THE HOLLOWED BEAST

The Night Watch of Oakhaven operated in shifts of four, with a fifth officer rotating coverage of the overlap hours between the end of the second shift and the start of the third. Rosamund Vance had restructured the schedule eight months ago, after the third consecutive week of incidents clustering in the overlap hours, and the restructuring had worked well enough that she had stopped monitoring it directly. She monitored the outcomes instead. Outcomes were cleaner data.

Tonight she was on the third shift personally, which she did once a week to maintain currency with the terrain her officers were walking. This was not, strictly speaking, required of a Captain. She did it anyway.

The district they were covering was one of the darker portions of the Lower Veins, a section of warehouses and overflow storage where the gas lamps were maintained at minimum and the canal came within thirty feet of the nearest building wall. The fog was heavier here than in the rest of the Lower Veins, fed by the canal's constant output of cold vapor and by the specific atmospheric conditions that occurred where tall buildings and narrow passages created wind channels that held moisture in.

Rosamund walked at the front of the patrol. She had always walked at the front. She had an officer on each flank and one at the rear, and she trusted all three of them, which was not always a given in a force as politically managed as the Night Watch of Oakhaven.

She had been thinking about the report from three days ago. The body on Cutter's Row. She had read it twice, and she had read the supplementary report that had accompanied it, filed by a Blood Alchemist operating at that address, and she had noted the name in the supplementary report and had not included it in her upward summary.

She had been doing that for nine years. Small, specific omissions. Her superiors received the complete picture of Oakhaven's criminal and supernatural activity, minus one address, minus one name. She had never been asked to justify the omission. She hoped she would not be.

The report from the front pair of the patrol reached her through the signal sequence they used when verbal communication was inadvisable: two taps on the wall to the left, pause, one more. Contact ahead. Unusual. Proceed with caution.

She moved up.

The creature was at the end of the alley, and wrong in every way that things could be wrong. It had the structural suggestion of a human body, the height and the rough proportion, but nothing beyond that was right. The face had been replaced with a surface that was not quite smooth and not quite featureless, something that shifted when light hit it from different angles. The limbs moved at intervals that did not correspond to any gait she had seen in a living thing. It was moving away from her, along the alley wall, and she understood almost immediately that it was not fleeing. It was leading.

She gestured her team to positions. She took the alley entrance herself.

She had been fighting things that came from the wrong side of the wall between Oakhaven and the Hollow Below for nine years. She had learned, over those years, that creatures like this one were rarely as dangerous as they appeared and usually more dangerous than they seemed. She had learned to hold both facts simultaneously and act on neither until she had more information.

The creature moved faster.

She moved faster.

The alley opened into a small courtyard behind a row of storage buildings. The creature turned to face her, or turned in her direction, it was difficult to be certain with a face that was not quite a face, and she brought up her right hand and activated the rune she had spent two days of preparation on. The bitterroot-and-silver sequence she used for containment, the one that cost her a memory each time she used it. She felt the familiar sliding-away sensation as something went, something small, something from a long time ago. She did not know what it was until it was gone and the not-knowing was its own specific texture of loss.

The rune activated. The creature staggered.

She closed the distance.

The fight was not long. The rune weakened the creature's structural integrity enough that her standard close-combat approach was effective, and she brought it down with five sustained strikes using the silver-edged blade she carried specifically for this category of encounter. Her team covered the perimeter. No one was injured. She was grateful for that, as she was always grateful for that.

The creature was down.

She crouched over it.

The things that came from the Hollow Below decomposed quickly once incapacitated, the substance they were made of less stable outside the void than within it. She had a limited window to examine the body before there was nothing left to examine, and she used the window efficiently.

She found the ring in the chest cavity. She had found objects in creatures before, things that had been in the path of whatever process transformed a person into this, but finding a ring was unusual. She pulled it out. It was silver, small, the kind of ring a woman might wear on the fourth finger of her right hand. Engraved on the inside of the band, a name she recognized as belonging to a woman who had been reported missing from the Veins district eleven days ago.

She held the ring in her closed fist and looked at what remained of the creature.

She reached into the chest cavity again, more carefully. She was looking for what she had noticed a moment before the ring, a quality of the tissue that was not quite the ordinary quality of Hollow Below material, a pattern in the degradation that she had seen before in other contexts, in other work.

The patterning in the degraded tissue was consistent with Blood Alchemy. Specifically, with Vance Blood Alchemy, the specific compound signature that she recognized because she had grown up in the house where that signature had been developed.

She withdrew her hand. She stood.

She looked at her officers, who were maintaining the perimeter with the professional competence she expected from them. She looked at the courtyard, at the canal wall thirty feet away, at the fog coming off the water in slow rolling layers.

She wrote in her report, later, that the creature had been encountered and incapacitated, and included the ring as evidence connected to the missing person case. She did not include the Blood Alchemy pattern. She would investigate it herself.

She walked back through the alley she had come in from. At the entrance to the alley, she stopped. She reached into the inner pocket of her armor, where she kept a small flat card for the sending system, and she wrote a short message to the administrative office of the Night Watch: Remove Evelyn Vance from the current Blood Alchemist monitoring list update.

She handed it to the signal runner without explaining.

She went back to the patrol.

She thought about the ring in her evidence pouch, and about the woman it had belonged to, and about the pattern in the tissue that should not have been there. She thought about her sister, two miles away in the Lower Veins, working with blood in a small shop on Cutter's Row.

She had been keeping Evelyn out of the Watch's formal notice for nine years. She intended to keep doing it.

The fog pressed in from the canal. The patrol moved on.

Rosamund walked at the front, as she always did.

She did not look back.

She had begun losing memories at a rate she had not initially expected when she took the rune training. The instructors had mentioned the cost as a theoretical consideration. They had not mentioned what it felt like to reach for a specific moment and find it absent, to know by the shape of the gap that something had been there and to be unable to recover what it was.

She had lost a number of her childhood memories to the rune work over the past nine years. She did not know the exact number because she had lost some of them before she understood what was happening. She had lost her mother's face. She had lost the sound of certain voices. She was losing, incrementally, the texture of specific years, the years before Silas died, the years when Cutter's Row had been a place she visited on holidays and before that, the years when she was learning to fight and had not yet understood that she would spend her life doing it.

She retained the events. She retained the knowledge. She lost the quality of them, the way things felt when they were happening, the emotional information that made them memories rather than records.

She was beginning to lose the sound of Silas's voice.

She knew this because two months ago she had been able to reconstruct it clearly, the specific timbre of it when he was explaining something he found interesting, the slight increase in pace that meant he was enthusiastic, the drop in register when he was saying something serious. Now she had the outline of those qualities without the content. She knew she had known them. She could not produce them.

She had not told anyone this was happening. There was no one to tell.

She walked the patrol until the end of her shift, and then she walked the handover with the incoming shift leader, and then she walked back to Blackthorn Keep alone, which was how she walked most things.

In her office, she placed the ring from the creature's chest on the desk in front of her and looked at it for a while.

The woman it had belonged to had been a baker. Forty-three years old. She had lived in the Veins district with her husband and two adult children. She had been reported missing by her husband eleven days ago, and the investigation had stalled after the first forty-eight hours because missing adult persons in the Lower Veins had a statistical tendency to have left voluntarily.

She had not left voluntarily. Something had found her and done to her what Rosamund had seen done to the creature in the courtyard: had taken everything that made her herself and left the structure behind.

Rosamund wrote the report. She looked at the Blood Alchemy assessment section of the standard form, where she was supposed to describe any alchemical elements present at the scene. She looked at it for a long time.

She wrote: No alchemical elements identified.

She sealed the report.

She sat in her office in the pre-dawn quiet of Blackthorn Keep and thought about her sister, who was two miles away and who had been doing something with blood that left a signature in the tissue of things that should not be connected to her, and about what that meant.

She would investigate it herself. That was the only option that kept Evelyn outside the formal record.

She had been investigating things herself for nine years.

She looked at the ring.

She put it in the evidence drawer.

She went to make the tea she would drink instead of sleeping for what remained of the night, because sleep was less available to her than it used to be, and the absence of Silas's voice in the archive she kept of him was something she was going to have to sit with for a while before she could put it away.

She had developed, over nine years, a set of practices for the pre-dawn hours when sleep was not available. She made tea. She reviewed the outstanding case files, the ones that had not been formally closed because the evidence did not support closure, of which there were always several. She wrote the personal notes that did not go into official reports, the observations that lived in a locked drawer of her desk because they were not evidence in any formal sense but were the material of her actual understanding.

Tonight the personal notes were about the creature in the courtyard, and about the Blood Alchemy signature, and about the specific quality of it that had reminded her, standing in a dark courtyard at three in the morning with a dead woman's ring in her hand, of her childhood.

Their mother had been a Blood Alchemist. Not a practicing one, by the time they were children, but she had trained in the discipline and the training showed in the way she ran the household, the efficiency of her problem-solving, the specific quality of attention she brought to things. Evelyn had inherited the training more fully than any of them, had taken to it with the enthusiasm of someone who had found the language they had always been meant to speak.

Silas had learned enough to understand it. He had never practiced it formally, but he had understood the theory well enough to have conversations with Evelyn about it that Rosamund, who had chosen rune work instead, had followed at a distance. He had understood the theory well enough to develop compounds on his own, apparently. Well enough to have supplies that were still being used twelve years after his death.

She had not known about the Sterling connection. She had not known about the compounds Silas had been making in the year before he died.

She thought about what else she had not known.

She thought about Evelyn, who was two miles away and who was apparently now working with a man from the Sterling family, which was a connection that Rosamund did not like for several reasons she could enumerate precisely.

She would have to address it. Not tonight. But soon.

She looked at the locked drawer where her personal notes lived.

She thought about Silas's voice and the gap where it had been.

She drank her tea.

She waited for morning.

In the morning, she would be the Captain of the Night Watch again, which was the role that kept everything else at the distance she required. She was good at the role. She had made herself good at it, with the same deliberate effort she had made herself good at everything she had decided she was going to be good at.

She had decided, nine years ago, that good at it was what she was going to be.

She was still deciding it, every day.

The tea was cold by the time she finished it.

She washed the cup.

She went to start the day.

She had a meeting at the seventh bell with the officer she was considering for promotion. She reviewed his file while the building woke up around her, the sounds of the shift change settling into the ordinary sounds of Blackthorn Keep in the early morning: footsteps in the corridor, the mechanical groan of the exterior gate being opened for the first patrol release, the distant smell of the kitchen beginning the day's first round of provisions.

She kept an orderly office. Not spartan, but controlled. Two chairs, a desk, a cabinet for the case files she was actively working, and the personal notes drawer that she kept locked at all times. On the wall behind her desk, a map of Oakhaven with the patrol districts marked in three colors, one for each shift. On her desk, the current case prioritization, updated at the start of every week.

She looked at the map. She looked at the district that contained Cutter's Row, which was in the Lower Veins second-shift coverage, a district she walked personally twice a month.

She thought about the Blood Alchemy signature in the creature's tissue, and about the specific pattern of it, and about what it would mean if someone was using Vance-signature compounds in the creation of Hollowed.

She thought about Evelyn, who was the only active Vance Blood Alchemist she knew of.

She thought about the fact that Evelyn would never do this. She knew that with the certainty of someone who had spent thirty years knowing a person, even a person they were estranged from. Evelyn was difficult and cold and had not spoken to her in nine years, and Evelyn would never do this. She believed that the way she believed the map on the wall.

What she did not know was who had access to Vance-signature compounds that Evelyn had not made. Or whether the signature had been replicated. Or whether there was a third category she had not considered yet.

She filed it in the drawer.

The officer arrived for his meeting at exactly the seventh bell, which confirmed her assessment of his reliability.

She put the Captain of the Night Watch on and did her job.

The meeting with the officer took forty minutes. She made her recommendation official at the end of it. He thanked her. She told him what was expected of him at the new rank. He left.

She looked at the closed door for a moment.

She opened the case file for the missing persons report that was now a fatality report. She added the information about the ring. She marked the case as active investigation.

She closed the file.

She thought about the Blood Alchemy signature for a while longer, and then she put it away in the internal drawer where she kept the things she was not ready to formalize yet.

She had a patrol review at the ninth bell and a supply assessment at noon and a briefing with the district liaison in the afternoon. She had a full day of being the Captain of the Night Watch, which was what she was, which was what she had made herself.

She had learned, over nine years, not to count the cost of the rune work until she could afford to.

She opened the next file.

She got on with it.