Chapter 5: Town of the Taxed Dead

The road to Gallowsrest had been paved with bones.

Not metaphorical bones. Not bleached stones shaped by wind into grim reminders. Actual bones, pressed lengthwise into hard red clay until cartwheels and boots had polished them smooth as old ivory. Rib cages arched beneath puddles. Femurs lined the ruts. Skulls sat half-buried along the shoulders with iron nails driven through their jaws, each one hung with a little bronze tag stamped in neat block letters.

UNCLAIMED.

Mara stepped over a pelvis fused into the road and tried not to think about how many bodies it had taken to build a mile.

The blood-red sky sagged low over Arxil, heavy with clouds the color of bruised meat. Far ahead, Gallowsrest crouched on the horizon behind a palisade of black timber and leaning watchtowers. The town had been built around a hill crowned with a gallows tree, its branches kinked and unnatural, each limb bearing rusted chains instead of leaves. Even from a distance, Mara could see things hanging there.

Some of them moved.

Bram saw her looking and made a small, strangled noise.

“Maybe it’s decorative?” he offered.

“Decorations don’t kick,” Mara said.

“Festival decorations might.”

“Bram.”

“I’m trying very hard not to vomit on the bone road.”

The cowardly berserker walked beside her with his chipped axe held in both hands like it might leap from his grip and attack him. Dried carrion boar blood blackened his sleeves. His huge shoulders were hunched nearly to his ears, which made him look less like a warrior and more like a terrified door trying to sneak away from a burning building.

Mara’s own body hurt in ways she had begun cataloging with clinical spite. Bruised left ribs. Bite gouge along the forearm, badly scabbed. Deep fatigue tremor in both hands. A phantom pressure behind her eyes from using whatever her class called healing, though it felt less like medicine and more like reaching into a corpse’s pocket while death wasn’t watching.

Her health bar floated at the edge of her awareness, cracked and too low for comfort.

Mara Voss
Class: Gravebound Medic
Level: 2
HP: 31/74
Status: Exhausted, Minor Infection, Soul Threading Instability

She hated that last one. The System had flashed it after she’d picked up the black needle from the boar’s corpse. It now sat wrapped in a strip of torn shirt and tucked inside her belt pouch, cold against her hip despite the day’s heat.

Every so often, when Bram wasn’t talking, Mara heard it whisper.

Stitch what breaks. Knot what flees. Thread the door before it shuts.

She had treated hallucinating patients before. Oxygen deprivation. Head trauma. Sepsis. End-stage grief. Her professional opinion was that haunted surgical equipment belonged on none of those lists.

“If there’s a town,” Bram said, “there’ll be an inn. Inns have beds. Beds have blankets. Sometimes soup. Not always good soup, but wet and warm, which is most of what soup promises.”

“And guilds,” Mara said.

He winced. “Technically.”

“You said Iron Halo runs Gallowsrest.”

“I said they administer it.”

“That sounds like run with paperwork.”

“It is run with paperwork. Also swords.” Bram swallowed. “Mostly swords.”

The road curved down into a shallow valley. Gallowsrest sharpened into view: a frontier town squeezed inside three rings of defenses. Outer ditch. Timber wall. Inner stone gatehouse banded with iron. Smoke rose from chimneys. Banners snapped from towers—white cloth painted with a black circle pierced by eight silver spikes. The Iron Halo.

Outside the gate, the living stood in lines.

Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. Men and women in torn modern clothes, homespun tunics, leather scraps, and cheap starter armor. Some carried knives like Mara’s rusted blade. Some clutched bundles to their chests. A young man in a bloodstained delivery uniform stared blankly at nothing while a woman with silver hair braided down her back sobbed over a cracked wooden tablet.

Above them hung a floating sign made of blue System light.

WELCOME TO GALLOWSREST
An Iron Halo Guild-Protected Settlement

Entry Tax: 5 copper or equivalent service credit
Weapon Declaration Fee: 2 copper per item
Unclaimed Asset Processing: Mandatory
Respawn Consultation Available Within

Bram stopped walking.

Mara continued three steps before realizing he had frozen.

“What?” she asked.

His eyes were fixed on the gate. “Maybe we go around.”

“Around to where?”

“Elsewhere.”

“Specific.”

“I’m a concept man under pressure.”

Mara looked past the lines to the gatehouse. Iron Halo guards stood on raised platforms with crossbows held casually at hip level. Their armor was better than anything she had seen since waking in Arxil: interlocking steel plates over black gambesons, white tabards spotless despite the dust, helms shaped like crowns of blunt spikes. Each guard had a glowing level marker above their head.

Iron Halo Gate Warden – Level 18

Another.

Iron Halo Titheblade – Level 22

Mara’s stomach tightened. The carrion boar had nearly gutted them at Level 3.

“Bram,” she said carefully. “Do you owe them money?”

“Not money.”

“That’s not no.”

“It’s complicated.”

“Is there a bounty?”

“Only if they filed it properly.”

She stared at him.

He gave her the smile of a man watching his own coffin being built. “I may have had a prior contractual relationship with an Iron Halo subsidiary.”

“You worked for them.”

“Briefly.”

“You deserted.”

“Strategically survived.”

“Bram.”

“They wanted me to berserk into a nest of glass hornets to clear a resource node.” He rubbed at the back of his neck. “I considered the proposal, weighed the benefits, reflected on my growth as an individual, and hid in a grain cart until we crossed three territorial markers.”

Mara pinched the bridge of her nose. “Are they going to recognize you?”

“I grew a beard.”

“You have stubble.”

“A young beard.”

The line ahead lurched forward. Someone shouted. A guard struck a newcomer in the stomach with the butt of a spear, and the man folded to the dirt. His floating name flickered into view as he gasped.

Jalen Reed
Unclaimed Asset
Level 1

“No payment, no entry,” the guard said. His voice carried without strain. “No entry, no protection. No protection, no complaint when night things eat your feet first.”

The woman with silver hair shoved herself out of line. “He doesn’t have copper. None of us do! We woke up in a ditch!”

The guard did not look at her. “Service credit is accepted.”

“What service?”

Another Iron Halo officer smiled from beneath an open-faced helm. He had a narrow mustache waxed to cruel points and a ledger chained to his wrist. His level marker shone pale gold.

Collector Vennik – Iron Halo Guild Clerk
Level 27

“Frontier labor. Dungeon porterage. Meat shielding. Alchemical testing. Corpse retrieval. Municipal sanitation.” Vennik lifted a quill. Its feather was white. Its nib was bone. “Terms range from one week to seven years, depending on debt, aptitude, and willingness to waive injury compensation.”

“Seven years?” the silver-haired woman breathed.

“A generous maximum. We prefer not to burden new citizens with indefinite servitude before lunch.”

A few guards laughed.

Mara felt something old and hot crawl up from under her ribs. It had the same shape as the rage she’d felt in emergency rooms when administrators denied transfers, when insurance reps argued over coverage while patients drowned in their own lungs. Only here the cruelty did not wear a suit. It wore steel and called itself a guild.

Bram leaned closer. “Mara. Your face is doing the thing.”

“What thing?”

“The thing right before you make someone regret surviving childhood.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“Wonderful. Let’s continue that tradition.”

They joined the back of the line.

The people around them smelled of fear, road sweat, and untreated wounds. A boy no older than sixteen stood barefoot in hospital scrubs, an IV bruise blooming purple on one arm. He kept opening and closing a System window only he could see, whispering, “Log out. Menu. Exit. Customer support.” Beside him, a broad-shouldered woman in a wedding dress torn to rags held a garden shovel like a halberd. Dried blood streaked the lace.

“New?” Mara asked her.

The bride turned eyes like cracked glass toward her. “Is there an old?”

“Apparently.”

The woman huffed one humorless laugh. “I was cutting cake. Then something hit the reception hall. Gas explosion, maybe. I woke up with this.” She lifted the shovel. “My husband wasn’t there.”

Mara said nothing. There were no clean words for that.

The line moved.

At the gate, each person placed a hand on a black stone pedestal. The System read them. The clerk named their debts. Those who could not pay were directed to one of three tables beneath striped awnings.

One awning displayed a loaf of bread and a chain.

One displayed a sword and a chain.

The last displayed a halo and a chain.

Under the halo awning, newcomers signed contracts with trembling fingers while Iron Halo clerks pressed thumbprints into wax. Afterward, each received a small iron disk on a cord. Some wept as they put it around their necks.

“Respawn tokens,” Bram murmured.

Mara’s attention snapped to him. “Those are respawn tokens?”

“Low-grade. Guild-locked. If you die inside their territory, you wake up in their chapel instead of staying dead.”

“That sounds useful.”

“It is. That’s why they own everyone who needs one.”

A man at the halo table shouted, “Ten years? For one token?”

Collector Vennik’s voice drifted over the yard. “For the opportunity to continue existing after catastrophic misfortune, yes.”

“But if I don’t die?”

“Then you will have purchased peace of mind while providing valuable service to civilization.”

“And if I refuse?”

Vennik smiled. “Then civilization will be very sad to watch you feed the local ecosystem.”

The man looked toward the tree on the hill. Chains swayed from its branches. A body gave a weak twitch.

He signed.

Mara’s fingers curled until her nails bit her palms.

“Don’t,” Bram whispered.

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You’re breathing like an avalanche.”

“People are selling a decade for an insurance policy.”

“Yes.”

“You’re saying that like it’s normal.”

“No. I’m saying it like it’s common, which is worse and more survivable.”

The distinction made her hate the world a little more.

When the barefoot boy reached the front, he had no money, no weapon worth taxing, and no idea what the clerk meant by service credit. He signed the bread-and-chain contract for three months of municipal sanitation in exchange for entry, a bunk, and one bowl of stew a day.

“Three months,” the boy whispered as they branded a glowing sigil onto the inside of his wrist. “I have finals next week.”

The bride paid with a gold ring. The clerk weighed it, bit it, and told her it covered entry, weapon declaration for the shovel, and one night in a common house. She asked if it covered information about missing people.

The clerk laughed until she lowered the shovel at his knees. Then the guards raised crossbows, and she stepped back shaking.

Mara made herself memorize the positions of the guards, the hinges of the gate, the distance to the ditch. She did not have a plan. Counting exits was what she did when the world narrowed. Ambulance bays, tenement stairwells, riot scenes. Always know where not to die.

Then it was Bram’s turn.

He put his hand on the pedestal as if offering it to a snake.

Blue light crawled over his palm. The stone chimed. A System panel unfolded above it.

BRAM OF LOWBARROW
Class: Reluctant Berserker
Level: 3
Status: Contract Breach Flag Detected
Outstanding Obligation: Iron Halo Auxiliary Hazard Division
Penalty Pending Review

Every Iron Halo guard within earshot turned.

Bram closed his eyes. “Ah.”

Mara said, “Young beard, huh?”

Collector Vennik’s head lifted like a hound scenting blood. His smile sharpened. “Bram of Lowbarrow.”

“Collector,” Bram said with a doomed little wave. “You look well. The mustache has become more aggressive.”

Vennik approached, ledger chain clinking. “You absconded during an active hazard contract.”

“I prefer withdrew consent.”

“You hid inside a grain cart.”

“Consent withdrew under grain.”

“You cost the guild three porters, two alchemists, and an entire afternoon.”

“In my defense, the hornets were made of glass.”

Vennik’s quill scratched across the air. Numbers appeared in red above Bram’s head.

Debt Recalculated
Original Service Remainder: 41 days
Penalty Multiplier: x6
Lost Productivity Fee: 19 silver
Reputational Harm Fee: 8 silver
Administrative Pursuit Fee: 3 silver

Total: 246 days service or 30 silver

Bram stared at the floating total. “That seems high.”

“You are fortunate interest has been waived in honor of Founder’s Week.”

“Is it Founder’s Week?”

“It became Founder’s Week when I said that sentence.”

A guard behind Mara chuckled.

Mara stepped forward. “What happens if he doesn’t pay?”

Vennik’s eyes slid to her. Up close, they were pale brown with flecks of gold, as pretty and empty as polished coins. “And you are?”

“Mara.”

“Mara what?”

“Voss.”

He gestured to the pedestal. “Hand.”

Bram hissed under his breath, “Mara, maybe don’t—”