I’m standing in long gray grass, in the middle of the standing stones. The Devil’s Footsteps don’t look any different in the world of the dead. They’re the same size, the same shape, with the same cup- and hoof-shaped patterns etched into them. They even have the same patches of lichen dappling them. The stones are the only thing that hasn’t changed.

When I crossed over, moments ago, it was evening. The trees around us were painted in sunset colors, dull orange trunks casting long violet shadows. There’s no color in this place. The mist around me is gray. The stones are gray; the sky overhead is gray. My skin is gray; my hands have gray fingernails. My raincoat, which is supposed to be red and blue, is now two shades of gray. The Shepherd’s black suit and hat are deep charcoal-gray. Ham, who’s gray anyway, is even grayer than me and the Shepherd put together. He still looks strange and wispy, like he’s a cloud of smoke someone formed into the shape of a dog.

There’s something curiously lifeless about the grass beneath our feet. I brush one foot through it, and it rustles like grass should. But there’s something off about it, all the same. We’ve been drained of color, bleached of something vital. I feel like if we got any grayer, we’d become part of the mist itself.

“Welcome,” the Shepherd says. “The Gray Meadows.”

“I remember this place,” I say. “This is where I met Mr. Berkley.”

“Best not to speak of that one,” the Shepherd says. “Not here. There is power in the names of great spirits. Even in the names they have chosen to hide behind. To speak of that being here could be to behold it.”

I nod. Ham is investigating the base of one of the stones.

“So which way do we go?” I ask.

“I believe we will find the Ahlgren girl’s house in this direction,” the Shepherd says, pointing. “We may pick up their trail from there. But first we must explain our business to the Gatekeeper.”

“To who?”

“As I said, your powerful friend may roam where it pleases, and such a being as a lowly Gatekeeper would not dare to question its movements. You and I are not so exalted, and abide by different rules.”

The Shepherd sets off downhill, and I follow him. The mist makes it difficult to see much, but I can tell already that the landscape of Deadside is different from that of Liveside. In Dunbarrow, the Devil’s Footsteps are set in a hollow, a clearing in dense woodland. In Deadside, they’re set at the top of a steep hill without an oak tree in sight. I follow the Shepherd down a narrow path, the only plant life the still, gray grass and some thornbushes. Ham trots behind me, seemingly unfazed by the strange new world he’s followed me into.

At the bottom of the hill, we come to a large expanse of gray sand, in which a white tree seems to have fallen. The Shepherd comes to a halt, and I stop beside him. I start to speak, and he silences me.

The fallen tree moves, flexing in the mist, and I realize with horror that what I thought was a tree trunk is actually an animal, the biggest snake I’ve ever seen. It must be longer than a truck, thicker than an ogre’s arm, and it rears up out of the dirt, turning to face us. The snake’s skin is crusty and white, reminding me of the dry, dead skin you get on the soles of your feet. Its eyes are a piercing sapphire-blue, without pupils, the brightest color I’ve seen since arriving in Deadside. The snake opens its mouth, and I see that it has unmistakably human teeth lining its jaws, and a pink human tongue.

Yes? The snake addresses us, its voice surprisingly gentle.

The Shepherd looks at me with an expression I can’t interpret. Is this the Gatekeeper? I suppose it must be. What am I supposed to do?

“Um, hello?” I say.

And you are? the snake, the Gatekeeper, asks me.

“I’m Luke Manchett,” I tell it.

The Gatekeeper doesn’t respond.

“My name is Luke Manchett,” I say a little louder, guessing this is a test of some kind, “and I’m a necromancer. This is my Shepherd, and my familiar, Ham.”

Luke Manchett and retinue, the Gatekeeper says. What is your purpose in crossing the threshold, Luke Manchett? What do you seek?

“Er . . . just passing through,” I say.

The Gatekeeper grimaces, exposing its large teeth.

Where did you find him, Octavius? it asks the Shepherd.

“I apologize on my master’s behalf,” the Shepherd says, taking his hat off and dipping his head in a bow. “He is not of the old school. The accepted ways are a mystery to him.”

You can say that again, the snake grumbles.

“If you will allow me to announce you?” the Shepherd says to me, replacing his hat. His tone suggests that I’ve messed up yet again and he’s about to bail us both out.

“My, uh, powerful servant,” I say, “will announce my business.”

The snake nods.

“Mighty Gatekeeper!” the Shepherd says, raising both arms, projecting his voice like an opera singer. “Terrible serpent of the underworld! Before you stands Luke Manchett, a powerful necromancer! Son of Horatio! Only sixteen summers he has, yet here he stands before you! Raiser of the dead! Master of the Book of Eight! His mind consumed by shadow! His heart heavy with regret! He has parleyed with the Black Goat and lived to tell the tale! Look also upon his fearsome hound, Ham! A pitiless beast, consumer of spirits, scourge of deer and cats! I am his Shepherd, once known to you as Octavius, the King of the Dead! By my presence as his servant, you may gain some measure of Luke’s power and wisdom.”

Good, good, the Gatekeeper says, looking at me with what I take to be new respect. And what is your master’s purpose in the realms I guard?

“Luke seeks the traitorous sorceress Ashana Ahlgren, daughter of the great sorcerer Magnus Ahlgren. Under the guise of friendship, she sought to steal my master’s copy of the Book, and she has killed his beloved, the witch child Elza Moss! Ashana’s treachery knows no bounds! She has sworn to aid my master and has reneged on her promises! Shame! Treachery! Shame!”

Disgusting, the snake says, shaking its horrible head.

“The she-dog, this oath-breaking cur, she heads for the cradle of the eight sacred rivers, the Shrouded Lake! Accompanied by her crippled sister and her faithful retainer, Ashana seeks to offer a nonpareil to what sleeps beneath the water, and return her sister to true life! My master intends to stop her and take revenge! Blood! Treachery! She has no shame!”

A nonpareil, the Gatekeeper says eagerly, a rare and precious treasure indeed.

“Total nightmare to get hold of them,” I say conversationally.

The gigantic snake and the Shepherd both give me the kind of look you’d give someone who farts in church.

A sorcerers’ feud, then, the Gatekeeper says to the Shepherd, ignoring me. Treachery. Blood. A battle between two dynasties. A young man questing to avenge his fallen beloved.

“Truly,” the Shepherd says, “this is a tale which will be sung throughout the ages. We beseech you, powerful Gatekeeper, let us pass. Let us avenge the witch child Elza Moss. Let us avenge ourselves upon Ashana.”

Very well, the Gatekeeper says, smiling at me with its human teeth. Far be it from me to stand in the way of such a tale. Allow me to check your sigil, Master Manchett, and I will grant your passage into the underworld.

I raise my hand with the black ring on it, and the Gatekeeper runs its pink tongue over my sigil, tasting it like you’d taste an expensive wine. I try not to shudder.

Yes. There is great power here. I will let you pass, brave sorcerer. May fate speed your journey. May you avenge yourself on this betrayer and eat her heart.

“Thank you, mighty Gatekeeper,” I say, and for the first time, I sense I’ve done the right thing. The snake grins hellishly and coils itself back down into the sand. Its blue eyes close. I think it’s gone to sleep.

The Shepherd leads us past the sleeping snake. Ham trots by my side. We move on, through gray grass and gray copses of fir trees, cross a narrow gray stream that somehow flows without making a sound. The mist is all around us, the dull light unchanging, the only noise the sound of my footsteps on the ground. After a while I ask, “So how did that go?”

“The thing to remember about creatures like that,” the Shepherd remarks, “is they still think they live ten thousand years ago. They’re older than the world itself. They spend a great deal of time doing very little, and they take their excitement when they can get it. They’re cut from the Heroic cloth. They know that era is long gone, of course. But if you humor them, they love you for it.”

“Right,” I say.

“I would judge you were perhaps a hair’s breadth from it eating you,” he continues. “So next time, I would try to pretend you are in an epic poem. A loud voice, strong posture; be sure you spend plenty of time on the declaring of deeds. That will usually suffice.”

“I liked it when you described Ham as a ‘scourge of deer and cats,’” I say.

“I was doing my best”— the Shepherd sniffs —“with what little I had on hand.”

The mist eddies and flows around us, although I never feel any wind that could be pushing it. The mist is the only thing in this gray world that seems to move; everything else gives the impression that it’s been in one place forever. I think that’s what unsettles me about the grass: the sense that you could stand here for a thousand years and it would never grow one centimeter. The only time it ever moves is when we step on it. I don’t hear any birds, don’t see any squirrels or rabbits. There aren’t even mosquitoes, and I never thought I would miss those. There’s no sun, no clouds, no sense of day or night. The only way to track time passing at all is by your own movement through the landscape. We walk across endless expanses of heather, past lonely pine trees and hulking bare rocks. You can’t fly in Deadside, I’ve found; I’m trapped on the ground the way I would be in my body back home.

“Where are we?” I ask after what could have been hours.

“We are approaching Ashana’s house,” the Shepherd responds without looking back.

“What is this place?”

“The ancients called this land Asphodel,” he replies. “These lands lie closest to the world of the living. In a way, this country is England’s memory of itself. Before human life existed.”

“I see,” I say, although I don’t.

We move on, Ham trotting along at the rear. He isn’t sniffing and dawdling like he does on walks around Dunbarrow. He seems to grasp that we have purpose.

After what feels like a long time, we come to a forest of some sort, slender gray trees with black apples growing from the branches. The Shepherd tells me not to eat them, as if there were any danger of me wanting to, and we pass into the forest. After a while we come to a clearing, and I see Ash’s house.

It doesn’t look much different from the way it looked when I first saw it. The house has two stories, a garage, a front garden with a fence and a metal gate. It has double-glazed windows and a chimney stack and a bracket for a satellite dish. It looks extraordinarily normal and just plain extraordinary all at once. The house has become as gray and lifeless as the rest of this forest.

“I don’t for a moment expect she left it unwarded,” the Shepherd says, “but it would be remiss of us not to make sure.”

We approach the house. Sure enough, there’s a line of silver flame that erupts from the ground, blocking our path. It makes a high chiming noise when you’re close to it, and emits no heat. The Shepherd makes some halfhearted explorations around the ward but finds no weakness.

“As I expected,” he announces.

Ham seems to be sniffing something on the far side of the garden. I make my way over to him. It’s the remains of Ash’s reading machine, broken apart, spokes and levers sticking out like the legs of a smashed insect. Inside I find part of a book, completely torn to pieces. It seems to be my French-to-English dictionary. For the first time in a while, I laugh.

“Here’s where she found she didn’t have the Book,” I say to the Shepherd. “Elza even swapped something else in, to make up the weight.”

He smiles a thin smile.

“Your witch child is not without her virtues,” he remarks.

“So where do we go now?” I ask.

“The geography of the spirit world is complex,” he says in his lecturing voice. “Where the living world is consistent and yet ever-changing, the spirit world is inconsistent and timeless.”

“I don’t understand even one little bit of what you just said.”

“It means, dull boy, that Asphodel and similar realms are unmappable by conventional means. The landscape eddies. It flows. The configurations are infinite. A mountain may become a crevasse when the traveler turns his back. We could return to the Devil’s Footsteps and find that one of the eight rivers runs between us and those stones. One never knows.”

“So how do we find our way to the Shrouded Lake? How will Ash? How can we find her?”

“As I said, navigating this other world is partly a matter of will. As Ashana greatly desires to reach the Shrouded Lake, she will eventually do so. But it may take her some time. We have an advantage, as we have a map.”

“We do?”

The Shepherd reaches over to me and pulls the Book of Eight from my jacket. I think it’s the first time he’s touched me in Deadside, and I’m alarmed to find that he’s physically present. I can feel his wrinkled old hand against my chest. I really don’t want him to touch me.

The Shepherd is holding the Book, oblivious to my distress. He strokes the green spine, and the Book of Eight falls open. He turns the pages, muttering, until he finds what he wants.

“Look,” the ghost says. He holds the Book so I can see. It looks like it usually does, a bizarre jumble of shifting shapes and symbols, holding no meaning for my conscious mind whatsoever. It doesn’t seem as hypnotic here in Deadside, though. I don’t feel I’m in any danger of losing myself in its pages.

“We wish to arrive here,” he says, tapping a strange mark with one long thumb. It lies in the center of the page, with eight lines spidering their way out from it in all directions. “The Book’s map will alter itself, along with the landscape. An infinitely long volume has room to map every single configuration of the spirit world that could exist.”

“So you can get us to the Shrouded Lake?”

“I can.” The Shepherd gives me a graying grin. “Not only that, I believe we may find that we arrive before Ashana and her companions.”

“Well, let’s get going, then,” I say.

The Shepherd keeps ahold of the Book, examining it now and then and talking to himself. We move off into the forest, Ham trotting along between me and the ghost. We walk through more of the apple trees, then up a barren slope dotted with thin, unwholesome-looking clumps of reeds, and from here, with the disjointed logic that a dream has, we’re walking in a deep forest. The trees are taller than anything I’ve ever seen before, dark and elephantine, with bark like the scaly hides of dinosaurs. They loom over us, taller than those giant redwoods that grow in California. Some of their roots are the diameter of train carriages, maybe thicker. I can’t see their summits, can barely even see any branches. The trees are monoliths of gray bark that vanish in the fog overhead. It’s darker here, too, the fog thicker and closer to black. I almost bump into the Shepherd, who’s peering down at the Book.

“Keep close to me,” he says, and then strides off into the fog again. I follow as best I can. He and Ham scramble down earthen banks, ford through the stagnant pools of dark water that collect around the bases of the trees. At one point we pass a single fallen leaf, dead and gray, which I swear is larger than a racing yacht’s sail. I feel as though we’ve been shrunk down to mouse-size, and that at any moment a silent white owl, grim and immense, could come soaring down from the treetops and carry us back to its nest. From what I’ve seen of Deadside this far, it isn’t even that unlikely.

As I’m scrambling under a gnarled loop of tree root, I see a flash of white off to the left of us. It’s a human figure, I’m sure of it, and from the pale clothing, it could be Ash. I freeze, trying to determine if she saw me. The fog is thick and dark, almost like smoke. I can’t see anything anymore. I can see the ground beneath my feet, and that’s about it. I realize I’ve lost the Shepherd and Ham.

“Hey!” I hiss. “Guys! I saw something!”

No response.

Maybe the Ahlgrens were waiting for us? This is an ideal ambush spot.

I silently press on, following the trail I know they were walking on. As I’m coming down a steep bank of earth, still afraid to shout too loudly in case Ash and the Widow are nearby, the fog lifts a little, like a breeze ruffled a curtain, and I see more clearly where I am. This is a hollow of sorts, a depression between two of the gargantuan trees, and to one side there’s a cave that’s formed where earth has collapsed away between two of the trees’ roots. A figure is standing outside the cave, with its back to me.

It’s Elza.

What’s happening?

It’s unmistakably Elza, just as I last saw her. How can it be her? Is this where she ended up? Her hair is long and wet and black, falling down her back, just like it was when she died. She’s dressed in her leather jacket, black jeans. She’s pulling at a strand of her hair, just like Elza used to when she was stressed.

“Elza?” I call.

She stands still.

“Is that you?”

“Luke?” she calls back. It’s her voice. She sounds afraid.

“Elza! I’m coming to get you! It’s OK.”

She doesn’t turn around. I make my way across the hollow toward her.

What is she doing out here? I have a sudden rush of love, an urge to hold her and comfort her. She must be scared, terrified. . . .

“Where are you?” she asks.

She still hasn’t turned around.

“I’m here, Elza! I’m here! It’s OK!”

I’m nearly touching her. I can see the strands of her hair; her fingernails, painted black; the silver beads she wore around her left wrist.

“Do you love me?” she asks.

“I’ll always love you,” I’m saying, reaching my hand out to her, “always, forever. . . .”

Elza turns around. Where her face ought to be, there’s just a mouth. It’s a wide, ravenous mouth, toothless and tongueless, occupying her face from chin to hairline.

“Do you love me?” the monster asks, still using her voice.

There’s no time to scream. The Elza thing jumps at me, clawing at me, knocking me to the earth. The being, whatever it is, is strong, and it tries to pin me to the ground so it can lower its mouth to my face. I’m looking into blackness, hungry blackness, and —

There’s a blast of green light, and the mouth is screaming. The thing leaps off me and rears up to face this new threat. I hear Ham barking and the Shepherd yelling something unintelligible. The Elza monster roars, no longer sounding remotely human, and I see beneath the clinging layer of green fire that there’s something else standing there, not Elza at all, something like a thin and faceless woman with impossibly long arms. She seems to be covered with fur.

The monster shrieks and leaps like a monkey up into the tangled roots overhead, scrambling away into the mist. The Shepherd and Ham are standing over me. I never imagined I’d be glad to see the black-eyed ghost. One of his hands still crackles with the green fire; the other cradles the Book. Ham licks my face.

“What . . . ?” I ask.

“A hungry spirit,” the Shepherd snarls. “A ghoul. Shifting forms like the mist itself. Such is the fate of those who dwell in these deep woods too long. It nearly had you, Luke.”

“I thought it was Ash,” I say, ashamed. “And then it looked like Elza.”

“Next time, raise your sigil. That ring commands some authority over the unbound dead here. You are lucky we came back to find you.”

“I will.” I start to get up.

“I want you to remember,” the Shepherd says quietly, “your oath to me. What you promised. I said I would help you wholeheartedly, and I have. I could easily have left you.”

“I know,” I say.

“Keep close to us!” the Shepherd says.

I don’t need telling again.

The monstrous forest stretches much farther, and I take utmost care to stay within touching distance of the Shepherd and Ham. We follow an arduous path over and around roots, through a system of caves, around the edge of a large chasm that seems to drop into nothingness. There’s no more contact with the beings that live in this forest, although sometimes when the fog shifts, I catch sight of furtive human shapes ducking behind roots or vanishing into tunnels. The forest is clearly inhabited. Whether they’re scared of the Shepherd, or me, or perhaps just the sigil I carry, I don’t know.

As suddenly as it began, the forest vanishes. We’re walking through heather. The fog is thinner, more like mist. I don’t have to stay within arm’s reach of the Shepherd. We tramp along in single file. For hours we don’t speak a word, don’t see a soul. I wonder what it’s like for Ash, moving through this gray silent world with the Widow. Did they bring Ilana? The idea of chaperoning that cheerful, strange girl through Deadside sends shudders through me.

We pass a hilltop where a black tower stands, its doorway empty and open, with no windows in its stone walls. None of us have even the slightest urge to look inside. We walk across a wide gray desert where boulders lie at disorderly angles, with trails in the dust behind them indicating that, at some point, they’ve been moved around. We walk through meadows and forests that could be England. We climb a mountain, which would be beautiful if the slopes weren’t gray and the view obscured by fog.

While crossing a plain of dull, volcanic-looking rock, we come to our first proper river. I have to call it a river, because that’s how the Shepherd refers to it, but you wouldn’t immediately think river if you saw it. The river is a wound in the rock, a chasm, and at the bottom of this chasm is a slow-flowing stream of red fire. The flames are red in the way fresh blood is red, a clamoring crimson, with none of the yellow or orange tones you see in normal fire. There’s heat coming off the river, and the redness is an astonishing contrast to the monochrome landscape we’ve been traveling through. Ham stays well away from the edge.

“The Phlegethon,” the Shepherd says.

“The flegga-what?”

“Phlegethon, the ancients named it. There are eight rivers, boy, that flow through the underworld. Eight rivers of shadow and flame. The greatest of them is the Styx, River of Oaths, backbone of the underworld. The lesser rivers number seven: Lethe, Acheron, Phlegethon, Cocytus, Apelpsion, Algos, and golden Elys. We stand before the Phlegethon, the River of Rage. It flows into the heart of the darkness, Tartarus.”

“It doesn’t sound like we want to follow this river,” I say.

“No,” the Shepherd agrees. “This river does not lead anywhere we want to go, and we cannot travel upon it.”

I don’t have anything to say to that. We walk in silence alongside the chasm, the bloodred river below us, and eventually, as the Shepherd knew we would, we come to a bridge. It’s roughly carved from the same volcanic stone, and fortunately seems to be unguarded. We cross, and when we reach the other bank I look back and the Phlegethon has vanished. We’re in a barren gray field instead.

Things get bad again maybe hours or days later; without nights or the sun or even meals to judge time by, your perception swiftly stops having any meaning at all. My legs don’t get tired, because, like the Shepherd said, you don’t have muscles here. It’s about will and wisdom. I’m feeling pretty short of the latter.

We’re descending a barren slope, heading toward who-knows-what, when the fog lifts again the way it does sometimes in this place, and I find I can see farther down the slope into a stony valley dotted with fir trees. There are figures, only specks, moving toward the tree line. Two of them are bright white, the third wearing gray.

“Is that . . . ?” I ask.

“Having never laid eyes upon them, I could not say,” the Shepherd replies.

The specks have vanished into the trees. They must’ve been miles away. The fog thickens again, almost as though the landscape itself were taunting us. It was Ash and Ilana and the Widow, I’m sure of it.

“That was them,” I say. “I know it was. We’re gaining on them.”

“We are still far from the Shrouded Lake,” the Shepherd says, examining the Book of Eight. “However, I see no reason why catching the Ahlgrens before they reach its shores would be to our disadvantage. Do you believe they saw us?”

“Who knows?”

“We shall assume that they did, and hope that they did not. Let us make haste.”

We break into a jog, Ham scampering downhill, sending small flurries of gray pebbles skittering around his paws. I’ve never seen the Shepherd run before, I realize, and it looks strange. In his three-piece suit and glasses, he’s dressed more for a long night at the library than running a marathon. When I went up against him, he never had to run anywhere — he always gave me the impression that he was three moves ahead, that I was turning up late to the places he already wanted me to go. As we pelt down the mountainside together, I’m wondering how great this plan of ours really is. Any scheme that involves an elderly master tactician hurtling downhill at a breakneck pace seems like it’s got a loose thread somewhere.

The three of us reach flatter ground, run on into the woods. This forest is normal-size, the trees lifeless grayer versions of the trees you’d see around Dunbarrow. We push our way through low bushes, strange black clumps of flowers. I’m peering into the mist, convinced that at any moment I’ll see Ash’s pale hair, the Widow’s white gown, perhaps hear a snatch of Ilana’s muddled twin-speak. I nearly walk right into the Shepherd, who’s crouched down like a hunter.

“What is it?” I whisper.

He shushes me, pointing at the forest floor. He’s looking at a small silver coin, not a sort that I recognize. It looks ancient, rough, and chipped. There’s a bird stamped into the metal.

Ham sniffs at it, then recoils as though it tried to bite him.

“It is a problem,” the Shepherd says quietly.

“Are we in danger?”

“Yes. But not from the Ahlgrens,” he says. He examines the Book of Eight, ripples and eddies of ink swimming across the double-page spread. He frowns, not liking what he sees. “No choice,” he says to himself. “Having found its mark, we cannot retreat. We have to go past it.”

“Go past what?” I ask.

“The less you know of such matters, the better,” he says, closing the Book. “It will really do you no good to understand. Do not speak to them. Whatever you do.”

“Speak to who?” I ask.

He leads off without another word, leaving me and Ham to skulk along in his wake. What on earth is happening? I notice more and more coins, all the same sort, silver with a bird stamped into them. I think it might be a raven or a crow, some kind of carrion bird. At first it looks like someone dropped a purse; and then, as the coins grow more numerous, like we might be walking through a grove of money trees that are dropping ripe fruit; and finally, when you can’t even see the ground anymore, I imagine a blizzard of silver pieces, blanketing the earth in money. Our feet slide in the coins, sending them jittering and jangling over one another. It’s impossible to walk quietly, and again I’m seized with the fear that Ash might be lying in wait for us.

Then I hear the voices, and a different kind of fear grabs at me.

They’re low, urgent voices, chanting like monks at prayer. They seem to be coming from all around us, echoing through the fog and the trees. I clink my way across the coin-strewn ground, the voices growing louder with every step, knowing that whatever we’re about to see, I desperately don’t want to see it. We move out of the forest, onto a great plain that shimmers with drifts of silver pieces, and I see the source of the noise.

The plain is covered with stakes — long, sharpened poles of wood, a little taller than I am. On each stake is a severed head, all facing the same direction, positioned at regular intervals across the plain, and they’re all chanting, or perhaps babbling; it’s hard to tell. The sight is so gruesome and strange that I barely know what to do. The Shepherd forges ahead, boots scattering the coins underfoot, and me and Ham follow him, afraid of this place but more afraid of being left behind. Ham’s tail is between his legs, and he refuses to look up from the silver-coated ground.

The heads are all human, and they’re mostly men. Some are bearded; some aren’t. There are men from every country and nation you can think of. As I pass, the heads see me, tilt downward to catch my eyes. Their lips move.

“I say, boy,” one says.

“Agua,” another says, wheezing. “Agua . . .”

Some of them wear helmets: bronze helmets, steel helmets, helmets made from dried bamboo padding. Some of them wear the full-faced helmets of medieval knights; others wear a wreath of leaves. I see one head wearing a gas mask, a housefly spliced with a morose elephant.

“You there, who are you?” a head asks me, in the tone of someone used to being obeyed. I walk on, ignore him. The Shepherd is just ahead of me, his hunched shape half-visible in the mist, silently winding his way through the stakes.

“If you could just loosen my bonds,” one sweating, sallow head pleads as we pass him.

“I’ll tell you where it’s buried,” a man with no teeth and a huge black beard promises.

“Please help us.”

“Boy!”

“Pardon me, sir . . .”

The heads harangue and plead, wheedle and beg; they mock and abuse us as we pass. I don’t speak to any of them. I put one foot in front of the other.

The Shepherd walks onward, occasionally checking to make sure me and Ham are still behind him, sometimes looking down at the Book of Eight. The stakes grow thicker and more numerous, the heads closer together, chanting and babbling, all facing the same direction. When the stakes are so thick that we’re knocking into them as we walk, the mist thins, and I see what stands at the center of the plain.

It’s a tree, I think, or something like a tree: a black spiky shape breaking through the earth, coins heaped in shimmering drifts around its trunk, and enormous swords, eight of them, stuck into the earth in a circle around its base. Every part of the tree seems to have a bird perched on it, more black birds than I’ve ever seen in one place before; the tree itself isn’t visible, I realize, only the birds sitting on it, ravens or crows or something, cawing and squabbling and flapping their wings as they jockey for position, sometimes taking flight and landing on another spot of the tree. It’s like on a nature documentary when you see ants swarming over a hapless bug — the birds are that dense, the kind of creepy repetition you don’t often see outside of a computer screen. The tree, if that’s what it is, is mesmerizing. The heads cry louder as the tree comes into view, although I still can’t understand most of what they’re saying.

I fix my eyes on the coins, the ground, and hurry onward. The stakes become less dense again, the chanting of the heads less fervent. And then I hear a voice I recognize:

“Boss.”

I look up at the stake right in front of me. It’s him.

“Seriously, boss, I’m glad to see you!”

Shaved head, scar down his left cheek, a cross tattooed on his forehead. A flattened nose, gray eyes, snaggle teeth. Three gold rings punched through his right ear. And I’d know that voice anywhere.

“Please, boss,” the Judge says, “you gotta get me out of here.”

I swallow.

“You promised, boss,” he says, “remember? Said you wouldn’t send us to Hell. Well, look at me now. Help me out. Get me down off here.”

“Sorry,” I say under my breath.

The Judge’s head looks at me with openmouthed glee and begins to scream. It isn’t his voice anymore: it sounds like a bird, the cry of a vicious hawk with a baby rabbit in its claws. The other heads take up the bitter scream, their voices becoming an inhuman noise, beyond words.

The Shepherd is looking back at me, horror on his waxy white face.

“RUN!” he screams. “RUN, YOU STUPID BOY!”

I don’t need telling twice. The heads are screaming, and I hear the beating of wings. Me and Ham take off like rockets, dodging between the stakes, my feet slipping on the coins, convinced at every step that I’ll fall and whatever’s after us will have me —

The Shepherd’s moving faster than I thought possible, sprinting like a champion athlete across the terrible plain. Ham’s running flat out, whimpering, coins spraying around his paws like sea foam. I chance a look behind us as we run.

The black tree is exploding in slow motion, unraveling, birds flying from its branches and trunk into a whirling cloud that seems to cover the gray sky. As I take a second glance, I see them diving down at us.

I scramble up a bank, coins jangling and rolling, grabbing desperately at roots and stones beneath them.

We’re in the woods again. The heads are behind us. Ham yowls madly in the trees. I can’t see him. I can’t see the Shepherd, and I —

Something black flies down through the mist, cawing. It’s a bird, a raven, with a stone beak and silver coins for eyes. It dives at my face and I thrash it away, still running, my hand throbbing with cold where I hit the creature.

There are more of them, black flashes above me as I run. I’m hurtling through gray woods, no idea where I’m going. I skid down a bank, sending coins flying, the birds crying harshly in the gray mist. I’m completely out of control, and when I trip over a root and fall flat on my face, it’s almost a relief.

The birds land in a circle around me. They’re made of shadow, the way the Fury was, although whether they’re demons or some other kind of spirit isn’t clear to me. There’s a pause while we look at one another, me on my hands and knees, them glaring back with glinting coin eyes. The nearest shadow bird screams, a high, horrible sound like a chain saw ripping into metal, and they leap at me.

I do the only thing I can do: I cover my eyes with one hand, frightened by the birds’ cruel flint beaks, and lunge at them with my sigil. The ring blazes with cold, sending shock waves of icy power through my body, and I convulse like I’m having a fit. The birds scream louder, and I feel their wings beat at me, their stone beaks tearing at my back and legs, but I swing my sigil toward them. The coldness grows, white light streaming from my sigil ring, and when it fades, the birds are gone. I’m on my own in Deadside, crouched in the gray forest, surrounded by a freshly fallen pile of silver coins.

I trek through the forest alone and across a barren gray moor, concentrating on walking forward, keeping one foot in front of the other, not sure what my plan is now. I try to hold my companions in my mind as I walk, remembering what the Shepherd said: that to will yourself to find something in Deadside is how you will come upon it. Ham and the Shepherd. The Shepherd and Ham. Did the birds take them? What happened?

I shouldn’t have spoken. What even was that place? The Shepherd should’ve . . . but he told me not to speak. He told me what I needed to know.

Ham and the Shepherd. Ham and the Shepherd. I’ll find them, and we’ll make our way to the Lake. Save Elza. We can still do this. I’ll do it alone if I have to. Without the Book . . . no, keep walking. I can’t give up.

Ham and the Shepherd.

Ham and the Shepherd. I try to hold them in my mind as clearly as I can. Ham’s stupid marmalade eyes and the Shepherd’s cruel black ones, Ham’s long fluffy tail, the Shepherd’s hooked nose and full waxy lips.

This is where I’ll find them, I insist as I climb a low hill.

This is it. They’ll be right here.

To my amazement the mist clears and I come upon them, waiting at the base of a huge dead tree. The Shepherd is leaning against its gray trunk, examining the Book, and Ham is lying on his side in the grass at its base.

“Hey!” I shout.

It worked! I can’t believe it actually worked. I never thought I’d be glad to see the Shepherd, but here he is, and despite his sour ways, aren’t we starting to get along —

The Shepherd walks up to me and, without a word, he strikes me across the face. It doesn’t hurt the way it would in the living world, but he’s strong enough to knock me flying, sending me thudding to the ground. He draws his boot back and kicks me in the stomach, and then in the throat for good measure.

“Damn idiot!” he yells. “You bungler! Do you understand what nearly became of us?”

Ham snarls and leaps between us, baring his teeth at the Shepherd. The ghost looks from me to my dog and backs off, still glaring with cold fury.

“Sorry,” I say, holding my hands up, both in supplication and to remind him who’s wearing the sigil. “I’m sorry! I just —”

“You just did the exact thing I told you not to do! You spoke to them!”

“It was the Judge —”

“Those things are no longer men! They are worshippers now!”

“What . . . what was that place?”

The Shepherd adjusts his hat, which had come askew when he hit me. He seems calmer now. Ham drops his hackles but still stands between me and the ghost.

“We had the misfortune to come across the Ravendark Tree,” the Shepherd says. “An old power. Older even than the Black Goat, though that one would never admit it.”

“It’s a . . . a god?”

“A shrine, of sorts. A living temple. As to what power is honored there, I think it is best not to know. An ancient and nameless spirit.”

“I’m . . . I’m sorry.”

“This world is not a game,” the Shepherd says. “If we had been slower, less lucky, it would be our heads on those poles, too, alongside the rest, singing that tree’s endless song.”

“We got away,” I say, getting to my feet. Ham presses himself against me, whining, and I stroke his head to soothe him.

“We did,” the Shepherd agrees. “Unfortunately your mistake has put us far off course. I had intended to leave the tree’s sacred grounds via an entirely different route.”

“We can’t catch them?”

“I do not believe so. Not now. Not on foot.”

“So what do you suggest?”

“There is a river nearby,” he says, pointing to a long ribbon of black ink that’s scrawled across his current page of the Book. “I believe we may be able to arrange transportation.”

We walk through gray heather, past gray copses of trees. Beyond a long stretch of dim marshes, we come to a stony riverbank and a fast-flowing black river.

“The Cocytus,” announces the Shepherd. “The River of Lamentations.”

The river water is strange, I realize: there are no reflections within it. The Cocytus is a swift flow of darkness, moving without sound or ripple. When I peer down into it, I can’t see the mirrored image of my own face. Nothing but blackness.

“Immerse the sigil in the river,” the Shepherd tells me, “and we will see what its Riverkeeper has to say to us.”

“What is a Riverkeeper?” I ask.

“A powerful spirit. Do nothing to incur its anger.”

“You’re sure about calling this thing?”

“With the time we have lost, I do not believe we have another option,” he says, not entirely reassuringly. “The Cocytus flows from the Shrouded Lake. If the Riverkeeper agrees to transport us upstream, I believe this to be our best chance of making it there before the Ahlgrens do.”

I don’t argue. I dip my right hand into the black water, immersing the sigil. It’s cold, unsurprisingly, although it doesn’t feel like putting your hand underwater. The sigil pulses with power. I withdraw my hand, and we wait.

For a while we get to rest. The Shepherd sits down, pores through the Book, occasionally removing his eyeglasses and peering intently at the pages.

Ham sits next to me, looking at the river with curious eyes. The trip’s been longer and more dangerous than I could’ve imagined, and we’re not done yet. I’m glad I didn’t leave him at home, though. I run my hands through his strange spirit fur. He grumbles. We sit like this for a while, and then without warning, the Riverkeeper emerges from the mist.

The spirit travels the Cocytus in a boat that reminds me of a gondola. The Riverkeeper’s boat seems to be made of bronze or brass, some dull-hued metal, elaborately engraved with spiraling designs. The gondola looks like it has been through a lot: it’s streaked with grime, some parts are dented and battered as though someone went at them with a hammer, and furry patches of white moss are clinging to the bits of the boat that ride higher above the water.

The Riverkeeper is a monster; there’s no other way to put it. The thing has to be eight feet tall at the least, more ogre than man, silently punting the gondola through the river of shadows. It wears a gray robe, something like a toga, spun from wool.

The monster’s boat glides closer to the shore and comes to a halt right in front of us, its brassy prow riding up onto the gray banks of the Cocytus. The enormous boatman steps lightly off the vessel and looks me up and down. Boatman might not be quite the right word, I realize now, because the left-hand side of the Riverkeeper’s face is unmistakably a woman’s. She has a sharp cheekbone, flowing blond hair, an eye as blank and silver as a ball of mercury. The right-hand side of the Riverkeeper’s face is male, head shaven, with half a blond beard and mustache, and an eye that seems to be a glowing red ember. Whether these differences in anatomy extend below the neck, I’m mercifully unclear, as the creature’s robe is all-concealing. The feet that walk across the gray stones toward our party are bare and look more animal than human, with clawed hairy toes. I notice that the Shepherd is kneeling, and I decide it would be best if I did likewise.

Ham cringes beside me. I keep one hand resting on his paw. I press my forehead to the riverbank.

The Riverkeeper speaks, two voices as one, a low masculine rumble and a lighter, colder female tone. I don’t understand a single word the creature says.

“I will parley with them,” the Shepherd hisses to me.

“What language is that?”

“A spirit tongue. It was spoken when our world was young. Fortunately I am fluent.”

“So parley, then,” I hiss back.

The Shepherd, still kneeling but now looking up at the creature, answers in the same language. When he speaks, it still sounds like nothing on earth. The Riverkeeper responds, perhaps impatiently. The Shepherd says something else. He gesticulates. He bows his head to the ground at one point, and I do the same. The Riverkeeper laughs, a horrible sound, and gestures at us in a way that seems indulgent somehow. I’m looking up at its long, split face, half male and half female, yet strangely coherent as a whole. The silver eye blinks, I notice, but the red-ember eye never does.

After a while the Shepherd stands upright, and I do, too. The Riverkeeper is making an extended point. It holds up two fingers, and then says something else and holds up one. The Shepherd nods and turns to me.

“The Riverkeeper is moved by our tale,” he says, “and is prepared to offer us passage so that you may avenge your beloved and return her to life.”

“Well, that’s very kind of it.”

“They do not offer us passage for free,” the Shepherd continues, smoothly. “A toll must be paid to sail the River of Lamentations.”

“Right.” I look at the monster’s strange face. “So what does it want from me?”

“The standard rate,” the Shepherd says.

“Which is what, exactly?”

“A tooth for each supplicant,” he says, as if we were discussing the weather, “and a finger for the master.”

“Wait —”

“These are reasonable terms,” the Shepherd tells me. “If you refuse, we will not make it to the Shrouded Lake in time.”

“Whose teeth are we talking about? Whose finger?”

“Yours, of course,” the Shepherd says, as though talking to a child.

The Riverkeeper addresses me in its doubled voice.

“They say you are free to choose which teeth, and which finger. The Riverkeeper is not ungenerous in these matters.”

“Shit,” I say under my breath. “Is this going to hurt?”

“I have never paid a river toll myself,” the Shepherd says. “But from what I have heard, it is one of the less painful ways to lose a finger.”

I look at the monster, at the bronze boat, at the dark, silent river flowing past us. Time’s running out. Ash already had a lead on us, and after that horrible incident with the Ravendark Tree . . . I don’t know what to do. I like my fingers, and my teeth as well. We’ve all had a good run together. But I want Elza back. I didn’t come this far to turn back now. You have to choose what you’ll give up to get what you want. With magic, I’m learning, nothing comes without a price. And I mean, fingers, what are they good for, really? Pressing buttons? Pointing? If you didn’t have a little finger, if you were just born without one, would you even really consider yourself at a disadvantage? It’s not like losing a hand. Worst that’ll happen is I can’t look posh and drink tea with my pinkie in the air.

“All right,” I say. “Fine. Let’s get this over with.”

“I would advise that you offer up the back teeth,” the Shepherd says. “Less visible.”

“Just what I was thinking,” I say, sounding braver than I feel.

The Riverkeeper motions with one long-fingered hand, a Shall we move along? sort of gesture.

“Tell it one back tooth from the left, one from the right,” I say to the Shepherd. “And the little finger . . . on my left hand. That’s my offer. And I want to be taken right to the Shrouded Lake.”

The Shepherd speaks again in the spirit language. The Riverkeeper nods.

“They accept,” he tells me.

I swallow. This is for Elza. If I don’t do this, I’ll never see her again. What’s a pair of teeth and a finger compared with that? A finger for her whole body and mind? A couple of teeth so I can see her smile again? It’s a bargain.

“Get on with it, then,” I say.

The Riverkeeper motions for me to open my mouth, and I do; the creature reaches inside, stooping in order to do so, and its long, spiky fingers jostle against my tongue and teeth. The giant’s hand tastes of metal and earth, a dull, sour flavor. The fingers find the teeth it wants, the molars at the very back, top left and bottom right, and they twist and tug at them as if trying to undo a knot. With a rush of heat, I feel the teeth give way — it doesn’t hurt, not the way it would in Liveside, because they’re just the spirit of my teeth — and the creature withdraws its hand, two of my white teeth stuck through with its bronze fingernails. The Riverkeeper holds them up to the gray light of Deadside, examining them with its silver eye and burning eye for flaws or weaknesses, and then, satisfied, it takes a small leather bag from inside its robe and stashes my teeth inside.

“And now the little finger,” pronounces the Shepherd.

I hold out my left hand, quivering only slightly. The Riverkeeper smiles for the first time, revealing bronze teeth that are shaped like trowels: blunt scraping instruments. It bends down toward me, gently fitting my little finger inside its mouth. I close my eyes and try to think about Elza’s face.

Our passage along the Cocytus, the River of Lamentations, is swift and mostly silent. We travel against the current, the logic of Liveside’s rivers having no hold over this flow of shadows. The Riverkeeper stands at the back of the bronze boat, punting us along with a wooden pole. The monster is silent as we travel; it sings no songs, neglects to point out notable features of the spirit world as we pass them. I sit in the middle of the gondola, legs crossed, with Ham’s furry head resting on my lap. I stroke his ears and rub his snout. The Shepherd sits at the boat’s prow, silent, unmoving, like a figurehead.

The sky overhead is hidden by gray fog, the banks of the Cocytus equally gray and barren of feature. We pass gray sandbanks, gray rocks, the occasional gray willow tree that droops down into the black water. The river runs through gray canyons of dizzying sheerness and steepness; runs through gray fields of astonishing flatness and drabness.

There’s no blood on my hand, no pain at all. It looks like I was born without a finger. There’s just a nub, a strange absence. The Riverkeeper sheared it off with a single bite and then let my finger drop from its mouth into its clay-colored hands. It examined the digit with the pride of an angler who’s reeled in a big fish, with the avarice of a diamond merchant presented with a flawless stone. Then the Riverkeeper took a golden box from its robes, the sort of thing you might keep a wedding ring in, and carefully tucked my finger away.

The river runs on. Nothing seems to swim in it, fortunately. We pass through a landscape of standing stones, each monolith higher than a house, arranged in a monotonous pattern that stretches as far as I can see. We pass under an elegant bridge, lit by hanging lanterns, and for a brief flash, I think I can see a child looking down at us. We sail through areas where the river is so wide and slow you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a lake, a swamp, and I see islands crammed with gray mangrove trees. We sail through narrow chasms where the Cocytus runs fast as a fairground ride, the Riverkeeper expertly punting us upstream through ferocious rapids without the boat ever seeming in danger of capsizing. We sail past a bank where a herd of black horses with human heads are drinking from the water. They look up at us as we pass by, their eyes white and blank as marbles, but none of them says a word.

“Is this what happens when you die?” I ask as the monstrous horses fade into the fog.

“Pardon?” the Shepherd asks. He doesn’t turn around.

“This,” I say. “Is this it? Because I used to think, how sad to hang around on earth when you’re dead. But now . . .”

“You have started to see it as the better of two bad choices,” the Shepherd says. “You feel that the underworld is a place apparently designed to blaspheme against all that men feel to be good and decent. You see that Asphodel is a labyrinth built by a madman, a twilit chaos, where water flows uphill and night never falls and man and beast have become intertwined.”

“Something like that.”

“I cannot say I disagree,” the Shepherd says after a pause. “There are places worse than Asphodel, hard as that may be to believe. Tartarus, for example. The darkness.”

“I mean, this is where I’m going when I die? Where everyone goes? Gray mist and horrible things trying to eat you?”

“Perhaps,” the Shepherd says. “I have come to believe that, if there is a realm of perpetual mist, and a realm of perpetual darkness, there must be a realm of sunlight to match.”

“You think that?”

“I will never see it,” he says. “And I have never spoken to any who have been there and returned from its borders.”

The river flows. Our gondolier pushes against the riverbed, lifts the pole, pushes again. All I can see is fog, black water.

“Then again,” the Shepherd says at last, almost to himself, “who would be willing to leave Paradise?”

Hours, maybe days, pass, and then we come to a waterfall.

The falls are silent as the river, a colossal torrent of shadows, plummeting down a high ridge of gray granite. My questions about how we’ll navigate this obstacle are answered when we sail up to the fall of darkness and then, without any apparent effort, are punting up it. The waterfall is below us, with the river rising behind our boat like a wall. There’s no sense of gravity changing, no vertigo. We were traveling horizontally, and now we’re sailing vertically instead. There’s no more and no less to it than that.

The fog thickens as we ascend the black waterfall, the grayness gathering so close around our boat that I can’t see the Shepherd, can’t see Ham, can’t even see myself. And just as I think things can’t get any grayer, as I start to believe time itself has stopped, that I’m only a mind floating disembodied in a void, we break through the fog into a vast open space, and I see that we’ve come to the end of our journey.