The first corpse of the morning still had her eyebrows.
Thren found this irritating. Eyebrows meant the girl had died quickly — too quickly to leech anything useful, leech-wine souring already in the cooling meat. The soldiers had dumped her outside the tent flap like a gift she hadn't asked for. Crimson Rot had eaten her from the inside out. Not much face left below the brow ridge. The lips were gone. The nose was a prune of black tissue. But the eyebrows, dark and ordinary, stared up at Thren with an accusation she did not want to inventory.
"Young," she said, not to anyone. The tent was empty except for the three bodies from yesterday, which she had already drained to grey husks. The girl made four. She crouched, knees grinding — the left one remembered being a god's knee once, during a bad draw thirty years back — and pressed her thumb to the girl's jaw. Still warm. Six hours, maybe seven. Past prime, but not useless.
She took the bone needle from her sleeve, found the sweet spot behind the ear where skull met spine, and pushed.
Sour. The leech-wine that rose was thin, pink-tinged, carrying none of the density of mature memory — no first humiliations, no sharp griefs, only the flat panic of a death already swallowed. Thren collected it anyway, three drams into a stained cup. Waste not. Her mother had carved that into the tomb wall before Thren had carved her out. Before all of them carved themselves out, one by one, until the stone held only Thren's name and the names of the dead who had never learned to write.
Someone coughed outside. Not a soldier's cough — too wet, too pleased with itself.
"Enjoying my deliveries?" Varn Exultant-Canker stepped through, rancid in his official blacks, belly preceding him like a negotiator. He looked at the eyebrow-girl with genuine delight, the way a farmer admires a fat pig. "The Crimson Rot spreads, Stone-Rotted. Four hundred new dead since yesterday's sunset. The Emperor's legions are pissing blood and praying to meat. You are summoned."
"I don't cure plagues," Thren said. "I drink the dead."
Varn smiled with all his teeth, which were too many and too small. "You'll cure this one. Because I've read the commission's small clauses. The Rot's source is known to the chirurgeons. It's fermented sorrow." He let the match die. "The sorrow of a god you helped dismember, Thren. And the cure —" He produced a scroll, oil-stained, thumb-printed in places that looked too dark for ink. "The cure requires a living soul-flaying. Someone blood-of-your-blood. The last name still on your mother's stone."
Thren's hand stopped halfway to returning the needle to her sleeve.
"I have no daughters left," she said.
Varn's wet cough again. Not sickness. Amusement. "Thessa never carved her name out, old woman. Thessa's been hiding in the meat-pits of Othroc for six years, waiting for you to notice. Still alive. Still yours to flay."
He laid the commission on the girl's empty face. The parchment soaked up what leech-wine remained there, drinking the dead girl's last panic into its fibers.
Thren looked at her hands. Scarred across both palms in a grid, the marks of extraction. She thought of a god's face, thirty years younger, asking her a question she could no longer remember.
"Tomorrow," she said. "I'll need a cart."
Varn was gone before she spoke the last word, which was typical of him. Typical of all of them. The dead girl's eyebrows watched Thren pack her needles, the empty cup, the dried husks of yesterday's work. Outside, four hundred new bodies burned or didn't burn, depending on who had bothered to light the pyres. The Crimson Rot didn't care. It just ate.
She thought of Thessa's name, still in stone. Still waiting to be struck out.