For a long moment, neither man moved. The candle on the deal table burned steadily now, its flame erect and unwavering, and in its light the face of Septimus Creach was a mask of shadow and bone. His slate-colored eyes, fixed on the scroll in Thaddeus's hands, held an expression that was difficult to name: not menace, exactly, nor hunger, but something that partook of both. It was the look of a man who had spent years searching for something and was now, at last, within arm's reach of his quarry.
Thaddeus rose slowly from his chair, the scroll clutched in his right hand and the bronze eagle in his left. The weight of the eagle was reassuring, a solid anchor in a world that seemed to be dissolving into nightmare.
“You knew about this,” Thaddeus said. His voice was steadier than he felt. “You knew about the list. You have known all along.”
Creach stepped into the room. His boots made no sound on the flagstones. His black coat, still beaded with moisture from the fog outside, hung from his gaunt frame like the vestments of some ascetic order. He closed the door behind him with a soft click.
“I have been searching for the roll of the condemned for twenty years,” Creach said. “I have traced it through monastery libraries and private collections, through the papers of defunct antiquarian societies and the attics of country houses. I knew it existed. I knew it had been hidden inside the eagle of the Ninth. But I did not know where the eagle itself had been buried until you dug it out of your drainage ditch.”
“Then you came here under false pretenses. You are no independent scholar.”
“Oh, I am a scholar, Mr. Mire. A scholar of a very particular kind. My family has been bound up with this matter for generations, as yours has. The difference is that my ancestors were not the condemned. They were the executioners.”
The words fell into the silence like stones into deep water. Thaddeus tightened his grip on the eagle.
“My true name is Septimus Creeke,” the man in black continued. “I am the younger brother of Justice Oswyn Creeke, though we have not spoken in many years. We disagreed about what ought to be done with the family legacy. He wished to bury it. I wished to understand it. I have spent my life studying the Lex Muneris and its consequences, tracing the thread of legal reasoning that has justified the destruction of dual-service men from the Roman era to the present day. The scroll you hold is the oldest surviving record of that destruction. It is the original sin from which all the others flow.”
Thaddeus looked down at the scroll in his hand. The vellum was so old that it crackled at the slightest touch, the ink faded to a ghostly brown. And yet the names were still legible, dozens of men who had been marked for death because their service did not fit into the neat categories the law demanded.
“Why?” Thaddeus asked. “Why would anyone devote their life to studying such a thing?”
Creach smiled, a thin, mirthless expression that did not reach his eyes. “Because I am a dual man myself, Mr. Mire. I am the younger son of a family that has produced judges for six generations. I was trained in the law, but I had no taste for the bench. I became a scholar, an antiquarian, a man who lives by his wits and his pen. I am both a Creeke and not a Creeke, both a servant of the law and its most determined critic. The same ambiguity that condemned your ancestors runs in my veins as well. The difference is that I have made a study of my own illegibility.”
He crossed to the fireplace and stood with his back to the flames, his gaunt figure casting a long shadow across the ceiling. “The scroll is not merely a list of names. It is a legal document, a warrant of execution issued by the provincial governor in the year 120. The men named in it were officers and specialists of the Ninth Legion who had been seconded to civilian duties: engineers who built roads and aqueducts, clerks who kept the tax records, physicians who treated the local population. They were soldiers who had become, in the eyes of their commanders, contaminated by civilian contact. The purity of the legion had been compromised. The only remedy was annihilation.”
“And my name,” Thaddeus said. “Thaddaeus Mirus. It is on the list.”
“Yes. That is the mystery that has eluded me. Your name should not be there. The list was compiled two thousand years ago. And yet the name Thaddaeus Mirus appears at the bottom, written in the same hand as the rest. I have three theories. The first is that it is a forgery, added later by someone who wished to implicate your family in the ancient crime. The second is that it is a coincidence, that there was a Roman soldier named Thaddaeus Mirus who happened to share your family name. The third—”
He paused, and his eyes gleamed in the firelight.
“The third is that the list is prophetic. That the man who wrote it, whoever he was, foresaw the chain of events that would unfold over the centuries, and wrote the name of the last victim at the bottom of the scroll. The Romans believed in such things. They believed that certain places were cursed, that certain acts of violence would echo through time, claiming new victims with each generation. The Murgatroyd Mire is such a place. The ground here remembers what the ledgers forget.”
Thaddeus set down the eagle and the scroll on the table. His hands were trembling, though whether from cold or fear he could not say. “You speak of curses and prophecies. But Dr. Grubb was killed by a human hand, with a human weapon. The curse tablet was stolen by a human thief. Whatever is happening here, it is not the work of ghosts.”
“No,” Creach agreed. “It is the work of someone who believes in the curse, who believes that the old law must be enforced, who has appointed themselves the inheritor of the tribunal's authority. Someone who knows that the excavation is uncovering not just bones, but evidence. Evidence that could overturn the legal precedents that have justified two thousand years of persecution.”
“Evidence of what?”
“Evidence that the Lex Muneris was never valid law. That it was a fabrication, a convenient fiction invented by a provincial governor who needed to justify the destruction of a legion that had become politically inconvenient. The men of the Ninth were not executed because they had blurred their service. They were executed because they had witnessed something, or refused to participate in something, or threatened to reveal something. The ‘Stain of Service' was a pretext. The truth is buried in that trench, and someone is willing to kill to keep it buried.”
The revelation hung in the air between them. The candle had burned low, and the shadows in the corners of the room had deepened. Somewhere outside, a fox screamed in the darkness, a sound that was eerily like a human cry.
Thaddeus thought of the mass grave, the ordered rows of skeletons, the crushed vertebrae, the missing belt-plates. He thought of the 1783 tribunal, the forty-seven men garroted in the bog, their names struck from the muster rolls. He thought of his own pension rejection, the cipher that marked him as “non combatant in situ,” a man who existed in the space between categories where the law could not protect him.
If Creach was right, then the entire edifice of law that had justified these atrocities was built on a lie. The Windfall Exclusion Provision, the Statute of Divided Service, the Lex Muneris itself—all of it rested on a precedent that had been fabricated to cover up a crime. The tribunal of 1783 had not been applying the law. It had been perpetuating a myth.
“We must tell the others,” Thaddeus said. “Honoria. Parkin. The Groat brothers. Your brother the judge. If the legal basis for the executions was fraudulent, then the surviving records must be corrected. The dead can be pardoned. The living can be compensated.”
Creach shook his head. “You do not understand. The person who killed Dr. Grubb is someone who knows the truth and is determined to suppress it. The person who stole the curse tablet is someone who believes that the old law is sacred, that the division of service is a sin that must be punished. If we reveal what we have found, we will be in danger. More than we already are.”
“We are already in danger. Dr. Grubb is dead. The tablet is gone. The carving on the mantelpiece was a promise, not a warning. The tribunal is still in session, and we are the accused.”
Before Creach could reply, the door to the parlor burst open. Honoria Silt stood on the threshold, her hair loose around her shoulders and her grey eyes wide with alarm. She was still in her nightdress, a shawl thrown hastily over her shoulders, and in her hand she clutched a letter.
“The Royal College of Chemistry,” she said, her voice breathless. “The analysis of the residue from Dr. Grubb's sleeve. It arrived by express rider not ten minutes ago. I paid the innkeeper's boy to bring it here immediately.”
She crossed to the table and spread the letter beside the scroll. The handwriting was cramped and technical, full of chemical symbols and percentages. Thaddeus scanned it, his heart sinking with each line.
“It is a pigment,” Honoria said, her voice trembling. “A rare pigment, used in the preparation of certain legal documents. It is made from crushed gallnuts and iron sulfate, with a binding agent of gum arabic. The College's analyst says it is indistinguishable from the ink used by the High Court of Chancery in the preparation of official warrants and death sentences.”
She looked up, her face pale. “Dr. Grubb was killed by someone connected to the High Court. Someone who has access to judicial ink. Someone who signs death warrants.”
In the fireplace, a log collapsed with a shower of sparks. Thaddeus turned slowly to look at Septimus Creach, but the man in black was already moving toward the door.
“My brother,” Creach said, his voice tight with something that might have been grief or might have been rage. “He arrived the night of the murder. He has been here ever since. He brought with him the journal of our great-grandfather, the judge who signed the warrants in 1783. And he carries, always, a pen case containing the judicial ink of the Creeke family, passed down from father to son for six generations.”
He paused at the door and looked back at Thaddeus, his slate-colored eyes burning with a cold fire.
“Justice Oswyn Creeke did not come here to help us, Mr. Mire. He came here to finish what his great-grandfather started.”
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