The Bone Tithe Collector

• Chapter 1 The Ledger of Ostracon
• Chapter 2 Shortage at Blackbarrow
• Chapter 3 The Unclaimed Rib
• Chapter 4 Tracks in the Calcium Dust
• Chapter 5 The Walking Ledger
• Chapter 6 Echoes in the Ossuary
• Chapter 7 The Missing Marrow
• Chapter 8 Whispers Beneath the Silt
• Chapter 9 The Cartographer of Graves
• Chapter 10 A Skeleton in the Orchard
• Chapter 11 The Tithe-Keeper’s Curse
• Chapter 12 Dance of the Reassembled
• Chapter 13 The Hollow Pit
• Chapter 14 The Necromancer's Debt
• Chapter 15 Unnatural Assemblage
• Chapter 16 Shadows of the Catacombs
• Chapter 17 The Sovereign Skull
• Chapter 18 March of the Shards
• Chapter 19 The Broken Crypt
• Chapter 20 Blood and Bone Dust
• Chapter 21 The Collector’s Reckoning
• Chapter 22 The Bone-Bound Army
• Chapter 23 Vault of the Undying
• Chapter 24 The Final Audit
• Chapter 25 Stripping the Skeleton
• Chapter 26 Paid in Full

The ink in the Ossuary-General was never black. It was a thick, curdled grey, mixed with the soot of incinerated pelvic bones and a dash of vinegar to keep it from rotting in the well.

Vaelen rubbed his thumb across the nib of his iron quill, leaving a smudge the exact color of a wet tombstone. Around him, the Great Scriptorium of Ostracon hummed with the dry, rasping sound of three hundred clerks scratching at sheepskin. It was a sound not unlike a plague of locusts chewing through a field of dry wheat, and to Vaelen’s ears, it was just as ominous. Every scrape of a quill recorded a death, a debt, or a birth—which, in the eyes of the High Patriarch of the Bone Tithe, was merely a future debt waiting to mature.

He adjusted his spectacles, the lenses of which were ground from cloudy quartz and mounted in a heavy brass frame that pinched the bridge of his nose. Before him lay the Great Ledger of the Southern Marches, a massive volume bound in cured human hide, its corners capped with polished copper. The page he was currently auditing was dedicated to the province of Oakhaven, a soggy, miserable stretch of pine forest and peat bogs that was currently six months overdue on its skeletal obligations.

"You’re squinting again, Vaelen," a voice wheezed from the neighboring desk.

Vaelen did not look up. He knew the voice belonged to Master Scribe Jeremy, a man who had spent forty-two years in the Scriptorium and now resembled a dried pear with a comb-over. "The light in this sector is atrocious, Jeremy. The candle-maker is skimpy on the tallow again. I suspect he’s skimming the fat from the rendering vats."

"He wouldn't dare," Jeremy muttered, his quill never pausing its rhythmic scritch-scratch. "The Patriarch has people flayed for less. Fat is fuel, and fuel belongs to the Order. If you cannot see, use your inner eye. Or better yet, write larger."

"Writing larger means using more parchment, which means more sheep must be slaughtered, which increases the tallow supply but decreases the mutton yield, thereby upsetting the entire agricultural balance of the lower valleys," Vaelen said, his voice flat, mechanical, and entirely devoid of joy. "I prefer to squint."

He dipped his quill into the grey ink and drew a neat, thin line through the entry for Oakhaven: Parish of St. Jude. They had settled their arrears three days late, delivering forty-two humeri, eighty-six ribs, and a moderately intact skull that had belonged to a village blacksmith. The skull had been rejected twice by the inspectors for teeth rot, but Vaelen had allowed it through after a bribe of three jars of pickled eels from the village elder. A man had to eat, after all, and the rations provided by the Scriptorium consisted mostly of barley porridge that tasted of lime dust.

To the uninitiated, the Grand Order of the Bone Tithe was a terrifying entity of dark magic and necromantic dominion. To Vaelen, it was simply an incredibly tedious bureaucracy.

The world ran on bones. They were the mortar of the empire, the timber of the grand fortresses, the fuel for the soul-forges, and the very soldiers that guarded the borders against the wild, screaming things that lived in the dark spaces beyond the maps. When a man died in the empire, his soul went to whatever gods he had managed to placate, but his skeleton belonged to the state. It was a simple, logical contract. The living enjoyed the protection of the silent, bone-built walls and the tireless labor of the skeletal work-gangs; in return, they surrendered their scaffolding when they no longer had any use for it.

But people were notoriously selfish about their dead. They hid their grandmothers in the floorboards. They buried their uncles deep in the peat bogs where the acid would dissolve the calcium before the collectors could arrive. They traded ribs to hedge-wizards for charms against the ague.

It was Vaelen’s job to find the discrepancies. He was not a warrior, nor was he a necromancer of any great renown, though he knew enough of the basic animating cantrips to keep a severed hand from crawling off his desk. He was a Collector-Investigator, third class. His weapon of choice was a six-pound ledger, and his shield was a rigid adherence to the tax codes of the Sovereign Arch.

The heavy oak doors at the end of the Scriptorium creaked open, the sound echoing off the vaulted stone ceiling. The scratching of three hundred quills instantly stopped. The silence that followed was heavy, cold, and absolute.

Vaelen looked up. Walking down the central aisle was a figure clad in the deep crimson robes of the High Prefect’s personal guard. Behind him came a carriage-driver, recognizable by his heavy oilskin coat and the thick grease under his fingernails, carrying a iron-bound dispatch box.

The red-robed guard stopped at Vaelen’s desk. He did not speak. He simply placed a heavy brass key on the ledger and pointed a gloved finger at the dispatch box.

"Is this for the Southern Marches?" Vaelen asked, his voice sounding thin in the vast, silent hall.

"It is from Blackbarrow," the guard said, his voice muffled by the iron grate of his visor. "The autumn harvest is short. Significantly short."

Vaelen sighed, a long, weary sound that seemed to express the collective exhaustion of his ancestors. Blackbarrow was a mining town nestled in the jagged grey teeth of the Wyrmtooth Mountains. It was a harsh place, where the earth was hard and the people were harder. They mined coal and iron, but their most important export was the sturdy, thick-walled bones of miners who had spent their lives hauling heavy carts. Miner’s bone was highly prized by the military; it was dense, resistant to fracturing, and made excellent heavy infantry shields when fused together by the flesh-weavers.

"How short?" Vaelen asked, reaching for the brass key.

"See for yourself," the guard replied. "The collector for that district, Brother Thomas, did not return with the shipment. Only the driver made it back, along with three crates of limestone dust and a wagon that was largely empty."

Vaelen unlocked the dispatch box. Inside lay the local registry for Blackbarrow, its leather cover stained with dark, greasy spots that smelled faintly of old lard. He opened it to the current fiscal year.

According to the demographic projections, based on the average mortality rate of a coal-mining town with poor ventilation and frequent tunnel collapses, Blackbarrow should have yielded eighty-four complete skeletons, ninety-two partials, and at least three hundredweight of loose fragment bone for the mortar-mixers.

The manifest signed by the village headman, however, listed only twelve complete skeletons. And even those, according to a frantic scrawl in the margin by Brother Thomas before he disappeared, were "of questionable structural integrity and strangely light."

"Where is the driver?" Vaelen asked, looking past the guard to the shivering man in the oilskin coat.

The driver stepped forward, twisting his greasy hat in his hands. His eyes were wide and bloodshot, the yellowed whites showing clearly against his soot-stained skin. "I didn't see nothing, master. I swear it. I just drove the team. Brother Thomas went up to the ossuary at the edge of the town to oversee the loading. He was gone for three days. On the fourth day, the wagons were rolled out of the yard, already sheeted over with tarpaulins. The headman told me Thomas had taken a pony and gone ahead to the next parish. I didn't look under the sheets until I reached the toll-gate at the river. That’s when I saw we was hauling rocks and dust. Just grey lime and gravel."

"And Brother Thomas?" Vaelen asked.

"Never saw him again, master. But... but there was something else." The driver lowered his voice, his eyes darting toward the high, dark corners of the scriptorium as if expecting the shadows to reach down. "The crates we did bring back. The twelve skeletons. They weren't lying down like they ought to. When I stopped the wagon at night, I could hear 'em. In the back. A sort of... dry clicking. Like a beetle trapped in a cupboard."

"Woodworms," Jeremy offered from the next desk, not looking up. "The mountain parishes are notorious for woodworms in the coffin-planks. They get into the marrow cavities. Highly annoying. You have to smoke them out with sulfur before you can apply the animating grease."

"No, master," the driver whispered, shaking his head vehemently. "It weren't worms. Worms don't try to slide the bolts on the inside of a shipping crate. And they don't leave finger-marks in the grease on the tailboard."

Vaelen closed the ledger with a dull thud. The grey ink on his fingers had dried, leaving his hands looking cold and dead, much like the specimens he spent his life cataloging. He looked at the key, then at the ledger, and finally at the red-robed guard.

"This is an administrative failure," Vaelen said. "A simple matter of withholding state property. The villagers are likely hoarding the remains to avoid the winter labor tax. If they have no skeletons to surrender, they cannot be drafted for the road-building brigades."

"The Scriptorium does not tolerate failures, administrative or otherwise," the guard said. "The High Patriarch has personally noted the deficit. The army is preparing for the spring campaign in the western wastes, and we require three thousand fresh heavy-infantry pikes. If Blackbarrow does not pay its tithe, the Scriptorium will take the equivalent weight from the living population of the district."

Vaelen winced slightly. That was a messy business. The living were far more difficult to audit than the dead; they screamed, they bled, and they tended to ruin the structural integrity of their bones by fighting back during the harvesting process. It was highly inefficient.

"I will go myself," Vaelen said, reaching for his traveling satchel—a stiff, square leather case that held his traveling ledgers, three spare quills, a bottle of stable ink, and a small brass scale for weighing bone fragments. "I can reach Blackbarrow before the first heavy snows close the passes. I will find Brother Thomas, collect the missing weight, and correct the ledger."

"And if the bones are not in the village?" the guard asked.

Vaelen adjusted his quartz spectacles, his eyes appearing unnaturally large and pale behind the thick lenses. "The dead do not walk away on their own, soldier. If they are missing, someone has moved them. And whoever has moved them has committed grand larceny against the Sovereign Arch. I will find the thieves, and I will draft them into the collection wagons to make up the weight."

He stood up, his joints making a dry, cracking sound that matched the rhythm of the room. He strapped his ledger to his chest, slung his satchel over his shoulder, and walked down the long, cold aisle of the Scriptorium, leaving the scratching of the three hundred quills behind him.

The road to Blackbarrow was not so much built as it was tolerated. It wound upward through the jagged, pine-choked ravines of the Wyrmtooth Mountains like a black ribbon dropped by a careless giant, thick with frozen mud and bordered by deep, silent ditches that smelled of rotting bracken and wet iron.

Vaelen sat in the corner of the mail-coach, his knees drawn up toward his chin to avoid the damp draft whistling through the floorboards. Across from him sat the driver, a man named Gallow who had spent the last three days refusing to look Vaelen in the eye, and a silent, shivering boy of fourteen who had been hired at the last coaching inn to grease the axles. Every time the heavy iron-shod wheels struck a pothole, the brass scales in Vaelen’s satchel clinked against his iron inkwell, a small, rhythmic reminder of his purpose that sounded like a coin dropping into an empty collection plate.

By the afternoon of the fourth day, the pine forests began to thin, replaced by scarred hillsides of grey shale and the dark, yawning mouths of abandoned coal shafts. This was the fringe of Blackbarrow’s domain. The air here was different; it carried a gritty, alkaline bite that coated the tongue and made the eyes water. It was the dust of the crushers, where the low-grade limestone was ground into powder to mix with the mortar that held the empire’s frontier outposts together.

"We’re close now, master," Gallow muttered, his knuckles white on the leather reins as he stared straight ahead through the sleet. "Just over this ridge. If the wind stays behind us, we’ll make the gates before the light fails entirely. Though if you ask me, there’s no great hurry to get inside."

"I did not ask you, Gallow," Vaelen said, his fingers tracing the embossed leather of the ledger on his lap. "And the Scriptorium does not recognize the concept of a late arrival. The tax year ends in forty-eight days. If the accounting is not completed before the first hard freeze, the interest rates compound by five percent per week. The villagers would find that far more unpleasant than a cold ride."

"They might," Gallow mumbled, spitting a dark stream of tobacco juice into the slush beside the wheel. "But then, the dead don't pay interest."

The coach rounded the crest of the ridge, and Blackbarrow revealed itself in the grey twilight. It was a miserable, tiered settlement that clung to the side of a massive, amphitheater-like quarry. The houses were built of rough-cut slate, their roofs weighted down with heavy stones to keep the mountain gales from tearing them away. Smoke rose from dozens of stone chimneys, but it did not rise high; the cold, heavy air of the valley pressed it down, wrapping the entire town in a greasy, sulfurous shroud that tasted of wet coal and old lard.

At the eastern edge of the quarry, standing like a rotten tooth against the grey sky, was the parish ossuary. It was a circular tower of dressed granite, its narrow arrow-slits dark and empty. This was where the harvest was supposed to be stored—a consecrated dry-house where the flesh was systematically stripped, the marrow drained, and the clean calcium cataloged before being shipped down-valley. Now, however, the heavy oak doors of the tower hung slightly askew on their iron hinges, and there was no sign of the yellow tallow lanterns that should have marked the presence of the resident collector.

The carriage rattled through the town gates, which were nothing more than two massive posts of pine reinforced with rusted bands of mine-iron. No guards challenged them. A few miners, their faces blackened with coal dust until they resembled soot-demons with white eyes, paused in the slush to watch the coach pass. They did not wave or offer greeting; they simply stared with the dull, heavy hostility of people who knew that any visitor from the lowlands was there to take something away from them.

The coach pulled up in the central square, a muddy expanse dominated by a large timber gallows and the village well. A small group of men was already waiting there, led by a tall, raw-boned individual wearing a heavy coat of wolf-skin over a grease-stained leather apron. This was Elder Bradley, the secular administrator of the district, whose family had run the Blackbarrow mines for three generations.

Vaelen climbed down from the carriage, his joints popping in the freezing air. He adjusted his quartz spectacles, which immediately fogged over from the heat of his own breath. He wiped them clean with a corner of his wool sleeve and looked Bradley up and down.

"You are late with your report, Elder," Vaelen said, his voice carrying the flat, dry tone of the Scriptorium. "And your shipment was seventy-two skeletons light. I am Vaelen, Collector-Investigator, third class. I have come to audit your churchyard."

Bradley did not offer his hand. He merely grunted, his breath forming a thick plume of white steam between them. "We sent what we had, Scribe. The winter was hard, but the dying was thin. A man can’t help when his neighbors choose to keep breathing."

"The demographic projections for this parish, based on forty years of actuarial tables, indicate a standard mortality rate of four-point-two percent per annum," Vaelen replied, opening his leather satchel and pulling out a small, brass-bound register. "With the coal-damp explosion in the third shaft last June, and the subsequent outbreak of the grey-cough in the lower tenements, your expected yield was eighty-four complete adult specimens. You delivered twelve. Of those twelve, three were missing their clavicles, and one was entirely devoid of a left femur. That is not a shortage, Elder. That is a dissection."

"The shafts collapsed," Bradley said, his voice tightening. "The bodies are still down there, three hundred feet under the slate. If you want 'em, you can take a pick and a bucket and go dig 'em out yourself. My men are miners, not grave-robbers."

"The bone tithe is a prior lien on all mortal remains within the territory of the Sovereign Arch," Vaelen said, his finger pointing at the dry-stamped seal on the register. "Whether they are under three hundred feet of slate or sitting at your dinner table, they belong to the Scriptorium. If you cannot extract them, the cost of the labor required to do so will be added to your winter salt tax. Now, where is Brother Thomas?"

The miners behind Bradley shifted uncomfortably, their heavy leather boots squelching in the mud. Bradley looked down at his own fingernails, which were cracked and black with grease.

"Gone," the Elder said shortly. "Pack on his back, mule by the halter. He said he was going down to the lower parish at Oakhaven to check on their lambing-tax. That was ten days ago."

"Brother Thomas’s mule was found three miles down the road by the toll-keeper," Vaelen said. "The animal was still saddled, and its throat had been cut with a clean, straight stroke. Not by wolves, Elder. Wolves do not use a bone-handled skinning knife, nor do they leave the saddlebags intact."

Vaelen stepped closer, his small, pale eyes fixed on Bradley through the cloudy quartz of his lenses. "And then there is the matter of the twelve skeletons you did send. The driver reports they were... active."

One of the miners behind Bradley, a short, barrel-chested man with a scarred temple, made a quick, protective sign of the cross in the air. Bradley glared at him, and the man quickly dropped his hand into his pocket.

"The driver was drunk," Bradley said. "Gallow always was a man for the potato-spirit. He hears things in the wind."

"I do not rely on Gallow's ears," Vaelen said. "I rely on the physical evidence. When the crates were opened at the first river-gate, the bones were found to have significant grease-stains on the interior pine-wood. Fresh grease. Not the dried tallow used by the preservationists, but the yellow grease of living joints. Now, you will show me to the ossuary, Elder. We will begin the audit tonight."

Bradley looked as if he wanted to argue, his thick jaw bulging as he ground his teeth together. But he looked at the heavy brass seal on Vaelen’s ledger, and then at the iron-shod carriage behind him, and seemed to think better of it. The Scriptorium had three regiments of heavy bone-infantry stationed at the river-junction forty miles away; they did not eat, they did not sleep, and they were very thorough when it came to collecting arrears.

"Fine," Bradley spat. "But the tower’s cold. And we don’t keep candles there anymore. We’ve had to use the tallow for the mine-lanterns."

"I brought my own lights," Vaelen said. "And my own ink. Lead the way."

The walk up the winding shale path to the ossuary was silent save for the crunch of gravel underfoot. The wind had risen, howling through the pine needles with a sound like dry paper tearing. The smell of the town faded, replaced by the cleaner, colder scent of wet stone, but beneath it Vaelen could detect another odor—the faint, sweet, vinegar-like smell of old bone-wash.

The ossuary doors were indeed unlatched. They creaked open as Bradley pushed them, revealing a circular chamber some thirty feet across. The floor was flagged with grey slate, swept clean of everything except a thin, sparkling layer of white dust. Around the walls, rows of deep stone bins rose three stories high, accessed by a series of rotten pine galleries. These bins should have been stacked to the brim with organized bone: skulls in the lower tiers, long bones in the middle, and the rib-shards and vertebrae in the high, narrow niches near the roof.

Now, the bins were entirely empty. They looked like the nests of some great, extinct bird, dry and hollow.

"It’s clean," Bradley said, gesturing with a hand toward the empty bins. "We cleared it out for the harvest, just like Thomas asked. What’s left is in the lower crypts."

"And where are the parish records?" Vaelen asked, his boots clicking on the slate flags as he walked toward the center of the room. "The parish churchyard ledger should be kept in the desk by the hearth."

"Thomas had it with him," Bradley said. "In his saddlebags, I expect."

"No," Vaelen said, his voice flat. "The mule’s saddlebags contained only three spare shirts, a half-eaten loaf of rye, and a small iron pot. The ledger was not there. A collector does not travel without his ledger, Bradley. It is his authority. Without it, he is merely a man with a scale."

Vaelen knelt down on the cold floor. The white dust was thicker here, near the center of the room. He dipped his middle finger into the powder, brought it to his nose, and sniffed. It was not limestone dust. It was too dry, too sweet. It was bone-meal, the fine, flour-like substance created when two bones are rubbed together under great pressure.

He looked closer at the floor. In the thin layer of dust, there were marks. They were not the wide, flat tracks of heavy miners' boots, nor were they the marks of the hand-barrows used to carry the harvest. They were small, circular indentations, no larger than a silver piece, repeated in a strange, three-pointed pattern that wound from the center of the room toward the dark archway that led to the lower crypts.

They looked exactly like the marks left by the head of a humerus when it is used as a peg.

"You have had rats, Elder," Vaelen said, rising and wiping his hand on his breeches.

"We’ve always had rats," Bradley replied. "They get into the marrow-bins. Nothing you can do about it."

"Rats do not usually travel in three-legged pairs," Vaelen noted. "And they rarely have a stride of thirty inches."

He pulled a small leather case from his satchel, opened it to reveal three tallow candles of a pale, yellowish hue. These were not common fat-candles; they were made from the grease of consecrated sheep, mixed with a small amount of saltpetre to make them burn with a bright, blue-white flame that did not smoke in closed spaces. He struck a spark with his flint, lit one of the candles, and handed the other two to Gallow, who had followed them up the path with his collar turned up against the wind.

"Stay by the door, Gallow," Vaelen commanded. "If anyone approaches, blow your whistle. Elder, you will come with me."

"I've got work in the town," Bradley said, stepping back toward the entrance. "The night shift is going down the third shaft in an hour."

"The night shift can proceed without you," Vaelen said, his pale eyes gleaming in the blue light of the candle. "The Scriptorium’s business takes precedence over coal. If you refuse to assist an audit, I am authorized to declare this entire parish in administrative default. That means an immediate seizure of all movable property, including your personal stock of wolf-skins."

Bradley's face went dark, but he did not move. He let out a long, slow hiss of breath and stepped into the room, his heavy boots sounding loud in the empty space. "The crypts are through there," he said, pointing a thick finger at the dark archway. "But there’s nothing to see. Just old lime-pits and some empty bins."

"We shall see," Vaelen said.

He led the way down the narrow stone stairs, the blue candle-light throwing long, jumping shadows against the rough slate walls. The air grew colder as they descended, and the smell of sulfur and coal-smoke from the town faded completely, replaced by the deep, heavy damp of the earth.

At the bottom of the stairs lay the lower crypt, a long, low-ceilinged chamber supported by massive pillars of unshaped rock. In the center of the room were three large, rectangular pits, their edges lined with dark, greasy timber. These were the lime-pits, where the bodies of the poorer miners were laid after death to let the lime eat away the flesh before the bones were harvested.

Vaelen held his candle over the first pit. It was empty, save for a three-inch layer of greyish-green water that reflected the blue light like a greasy mirror. The lime had been exhausted; the water was cold and still.

"The twelve skeletons you delivered," Vaelen said, his voice echoing off the low ceiling. "They were taken from this pit?"

"Aye," Bradley said. "The last of the spring fever cases. We put 'em down in May. They should have been clean by now."

"They were clean," Vaelen said, looking down at the timber lining of the pit. "But they were not dead."

He pointed his candle at the wooden side of the pit. There, deep in the soft, rotting pine, were scratches. They were not the wide, blunt marks of a shovel or an iron rake. They were thin, sharp grooves, dozens of them, clustered together near the rim of the pit as if someone—or several someones—had been trying to find a purchase on the greasy wood to pull themselves out.

"The wood-worms again," Bradley said, though his voice was slightly higher now, his eyes darting toward the dark corners of the crypt.

"Wood-worms do not have fingernails, Bradley," Vaelen said. "And they do not leave five-fingered claw marks in three-inch pine. These bones were harvested before the marrow was dry. The animating grease was already in them."

"That’s impossible," Bradley muttered. "No one’s used the grease here since the old priest died three years back. We don't have the cantrips. The Scriptorium doesn't allow the local parishes to keep the oil."

"The Scriptorium does not allow many things that happen anyway," Vaelen said. He walked toward the far end of the crypt, where a smaller, arched doorway led into the old parish coal-cellar.

The door was made of heavy oak, reinforced with iron straps. It had been secured with a heavy iron bolt, but the bolt had been bent—not from the outside, as if someone had been trying to break in, but from the inside, the heavy iron bar twisted out of its bracket by some immense, slow pressure that had splintered the oak around it.

Vaelen pushed the door. It swung open with a dry, scraping sound, revealing a small, dark room that was entirely filled with coal-dust and shale.

But it was not empty.

In the center of the room, sitting on a heap of low-grade anthracite, was a wooden crate. It was one of the shipping boxes used by the Scriptorium, its side stamped with the three-pronged crown of the Ossuary-General. The lid had been smashed from within, the pine planks splintered and scattered across the coal-pile.

Vaelen approached the box, his candle held high. Inside lay a single, human skull.

It was not a clean skull. It was still dark with the grease of decomposition, its jawbone held to the cranium by a few dried threads of sinew. The teeth were remarkably white and sharp, showing clearly against the dark bone of the jaw.

As Vaelen watched, the skull’s lower jaw dropped open with a tiny, dry click. It stayed open for a second, then snapped shut with a sharp clack that sounded like a dry twig snapping.

Then, slowly, the skull began to tilt. It did not roll; it tilted systematically to the left, then to the right, as if searching for something in the blue light of the candle.

From the dark corners of the coal-pile, there was a sudden, dry rustling sound. It was the sound of dozens of small, hard objects shifting against the coal—not rats, but something lighter, sharper, and far more numerous.

"Elder," Vaelen said, his voice remaining perfectly level as he reached into his satchel for his brass scale. "I believe I have found your missing forty-two humeri. They appear to be looking for their ribs."