It hit the Gauntlet hard enough to put me on one knee. The piston fired at the same instant its weight came down on me. Steam burst from the brass vent beside my wrist. The iron knuckles struck into the thing’s chest with a sound like a shovel hitting wet timber. For one second, I thought it had worked. Then its body folded around my hand. Not yielded. Folded. The creature had too much in it now. Cattle hide stretched across human-pale flesh. A broken hoof dragged from one shoulder. A cow’s head hung against its side by cords of red meat, its eye rolling white as it screamed. The thing’s own arms were longer than they had been in the pasture. Stronger too. One slammed into my chest and sent me backward through the gorse. I landed badly. My shoulder struck stone. The air left me. Genesis slipped from my hand and vanished somewhere in the wet grass. The monster came down the slope after me. I rolled before its weight found me. Its hand—if it was still a hand—hit the ground where my head had been. Fingers dug into the mud. The cattle mouths along its body opened and gave the same low, broken note. Not singing. Trying to sing. I pushed myself up with my right hand. My left arm hung low, the Gauntlet smoking at the seams. Confirmation was a stupid name for a weapon. The Order liked its sacramental language. It made iron sound holy. It made pressure chambers sound like doctrine. A bishop’s hand, they called it in the workshops, because every piece of it was made to force obedience: the leather brace locked over the forearm, the brass cylinder held against the wrist, the piston driven through the knuckles. In truth, it was a factory tool made for breaking things that refused to break. It was heavy. It was slow. And every time it fired, the recoil came up through my arm like someone driving a hammer into the bones of my hand. Useful, in other words. The creature rushed me again. I raised the Gauntlet. “No,” I said. The piston hissed. I drove my fist into the side of its head. This time it staggered. Not far, but enough. The cow-head fused to its shoulder snapped sideways. One horn tore loose and spun through the rain. The creature made a noise in three voices at once—one animal, one child, one old woman coughing behind a chapel screen. Then it stopped. It looked at me. That was the part I hated most. Not the size. Not the smell. Not the fact that it had dragged living cattle through the moor and worn them like wet clothes. The looking. It did not look like a beast deciding whether I was food. It looked like something learning. “You remember,” I said. The thing tilted its head. From somewhere inside its throat, my own voice answered. “Father.” I found Genesis in the grass. The revolver was slick with mud. I wiped the grip against my coat, brought it up, and fired once into the cow’s skull at its shoulder. The head burst apart. The creature jerked. The sound it made dropped out of tune. For a moment the low chorus broke into separate noises—one scream, then another, then a wet choking gasp. I fired again. The round struck the creature’s upper chest. It tore a dark hole through the flesh, but the thing kept moving. It did not feel pain the way an animal did. Or perhaps it felt too much pain, all at once, and pain had become meaningless somewhere below Saint Aldric’s. It sprang at me. I fired a third time. The chamber clicked empty. “Of course,” I muttered. The creature was close enough now that I could see its face clearly. The child-face was still there, but stretched. Wet ash skin pulled tight over a skull that no longer fit it. The mouth had widened. The jaw hung low, shaking as it opened. Behind the teeth were other teeth. Behind those, movement. It reached for me. A line screamed through the rain. The bolt struck its flank with a heavy, ugly sound. Not a clean puncture. The improvised head tore through cattle hide, caught under something thick, and held. The creature lurched sideways. A cable snapped tight. For one strange second, it looked as though an invisible hand had grabbed the monster and yanked it off balance. Then I heard Caleb shout. “Father!” I turned. He stood twenty yards uphill, one foot planted against a stone, both hands gripping the cable. The Vowkeeper was strapped over his left forearm. Its wire ran out toward the creature, bright and wet in the grey light. He had changed the bolt. The head was not one of the bent Crownless bolts. It was darker, rougher. A shortened fishing spear, filed down by hand. Behind it, wrapped near the shaft, was a small anchor hook. It had caught in the creature’s body and opened there. The cable attached to the bolt was not Vowkeeper wire alone. Caleb had added the Matrimony cable. I recognized it at once. Higher-tension steel. Thicker line. One of the spare binding lengths from my own field kit, looped and fastened around the Vowkeeper housing with more confidence than I liked. “You took my cable,” I shouted. Caleb’s face went pale with effort. “You were busy!” The creature pulled. Caleb slid a full step through the mud. His bad leg buckled. “Let it go!” I shouted. “No!” The cable strained. The fishing spear sank deeper into the flesh. The small anchor hook tore open a seam beneath the cattle hide. The creature screamed. This time the sound was not borrowed. It came out raw and furious. The cattle mouths joined it. The grass shook with it. Caleb dug his heel in again. His bandaged leg trembled. “Caleb,” I said, sharper now. “Release it.” “It’s holding!” “It is pulling you toward it.” “I know!” The creature turned toward him. That was all it took. I ran. The Gauntlet was still charged enough for one more strike. I could feel the pressure ticking beneath the brass casing, impatient and dangerous. I went low as the creature dragged against the cable, stepped over one of its trailing limbs, and brought the iron fist up into the seam below its jaw. The piston fired. The blow lifted its head. Bone broke somewhere inside it. Not one bone. Several. The creature’s mouth opened. A black-gold thread spilled from it, thick and shining in the rain. It stumbled backward. Caleb pulled harder. For a moment, we had it between us. The cable held. The creature bent at the waist, dragged down by the anchor in its side. One cattle leg kicked against the ground. Another folded beneath its own weight. The child-face twisted toward me, then toward Caleb. It did not look frightened. It looked angry. “Again!” Caleb shouted. “I’m out.” “Genesis!” “Empty.” He stared at me as though I had chosen that answer simply to annoy him. The creature pulled once. The anchor shifted. Pulled again. The cable sang. On the third pull, the improvised bolt came free. It tore through the creature’s side in a spray of dark fluid and wet hide. Caleb fell backward into the mud. The cable whipped past his face and cut a line across his cheek. The monster did not wait. It turned and ran. “After it,” Caleb said, already trying to get up. “No.” He looked at me. I pointed at his leg. Blood had soaked through the linen. “Father—” “You got your entrance. Do not ruin it by dying in the next thirty seconds.” “I am fine.” “You are bleeding through your trousers.” He looked down. “That is not the point.” “It is very much the point.” The creature crashed through the gorse ahead of us. We heard the cattle limbs dragging behind it. The low broken note rose again, moving away through the fog. Caleb swore under his breath. Then he grabbed the cable and began winding it back into the Vowkeeper. “You said we had to think,” he said. “I did.” “I’m thinking it is going somewhere.” I looked toward the sound. The cemetery lay beyond the rise, behind Saint Aldric’s. I could not see it through the fog, but I knew the ground there. Old stones. Uneven earth. Graves close together because Crawmoor had run out of decent places to put its dead long before it ran out of dead people. The monster knew it too. “Can you walk?” I asked. Caleb looked at his leg. Then at me. “Yes.” “That was not the question.” “It is the only answer you are getting.” I wanted to argue. Instead I picked up Genesis, reloaded with hands that had begun to shake, and said, “Stay behind me.” Caleb gave me a look. “Not this time,” I added. He did not smile. But he followed. *** The cemetery gate stood open. It was not usually open. I remembered that much from the first day. A black iron gate, chained and stiff with rust, set into a low wall behind Saint Aldric’s. It faced the sea. Most of the graves leaned toward the cliff as though the ground beneath them had been slipping for years. Now the chain lay on the grass. Broken. The fog had settled between the stones. We moved through it slowly. Caleb kept close behind me, Vowkeeper raised. His breathing had changed. Shorter. He was trying not to put weight on the bad leg. “Do you hear it?” he whispered. “Yes.” The sound was not far. A wet dragging noise. Then silence. We passed the first row of graves. Names appeared and disappeared under moss. Children. Fishermen. Wives. Men who had died at sea and been buried with empty coffins because there was nothing left to bring home. The ground ahead of us moved. Not much. Just enough to make the grass ripple. Caleb stopped. “Father.” I saw it. A fresh grave had opened near the far wall. The soil had not been dug out. It had pushed itself aside, rising in wet clumps around a black hole in the earth. The creature crouched beside it. Most of the cattle mass was gone now. Left behind somewhere in the moor, perhaps. Or broken down into whatever it needed. Its body looked thinner, but not smaller. The child-shape had lengthened again. Its arms reached into the grave. Something inside the grave moved. A hand appeared first. Grey skin. Mud packed beneath the nails. The fingers were stiff, curled inward. The creature caught the wrist. Caleb made a small sound behind me. The corpse came up slowly. Not dragged like the cattle. Lifted. The dead man wore a burial shirt gone brown with damp. His head lolled against one shoulder. His mouth hung open. Soil filled the folds of his face. The creature pulled him close. The corpse’s chest pressed against the creature’s open flank. For a second, nothing happened. Then the flesh touched. The dead man’s ribs cracked beneath his shirt. Once. Twice. The sound was quiet in the fog. His body bent inward. The creature’s side opened wider. Wet strands stretched between them. Bone found bone. Skin drew tight across a shape neither body had chosen. Caleb whispered, “Father…” I raised Genesis. The corpse’s head lifted. Its eyes opened. They were cloudy. Dead. Full of dirt. They looked at Caleb first. Then they turned to me. The corpse’s mouth opened. The song came out wearing a dead man’s teeth.

Chapter 32: The Dead Look Back