"I am so, so, so, so, so sorry," Caspar says. "Mrs. Tilliam, I never intended to harm a hair on your head. And I am so—"

Rebecca laughs. "It's okay, Mr. Cartwright. Truly, it is. Your mistress has already apologized prettily on your behalf. And please." She raises her voice to include the full taphouse. "It's Miss Wallace, everybody. Till death was what I said, and now it's happened."

"Understood, Miss Wallace." Edgar keeps his nodding gravity and his schoolteacher solemnity, but there's a sparking thought in him, and in half the taphouse besides. Ever since Degmar and Alys set the blueprint, there has been a new curiosity settling in over Little Paradise.

"Really, Miss Wallace," Caspar says. "If there's anything we can do for you, anything at all—"

"I'll be sure to let you know." She pats his hand. "But you really don't have to worry. It's not like you were the one who killed me."

Her face melts. Her shoulders lower and loosen.

"That would be me," Adaire says.

An iron curtain slams over the fireplace warmth on the taphouse.

(I know. I said I was a reliable narrator. But I couldn't resist the reveal this one time. Apologies, dear reader.)

Salome's warlock returns a bland smile of greeting to the dozens of icy glares now pointed her way. "Well done, no?"

In a room full of chilly expressions, Caspar's is positively polar. "Where's Rebecca, Adaire?"

"With your mistress over at the dance hall, introducing herself to the builders," Adaire says. "I'm avoiding the woman for now. I don't imagine she wants to see me."

Edgar scowls. "I don't imagine anyone does."

Adaire ignores him. "The warlocks are gathering, Mr. Cartwright. Shall we?"

My husband rises reluctantly. The saloon doors swing as he joins Adaire in the crisp outdoor evening. "You've got a lot of making up to do."

"I serve at my mistress's pleasure," she says. "Not theirs and not yours. Kindly remember that."

"And is she pleased? That you killed Diamante's biggest movie star?"

"She recognizes the necessity. And she's excited for the opportunity."

I'd be loath to admit this to Caspar, but I am, too. If Adaire can fool a whole taphouse of the lady's fans, this false Rebecca is a huge ace in the hole.

There's a broken-down well deep in the woods. A ring of stumps encircles it like studs in a leather fastening. I'm perched on one, having excused myself from Rebecca's company. She's adjusting well enough without me, and I wanted to be here to make kissy faces at Caspar. Jordan's seated on another, watching Peat Moss try to clamber onto his. "If you're wanting to sit like a person, Peaty," she says, "You really gotta wear pants."

"Seconded," Caspar says.

"What?" Peat Moss shoots him a look of betrayal. "Why?"

Jordan points. "Your fuckin' nuts are hanging out, man."

"I'm a deer. That's normal."

"If you're gonna be a bipedal deer, dear, we need more coverage," I say. "Sorry. I'm sure Saoirse will have a blast putting little outfits on you. I can give you some pants right now if you wanna sit."

"No, no. No pants," Peat Moss grumbles as he curls up on the forest floor instead. "You've all forgotten what it's like. This freedom."

Adaire parks on the stump he left behind. "So, then," she says. "We're now in the business of impersonating Rebecca Tilliam."

"By the way," Peat Moss says. "To the rest of the animal kingdom, you people are the weird ones."

Adaire folds her hands in her lap. "We're finished now?"

Peat Moss settles. "I just wanted it known."

Jordan squints at Adaire. "Is your impersonation even something we can hang our hat on?"

Adaire picks at a nail. "Why don't you ask Caspar?"

Caspar's rigid and irritated, but he can't deny it. "Reckon she can do it."

"Thank you," Adaire says, and her tone is just nice enough to keep me from manifesting a few mosquitoes to bite her. "Our primary goal is the same, and has happily been simplified: an audience with His Sacredness Armos Pastornos CDXXXI. The Suzerain."

"Have we figured out what we'll do with him?" Jordan asks.

"He has the key around his neck, every appearance he makes," Adaire says. "We'll take it off him."

Caspar raises his hand. "How do we get it to the Sisters?"

Adaire's voice tinges with skepticism. "Has Irene not told you?"

"I haven't asked."

She glances at me. I don't appreciate the look in those chameleon eyes. "One simply needs to hold the key here on Diamante, and their mistress gains its power. Entrance to the Kingdom and rule over Heaven."

"Correct," I say. "We'll park our prime forms at the Kingdom gate. With the time dilation, you'll only need a couple seconds of physical contact."

Adaire purses her lips. "You never thought to ask how it works?"

"I figured I'd be told when I needed to know," Caspar says. "We're servants, as you love to point out."

Adaire's brows settle. "Quite so. It's possible I can bring Peat Moss; we'll work to establish him as a new pet we've obtained in Pastornos. But as the likeliest way to the key is through physical violence, we'll need Caspar and Jordan there, and we can't bring personal security into the Basilica Pastornica. My mistress and I have come up with what we believe is a sufficient alibi. We're canonizing you."

Jordan blinks. "We're what."

"We're going to access the canonist archives and add a pair of false identities for you. Depicting you as bishops in bellicus. That way—"

"What's in bellicus?" Peat Moss asks.

"It's what happens when a militia bishop is KIA," Caspar says. "Seen it a few times. The company's COs vote and frock a new one in. Doesn't have to be clergy already. If they make it back, they're big deals. Big war heroes."

"Tilliam and I will secure an invitation to one of the Temple District basilicae," Adaire says. "You'll join us as our security detail. With the ease-of-access we'll have, we can obtain a pair of uniforms and move you through the catacombs—"

"The Temple District catacombs are real?" Jordan cuts in.

"Yes. It's how they move cardinals and their retinues in secret. No more interruptions, please." Adaire reaches into a knapsack leaning by the well and pulls a folded sheet of dot matrix paper. She passes it to Jordan. "I have a map the two of you will have to memorize. We'll take the time to go over every security measure and workaround you need. And we'll train you how to punch the data into their system."

Jordan shifts on her stump. "Sounds like a lot to pick up."

"If the clerical pageboys can do it, you can," Adaire says. "Have faith, yes?"

"You sure know a lot about all this basilica stuff," Peat Moss says.

"Our employers are omniscient, Mr. Moss." Adaire says. "Remember? Salome has been preparing for a long time."

"Would you let my distinguished sister know I hear and resent the implication there, please," I say.

As we adjourn, Peat trots by my husband's calves. "Do you wanna do another shooting lesson, Cas?"

"Sorry, Peat Moss," Caspar says. "Got work to do before we head back. Maybe Jordy can give you a hand."

"Whatcha gotta do?" the fawn asks.

"I have another spell to teach my warlock." I squeeze Caspar's hand. "But first, I need his help moving some furniture."

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

Caspar carries me to our bed and tosses me onto it. We move some furniture. What our technique lacks in efficiency it makes up for in diversion.

We lie tangled in silk bedsheets, bathing in the afterglow. My leg drapes over my warlock. His thumb draws little figure-eights on my spine. He admires the smush of my thigh where it lays against his stomach. Our heartbeats are slow and synchronous. I gaze into my warlock's hazel eyes and know it won't be long now. It won't be long until we realize what terror gnaws at Alexandra, whether she spoke cowardice or an omen. It won't be long until Caspar faces his last trial, and we discover whether this beautiful, strong man is strong enough. And then I'll have him forever. Or I'll have nothing.

"I wish I could hear in there." Caspar rests his hand on my cheek. "Like you hear me. I know that would make my head blow up or something. But I wish it anyway."

"I'm thinking about the future," I say. "Our future."

"What about it?"

"I think…" I chew on my lip. "I think I want a river out back. Like the Altarwood. Maybe one of those fancy floating docks. I wanna try canoeing. That canoe trip to Alhama you took in high school looked so fun."

"You mind if I ask, with no malice at all," Caspar says. "Why you were watching me, the whole time. What made you keep tabs on a snot-nosed seminary kid?"

"I picked a few dozen snot-nosed seminary kids at random across Chamchek," I say. "I wanted to understand the pious Pastornists, and it felt like a good place to start. But as the years passed, I dropped most of them. A few died on Crusade, a few of the sweating sickness back in '64. Most are living boring lives in a constellation of villages. I whittled my focus down to the most interesting people. By the time you were twenty, I had three or four left, but you were the one I watched the most. You joined the militia, and I spent the campaign over your shoulder, thinking: maybe he'll take a bullet to the heart, and I can introduce myself. Maybe he'll be my warlock. Once you'd learned your hedge magic, I knew it could only be you." I shift further onto his chest. "And now it's only you forever."

Caspar's eyes dance. His lips find mine again.

"Good workout, canoeing," he says, when we've had our fill. "Good for your core."

"Would you like that?" I curl closer. "A lil' gym bunny? Maybe if I had a six-pack?"

His grin banishes the last dregs of dread from me, like the sun melting snow. "You know I like you just the way—" His caress on my stomach pauses as it brushes unexpectedly taut skin. He looks down at the graceful, trim musculature of my newly prominent abs.

Maybe he does like that.

₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪

Eventually, we extricate ourselves from bed, and I teach him his latest spell. The hardest part, he finds, is regrowing all his teeth after.

₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪

"Anything?" Jordan asks.

Caspar shakes his head. "Just cart sounds. It's tough to hear the talking. Let me focus, right?"

She nods and taps her fist on his shoulder. He plugs the one ear left on his head, the better to listen to the other.

Blowing air. The rhythmic drum of a track. The basilica catacombs are lined with subterranean railways. Down there, rushing through the ossuary dark, is a train car with three clerks, two armed guards, and a severed ear onboard.

The utility room door opens and a stoop-shouldered janitor enters, pushing a hamper. His uniform identifies him as Xavier, fifth sphere priest of the Basilica Bianca's cleanliness team. Jordan's head jerks around; her hand goes to her .45. "Sir." She's got that inspector sound: loud but calm. "Going to ask you to leave. Temple business."

The janitor pushes his threadbare cap up. "A simple improvisation, but well executed." He steps around the wheeled hamper with a smooth sweep to his gait and is Adaire. She flicks the catch on the hamper.

Jordan drops her grip from her holster and puts it on her chest. "Scared the shit outta me."

"I have your outfits. And your deer." Adaire opens the hamper lid and pulls a Basilica Templar uniform out, brushing toasted-marshmallow hairs from its pauldrons. The hamper quakes on its casters as Peat Moss hops from it.

He watches Jordan unfold stripy hosiery and slashed silk sleeves. "These things are so goofy looking."

Jordan unbuttons her pants. "They're historical."

Peat snickers as Jordan pulls her foppish doublet on. "More like hysterical."

"Vocabulary jokes," Jordan says. "Truly, he's in his middle school era."

Caspar holds up a hand. "Checkpoint. Everyone shh."

Jordan crouches beside him and pulls a notepad from her discarded jacket pocket.

The squeal of a handbrake, and the train noise resolves with the slowing motion.

An electrostatic crackle. A mechanized voice on the edge of hearing says "Password."

"Minotaur Umber Five Eight Five And The Wicked Shall Know Purgatory's Vexation."

A gruff templar says it, Caspar repeats it, and Jordan scribbles it on her pad. The password changes every morning—it was the only part of the plan that the warlocks' omniscient mistresses didn't already have in-hand. Now they've got all they need (except for Caspar's ear, which he'll have to retrieve on the way).

Caspar hastily belts himself into his doublet and his hose. A quick correction to the earlier thought about Caspar missing uniforms: he missed uniforms that didn't include ruffled collars.

Adaire shrugs her janitorial coverall off and steps into her fine fringe dress. "Zip me, please."

Caspar closes the fabric up the rest of the way; by the time the zipper's up at the nape of Adaire's neck, she's transformed into Rebecca Tilliam. Caspar jerks his hand away from the zipper like it's given him a static shock. He has imagined zipping Rebecca Tilliam's dress up for her before. This isn't what he pictured.

"Thank you, young sir." Adaire gives him that television smile. It's a flawless imitation. "Tilly and I will be at Cardinal Safton's sermon in the nave. You have fifty minutes."

She tilts the hamper over. Paul Tilliam spills out, his limbs bound, his mouth taped. With two quick swipes and a tear from his faux wife, he's back on his feet and sputtering. "It smelled dire in there," he says. "Really, truly unnecessary."

"Alas, Paul." Adaire straightens his hat. "The trust died with dear Rebecca. Let's see that smile, please."

They split. Adaire-Rebecca clicks in her kitty heels down the echoing hallways and past the cherubic frescoes of the Basilica, dragging the archbishop to their sermon/photo opportunity in its vaulted nave.

Caspar and Jordan, in their clown show getup, leash Peat Moss (now disguised as a forbidding, spike-collar metzgerhund guard dog) and move through narrower, dimmer climes.

They follow the map Adaire made them memorize. It takes them through a series of echoing, sterile backrooms, each colder and deeper than the last, until they emerge into a two-laned switching station. Parked in its bay is a twenty-foot long autocart, a control cabin sprouting wartlike from its aft like a cartoonish tugboat.

As Jordan rightly notes: "Doesn't look much like a catacomb."

Caspar enters the cabin, lifts the flap of his foppish beret and focuses. A ropy strand of flesh snaps into place, and his ear whips out from below the control console. He shakes his head around, feels the return of his full vestibular system return the surety to his steps.

They coast out from the station, and into the ossuary tunnels where the still-smelling air is whipped into motion by their passage. Their high beams cast along rows and casements and arches and struts and junctions and buttresses of bone. Cities of bone.

They speed through centuries of the dead.

"Okay," Jordan says. "That's more like it."

Caspar watches the mortal remains resolve into a yellowy chalk smear as they rush through. All these people, he thinks. All in Heaven. All in agony. All counting on us.

A gleaming red light indicates the next switching station. The track is disengaged; until that light turns green, they're not going anywhere. Jordan cuts the engine and they groan to a halt before an intercom held up by a pillar of ulnae. A pool of light in the distant dark illuminates another platform, like the one they left, a concrete extrusion of modernity into the ageless repose.

"Password."

Caspar licks his lips as he holds the pad up to a penlight. "Minotaur Umber Five Eight Five And The Wicked Shall Know Purgatory's Vexation."

A held breath. And then the light flicks green and the track squawks its way into parallel. Jordan throws the throttle and they speed along, past the station platform and further into the dark.

The control cabin's switchboard is easy enough to understand. Caspar has to double back at one point when he takes them down the wrong Y-junction, but it's hardly as difficult as crash-landing an airship.

How many miles slide past in that crepuscular graveyard? How many sturdy, obedient souls do they move beneath? How many of the Father's servants have some inkling of the mass grave upon which the crown of their civilization rests?

These are my thoughts, to be clear, not Caspar's. Caspar has a task now, and has moved on from his existential dread. Currently he's thinking about the proper way to run this trek in reverse, with a small piece of his mind set aside to idly wonder whether I'm ticklish.

(I am. No clue why evolution left that in you—it seems an annoyance—but I don't want to miss out on any sensations, just in case.)

No signs or words to guide them. Only the map in their minds and a series of cipher sigils burnt into varnished wooden placards. Their pale headlight glares onto a cursive stroke intersecting a fleur-de-lis, encompassed by a globe. The scriptorium.

Off the cart, onto the station, and into an overheated manila colored room, dominated by a cityscape of whirring machinery and fridge-sized modems. A hundred feet above them, the sacred scriptorium gleams and dazzles in the winter sun. Rows of texts on illuminated vellum decorate grand cherrywood shelves and scroll cases.

It's all for show. All fancy giltwork to hide this sweltering, buzzing room, the actual archive. The only nod to the aboveground splendor here is a printout-sized portrait of the saggy Suzerain hung in a disproportionately fancy frame, and an ivory tray with an incense cone on it to cover up the ozone smell.

Caspar and Jordan find a console housed between two sloshing coolant pipes that bead with condensation. For a few panicky minutes the warlocks struggle with a technology decades beyond anything they've seen in Chamchek.

"Gotta put a backslash at the beginning, Cas."

"Which slash is the damn backslash?"

Finally, the command line resolves itself into a fuzzy green menu, and Caspar feels the ground solidify beneath his feet. His thick fingers hunt and peck across the clacky keyboard. "What do you want your bishopric name to be?"

"Let's go with…" Jordan taps her lip pensively. "Lucerne."

"Very Eastern Diocese," Caspar says. "You got any ideas for mine, Peat?"

"Peat Moss," says Peat Moss.

"Peter." Caspar taps it in with one hand; the other scratches the fawn behind an ear. With a final keystroke, the terminal is shut off, and two bishops are born.

They return to the station. The subterranean air slaps a chill across the perspiration on Caspar's forehead.

"That was simple enough," Jordan says, as they climb back onto the cart. "Hope it works."

Caspar shoulders the door to the control cabin open. "Adaire seems confident." He's thinking it was too simple, in fact, but he doesn't want to expose that thought to the light, spare as it is.

"Does she make you guys nervous?" Peat asks. "She makes me nervous."

"She cut Rebecca Tilliam's head off." Caspar starts the engine. "Nervous is right."

"Yeah, but also she's, like, nice and mean. At the same time."

"That's called passive-aggressive," Jordan says. "And it's the spice of life. Remind me and I'll give you some lessons on it."

Caspar shakes his head as he takes them down their first left. "You are intent on ruining this boy, Darius."

They rattle past the switching station. They give the password once again and let the track squeal into place to guide them past the platform.

Upon it, hidden in the shadows pooled by the workmanlike fluorescents, waits the ambush. A full firing line in shiny black, with shinier, blacker guns.

"Down," Caspar cries, and a dozen automatic weapons roar their scorn, lighting the tunnel up as if it were a solstice day. The cart skids past, newly ventilated in a hundred places.

"Oh no oh no oh no." Peat Moss is flat on the floor.

"How in the goddamn hell did they know?" Caspar pokes his head up from the rim of the control cabin window.

Jordan dashes to the rear platform of the cart, pulling leather as she goes. "Caspar. They're following us."

A cart has departed the switching station. Its high beams sweep across the pits and bones and the metal rail. It speeds toward them.

"Cut the engine halfway," Jordan calls. "We take this cart here, we can block the rest."

The tunnel light gleams off their pursuers. Four people in Eight's telltale warlock black, their chitin piecemeal and ugly. And something hulking and chrome, as it steps forward and raises its arms.

They behold death.

"Full speed!" Jordan drops into cover. "Full fucking speed!"

Eight's warlocks have a Dominion suit.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.