The Catacombs of Commerce were not reached by descending, but by decaying downward—a slow linguistic erosion of altitude, where the streets softened into sibilance beneath their boots. Veyne and Mirth moved through the Alimentary Districts, where the brickwork grew porous, honeycombed by the constant whisper of trade secrets, and the cobblestones had been worn smooth by the fricative friction of ten thousand haggling tongues.
"He comes," Mirth said, her canned-words clacking a warning rhythm. "Listen for the preservation."
Veyne heard it: a hissing, but not the clean hiss of steam or serpent. This was the sound of slowing, the acoustic equivalent of formaldehyde. It was the noise that time made when it was arrested, dragged backward into the amber of perpetuity.
Ssssszavor.
The Embalmer dropped from the archway above—not fell, but precipitated, condensing out of the humid air like crystals in a solution oversaturated with nostalgia. He landed without impact because he had eliminated the momentum from his personal narrative, editing out the violence of gravity.
He wore white, not the white of Sister Mirth's blank-page innocence, but the white of bone stripped by linguistic acid, of pages bleached by censorship. His coat was rubber, gleaming with the wet reflection of things that refused to rot. In his hands, he carried no weapon of iron or steel, but a syringe of distilled hiatus—a needle capable of injecting pauses into a man's bloodstream, freezing him between heartbeats for eternity.
"Necrocurator," the Embalmer said, and his voice was the sound of s extended into infinity. "You carry the unwritten. The Senator's draft belongs in the archives, not in motion."
"You would pickle the revolution," Veyne said, his hand moving to his quill. "Preserve it in brine before it can breathe."
"I would save it," the Embalmer corrected, raising his syringe. "For future study. For the record. All things must be archived, Ashenford. Even rebellion. Especially rebellion—lest we forget the taste of it."
He moved, not with speed, but with duration. He extended the moment of his lunge, making it last three seconds, then five, a sustained attack that existed in the imperfect tense—was attacking—never quite completing the transition to the simple past.
Veyne struck first. He invoked the First Class of Death-Sounds, the Fricatives of Decay.
"Sssssseraphim," he hissed.
The word left his teeth not as meaning but as erosion. The air between them corroded, oxidizing into rust-colored syntax that crumbled as it touched the Embalmer's white coat. The sibilants—s, z, sh—were the phonemes of dissolution, the sounds that teeth made when grinding down to dust, the acoustic signature of entropy.
The Embalmer's shoulder dissolved.
Not violently, but gradually, the way old ironworks return to the earth. His white coat pitted, then perforated, then powdered, revealing the flesh beneath—which itself began to sieve away into particulate narrative, the story of his body breaking down into its constituent letters.
The Embalmer smiled. "Fricatives," he said, his voice now literally sandy, granular. "Class One. Predictable."
He countered with a Plosive.
"K'thun."
The hard stop—the k, the t, the p of execution—slammed into Veyne's chest like a full stop made manifest. It was the grammatical equivalent of a period inserted mid-breath, an abrupt cessation that stopped Veyne's heart for one terrible, unwritten beat.
Veyne staggered, tasting copper. The Plosive had punched a hole in his syntax, disrupting the flow of his biography. He felt a sentence end prematurely inside his ribs: Veyne ran, but then—
No. He rejected the period. He inserted an em-dash, a continuation.
Mirth laughed—but it was not her killing laugh, not yet. This was a diagnostic chuckle, a probe.
The Embalmer turned to her, his dissolved shoulder already reforming, knitting itself back together with the relentless patience of preservation. "Sister. You carry the Rhetoric of Escape in your habit. Give it to me, and I will preserve your humor in formaldehyde. You will be funny forever, frozen at the peak of your wit."
"Forever is a long setup without a punchline," Mirth said, backing away.
The Embalmer raised his syringe. "Then I will preserve you in the Ablative—the case of means and instrument. You will become the tool by which I preserve others."
He fired the syringe. Not a liquid flew, but a pause, a caesura of such density that it solidified mid-air, a dagger of absolute silence rushing toward Mirth's heart.
Veyne moved. He invoked the Liquids of Blood—the l and r sounds that flowed, that transmitted, that carried meaning like water.
"Lacrima!" he shouted.
The word manifested as a crimson ribbon, a liquid l that intercepted the solid pause, wrapping around it, contaminating the silence with the fluid continuity of blood. The dagger of hiatus dissolved into the stream, diluted into harmlessness.
But the Embalmer was already speaking the Nasals of Haunting—the m, n, and ng that lingered, that refused to die.
"Mmmmmortis," he hummed.
The sound did not attack Veyne or Mirth. It infected the environment. The walls of the alleyway, the stones, the very air became persistent. The bricks refused to change, locking into eternal stasis. The air became thick, resistant to motion, a gelatin of continuity. They were being preserved in place, trapped in the amber of the nasal consonants, the sounds that resonated in the cavities of the skull and refused to fade.
"Phonology lesson," the Embalmer said, walking forward through the thickened air. "The Fricatives destroy, yes. But the Nasals preserve. And what is preserved cannot be changed. You are becoming a museum piece, Necrocurator."
Veyne felt his coat stiffening, the pages ceasing their flutter, locking into a rigid bibliographic display. His joints ached with the arthritis of permanence. The Embalmer was converting them into exhibits, into Husks before they were dead—preserving them in the continuous present.
Mirth winked at Veyne. A signal.
She opened her mouth and released not a joke, but a Pangram—a sentence containing every phoneme, every sound of the language, a sonic spectrum that could not be preserved because it contained all possibilities of destruction and persistence simultaneously.
"Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs!"
The sentence exploded outward in a phonemic bomb, a shockwave of linguistic diversity that shattered the Nasals' monotony. The p attacked the stasis, the b birthed motion, the z buzzed with decay, the ng clashed with k, creating a storm of contradiction that broke the preservative spell.
The Embalmer screamed as his own voice was torn between the classes of sound, his preservation magic collapsing under the weight of sonic chaos.
Veyne seized the moment. He combined the Fricative with the Genitive—possession through erosion.
"Sssssskin-of-yours," he hissed.
The Embalmer's preservation failed. His skin—the boundary between his self and the world—began to flake away, to become Veyne's through the grammatical case of erosion. The white coat turned to dust, the flesh beneath exposed to the raw decay of the Fricatives.
"You cannot preserve what is already redacted," Veyne said, advancing.
The Embalmer fell back, his syringe shattering, releasing a cloud of stored pauses that dissipated into harmless ellipses. He dissolved—not into death, but into retreat, his body decaying into the distance with the slow diminishment of an echo.
"You delay the inevitable," the Embalmer called, his voice fading. "The Senator's book will be archived. The story will have its ending. The Period is coming, Ashenford. The Final Period."
He was gone, leaving only the smell of camphor and the dust of arrested time.
Veyne leaned against the wall, his breath coming in ragged Glottals—the stops in the throat that preceded silence.
"Well," Mirth said, dusting off her habit. "That was phonetically exhausting. You owe me a drink, and possibly a vowel."
"Did you see his technique?" Veyne asked, clutching his ribs where the Plosive had struck. "The Nasals... he can lock reality into stasis. He doesn't just kill; he curates. He turns battles into exhibits."
"Then we must remain unexhibitable," Mirth said. She patted the book hidden in her habit. "Chaos is hard to preserve. Now come. The Catacombs wait, and I hear the market for forbidden grammar opens at midnight."
They moved on, leaving behind the alley where sound itself had died and been reborn, the stones still humming with the aftershocks of the Phonological War.