The dead are the realm’s largest single anxiety, and Britannia has built bell, ledger, watch and office around keeping them in the ground. Most of the time it works; the danger lies in the times it does not.
“Four in five of the graves I am called to are quiet graves that were made badly, and the remedy is an evening and a bell. I say so at every visitation. I am not believed, because nobody sends for me to be told that nothing is wrong.”
A death well kept
Death in Britannia is domestic before it is institutional. The body is washed, watched and prayed over, and on the first night somebody stays with it: partly for dignity, partly against theft, partly because an unsettled death is a poor thing to leave alone in a room. A lamp is kept, the parish bell sounds in its proper form, and iron, salt or a marked cloth may lie at the threshold. The neighbours who help are also quietly watching for a wrong quiet, a second voice, a mark that has changed, or a corpse that does not lie as it should.
Centuries of rite have made most funerals ordinary. The frightening case is the one where a familiar observance stops producing a familiar result, and mourning becomes evidence.
The ways the dead fail to stay
The unquiet grave is by far the commonest: a burial made in haste, in the wrong ground or season, or disturbed by water, building or theft. It walks nowhere. A room goes cold on one side, a dog will not pass a gate, servants leave. The office said again with the grave-bell settles it for the price of a candle. The unnamed dead are harder, since every burial office requires a name, and finding names is paid work in the cities.
The walking dead are treated as a season, not a wonder. Manors keep dog handlers for wolf and revenant season in the same paragraph of the same accounts. What rises after thaw is slow and silent and goes where it went in life. Sarrum burns its dead within the day and they do not walk. Elsewhere it is a Black Lantern suppression. Then there are presences that were never a body, for which no remedy is known and which the Wardens walk rather than cure, and the body somebody raised, which is a crime and not a kind.
The costly mistake
A frightened district wants the matter ended and sends for a suppressing order, paying eight to fifteen pounds for what a priest and a bell would have done for eleven shillings. The reverse error is rarer, and worse. Some dangers cross every jurisdiction: at the Dover Surf Revenants of 4582, harbour priests, tide men and paid hunters had to work as one line for half a season, the priests judging the dead and the ground, the tide men deciding when anything could be reached, and the hunters dealing with whatever moved.
When a company does not come back
What is found afterwards recurs across the realm: bodies drained past what the wound accounts for; bodies set hard that will not take an ordinary fire; bodies taken from the waist down, the upper half unmarked and the hands showing no defence; black blood on the grass that does not dry and is gone by morning. None of these is a kind of thing, yet each has been entered under revenant, vampire or blight by brothers whose form required a word.
Molling Marsh, a fen village of about ninety souls, stopped answering its bells in September 4586. A company of six went in for three pounds and four came back. The militia fired into fog and whatever bled did not pursue. Eleven villagers came out alive; seventy-nine were neither alive nor still. The Sarrum book entered it as a vampire attack, and a later hand has written in the margin that he does not believe it. Four comparable events have occurred since, each entered under a different name, and nobody has read them together.
At the table
A lane cleared of the restless dead is an improvement in carriage, a work of mercy and a preparation for the promised king, and one shilling pays for all three. Companies clear the dead troubling a burial line, hold bounds for suppressing houses and walk bad roads after thaw. They should also know that the most dangerous part of a death may begin after the monster is gone, when households, creditors, a parish and an insurer all ask who may call the dead person theirs. And the commission that would set four suppression books side by side remains untaken.