Chapter Seven
The Gatekeeper vanished mid-sentence, again.
He’d often done so. Nanda had found it startling, at first — rude, even — until she recollected that people did not cease to expire, just because she personally had need of their Guide into the Deathlands. He had, at intervals, to go and intercept some freshly-deceased soul, and dispatch it to its destined spot.
It, no. He, or she; these were people, or recently had been. They were not featureless objects. But it could be hard to keep hold of such mortal concepts in the city of the dead. The longer she wandered those hushed streets, the more her own life receded from her mind and heart, and the more she felt like a shade herself. Insubstantial, detached, ethereal.
She had, sometimes, to remind herself why she was there at all.
