Azrael Morningstar's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

The red thing took the bike under with one slow pull. The pool closed. Azrael stood on the bank with mud past his boots and nothing in his hands. The dead thing had promised passage to the mouth of the underworld, but it had not said when, and it had not said the swamp would hold still while he waited. The amber-eyed boy was already gone. The apprentice had run. Azrael was alone on foot beside a stone platform he could not use, in ground the swamp lords did not own. Something in the reeds behind him drew a long breath. Then another. He knew the sound. Soul-collectors worked in pairs at the edge of the crack. He had scrubbed his name off their noses, but a body still made tracks, and tracks were enough to follow. He moved. He kept low and cut away from the pool, boots sinking to the ankle at every step. The reeds thinned. He came out on a rise where a watch platform stood on four pine legs, a rope ladder swinging under it. Someone had built it to see over the swamp. Azrael grabbed the ladder and climbed. A small boy was already up there. Frost-white hair. A book open on his knees. He was drawing the seam of dark air Azrael had left behind, sketching its edges with a stub of charcoal. He did not look up when Azrael pulled onto the planks. "You can't stay," the boy said. His voice was calm and too old for his face. "They smell your mud." "I need down. Not sideways. Down." The boy turned a page. He drew a line, then another, quick and sure, the way a man signs his name a thousandth time. "The mouth opens where the dead thing takes your ride. It hasn't finished eating yet. You have to be at the water when it comes back up." He tore the page free and held it out. On it he had drawn the pool, the platform, and a small mark on the far bank Azrael had not noticed from the ground. "That's where it will surface," the boy said. "Not where it went under. Wait there. Don't run. Running makes tracks the collectors read." Azrael took the page. "Why help me?" "I draw what happens. You were already on the page." The boy went back to his book. Below, the reeds parted. A long grey shape slid between two trunks and stopped, nose up, testing the air. Azrael flattened on the planks. He held the drawing against his chest and made his breathing small. The shape moved on, following the trail he had left toward the pool. He waited until it was out of sight. Then he climbed down the far side of the ladder, stepped into the water to his knees, and walked the long way around to the mark on the page.