they found themselves required to weave carefully back and forth in order to navigate the crowds of fallen carriages, hansoms, and carts that littered the street.

Here was an overgrown park, its untended grasses sticking up through the thick layer of snow like stubble through the pale face of a dead man; there was a cavernous market, its unattended stalls piled high with frosty, rotten produce.

The wind was cold, and its long, frigid fingers tore at Yehuda Leib’s collar as if desperate to get in.