The boy left the building after only a few minutes. He kept his knife drawn and his stance low as he moved forwards with as little noise as he could manage. It was not possible to keep watch in all directions at once, but he did his best.

Evening was the most dangerous time in the city. It was when the screechers spread their wings and dropped from the high buildings where they roosted, setting out in search of the night’s first quarry. And it was when folks who might otherwise have passed you by without a word became thieves and murderers, when people like the boy, who had no bones to pay their tithe, set out to claim some.

He had never killed anyone before. He knew he might have to one day if he wanted to survive, but he wasn’t sure if he was prepared for it. He had seen his mother threaten people, more than once, but even then it had never actually come to violence. Even when the screechers had snatched her from the road beside him, he had not truly seen it. He remembered only the sound, the cry, the rush of cold air, his mother shouting, but by the time he’d looked around she had been gone, vanished into the sky.

It took him a moment to realise that the call he was hearing was not a memory, but real and present. He ducked down, dashing again towards a nearby building, but stopped before he got halfway there. Turning around, he looked up at the fog, the empty air above him. His mind had been too slow, too focused on what was past and gone ― if the screecher had been diving for him then, he would have been gone by the time he knew to react.

Cursing himself for being so distracted, he started moving again. It was so dark already that night had to be less than half an hour away… the low, creeping dread that had been gradually rising in him since he stepped back out of that building was beginning to surge into panic. He had never been this close to a night without tithes before. Theories began to whirl in his head, theories about what really happened when you couldn’t pay. He’d never been sure ― all he knew was the Proctor would take him. Would be killed? Dragged away somewhere? Would his bones be taken in place of those he’d failed give?

As he turned a corner onto another street, luck appeared before him in the form of a corpse. It was very fresh, perhaps only an hour old, and didn’t appear to have any sort of wound on it. In fact, when the boy first saw the hunched shape slumped against one wall, he thought they might be a living person, perhaps crouched there to lunge at whoever went past. But as he took a cautious step closer, he saw how pale the face was, how the eyes were distant and glassy, a faint reflection of the world held in them as they gazed at nothing.

If they had owned any weapons, they were gone now. The boy knelt next to them and peered at their clothes for any sign of blood, but there was none. He wondered if they were like his grandmother, dead without cause or warning, and he wondered who they had been. Had they been looking for a tithe, like him? Had their last moments been gripped by a pulsing fear that they would not find one, that the Proctor would take them, only to drop here instead?

He reached out and took hold of their hand, pulling it gently towards him and tugging their glove off. The skin underneath was calloused from holding a tool or weapon all day for many years, and it was pale, just like their face. It almost seemed to the boy that there was no blood in them at all. As he laid the hand on his knee, he looked up at their empty face again.

‘Sorry,’ he whispered.

A short while later, he was nestled in the corner of another room, a pile of poorly-cleaned bones at his feet as he used a cloth to wipe the blood it turned out they did have from his knife. It was not the first time he had given messy bones as a tithe, but it was the first time he had taken them himself. Strangely, he felt a little sick. Though he knew the corpse had no use for them any more, it somehow seemed wrong to take the bones. It did not feel like they were his to give.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

The Proctor did not care. Wherever they had come from, they were given, and they were taken, and the shadow left, and the boy slept as easy that night as anyone could in that city of fog, and he woke relatively well-rested the next morning.

As he stepped out into the streets, the early light seeping through the fog to cast a dull grey hue over the world, he looked back up the way he’d come to where the body still lay. He stayed there a few seconds, just looking, before he turned away and moved on.

That morning was calmer than the last. As he set out, the air hung still and silent, almost as if the streets were holding their breath for something. Whatever it was, the boy didn’t care much to ponder; his thoughts were fixed instead on his dwindling supply of food and water. The former was not all that scarce, even in such a ruined and barren place as the city, but water was a rare thing. The boy had four flasks he filled to the very top whenever he came across one of the few fountains that were scattered around his world, but three were empty and the fourth was growing low. A small and nagging voice somewhere in the far reaches of his mind insisted that, had he gone with the gang, they probably would have had water.

But it was too late for regrets, so he ignored that voice and kept on, and after only a couple of hours of walking he came to a tall archway with a large, triangular open space beyond it. Two other archways stood in the other corners, leading out into their own streets, but what drew the boy’s gaze was the fountain at the centre. With a wash of relief, he hurried over to it and began filling up the flasks.

Fountains only ever appeared in places like this. He wasn’t sure what to call them; ‘plaza’ did not sound quite right, as it was too grand a word for such worn and crumbling spaces, but no other words had ever come to mind. Regardless, they were always a welcome sight.

Despite the heat that hung over most days in the city, the water was always cool, clear and refreshing. He could see the stone the fountain was made of through it, and it glistened a little in what pale light made it through the fog. Water, he supposed, was the one real beauty his world had to offer. Once or twice, when his tithes had been secure, he’d lingered by fountains for several hours, just watching the water flow and listening to the quiet rushing sound it made.

That day, his tithes were not secure, but he stayed for a few minutes anyway. Enough minutes for the song of the water to be interrupted by the noise of boots crunching against the road.

He whirled around, gripping a full flask in one hand and his knife in the other, fearing a gang or a lone thief, but the newcomer was nothing quite as dangerous as that. Instead, she was an elderly woman with a bag slung over her shoulder and a walking stick grasped firmly in one hand. She stopped when she saw the boy, and looked at him oddly.

‘I’m not after your bones, lad,’ she said, in a strong voice. ‘I’ve plenty of my own, no need to worry yourself on that count.’

When she made to approach again, he backed away to the other side of the fountain. She frowned a little and shook her head, but otherwise did not appear to care much. With a surprising amount of energy for her age, she strode over to the fountain and began filling up a few flasks of her own.

‘Lots of water for the both of us. These fountains never run dry.’

‘I know,’ said the boy, slowly lowering his knife.

‘Looking for the gardens?’ she asked, glancing up at him, but spoke before he could answer. ‘No, not with that look, you aren’t. You’re like everyone else, then.’ Reaching into a pocket of her coat, she pulled out a piece of paper, rolled up with a line of string around it. She waggled it a little. ‘I know where they are.’

He stared at her for a moment, silent, unsure if he’d heard her right.

‘You don’t believe me,’ she observed. ‘This here is a map, lad. Got it from a poor fool as old as me when I was only as young as you. Been a long walk, but I’m almost there. Want to come, see paradise?’

Still uncertain, he took a step forwards, his eyes on the map.

‘Oh, no, no,’ the woman said, and it vanished into her coat once again. ‘I’ll take you there but you’ll not take my map, and I’ll thank you to not take me for a fool either.’ At his silence, she slung her bag off her shoulder and rummaged in it for a few moments before producing a small handful of fingerbones. ‘You look like a boy with no tithes, so take these. I’ve got more than enough. Take them, and come with me to the gardens.’

The boy hesitated a moment more, his mother’s warnings that no stranger could ever be trusted ringing loud and clear as a screecher’s cry in his ears, but again curiosity won him over, and he reached out and took the bones.