He'd taken notice of the way the other man perked up, almost, at the mere mention of necromancy. It's no surprise when Palamedes asks him to backtrack, though as with everything else about him, it's enough to pique Darlington's curiosity a little bit more. "They're the fourth oldest, founded in 1863. A little less than a hundred and sixty years ago by my reckoning and longer, I think, in terms of yours. Most of the rituals I've observed of theirs involve the invocation of spirits. Raisings. They can also create glumae, spirits that can pass through the veil between the living world and that of the dead and serve as messengers."

The Lettermen had always been one of the vaguer societies, their Thursday night activities cloaked both in the grim secrecy working with the dead almost seemed to require and the more amorphous and equally shadowy nature of who it was usually fueling the requests that drove each rite. It makes them difficult to explain with the kind of detail Darlington wants to give. "As an example," he continues, "the last ritual night of theirs I was present for involved the controlled reanimation of a corpse, who was then used as a conduit for the spirits of recent casualties in the Ukraine. Soldiers with information on troop movements that someone in the State Department had an interest in hearing." He shakes his head. "It was a macabre sort of relay, one ghost after another, a translator standing by to take down whatever was said."