The Book of Dead Days by Marcus Sedgwick

nimbly up the stone steps and, reaching up on tiptoe, swung one of the lions against its base.
    The loud metal clunk seemed to echo the length of the street, but as Boy looked around nervously he was relieved to see that no one was paying him any attention. Nor, unfortunately, did anyone inside the building seem to have heard.
    He swung the lion harder and waited.
    “Side entrance,” said a voice beside him.
    Startled, Boy looked to his right and noticed a small hatch set in one of the soaring pillars. Inside the pillar was a little room in which sat a tiny old woman with a wrinkled face and an expression to match.
    “Come about a death, have you? Round the side.”
    “Yes-no-not exactly.”
    The woman was unimpressed.
    “Death? Round the side. Side door, see? That’s where you register.”
    Boy was puzzled.
    “Then what do
you
do?” he asked.
    “Well,” she said, “I tell people about the side door.”
    “That’s it?” Boy asked. “That’s all you do?”
    “It’s important. Someone’s got to tell people about the side door. For deaths. Important,” she added.
    “And I wonder,” he said, “who tells me where to go if I haven’t got a death to register.”
    The woman blinked.
    “Well,” she said, peering anxiously around before answering, “well, I could, probably, tell you.”
    “Oh, good,” said Boy. “So where do I go to speak to the Master of City Burials?”
    “Well, then you’d want to knock on the front door there and…
What
?” She spluttered to a stop. “What do you mean? Don’t waste my time!”
    “No,” said Boy earnestly. “No, I really need to see him. My master sent me-his name’s Valerian. He said to say he sent me. We have to find out where someone is buried.”
    “You can’t see him. You think proles like you just wander in off the street for a chat?”
    “But, look,” he said, “the thing is, Valerian, he’s a friend of the Master. And he needs to find out something, about where a grave is-”
    “Listen to me,” she said. “No one gets to see him.”
    “But I have to see him!” cried Boy.
    “No!” snapped the woman. “He’s very busy working on his animals in the Dome. He won’t think about anything else. No one talks to him.”
    “What’s he doing with animals? Doesn’t he have lots of work to do for the cemeteries and so on?”
    “Well, I don’t know, of course, but he’s been working in the Dome with his animals for years and it must be very important because he is the Master and it must have lots to do with burying people or he wouldn’t be doing it.”
    Boy was puzzled, but he nodded.
    “What is he doing with them?” he asked. “What are the animals for?”
    “Well, nothing much. They’re dead, you see.”
    A creeping little curiosity inside Boy told him he was going to have to find out what the Master of City Burials was doing before he went back to Valerian.

12
    This was something Boy was good at.
    Creeping and climbing around the dark spaces of buildings that no one even knew existed was something he had always done. Even Valerian had to admit that Boy was very good at not being seen.
    Standing back in the street he had immediately spotted the dome the woman had spoken of. It was a huge glass roof made of hundreds, probably thousands of individual panes of glass. They arched in a single beautiful sweep from some part of the building out of sight from where Boy stood. He’d spent a long time stalking the area, and now dusk was coming. In the half-light, the Dome shone with the light of a thousand torches-or so it seemed to Boy. It was a glowing, shining, crystalline bubble that gleamed out of the filth of the City like a diamond in a dung heap.
    Boy had scouted around the streets that joined the Reach and found a small alley running into the center of the block. There was a narrow but sturdy iron gate across the entrance to the alley, but Boy was over it before he had even wondered what he was doing. If he had stopped to think, he