Elias ran.
There was nothing dignified about this decision. He turned away from the wall and moved swiftly through the space between the saloon and the cooper's workshop. He entered the alley behind the buildings, then plunged into the labyrinth of narrow lanes that sprawled behind Greyhollow's main thoroughfare, as if a second, more squalid town lay buried beneath the respectable one.
He knew these lanes as intimately as he knew the beating of his own heart. He knew every path, every dead end, and every spot where the ground turned to mire after a rain. Having spent nineteen years as a man no one wished to see, he had become an expert on these marginalized fringes of Greyhollow.
He turned left behind the leatherworker's shop, then right between two storage sheds that the mill had long since abandoned. He ducked beneath a broken section of fence, still unrepaired three years after the storm that had toppled it.
Heading toward the boarding house would have been a mistake, it was far too predictable. He needed a place where he could think.
He emerged behind the old chapel, now used for grain storage, and, pressing himself against the stone wall within the deep shadows of the eaves, he listened intently.
He heard the sound of footsteps. They were measured, unhurried.
"He isn't chasing me," Elias thought, and decided that was even worse.
The footsteps did not quicken. They rounded the corner at the end of the alley, paused, and then, without the slightest hesitation, continued straight toward him.
It was as if the man already knew exactly where Elias was headed.
Elias began to move again. He circled the chapel and passed through the narrow space between it and the vestry's storage building. He was just about to reach the road on the other side when a hand reached out from the left and grabbed his collar.
It was not a violent gesture, but rather one executed with the absolute confidence of someone who had already determined the direction this conversation was bound to take.
He twisted his body, and the grip instantly released.
The 'Seal Hunter' stood three feet away, both hands raised with his palms facing outward.
Up close, he appeared older than he had while seated on his horse. He was a little over fifty, his face so weathered and hardened that he must have ceased to feel the sun as anything new decades ago.
A scar ran from his left jawline to the corner of his mouth.
"I didn't come here to kill you," he said.
"Those who say that are often the very ones who 'do' come to kill you," Elias replied.
"Fair enough." He slowly lowered his hands. "But if I 'had' come to kill you, our conversation would have been over long ago."
Elias's back was pressed against the stone wall. He scanned the escape routes, including the passage he had just emerged from, as well as the road to his right.
The hunter was blocking neither of them. He simply stood there.
"So, what did you come here for?" Elias asked.
"I came here to find you, and I've done that." He reached inside his coat, pulled out a folded document, and held it out. "This is my warrant."
Elias declined to take it. "I can read it from right here."
The man almost smiled. He unfolded the document and held it up.
It was a standard Meridian Hunter warrant. Elias had seen enough such warrants to recognize their format. At the very top was an official seal. Beneath it was a description of the subject, followed by an authorization clause and the signature of the issuing authority.
He read it twice. The date listed on the authorization was twenty years old. The personal description consisted of four lines of text, concluding with a warning stating that this individual bore an unclassified 'Void Seal' and should be approached with extreme caution.
"This is old," Elias remarked.
"Yes," the man agreed.
"It was issued before I was even born," Elias pointed out.
"Yes." The hunter folded the warrant back up. "Someone wanted you found before you even came into existence. I spent nine years trying to make sense of it, and then I gave up trying to understand and simply started searching." He paused. "My name is Mordecai Vess."
"My name is Elias Mourne." He studied the man's face. Hearing the name, not a single expression shifted on his features. "You already knew that."
"I knew what name you would be called by. The rest, I did not know." Mordecai looked him straight in the eye, and he did so without that peculiar hesitation, followed by the attempt to conceal it, that most people displayed when looking at someone they knew bore the mark of the Void.
"Regarding your Seal, I must ask, how long has it been active?"
"It hasn't been active. It is black. It has been black my entire life."
Mordecai remained silent for a few moments. "Do you truly believe that?" he asked.
"That is exactly what the Seal reader told me on three separate occasions."
"Seal readers can only read what lies on the surface." Mordecai scrutinized him with an expression Elias could not quite name. It was not pity, nor was it cunning.
It was something far more guarded than either of those. "When did things start to feel different?"
"They haven't felt any different," Elias said.
"I'm talking about the little things. It could be a sensation, the feeling that you've grasped something just before it actually happens. It could be a moment where something that should have affected you simply didn't. Or perhaps a situation where you were cut off mid sentence."
"I told you, nothing of the sort has happened."
Mordecai let the matter drop and tucked the warrant back inside his coat. "I didn't come here on the authority's orders. I came here because I was sent."
"By whom?"
Before he could answer, a sound echoed down the alleyway from the direction of the main road. It wasn't loud, but it possessed a peculiar quality, an abnormality that seized Elias's attention before he could even consciously register what was amiss.
There were screams. Not screams of anger, but something else entirely.
"That's the morgue," Elias said.
The expression on Mordecai's face shifted. "What's going on at the morgue?"
"There's a body." He was already moving forward. "You can come along, or not, whichever you prefer."
They heard it before they even saw it.
It was a sound that was neither entirely human nor merely like the wind. It was layered and sluggish, carrying a resonance that seemed to travel less through the air and more through the ground, the walls, and the very bones behind one's ears.
Aldric stood in the doorway of the morgue, wearing the expression of a man whose lifetime of experience had just utterly failed him.
His apprentice, a boy of perhaps fifteen, stood pressed tight against the far wall, clutching his ears tightly with both hands.
Inside the morgue, the burned man stood upright in the very center of the room. He stood with a peculiar stillness, as if he were making no effort whatsoever to do so.
He was not merely standing upright and sleeping, nor was he standing there as a living being. It was something else entirely, a third state altogether, for which Elias had no words.
The wrapping cloth had fallen to the corpse's feet. Burn marks were visible across its chest and arms, and they were active in a way that could not quite be described as "glowing."
"Glowing" was not the right word. Yet, they were certainly doing something. The lines appeared deeper than they had that morning, and the geometry seemed more precise.
The corpse's eyes were open, and they were pitch black from rim to rim.
That raspy voice was emanating from the corpse. It did not seem to issue solely from its mouth, but rather from its entire body, as if the sound were rising directly from those very burn marks.
"What is that?" Mordecai asked in a very low voice, right over Elias's shoulder.
"I don't know." Elias stepped inside.
"This is a bad idea," Mordecai warned.
"Maybe it is a bad idea," Elias agreed. He walked along the perimeter of the room, skirting the edge of the fallen drapery.
The corpse did not turn to look at him. Its dark eyes were fixed on some middle distance, a space that was not the wall toward which they were directed.
Inside the room, the sound was louder. It was more layered. Elias focused on it exactly as he had focused on the pattern of burn marks that morning, and just as he always focused on things he wasn't supposed to understand.
Then, something shifted.
It felt as though a page had turned in his mind. It was like hearing words through a wall, and then, suddenly, that wall turning into glass.
That sound was a language, and Elias understood it.