The dead man’s Ancestors lay all around, stretching into darkness. Now attuned to the scent of the morticians’ special preserving ointments, Lena picked out sharp herbal smells beneath the ever-present musk of her world. The tomb itself was relatively small, and while noble families had the luxury of individual sarcophagi, the stonemason’s family—like most others—had cut long, body-shaped niches into the walls, one over another, or shared two bodies to a resting place. Husband with wife. Sister with brother. Baby with mother.

Each body’s empty eye sockets had been sewn open, their eyes replaced with smooth rocks painted as eyes, or sometimes glittering gemstones. Mortician Vigo said that the Ancestors were sleeping, but Lena didn’t think so. They were staring at the ceiling, at the floors of the living world above. Waiting.

Waiting for what?

A chill ran down her spine. She touched her forehead, lips, and heart in the old sign of reverence. When she’d been very little, the Ancestors had frightened her—she’d had nightmares about the staring stone eyes, about the way the older corpses’ flesh and skin were shrunken and leathery but their hair as thick and lustrous as the day of death. How, from certain angles, even the oldest of the Ancestors looked like living people lying in the dark. But now she was eleven, almost a grown-up, and she wasn’t afraid of anything.

Hunter mewed, and Lena nearly jumped out of her skin. I’m not afraid of anything, she reminded herself firmly, calming her racing heart.

“All right—let’s go,” she whispered to the cat, after a deep breath. “It’s a long walk back.”

She tried not to hurry as she started down the passages under the upper town, leading to the network of small cellars beneath the castle that the cryptlings called home. You weren’t meant to hurry—it wasn’t respectful, Mortician Vigo said. Hunter weaved through her legs, in and out of the lantern light, very nearly tripping her up.

For a time, everything was quiet and ordinary, the only sounds the occasional scuttle of a rat, or the snap of one of the mousetraps Lena had set out on her way down—the cryptlings and the cats were supposed to keep the vermin at bay. But as she drew farther through the cobwebbed passages, she started to hear something strange … a voice. It grew louder gradually: a low, rhythmic murmur, drifting from somewhere up ahead.

Lena frowned and stopped. Who else might be down here in the dead of night? As far as she knew, the stonemason’s was the only funeral tomorrow, and she was the only cryptling on duty. No one else was allowed down here.