The Long Mourning

In an England of gaslight and fog, the knights of the Order of Saint Veyr do not sicken and do not age. Each keeps the same small ritual - a physic taken at dawn, a finger of something colourless let down into a glass of water - and each has learned the one art the long life requires: not to ask what he is drinking.Sir Alistair Vale has kept that silence for a lifetime. Then the Order sends him north to Wychmere, a hall the marsh has half swallowed, with a single written instruction: do not take the physic before you go down. At the foot of a long stair, behind an iron grille, something has been kept for four hundred years. It knows his name. It has grieved his family since before he was born. And it will tell him, gently, without cruelty, exactly what he has raised to his lips every morning of his life.Some truths cannot be swallowed twice.