The Greying: 2

Bram got them out. A drowned family carried four hundred years and a city away, through a door he opened in a wall. It cost him one name to hold that door open.He greyed the mother himself. His own hand, at the lip of the crossing, with his eyes open. That one he signed for. It is the ones he did not count on that have been going ever since.A name held dark is a lamp. A name gone grey is a lamp turned down. For a year nothing came for him, and it took him most of that year to understand why. He was safe because he was losing them.There is a way to bring a name back. You go and stand on the ground they stood on, and you remember them until they are whole again. It works. Doing it is the loudest thing a man can do. Cure and harm are one motion of one pair of hands.The nurse comes with him now. She has to stay close, or the dark between the years keeps her.And somewhere in his city a woman has been waiting four hundred years for this family to be finished. Nobody like her has ever had to run. She sits down across a table and makes him an offer, and every word of it is true.The Greying is the second book of The Borrowed Dead, a trilogy about grief, the work nobody thanks you for, and how far an ordinary man will go for people he never met.