THE OVERCROWDED LEDGER OF BARON BALTUS

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a nobody, sent to reason with the dead.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

I have no name worth writing down, which is precisely why they send me to do the jobs nobody else will touch. This time the job was down — down past the wine cellars of Castle Bastable where House Dribble snores in its barrels, down past the cheese vaults, down the long stair that House Delve keeps threatening to tunnel out from under, and into the crypt. In Castle Bastable, the crypt is not a restful place.

It is not restful because nobody has died on schedule in a very long time. The realm keeps one Reaper, and his moped is forever somewhere else, coughing in a ditch, so the dead of Bastable are not collected. They pile up in the family vaults like lodgers in an inn that has stopped taking bookings and cannot make anyone leave. Through it all drifts cheerful Mr. Mortlake, the undertaker, a tape measure round his neck, happier than any man has a right to be, humming a tune he stole off Old Sozzle — a fellow with more work than he can ever finish and every intention of enjoying it.

Lord Perry had sent me with a cunning plan, which is his word for a scheme that will go wrong in a way he can pin on me. House Delve wished to tunnel through the north wall of the crypt. The dead in the north wall did not wish it. My task was to make them stop objecting — armed with no rank, no coin, and a leaking zinc bucket that had been pressed on me for reasons nobody would explain.

The chief objector was Baron Baltus von Sump, and he had been objecting since 1478. He came at me out of the dark with a cracked spectral monocle and a contract he had been clutching for six centuries, and he told me his grievance the way a man tells a thing he has told ten thousand times to no one at all: that he had been murdered. Cheated at cards, then quietly drowned, by the first Bastable — Sir Reginald — who scratched Baltus's name off the deeds and inked his own on top, and that every soul upstairs was descended from that one rotten hand of cards. If the miners so much as chipped his sarcophagus, he thundered, he would leak every debt the family had ever buried straight to the bankers, unionise every phantom in the vaults, and strike clean through to Spudmas.

Mortlake tried to manage him — offered, smoothly, to misplace the tax collector's paperwork. From up the flue, House Echo threw down an impression of Lord Perry's voice, drawling that I was doing marvellously and that the acoustics down here were superb for screaming.

And then I did the one thing I had not been sent to do. I sat down on the cold flags, and I listened.

Because it came to me, somewhere in the middle of his threats, that Baron Baltus did not care about the masonry. He had not cared about the masonry for four hundred years. What he wanted — what he had wanted since the card table went over and the black water closed above his head — was for one single living person to say the words "you were murdered, and it was wrong, and it should never have happened," and to mean them. Six centuries of the finest disgruntled haunting in the realm, and underneath all of it was just a man waiting to be believed.

So I said it. I am nobody; I had nothing else in the bucket to give him. I said: you were murdered, Baron, and it was wrong, and I am sorry, and I believe you.

The crypt went very still. And somewhere far below us — far below even the Delves' deepest reach — something I have never been able to explain gave a low, slow turn, the way a sleeper eases off a bruise; and for just a moment the whole north wall seemed to lean an inch back from the miners' chalk marks, as if the castle itself had decided, only this once, to be gentle about the digging.

Baltus looked at me for a long time. Then he said, gruffly, that Delve's lads could have their easement — provided they dug around his box and never through it, around, mind, and quietly — and that I might tell that fraudulent weasel upstairs there would be no phantom strike this Spudmas after all.

I climbed back up with my empty bucket. Perry took the credit, as he always does.

But I know what truly settled it, and it was not the cunning plan, and it was not the misplaced tape measure. It was that the loneliest thing in the dark is so rarely a monster. It is usually just someone who was wronged a very long time ago, and has been waiting, all this while, for a nobody with the time to hear them out.

The dead do not haunt you for the house. They haunt you to be believed — and even a nobody can give them that.