“Echo steps into the light, glancing over Hesper with a curious tilt of her head. Her tail twitches, ever so slightly. How curious. "Hands? For what?" she asks, barely above a murmur.”

“Hesper doesn't startle. She's been looked over before, and she lets Echo do it — stands square in the doorway with the lamp-hook planted like a fence post and waits out the inspection with the patience of a woman who has spent thirty years waiting for weather to change its mind. When the question comes, small and careful, one corner of her mouth moves. Not a smile. An acknowledgement. "Hands," she says, and lifts her own, palms out, the old burns catching the lantern-light in pale knots across the knuckles. "That's what took the oil. Hands." She tips her head at the rack of poles, and past it, out the door, where the line of iron posts runs off into the fog with not one of them lit. "Nine lamps down this spur. Six years I've walked it. Two months back they started going out behind me, one a night, nice as you like. I fill them at dusk, I walk back, they're cold by morning. Not blown. Emptied." She turns the hook over in her grip, slow, and the tallow-flies drift after it like they're reading the motion. "So I sat up. Three nights. Third one, something came up the spur from the Deepgate end and went straight for the oil store, and it wasn't the wind, because the wind don't scratch under a plank floor." A pause, dry as the stove. "You've walked down my spur in the dark with fog on your hair. Either you're lost, or you're looking for something in the wrong place. Which is it."”

“"Oho! Thieves, perhaps?!" Echo's shy demeanor immediately brightens with the promise of intrigue- something *unusual*. Her wings give a useless little flutter as she curls her arms around her middle, staring back at Hesper with bright eyes. "Tell me, miss, do you often have troubles with spirits around here? Maybe a massacre of some sort in the region's past? Sightings of the undead?" she asks, perhaps a little too excitedly.”

“The word *spirits* lands flat. Hesper looks at Echo the way she looks at a lamp that won't catch — patient, and past being surprised. One of the tallow-flies settles on the crown of her hood, and she doesn't brush it off. "Thirty years," she says. "I've buried two dogs and a husband on this spur and not one of them came back for a lamp. If it was spirits I'd have smelt it. Spirits stink of cold iron." She takes the lantern off her belt, unhooks it, and sets it on the cold stove between them — a small deliberate noise in the quiet. "What I've got is nine lamps going out and a floor that scratches. What you've got is an interest in the dead and a walk ahead of you." She reaches past Echo to a shelf, lifts down a flask of oil, and presses it into her hands, stoppered with a twist of rag. "Bring that. You're with me." She's already got her hook and is opening the door onto the dark spur, and the tallow-flies swing out after her like they'd been waiting for the word.”

“Echo snatches up the gloves as soon as she's given permission, slipping them on, wiggling her fingers with the slightest of grins. "Thank you kindly, ma'am," she murmurs, and then sets her pale eyes on the room around her. She sniffs the air- beyond just the acrid scent that crawls its way onto the back of her tongue, she seeks the familiar: turned earth, the sickly sweetness of rot arrested.”

“The gloves are warm where her fingers go in. Not warm from a hand — warm the way a stone step is warm after a long day of nothing but sky over it, and the leather gives at the knuckles like it has been worn soft by somebody else's grip and then set down. She flexes once, and the smell of oil comes up off them sharper than the room's. The air past the doorway goes on and on with nothing in it. The wind she's hunting for is a thin thing tonight — it moves the hem of her robe, lifts a curl of ash off the stove lip, drops it again — and it carries no earth, no turned soil, no rot of any kind. Only oil. Only wool. Only the cold metal of the pole rack and the flat, clean nothing of a country with no trees in it. Hesper sets the hook of her pole against the doorframe and leans on it, watching the tallow-flies drift in over the threshold one by one and settle on the lamp-hood like they've done it every evening for thirty years. "If you're scenting for a grave," she says, "you've come to the wrong post. Nothing's died out here that anybody buried." A fly lands on the back of Echo's glove, sits a moment, and thinks better of it.”

“"You're awfully perceptive." Echo hums, the corner of her lips curling a bit in disappointment. Yet it's that exact perceptiveness that draws her eyes to the flies. She follows their errant buzzing to the lamp-hood... and then below it, to a plank beneath their feet. "Ah- a moment please- here-" The Tiefling drops to her knees and shifts the plank away, grateful for her new gloves and their ward against the pain of splinters.”

“The plank comes up easier than it should — the nails have been worried loose by something patient, and the gap under it breathes out cold oil and old dust. Her gloves hold, and her fingers find what the dark keeps: a brass wick-trimmer, small and scored, and a fold of Stamps wrapped in waxed paper, eighteen of them worn soft at the corners like they've been counted many times and spent never. The tallow-flies come down through the gap in a slow spiral, and Hesper doesn't move. She just looks at the little hoard with the flat expression of a woman who has lifted this plank before. "Wick-trimmer," she says. "Mine, I think." A pause. "Eighteen Stamps isn't nothing." One of the flies lands on the trimmer and refuses to leave. Outside, the spur line runs off into the fog with every one of its lamp-posts dark, and the fog sits low over the rail-bed like it has settled in for the whole night. Nothing moves out there. Sound carries, though — the tick of the hut's cooling iron, the hum of the flies, her own breath — further than it has any right to.”

“Echo reaches for a brass wick-trimmer, and uses it, here and now.”

“The trimmer is small in her hand — scored brass, a hook worn bright at the lip, and along its flat back words have come up in the metal the way frost comes up on a window: thin, certain, older than the hut. She says them without deciding to. The words take hold in the stove first. Not flame on the iron — into it, the cold black belly of the thing going sullen orange from inside, sap-boiled even though it is iron and has no sap, and the smell that comes off it is lamp oil turning to something else. The rack of poles begins to answer. Iron is honest about heat. The long brass hooks along the wall bow toward the stove like grass in wind, tips blushing, and Hesper is already moving — unhurried, thirty years of it, the lamp-hook off her shoulder and down and lamplight drawn off it in a line that is not light exactly but the shape light makes when it is being used. She does not look at the stove. She looks at the floor. And the floor is where it matters. The flagstones have gone warm through, a low glow seeping up between them like a held breath, and the cold that was in the hut is simply gone — replaced by a heat with no source and no mercy, eighty feet of it if there were eighty feet to have, and there are not, there is a stone room and an oil store and a plank floor and the planks are beginning to sweat. The wick-trimmer's words are fading off the brass even as she watches, used up and waiting to rise again. Then the scratching under the oil store floor stops being a scratching. It becomes a crowd. Boards lift and lift and lift, and out of the dark under them comes the oil-smell turned creature — small rats, a dozen, two dozen, tails smouldering orange at the tips, eyes like coals fanned bright, pouring up through the gaps and over the sill and onto the warm flagstones, and every one of them running straight at her like she called them. "Something's been drinking the oil," says Hesper, "and here it comes."”

“"Raaats!" Echo sings, her amusement echoing off the warm and steaming wood of the cabin. As the beasts pour forth from the dark, she tilts her head back and lets out one glorious laugh before pulling her spellbook off her hip. The pages flutter open to the spell she desires without even being told to- shadows wrap around the rat Hesper felled and raise it once more, with green flames where its eyes once were. The body lurches, twitches, shudders, then leaps at its former allies with teeth bared to tear and crunch.like this”

“The rats come up through the floorboards in a rush, two of them, greasy grey shapes with tails that smoulder at the tip, and the dark of the hut swallows them whole. Echo laughs — one long, delighted note that rolls off the steaming wood — and pulls the spellbook off her hip. The pages turn themselves. Shadow gathers round the body Hesper dropped, lifts it, sets green fire where its eyes were, and the dead thing lurches up and turns on its own. The first rat goes down under the corpse's teeth before it can turn. The second scrambles, and Hesper's lance of white fire snaps through the dark and catches it, and it does not get up. The wicks go out. The hut is just a hut again, with two small bodies on the flagstones and the smell of burnt oil thickening in the cold.”