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at the Danék while the night broke over its surface and turned the narrowing ribbon of still-flowing water to rapid ink.
    The hand that held his mug shook slightly as night filled the boathouse, the lamps untrimmed and unlit, and Wull watched darkness spill over the books through which he had pored these last two days, the encyclopedias and the almanacs and the ledgers themselves: all the tomes in which Pappa had prided and which laid out the facts of the world in such detail. There were facts about plants, sun times, tide patterns, crop rotation, wine making, embalming, needlework, folklore, and the forensic history of wars fought so far in the dusty past that the names of the places and soldiers were built with strangely shaped and unpronounceable letters.
    But he found nothing that gave a name to Pappa’s condition, to the hollow looseness of his skin or the change in his voice. Wull had read until his head ached, and had woken, curled and solid, with his face on the page, the ink running in the water from his open mouth.
    Now, in the silence of night, he fancied he could hear the wicks of the lanterns sputtering and freezing in the face of winter’s elemental force, their rods surrendering to the ice as it swept its glittering malice across the world, and he held his cold tea and waited for the spark of courage that would propel him to rise up and face the world outside.
His
world.
    An ocean barge puttered past, lantern bright on deck, the captain looking agitatedly at the river’s locked-in whiteness. Wull watched him raise his eyes to the lampless boathouse and shake his head.
    â€œI bloody can,” said Wull aloud, feeling color in his cheeks. “It’s my bloody river.”
    He stood then, collecting himself, feeling the balance of his feet on the boards and the strength of his muscles inside his clothes. He heaved a big, whooping sigh that became a defiant growl, and reached for his hat.
    Then Pappa woke up.

4
Oracco
    Hanged men are valueable lumps inddeed, and can be myned thusly: bones ground for the tamperring of bred and the enrichment of soyl; teeth for the prodduction of false dentures; fat for the mannufacture of tallow and greese of all sorts; offal and other fleshily mass for the feeding of cattle and furthering of annatomollogy. The seed, eyes, heart, and brayn go for the growth of plants assosiated with magick and the occult; an long list of shrooms and fungi, webseeds, and mandrakes—this last an most valuable and cursedd thing, for it carrys a poysoned soul. The city sells these prodducts for hannsome reward, and returns to the bereeved a seeled casket weyted with turrf. A curssory glance at the ballance sheets of the municipal treashury will show exaktly where there also occurs a sharp ryse in the hangmans productivitty, and the administtering of capytal judgment for such crimes as petty larsenny and thebefiddlement of lyvestock in the throws of economic crysis is common.
    â€”From “Upton Died on Us,” the unpublished autobiography of Upton Dempsey, chief undertaker to the city of Oracco
    Â 
    â€œAnd why should I, Mr. Tillinghast? Why
should
I let you live?” Rattell skipped a little, his voice shrill. “You steal from me—I kill you.”
    Tillinghast hung between two bulbous men, arms clamped firmly in their grips. In the lamplight of the cellar, his pale, blue skin—cut in places on his face—glowed greenly under a tinkling neckful of silver charms. His jacket and shirt lay on the floor. But he had held on to his wide-brimmed hat, and it sat low over his eyes.
    â€œâ€™S not really up to you, that,” he said, and sniffed. The air was old and powdery. It smelled of things from under the ground and the cold dampness of the earth that pressed against the brickwork. Lopsided towers of crates were stacked in a rough circle around them, buried beneath ghostly sheets.
    Rattell looked at him, his good eye twitching. “What?”