l'esprit de l'escalier (phr.) the predicament of thinking of the perfect comeback too late.

Khalore woke to the sensation of something hitting her, quite hard, on the forehead, and rolling slowly – flakily – along her cheek until it fell dully onto the mattress beside her. She reached up, dazedly, eyes still closed, to pick off one of the flakes, and stuck it delicately onto her tongue.

Yum. Buttery.

"Sorry," Ilja said, his voice somewhat strained by tiredness, "I thought you had quicker reflexes."

"My reflexes are fine," Khalore said, "dulled only by the mild inconvenience of unconsciousness."

She could sense Ilja was smiling from the doorway, even with her eyes closed. There was a mild levity to the ambiance, as though the kind expression had warmed the air around them as well. If she could sense his smile, then clearly Ina had sensed something else, for her voice cut through the hushed morning quiet of the bedroom: "if you throw that at me, Schovajsa, you'll be starting something you can't end."

Ilja laughed; the mattress creaked and shifted as he sat down on the corner of the bed. Khalore fought her way free of the blankets – she seemed to have won the majority of them during some night-time battle, though she suspected Ina had opted for pacificism in this particular conflict – and sat up, smoothing her hair and frowning at the Chariot as he lay back across the end of the bed. He looked grey. Greyer than usual – actually honest-to-god sick.

Khalore whispered, "are you okay, Ilja?"

"Better now," he said. He had closed his eyes, so she couldn't see whether they, too, had lost more colour. "Better now."

He was still holding the croissant which might have been intended for Ina, tightly, clutched in his right hand so that little flakes of pastry halo-d around his fingers. Ina looked ill-inclined to fight him for it, though, looking at her, Khalore felt a particular spirit of violence rising in her own chest. The Lover had two long black lines running down her face as if branded there, a little uneven, a little blurred at the edges as though carved by a shaking hand; similar black marks shadowed her gold eyes, which seemed all the brighter for the contrast. Around her throat, there was a mottled mass of purple and green bruises. Had someone held her down?

Ina must have seen the look on Khalore's face; she shook her head, mutely, and smiled with tight-lips. Nothing for now. They could talk later. There was much to share; they would each get their turn. Khalore would make sure of it.

Ah, but violence was a difficult beast to tame once you had loosed its leash. That was probably just her temper talking, rather than some legacy of the Hanged Man.

"Long night?" Ina said softly; she leaned forward and gently plucked at Ilja's sleeve to check that he was still awake, so still and silent he was lying there. "That definitely seems to be going around."

"An understatement."

"Care to share with the class?"

"You know I never need an excuse to talk, Nanna." Ilja cracked open one eye, looking sleepy and slightly lost. He craned his neck, and smiled at the direction of the small black pile still collapsed next to Ina. "I'm glad she made it back."

"Was that in question?"

She had been left on the other side of the Walls. Everything had been in question.

Khalore said, hesitantly, "should we wake her before we talk?"

"God, no," Ilja said, "she needs the sleep."

"God, no," Ina said, "I need the peace and quiet."

They smiled at one another. Khalore rolled her eyes and pushed her pillow into a more comfortable position, half-braced against Ina, so that she could collapse back onto her side and watch the Chariot closely, half-filtered through the hazy gauze of the piled sheets. "Fine then." She pointed. "You go first."

"Gladly." Ilja yawned widely, showing greyed-white incisors that seemed sharper than they had been the day before. "Alright. Can I presume you guys know who Silas Schreave is?"

"Distantly," Ina said, her voice dripping with quiet sardonicism.

"Friend of Belle's," Khalore agreed.

"That's the fella. Well..."

Ilja had found himself delighting in his excuse to spend so much time around the youngest Schreave, to shadow the young prince so invisibly that he might as well not have been there at all. Whether that was simply how the heir to the throne treated all of the help, self-concerned as he seemed, or whether this was some legacy of the Chariot's curse, Ilja could not say for certain.

What he could say for sure was that Silas Schreave reminded him, just a bit, of Uriasz Chrzanowski. He couldn't name exactly what similarity had aroused this comparison – the sharp curve of his mouth, perhaps, or the way his eyes seemed to dart around the room whenever he had said something to check if people would react appropriately, be that with laughter or fear, or maybe it was just the faint air of vulnerability drowned, with much practice, by spite and sardonicism.

That vulnerability had risen, swelled the air like a stormfront, as Silas Schreave gazed down at the memorandum which had just been delivered to him from his sister. There was apprehension there; there was something that was not fear, but which was kin to fear. Ilja had perfected the delicate art of watching from his peripheral vision; it would have been impossible to tell that he was, indeed, keeping an eye on Silas, so straight-backed did he stand, so firmly did he fix his gaze forward. But he saw it all. He saw the way Silas' mouth twisted into a scowl; he saw the way his skin drew tight over his bones.

Silas stood, and left without a word. Ilja, his shadow, slipped away with him.

He knew only patches of the palace, isolated from one another by the servant passageways which allowed for the silent passage of equerries and maids from place to place without ever subjecting the royals to the sight of them. Ilja found himself stitching together those patches now as Silas moved from his mother's study, where he had whiled away a few hours reading a book in the coarse Illean script, and down the marble stairs towards the floors on which the Selected were residing. For a split second, Ilja wondered at what the message might have been – but then they had moved on, spiralling ever lower, down, down, into the guts of the palace, until they came to the impassive wooden door that Ilja had been guarding on the very first day of the Selection, the door through which they had brought Tereza Stan, the door no one ever seemed to return through.

Silas did not so much as glance at Ilja. He just flicked the latch on the door, and pulled it open, and disappeared down the stone steps within. Ilja, as ever, followed, matching his footsteps precisely so that he was placing his boots almost precisely into the invisible prints of the prince ahead. This staircase was not so gloomy as he might have suspected; though it lacked the airy silver light of the main palace, there was some faint amber light in the antechamber beneath them which seemed to have soaked into the stone, so that Ilja could still make out the silhouette of the prince ahead of him as he moved.

Was he the Radiance? Could he be?

"Silas, darling."

He greeted his sister with restrained affection, a hand on her shoulder and a kiss to her cheek. The Lady Asenath Schreave was the kind of girl that you couldn't quite look at directly, lest you blind yourself, and Ilja found he couldn't quite look away. There was something cold about her, despite that beauty; she was like the silver to Inanna's gold, the frozen equivalent of the same deep-rooted beauty. Even in the comparative grime of the dungeon in which she was standing – and this was, Ilja realised, a dungeon, with three large cells occupying the far side of the room and an iron door leading into an invisible fourth – she looked absolutely immaculate. Her dress was pale cornflower blue, embroidered with tiny forked-tail swifts in captured flight; she was wearing a veil in the same colour over her inky dark hair, which only served to make her eyes all the darker, her mouth all the redder.

Ilja realised that he was staring again.

"You've been avoiding me," Asenath said, her voice brimming with soft reproachment.

"Not avoiding you, dear Sena. Avoiding consequences."

"Yes," she said, "well, I would have preferred that you didn't eliminate any of the girls without my say-so..."

"She wanted to go."

"That was not her decision to make. Nor was it yours." She touched her brother's hair very gently. "You are too sick to be putting yourself under such pressure, Si."

He nodded, but that strange glower did not leave his face. Did the bastard ever smile? He had smiled at Eunbyeol, at Evanne. Ilja would bully Belle about that later. He had always found her to be such a forgettable type of girl, too self-serious to be much fun, too swarmed with self-doubt to be very interesting.

"You didn't summon me," he said, "for a dressing-down."

"No," she agreed, softly, sweetly. "I wanted to show you something. Priscus wanted me to show you something."

She turned towards the cell, and gestured at the person within. The door to the cell was open, Ilja could perceive, now that his eyes were adjusting to the gloom; within, there was a girl sitting on a chair, her yellow eyes glaring at Ilja from beneath a matted tangle of dark hair –

"That bitch."

The words had jumped from Khalore quite before she had managed to hold them back, but she would not apologise for them; she meant them, most fervently. Poor Ghjuvan's bright white smile swam in front of her vision, blinding. Ilja looked a little taken aback by the sudden ferocity of her pronouncement, but certainly did not seem to disagree. "That bitch," he agreed, sotto voce.

"That bitch," Ina agreed, looking somewhat dazed.

Kinga didn't say anything. Khalore suspected she might not be asleep, but might also have been feverishly wishing that she still was. Was she as angry as Khal? Did she feel the jagged-edge blade of hatred and fear and fury rising up in her chest?

"Ilja," Ina said, urgently, bolting upright in the blankets with enough panic to almost throw Khalore out of the bed entirely. "Did she – I mean, are you still –"

"I wouldn't be lazing about with you here if she had," Ilja said, "would I?"

"I don't understand," Ina said. Did she not? Khalore understood very well. Nez had killed Ghjuvan – killed him, had him ripped, reduced him to something that Lorencio could barely recognise as human, something that Kinga had still almost been killed trying to protect – and then she had gone straight to the palace to betray them and plead her case. Like a cornered rat, Khalore thought venomously, like a vermin with nowhere else to run. How much had she told them? How had Ilja got out of there alive? How could they ever hope to find the Radiance if she could just…?

Ilja said, "Azula got to her first."

Ina frowned. "I – Azula?"

"Schovajsa," Silas said. "Go. Guard the door."

Ilja obliged, though unwillingly, unable to tear his gaze from Nez. She looked worse for the wear – had she been worked over by the palace guards? Had Asenath interrogated her? But Nerezza Astaroth was not a girl who would withstand torture for her fellow Warriors. Ilja had no doubt that she would break in an instant if she could see in it some small material benefit for her part.

Would there be witchhunters by the door, ready to kill Ilja as soon as he took up his position there?

Silas had clearly wanted to wait until Ilja was out of earshot; the words that followed were silk-soft and low. "What is this?"

Asenath motioned for him to be silent, clearly wary of Ilja's closeness. Had Nez already told her what he was?

Or did she sense it somehow, the Radiance roiling beneath her skin, so that the nearness of the xrafstars was like sensing the close-by heat of a warm hearth?

"A Cursed One," Asenath said, softly.

Then, abruptly, Ilja felt something strange stirring through his hair – like someone had run a finger along his scalp. There were steps on the stairs ahead of him, and then, slowly, Azula came into view, her face grey and drawn, like a girl wracked in pain but muscling on regardless. Ilja strained to keep his face expressionless, even as concern flitted through him, tightening his heart in an iron grasp that did not lessen even as Azula stepped past him. He may as well have been a stranger, but that was good, he thought, that was good – she had grown up almost out of sight.

Azula took a deep breath – he saw her shoulders shudder – and then she went around the corner and curtsied deeply to the Schreave siblings. "She's on her way."

"Good." Asenath's voice was austere. "And Priscus?"

"They're still looking for him."

Ilja could not delay his ascent any longer, though the part of him that was more Pekka than the rest whispered to him that it was cowardice to even consider leaving Azula so deep below the ground, so tangled with the tentacles of the enemy. Yes, she was the Devil, but – had any of them truly mastered their powers enough to say they had truly absorbed themselves within their powers?

He opened the door. He closed the door.

He thought again of the anger in Nez's eyes. She was not a girl prone to silence; she was not a girl prone to discretion. But she had not spoken when she saw him. She had not cried out. Her lips, pressed shut thus, as though stitched together…

Khalore frowned. "I thought..."

Ina looked at her, eyebrow raised.

Khalore said, "I'll explain in a second."

"When did everyone in this family become obsessed with building tension?" Ilja shook his head mockingly. "That was it. I didn't get the chance to speak to Azula, but… they wouldn't have let me leave the palace alive if she let Nez slip. They wouldn't have let Azula go back into the study with them if Nez had told them anything. And she gave me one of these on her way out."

He had to open his eyes so that he could wink. Khalore was starting to understand why customers had always become a little flustered when they came into the bakery and found Ilja leaning on the counter in his palace uniform, shooting the breeze with Ina. If it wasn't one of them, it was the other. A few unfortunate souls hadn't been able to look directly at either of them.

Well, then. If Azula was winking, then it couldn't be too likely that the assembled forces of Illéa were about to bear down upon them. Khalore had to hand it to her; she was almost impressed. "When did she become so strong?"

"She's always been strong," Ina reminded Khalore softly. "Not always in the way Commandant valued."

"Reminds me of someone else," Ilja said. He was still lying back on the couch, halo'd by his grey hair. It was the most curious colour – not silver, as with older people in Opona, or white, as had stained Khalore's mother's hair from stress. It was still brown, still mostly brown, but as though it had been desaturated, as though all of the vibrancy had been drained out of it, as had been drained from the rest of his face and eyes. "But there's a silver lining here we mustn't forget."

"Oh?"

"If Nez is still alive," Ilja said, "and if we know where she is…"

Khalore had to smile. He knew her too well.

She could still get her revenge.

Her turn.

Khalore had never been the type of girl to say no to an adventure. Not when she still had this anger roiling under her skin, coiling tight around her bones, choking her lungs whenever she stopped to breathe.

So when Lorencio put down his scalpel, and tilted his head, and looked at her with that little wry smile that even a stranger would recognise as trouble brewing -

Well, it was the most at peace that Khalore had felt all day.

They had been dissecting a druj. Khalore was starting to see now why she might be able to hide as a Scholar, as dull as she was. There was a call here for brute strength, occasionally; there was a call here for callousness. The other cadets had squirmed with a scalpel in their hand, most of them taken from inner provinces where death was merely something that occurred outside the walls. Far away. Foreign.

Khalore had been the only one not to hesitate. She had peeled back the skin of the druj like it was nothing, soaked her hand deep in ichor despite the faint way that it stung, cracked the ribcages with a short, powerful thrust of her palms. Little butcher indeed. Lorencio had looked approving. Almost proud.

There had been something soothing about it. Butchery with a purpose. Not like fighting their way through the district, when they had left only bodies and mourning families in their wake. The soldiers Khalore had killed that day – did they have Khals of their own waiting, always waiting, trying in vain to call them home?

But this would help. That was what Lorencio said, in that low, soft voice of his, softly chiding her to take her time. No use destroying any organs they came across, if indeed they came across any, if druj even had organs. Everything had to be noted; everything had to be measured, and weighed, and written down. This was not simple butchery. It was dissection. It was science. It was study. It would help people.

Illéans.

It would help Illéans.

Maybe Khalore wasn't as careful as she could have been while she hacked into the druj. It didn't matter. This was comforting. It didn't matter.

She had lost track of time. She had lost track of everything. The other cadets had filtered out of the laboratory gradually; they had served days as long as hers, some fourteen hours by its close, but their demeanours were sleep-bitten, as though the thought of dreaming had occurred to them and now they could not shake it. She had not even noticed that it was just her left. Not until Lorencio had come back down from his office, and frowned, and said, "Angelo, have you ever encountered a concept called tomorrow?"

She said, "I didn't realise the time."

"Please don't exhaust yourself. There are bunks upstairs, above the library, if you would like to rest."

She didn't tell him that this was the most awake she had felt in days.

She withdrew her hand. She had been dissecting something that looked human enough that, for a split second, she had considered it as Nez, and allowed her fury to guide her in the mutilation that followed. But it was not so human-looking that she could sustain such a fantasy: a body composed of poisonously green scales the same colour as an excubitor's cloak, with a mass of bony growths in the place of a face, and scarlet-stemmed spider lilies spilling from its head like a grotesque parody of hair. Its head sat on the stool next to the dissection table; the excubitors had done part of Khalore's work for her.

Her hand was black with its blood – no, not blood, she had already been told that it was not blood. They called it ichor, this black liquid, acrid to the smell and vaguely burning to the touch. It was something else, which took the place of bile and spinal fluid and blood. An all-inclusive replacement. Kinga bled black like this sometimes, didn't she? Was that all the Moon was? Just a druj?

Lorencio said, "do you believe that there is a world outside the walls, Khalore?"

He had asked her this before, and again, it sounded like a test. A trap lazily baited, again, the simple devilry of doubt. Devil, she thought again, glancing over her shoulder at him. He was standing at the entryway to the cavernous laboratory, his hands in his pockets, looking at her with a directness that almost hurt. She said, as she had said before, "I don't know."

Better to seem dimwitted than traitorous.

He said, "that isn't a no."

Khalore straightened her back and reached for a rag with which she could clean her hand. Her scalpel still lay on the stone slab, beside the dead druj. She could reach for it before he could react, certainly; she could slice open a thumb in the same movement, imbue the blade with the power necessary for her aim to strike true. Would she be fast enough for that part? He was a Scholar, not an excubitor; he was built for books, not bloodshed, though a second glance at the way he held himself caused her to doubt that assessment. She said, "it isn't a no."

He nodded. The darkness suited him; it made his face more interesting than daylight ever could, all angles and valleys and ridges and softness.

She said, "do you?"

He had moved forward to pick up her scalpel; Khalore had retreated, and mentally rebuked herself for waiting to strike. Lorencio said, "I'm starting to think I could be persuaded."

And... well. Khalore had never been the type of girl to say no to an adventure.

Ilja said, "all this time I thought we were working slowly, but steadily, and it turns out we just had to send Khalore in to make friends."

"In fairness," Khalore said, "even I wouldn't have said that making friends was one of my key skills."

Ina said, "how about spotting traps?"

"Tch." Khalore shook her head sadly. "A little more faith, please, Nanna?"

"Yeah," Ilja said, "give her more credit than that."

There was a moment of silence, broken only by Kinga sighing deeply in her sleep. Was she dreaming? Khalore wondered. What was she dreaming of?

"Well," Ina said, "was it a trap?"

"A little bit," Khalore said, "it was a little bit a trap."

They were in the tunnels and advancing towards the capital before Khalore could even really question whether this step was a wise one. She had a torch in her hand and a bag over her shoulder and Lorencio was a half-dozen steps ahead of her, moving quickly and quietly, barely leaving a track in the dusty ground by which they might be tracked. He was looking for something in particular; every so often, he would slow his pace, and turn so that he could get the greatest benefit of the torch in her hand with which to consult his little notebook. Like a Hierophant consulting the notes of they who had gone before, Khalore thought wryly. What were they looking for?

She needn't have enquired; they found it, soon enough. It was a small, square trapdoor set into the ceiling of the tunnel, where it had sloped downward and squeezed tightly enough that Lorencio had to stoop in order to pass through. He began to address its latch. They were at their destination, Khalore thought, whatever that might be.

Khalore stepped forward to assist Lorencio with the lock. She said, softly, acidly, "I rather fear that you have tricked me into misdemeanour."

"You have my word," he said, "you will not be court-martialled for this."

"Not exactly what I was worried about."

"There are fates worse than death, Angelo."

"Such as?"

"Living in the dark," Lorencio said, "living in ignorance. Living in a cage."

They had caught the lock correctly; the bolt fell away, clattering to the ground much more loudly than Khalore would have liked, and the trapdoor swung open, falling down to lie parallel with the soft soil wall of the tunnel.

They stared up into the faraway square of light. Khalore said, "how do you know that you can trust me?"

"Kunegunde Kaasik has vouched for you."

"I barely know her," Khalore said. "You trust her judgment? You trust her?"

"I trust Hijikata." Lorencio's voice was soft and determined. "And he has vouched for her in turn."

"Seems a complicated house of cards on which to balance your hopes."

"Yes," Lorencio said, "but we are living through the apocalypse, Angelo. Now is the time for desperation."

"For risks," Khalore said.

"Precisely."

"Very well," Khalore said. "You go first."

He smiled. "You're learning."

It was not correct to give the name "ladder" to the contraption which lay within the passage upwards; instead, there were a set of bolts screwed into the wall, ascending towards the square of light above. Each bolt was no larger than a brass coin, no longer than a chair nail, spaced apart by roughly the length of a forearm, so that there must have been more than a hundred of them dotted up the wall.

Khalore had never missed her arm with such an urgency. She had to kind of wedge herself between the walls to keep her balance as she climbed, her remaining hand gripping tightly enough to the bolt that she was certain that she would draw blood. Lorencio was kind enough to wait at the top for her; he reached down to grip her arm, and pulled her out, albeit gracelessly.

They had emerged through a small iron grate in a large study – or perhaps it was a library – but it was clearly in the palace, or close to it. Khalore could not imagine such opulence existing anywhere else. The room was pannelled in red-stained tropical hardwood, with gold-wrought lanterns hanging from the sides of the enormous shelves and the enormous ladders which accorded access to their highest reachs. They were standing behind a desk; to their left, a set of winged couches arranged around a fireplace, where little piles of ash heaped upon the grate still approximated the shape of wood which had burned there all day long.

As Lorencio moved the grate quietly back into place, Khalore whispered, "where are we?"

Lorencio picked up the mug on the edge of the desk, and eyed its contents suspiciously. It was made of pale blue porcelain, decorated with phoenixes and grapes; he said, "this is the symbol of the Chou family. That would mean…."

He began to search the papers arranged on the desk, and filch out those he wanted Khalore to copy – she could not copy all of it, and she was insufficient in expertise to know which parts were important, but she set to her task with an urgency nonetheless. Her handwriting was still childish and inelegant in the Illéan script, but that mattered little. What mattered is that she was, at last, finally, helping. Contributing. To the mission. To Irij. To the downfall of the devils.

She watched Lorencio out of the corner of her eye. What was he looking for?

Was he looking for the Radiance as well?

Or was he testing her?

How did Ilja and Kinga manage it? How had Ghjuvan managed it? To balance this constant tension of suspicion, of fear, of uncertainty? To find a way through this strange world of devils and enemies without constantly feeling like your heart was going to betray you? No wonder they hadn't found the Radiance. No wonder.

Lorencio put a hand on her shoulder. "Are you alright, Khalore?"

Could she trust him? No. No, she thought, certainly not, no more than he could trust her.

Wasn't that a more empowering way to think of it?

She was the danger here.

The little butcher. The Hanged Man.

"Fine," Khalore murmured back, "fine..."

"There's nothing here," Lorencio said, "is there?"

"No," Khalore said, "just Selection..."

"And Selection, and Selection." Lorencio sighed. "Well, that… that might be a good thing. We came here because I thought that perhaps..."

He didn't trust them, Khalore thought. Something had happened; something had given him a reason to come here. Something had planted a tiny seed of doubt in his heart. Khalore found herself watching him, fascinated. The army did not trust the palace; the palace did not trust the people.

No wonder they were clinging so tightly to the Radiance. It was all they had left.

Speak of the devil, Khalore thought, and quite literally at that. It was Azula's voice, the accent familiar for how strongly it stood out after a day surrounded by Illéans – Azula had been raised on the outskirts of Opona, as Khalore had been, which meant that all of her consonants were stronger than they ought to have been, and her vowels were short and clipped and barely-there.

Azula was saying, "I don't know."

"She was a traitor, little Azula." The other voice was a more mature one, belonging to an older woman. It was Illéan, that much was certain, and refined, each sound pronounced with an elegant precision, far more delicate than Lorencio's.

Khalore could perceive clearly the doubt in Azula's voice. "Even so..."

"Your discomfort with death commends you, my darling. I hope you never – ever – become accustomed to it."

Khalore jerked back from the desk; Lorencio was already on the other side of the room, searching the wall for something imperceptible to an eye as incurious as Khalore's.

Lorencio had found what he was looking for; he pulled at a book in the shelf, and a panel of the wall dropped out of place, just wide enough for someone to slip through.

"Wait," Khalore said, urgently, "the order of the papers, they might realise that we..."

"There isn't enough time." Lorencio had returned to her side, to slip an arm around hers and encourage her quickly towards the secret corridor in the wall. She did not fight him, even as she glanced back at the dishevelled pile of papers worriedly. Whoever studied here – whoever this library belonged to – they wouldn't notice. Maybe they wouldn't notice. Who could remember what order they had left their receipts in, anyway?

And yet, sincerely, she doubted.

Lorencio pulled at something in the wall on the other side of the shelf, and they were plunged into darkness as the panel slid back into place. Like something in one of Belle's mystery novels, Khalore thought, wonderingly. "How did you…?"

"I worked here for a time," Lorencio said, "in my childhood. A hallboy."

He hadn't always been a middle-aged Scholar? For the first time in a lifetime of curses and monsters and magic, Khalore found herself deeply, sincerely, disbelieving.

"Where does this corridor lead?"

"I'm not sure. They've done a bit of redecorating since I was last here." She could hear the smile in his voice; he was as reassured as she was, then, to have escaped detection by Azula's mysterious mistress. "If we're on the western side of the palace, the stables. The eastern side, then maybe the cells..."

He had started to walk. Khalore hastened to keep pace.

"The cells?"

"They were reserved for the greatest of criminals: those accused of treason, and those accused of witchcraft. Empty now, of course," Lorencio said. "The paqudus operate independent gaols in the provinces themselves for the most part."

Khalore had passed one of them, in Aizsaule. The wing facing the street had belonged to the debtors' prison, so that their families could catch sight of them, so that the offending parties could plead for their loved ones to settle their debt and set them free.

"Probably better that it's the cells, then," Khalore said. "If they're more likely to be empty."

Famous last words.

The cells weren't empty. Of course they weren't. They couldn't catch a break, could they? The world was determined to turn their own desperation back atop them at every turn.

Khalore had to pick the lock into the cells; the doorway had been padlocked shut. When Khalore stooped to examine the lock, carefully pulling from her belt one of the hairpins she had earlier pressed into her blood to imbue it with the strength she needed for this task, she saw that there were small marks etched into the side of the doorway, letters that were neither of Illéa nor Irij.

As it transpired, there had been an excellent reason for that door to be kept locked.

When they stepped into the room, it was to the sight of a girl hanging from restraints on the wall. The manacles on her wrists and ankles had rubbed her skin raw, into a bloody mess of meat and skin; her clothes hung from her, a simple cotton shift dyed a bright blue, incongruously bright against the squalor of the room around them. Her head hung limp over the stone flags of the cell floor; her hair had been short shorn.

She might have been beautiful once, but as Khalore drew closer to her, cautiously, painfully slowly, she saw that the girl had symbols gouged into her skin, into her face, red and raw and bloody, just as had been carved into the door which had kept her imprisoned here. Khalore had no hope of deciphering them – she was not so smart to manage, nor so arrogant to try – but they were familiar. Uncomfortably, skin-crawlingly familiar. Yes, she had seen them before. She had seen them, carved into Ghjuvan's teeth, when Eero transferred the curse to Belle's custody.

The curse.

Khalore risked a look back at Lorencio.

She had never seen a look of such pure horror on a person's face before. In Ina's face, when Pekka had died, there had been grief as well; in Ilja's face, when he had learned of Ghjuvan's fate, there had been anger brewing alongside. But in Lorencio – no. Nothing but horror. Pure and sickly and almost tangible.

There was a white film over the girl's eyes, thicker than a cataract, more opaque than the blindness which came over the Hierophants of Irij. Khalore put a hand, very gently, to the girl's throat. For a split second, she was almost afraid that the girl would jerk back to life, that she would revive and scream and gnash her teeth. But -

She was dead.

Dead. Dead. Dead.

Dead like Pekka. Dead like Ghjuvan. Dead like Arsen.

Back in the tunnels, she could only enjoy the silence for a moment – and even "enjoy" was the wrong word, utterly the wrong word, for the silence stretched between them strung as tightly as a harpstring. Eventually, she said, softly, "but would they really have any use for it?"

"I could not say for certain, Khalore," Lorencio's reply was soft, and bitter, and angrier than she had realised that the Scholar could be. "It rather strikes me as some kind of sick experimentation for experimentation's sake."

She said, "by the royals?"

He said, "by monsters, Khalore. Monsters greater in their inhumanity than the druj could ever aspire to be."

Khalore thought again of the girl, that poor girl, the silent scream on her face, so that her skin stretched and her eyes gaped wide and blind and….

Kinga said, sleepily, something that sounded something like, "vashee wunuva slicktid?"

Ina smiled. It was a nervous smile; Khalore's story had clearly put her on edge. She had put an arm around Khalore, almost instinctively, like by holding her thus she could keep at bay all the dangers and horrors of this world. "What on earth did you say, Ki?"

Kinga turned her face out of her arms. She said, distinctly, "vashee wunuva slicktid?"

"Very funny."

"Was she one of the Selected?"

"Ohhh." Khalore frowned, and glanced at Ilja. "Does it sound like one of the Selected?"

Ilja nodded. His face could have been carved from granite, so hard his expression. "Tereza Stan." His voice was cold. Khalore knew what he would be thinking. The moment they gave them the slightest benefit of the doubt, these devils showed their nature. They could be shown no kindness; they could be shown no mercy. For certainly, they showed none, not even to their own. That kind of inhumanity could only be answered singularly: repent, atone, salvation. "Arali District."

It wasn't clear to Khalore whether this information had any significance for Kinga; the Moon of Kur just nodded sleepily and rolled her head back into the strange, contorted cocoon shape in which she seemed to have started sleeping since arriving in Illéa. Maybe it was a necessity, to sleep thus, when you were sleeping with – amongst – the enemy. Khalore couldn't imagine that it would go over well with the tagma if they woke to a girl with a druj's face lying in their comrade's bed.

Ina yawned widely. Khalore noted that Eero had sidled in – though, to be fair, he was not really a man who sidled, he was a man who appeared, and he had appeared now – to lurk at the edge of the room, just at the threshold of the bedroom, as though awaiting an invitation. Ilja offered it to him lazily: "not going to join us in bed, Eero?"

Ina had continued thinking aloud, undeterred by her old friend's pre-occupation with lightening the mood. "But if the Radiance is dead…?"

"Are you sure she was the Radiance?" Eero said.

"Are you sure she wasn't?"

"Maybe she failed initiation."

"They might," Ilja said, "just be moving the curse between people."

"Or maybe the curse needs to be fed..."

Kinga rolled out of the bed gracelessly, still half-tangled in blankets, and groped around on the floor for a shirt. She said, "you geniuses figure out what this means and tell me when I am needed to kill something."

"Where are you going?"

"Coffee," Kinga said, and dodged around Eero's elbow to go down the stairs. He watched her go, blue eye inscrutable. Those bright blue eyes, Khalore thought, so much like Pekka's. So much like Hyacinth's, when the Sun managed to open her eyes, when Khalore had pulled them open to watch for the little darting motions of a mind at sleep. It was an unnatural blue; it was too bright, too electric.

They lingered on her, practically physical. Khalore decided to follow Kinga downstairs in search of breakfast more substantial than a single croissant – but as she approached the edge of the stairs, she realised that Kinga had already struck a conversation with someone below. Pekka, Khalore wondered, or Zoran?

Neither, as it transpired. As she descended the stairs, Khalore noted that Kinga was speaking with that restrained sense of respect that she had always reserved for only those generations of Warriors older, more battle-hardened, than she. "The centre of every poem is this: I have loved you. I have had to deal with that."

"Those aren't your words."

"No." There was a smile in Kinga's voice. "It's from a book."

"Jaga's?"

"Ina's."

"What is the difference?"

"About five inches and forty pounds."

He laughed at that. Kinga didn't ask who he thought he was. Khalore wasn't sure that he would know. She wasn't sure that he was anyone right now – just a collection of Hierophantic memories, collated into the guise of a person. Maybe the part of him that had asked the question had been Arek, and the part of him that had laughed at the answer had been Matthias, just as the part that had hurt Ina, had tried tokill Ina, had been…

"Zoran." Ina had followed Khalore down the stairs; the Hanged Man, instinctively, put out an arm as though to protect her or to hold her back. Those bruises... "Pjotr." Her voice was soft, and still a little sad, but she managed to force out the name without letting her voice break this time. "Do you want to come upstairs? We're putting a plan together."

Khalore looked at her. "Eero thinks there's something to it?"

"I think there's something to it," Ina said, firmly, "and Ilja wants to talk himself in circles about why Lorencio brought you there, what he was looking for..."

Kinga shook her head. "I have patrol in an hour, Nanna."

"Then you can give us twenty minutes. Come on."

Khalore said, "do you really think this is going to matter, Ina?"

"I think," Ina said, "that this is the closest we've ever got. Maybe the closest we are ever going to get."

And it was all because of her. Even as the grotesque image of the dead devil girl swam in her mind's eye, knowing that she had contributed, that she had helped –

Khalore had to fight back a smile.