In your old life you might have been curious. But other noises haunted you, quite apart from the ones occurring to your ears. There was a great unmusical straining aboard ship—the sounds of wet drums—which had panicked you before you’d realised, with settling calm, that you were hearing the heave of seven hundred and eight beating hearts. You heard seven hundred and eight brains, thrumming in their cerebral fluid. You knew without checking that three hundred and four of those straining hearts belonged to necromancers; a necromancer’s heart myocardium flexed differently to your ears, worked worse, squeezed more feebly. You were sensing the living. Once you worked out what you were hearing, you became aware of everything immediate to you: the dust settling on the gleaming black plaques of the floor; the roiling of your pulmonaries; the soft marrow of your bones sucking up oxygen. Despite all this cacophony, you could not stay awake.
Harrow the Ninth - Act One, Chapter One
