The rain tasted like iron as I knelt on the wooden platform with my hands tied behind me. Below me, the whole city of Valenmor had come to watch me die. Thousands of faces stared up from the mud, and not one of them looked sorry.
"Murderer!" a man screamed.
A rotten apple hit my cheek. Juice ran down my chin, mixing with the rain and the blood from my split lip.
I did not flinch. I had stopped flinching three days ago, when they told me I had killed forty people in the Harbor Hall.
I had never even held a sword.
My name is Emma Ardent. I counted coins for a living. I was the woman who fixed other people's mistakes in neat little columns, and I went home before dark every night. I was not the kind of person who ended up on a scaffold.
But I had found one number that did not belong.
Three weeks ago, a missing sum led me to a hidden ledger. The ledger led me to a name. Lord Veyron, the kindest and most admired noble in the kingdom, had been stealing from the crown for years.
I told one person. That was my mistake.
Now Lord Veyron stood on a high balcony above the square, wrapped in a white coat that the rain somehow could not touch. He lifted one gloved hand and gave me a tiny wave, like a friend saying goodbye at a train station.
Then he smiled.
Heat rushed through my chest, hotter than fear. I wanted to scream the truth at the crowd. I opened my mouth.
"Silence," the executioner said, and shoved a cloth between my teeth.
He was a huge man with a face hidden under a leather hood. His hands were steady and calm. He had done this many times. He pulled me forward and pressed my neck against the cold wooden block.
Wood scraped my cheek. I could see a crack in the plank, and a small beetle crawling through it, going about its day.
Strange, I thought: The last thing I will ever see is a beetle.
"Emma Ardent," the judge called out from his stand. His voice was thin and bored. "You are found guilty of murder and treason. Any final words?"
The cloth was still in my mouth. Of course I had no final words. That was the point.
At the edge of the crowd, I saw a small girl pulling at her mother's sleeve. She did not shout like the others. She only watched me with wide, wet eyes, as if she knew something was wrong.
I held her gaze. I could not speak, but I tried to tell her with my eyes that I was not what they said.
Her mother yanked her away.
I heard the executioner lift the blade. Steel hissed against leather as he wiped it once, slowly, for the crowd.
My heart pounded so hard it hurt. My whole life flashed by in one cold breath. My mother's soup. My tiny desk by the window. The ink stains on my fingers that never washed away.
I do not want to die, I whisper that in my mind. Not like this. Not as a liar in everyone's memory.
"Do it," Veyron said from the balcony. I should not have been able to hear him over the storm, but I did. His voice was soft, and it slid straight into my ear. "Thank you, Emma. Your sacrifice will open something wonderful."
My eyes went wide. Sacrifice? I can't help but ask my self. Then the blade came down. I felt no pain. That was the first strange thing.
There was a flash of white, then a sound like a giant door slamming shut somewhere deep under the earth. The scaffold, the rain, and the screaming crowd all vanished, as if someone had blown out a candle.
Then I was falling. I fell through darkness so thick it felt like water. Cold hands seemed to grab at my ankles. Voices whispered around me in a hundred languages, and every one of them was laughing.
I tried to scream, but this time nothing was in my mouth. The sound tore out of me and echoed for miles. I hit the ground hard.
Pain exploded through my ribs, and for one beautiful moment, I was glad. Dead people do not feel pain.
I coughed, rolled onto my back, and stared upward. There was no sky.
Above me stretched a ceiling of red stone, huge and cracked, with veins of glowing light running through it like blood in an enormous body. Chains hung from it by the thousands, swaying slowly in a hot wind. Something large and shapeless was hanging from the nearest chain, and it moaned.
I sat up with shaking arms. My hands were free. My neck was whole. I touched it again and again, afraid it would fall apart.
"Still attached," a voice said. "Congratulations. Most people check for their head first, then scream."
I spun around.
A small figure sat on a pile of white bones a few steps away, swinging his legs like a boy on a garden wall. He had gray skin, pointed ears, and a patched brown coat far too big for him. Where his left eye should have been, there was only a smooth scar.
His right eye was gold, and it was studying me the way a merchant studies a coin.
"Where am I?" My voice cracked.
"Hell." He said it kindly, as if giving me directions to a market. "Welcome. Try not to touch anything. Most of it bites."
I stared at him. A laugh rose in my throat, and it sounded dangerously close to sobbing. "I was executed. I should be dead."
"You are." He hopped down from the bones and brushed off his coat. "Mostly. Except something is wrong with you, little bookkeeper."
My blood went cold. "How do you know what I do?"
"Because you are covered in it." He circled me slowly and pointed one crooked finger at my chest. "Look."
I looked down.
Thin gray threads wrapped around my body, dozens of them, glowing faintly. Each one stretched away into the dark, toward the endless red horizon. They hummed softly, like tiny strings pulled tight.
"Those are debts," the demon said. "Every soul that falls here carries them. Yours are strange. They are not yours at all."
"Not mine?"
"Somebody else owes them." His golden eye gleamed. "And someone sent you down here to pay."
My mouth went dry. Veyron's voice echoed in my head: Your sacrifice will open something wonderful.
Far away, across the red plains, a huge horn blew. The ground trembled. Every chain on the ceiling rattled at once, and thousands of moaning shapes turned their heads in the same direction, toward me.
The demon's grin slipped away.
"Well," he whispered. "That was fast. They already smell you."
"Who?" I scrambled to my feet. "Who smells me?"
He leaned close, and for the first time, I saw fear in that gold eye.
"Listen carefully, bookkeeper. If you want to live long enough to see the human world again, you will do exactly what I say. My name is Moth. And the first thing I need from you is a promise."
The horn blew a second time, closer.
Moth held out his small gray hand.
"Do we have a deal?"