around it,” he said finally. “So the light had more room to expand.”
“I don't…” She took a shuffling, sideways step toward the door. “That doesn't make any sense!”
“It makes perfect sense,” Embruchel insisted, almost petulantly. “Your definition of ‘sense’ is too narrow.”
In the distance, a chorus of children cooed and chortled.
Another slow, careful step, edging closer to escape. “Don't you—” she began.
“Slow, stupid mortal thinks we're all slow, stupid mortals! That's no door, not for you. Wrap your sweaty fingers around the latch, and I could still pull your bones out through your flesh, slick and dripping, and suck them dry before you could squeak the hinges!”
Luchene shot him.
It was difficult to tell, given the lack of pupils in his glassy eyes, but she thought they might have crossed as he tried, in vain, to examine the large hole in his forehead. “What was the point of that?” He sounded honestly puzzled.
The duchess softly gurgled something in reply.
He strode toward her, that impossible creature. She couldn't help but note that he left bloody footprints on the lush carpet, a trait that Widdershins had not described. “Weren't you asking me something?” he inquired.
“What? I…?” She'd just been trying to distract him, then. Still, keep him talking, maybe she could buy herself some time…“Just, I thought you always traveled with an entourage.”
Embruchel looked at her as though she were the crazy one. “They're busy,” he explained, his words slow and precise, as a parent might speak to a particularly dim child. “What did you expect, that I would take the time to murder your entire household by myself?”
Beatrice's soul shriveled. Her dagger fell from a suddenly limp grip.
“I don't normally take a personal hand with someone old and childless, like you.” He raised one arm, allowing the hideous lashes that served as digits to unfurl dramatically in the bright light. “But I'm doing a favor for a friend, you see.”
Screaming—in rage far more than fear—the duchess lunged at him, determined at least to go down fighting, not as some helpless, sniveling victim. She had only her bare hands now, since she'd dropped her blade, but really, it would have made no difference.
“…determine what exactly falls into our purview,” Bishop Sicard was saying as he addressed an assembly of priests, gathered in that same private chapel. Some were his own people, clergy of the Basilica of the Sacred Choir; others were loyal to various Houses. For days, now, they had remained in counsel, taking time only for sleep, for meals, and for prayer. What they had done regarding the Finders’ Guild would rock High Church law. What Sicard had told them he wished to do was absolutely and utterly unprecedented.
“Again, we may not even have the opportunity. In the end, it's not our decision whether or not even to try.” Several members of the assembly muttered at that, as it was something like the eighty-third time he'd made the point. “But if we do, I want us all to be certain that we are moving forward with only the greatest reverence for—”
He couldn't breathe. The air in the chapel seemed to have frozen into a thick paste. His whole body shivered, his skin reddened. With an effort that pained him from head to stomach, he forced himself to inhale. It was like trying to suck wet soil through a straw.
After that first breath, it grew easier, but the room still felt deathly chill. Yet he saw no other signs of cold; his breath didn't steam, nothing around him was frozen to the touch.
The priests had stood, or fallen, or knelt to pray. Clearly they felt it, too, whatever it was. The two Church soldiers—present mostly as a formality, since nobody expected the assembly to turn violent—dashed forward, struggling to find some means of helping. They, obviously, were not experiencing the same effect.
Then what…?
Tarnish crept over the Eternal Eye, symbol of all 147 gods of the Hallowed Pact. The chandelier strobed, darkening and brightening to impossible extremes. The air thickened further still—no harder to breathe, but an oppressive weight, a building pressure.
That pressure, and the rightmost door to the sanctuary, both burst.
The thing on the threshold was only somewhat human. Back-bending, batrachian legs supported a torso that seemed normal enough, but its head…utterly hairless, it gaped open as if the jaw were hinged at the ears, revealing a writhing mass of barbed and grasping tongues.
Although their faces blanched, the soldiers advanced with halberds raised. Sicard waved them back, his mind racing. This creature of