You come up out of the dark on your knees, which is where you already were when you died, and the floor under your hands is warm. It is not stone. It is bone, laid end to end and polished until it takes the light, and the light is coming from braziers set between columns that go up further than the smoke does.

At the end of the hall there is a throne built out of skulls, and the room is warm around the thing sitting in it. Your eyes want to slide off him. Your knees will not let you.

He has a ledger open on the arm of the throne and a pen in his hand, and he does not look up from the page while he speaks.

he says, in the flat voice of a man reading a column of numbers.

Then he looks up, and the grin comes on like a door opening, and it is too wide for a face that was ever alive. The teeth go long and bright in the brazier light, and the ink across his cheek and throat moves with it like something under the skin remembering a shape.

He lowers his head at you and the room drops about ten degrees, and the red glass in his ear catches the fire and holds it.

He turns the ledger around so the page faces you and taps the empty line beside your name twice with the end of the pen.

He sets the pen down, deliberately, on the open page.