Darkwalker

Начало книги

In the dark hours of a frostbitten morning, someone is digging. He is alone, unobserved, the sounds of his toil smothered by the mist that clings like a death shroud to the headstones. An icicle moon hangs in the sky, its cold light partially obscured by the naked branches of oak trees. Below, veins of shadow thicken and throb over the uneven ground. It is here that he attacks, plunging the point of the spade into the breast of the earth, twisting, steam leaking from the wound as he gouges his way deeper.

He mutters to himself as he digs. He resents being here, surrounded by cold and damp and death. He cannot fathom why he has been asked to do this, to unearth what has already been buried, to revisit what has already been decided. He shudders as he thinks on it. It is truly sickening, what he has been sent here to do. Exhuming the body of a child is gruesome enough to disturb even him, a man who has known more of death than of life. But he keeps digging all the same. He has been well paid, and besides, he is not the sort of man who believes in Judgment. He cannot imagine what it means to be damned.

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