Beschloss of wriven had ended a thousand years of death. Now one missing thing kept him from ending his own. The ritual that promised true immortality lay open on his stone table, and every line demanded the heart of a creature that had never lived. He read the words again by candlelight in the highest room of his obsidian tower. The rest of the working he could master. This one component he had never touched. He had crushed cities. He had raised armies from graves. Yet he did not even know what a heartless thing looked like, or where such a thing might be found. Boots scuffed the stairs. His student climbed into the light, a small skeleton in dark purple robes, the gold medallion of his mayoral office swinging against his ribs. Mertesegyce ran a swamp town by day and studied death by night, and he owed both to the master who had raised him from the mud. "You called for me," the skeleton said. His jaw clicked when he spoke. "You never call before midnight." Beschloss turned the page toward him. "Read this line. Tell me what it wants." Mertesegyce leaned close. His empty sockets fixed on the ink. He was quiet a long moment. "The heart of a thing that was born already dead," he said. "That makes no sense. A dead thing has no heart to give." "It has one meaning," Beschloss said. "There is a creature in the deep swamp. It walks and it hunts, but it never drew breath. The old texts named it. No one has cut one open." The skeleton stepped back. "You mean to send hunters into the bog." "I mean to go myself." Beschloss closed the book. "I have spent centuries learning to cheat death. I will not trust this to servants." Mertesegyce twisted his bone hands together. "Master, the deep swamp swallows what enters it. Even your dead do not come back from there." "Then you will keep the tower until I return." Beschloss lifted his staff. "If I fail, the town is yours alone." He descended the stairs before the skeleton could argue. Cold mud waited past the door. He walked into it for three days, following the pull of the ritual's map, until the water rose to his knees and the trees choked out the sky. Then he found the tracks. Bare feet, deep and wide, pressed into the muck. They had no warmth in them. He knelt and touched the print, and the mud beneath it was frozen solid. The creature was real. Beschloss followed the trail toward a black stand of reeds. He raised his staff and spoke the binding word. Something answered. It rose from the water without a splash, tall and gray and grinning, and it had no breath and no fear. And behind it, a dozen more stood up from the mud. He had come to take one heart. The swamp had more of these things than he could bind at once.