schilderwald (n.) a street that is so overcrowded and rammed with street signs, that you're more prone to getting lost rather than finding your way.

"Zoran. Pjotr. Do you want to come upstairs? We're putting a plan together."

Downstairs, the room was all bathed in orange light, freckled silver along the eaves where pale sunlight had filtered in to disturb the warm wash of the lanterns beside the door. As Khalore and Ilja trailed Ina downstairs, they could see that the Hierophant was sitting up on the couch, examining his hands intently. As Ina and Khalore spoke quietly about the plan at the base of the stairs, Ilja drifted closer to Kinga, who was sitting on the counter, her legs folded under her, chewing thoughtfully on an apple slice. She said, quite calmly, "it isn't Zoran."

It looked like Zoran. It had been speaking like Zoran, all poetry and quiet self-deprecation. It had eyes like Zoran's, that perfect pale blue colour with flecks of something like silver, like the scars wrought upon cracking ice.

Ilja blinked. "Then, who…?"

"My name is Gijs," Zoran said, quite pleasantly. "How do you do?"

"He's lost his mind," Ilja said, to no one in particular. Beside him, Kinga shifted her weight and smiled into her hand. "He's finally lost his mind."

"Who am I, then?" Zoran said. There was no aggravation in his voice. It was a simple enquiry, as another might ask about the weather, or whether the journey had been a long one, or whether one was still hungry after an enormous meal.

"You're –"

"Our Hierophant," Kinga said. "Ignore them, he caused a bit of trouble before you jumped in."

She was looking at Ina's throat.

"That's helpful," Zoran said, "makes everything a bit more convenient. I've been in this one before..."

Gijs, Gijs, Gijs – Ilja scoured his memories, searching for the answer. By the stairs, Ina and Khalore had glanced up. Ina still looked strange and exotic, with those burn marks scoured across her face, marking the path of her tears. The shape of a handprint was apparent on her throat. Her eyes were fixed on Zoran's face. Gijs, Gijs, Gijs…

Gijsbert Barnhardt, Hierophant of the Sixth Generation. A petty criminal, before he had become a Warrior, drawn from the prisons of the Nav region. He had been particularly short-lived, if Ilja recalled correctly – and Ilja suspected that he did. He had lived… how long? They had learned it in school. Ermete Tofana's voice curled about his ears: nine hours in all. He had spent all of those nine hours in a trance, caught by the visions that were, by virtue of his curse, his burden and his right.

This didn't look like a vision. This looked like a possession, whole-bodied. It was the most horrifically disturbing sight, to see Zoran move thus – all the more wrong for the fact it seemed so normal. But that was not Zoran's smile, crooked on one side, like the two halves of his face were in disagreement regarding how funny they found something. That was not Zoran's way of looking about a room, which he usually did with a certain, darting thoughtfulness, like he was adding each piece of new information to a mental archive as enormous as the ancient libraries of Old Kur. That was not Zoran's way of standing, shoulders slightly curled as though walking into a strong wind, or Zoran's way of keeping his hair slicked back, for the man in Zoran's body was wearing Zoran's hair windswept and dishevelled and devilish.

The man in Zoran's body said, "was there to be a meeting, then?"

Kinga was counting on her fingers. Ilja wondered at her – what a shame that their keeper of knowledge, learned from childhood at the foot of a cursed dynasty, was so utterly unintelligent. She made a face at him when she caught him watching. "I suppose you know, Iliusha?"

Khalore said, very softly, "where is Zoran gone?" She said it in a tone which suggested she was not entirely averse to the idea of cutting Gijsbert Barnhardt out of Zoran's body, if the situation called for it. Ilja was sure that he saw her fingers twitch in the direction of the screwdriver tucked into her belt.

"He'll be there somewhere," Kinga said. "They say that it's just like sleeping..."

"Get Matthias' notes," Ina said. "Where are Matthias' notes?"

Gijs patted himself down, and looked appreciating when Ilja stepped forward to assist him. It felt… wrong to touch Zoran like this, when Zoran was asleep but his body upright and alive. Ilja could feel every corded muscle beneath his old friend's worn jumper. Zoran had grown thin, these last few months, but Gijs held himself with less tension than that to which Zoran was accustomed, which made him seem rather less sickly by comparison. Zoran had been keeping Matthias' notes tucked under his shirt, belted to his abdomen. The pages were well-worn, dog-eared from many hours of reading. Ilja wondered whether Zoran had determined any new meaning from any of the nonsense scrawled across these pages, most of them typewritten, a scant few written in a loose, looping hand that looked like a blind man's cursive.

To be fair, that was probably exactly what this was.

He handed it to Ina, who bent her head over it like it was a favourite novel, searching for an answer to a question she had not yet spoken. Kinga crunched into another apple slice, and said, "where were you last?"

"Sixteenth generation," Gijs replied.

Kinga looked delighted. "Did you see Agata?"

"I did. We were on the slopes of a mountain, purple with heather, and she had just been stabbed-"

"The battle of Ybont Ddrylliog."

"She was very badly wounded," Gijs said concernedly. "Did she survive?"

"She lived to be stabbed many more times," Kinga confirmed. She was smiling. She had never known Agata, who had lived and died thirty-five years before Kinga had ever inherited her curse, but she spoke of her now in a tone more affectionate than she used for the Warriors with whom she had spent her entire childhood. Was it easier to show such love for the dead? Certainly, it was harder to disappoint them.

Khalore had moved to the counter to fetch one of the dull-headed pencils that Zoran kept in a clay jar by the edge of the table. Ina peeled off a page she had deemed unimportant, and Khalore bent her head over it. When she wrote, it was Irij script, but hesitantly, forming the letters as a child might. Had they really been here so long that they had begun to forget even the alphabet of their home?

Ina said, in a voice that was remarkably calm for all the violence which had been visited upon her, body and soul, these last few weeks, "and before that?"

Ilja had the unmistakeable impression that she was focusing on this to avoid thinking about Zoran himself.

"The fifth generation. Tymoteusz Brzezinski."

Khalore wrote.

"Before that?"

"Twelfth generation. Chjara Mannazzu."

"And?"

"Nineteenth generation."

"We are the nineteenth generation," Khalore said, coldly.

"Yes."

"You've taken over Zoran before?"

"It's relative," Gijs said. "Before this, for me. Maybe after, for you."

Ina said, "and what did you see?"

"An angel," Gijs said, "whose wings touched either side of the horizon, whose light scorched the stone itself, who boiled the ocean where she stood."

That sounded like a curse. That sounded like a curse, but it certainly didn't sound like any of their curses, unless Hyacinth Estlebourgh had something unexpected to show them when she woke up.

It sounded… radiant. Ilja caught Ina's eye, and knew that she was thinking the same thing. Ina said, "describe her to me."

Gijs boosted himself up to sit on the counter beside Kinga, his legs dangling loosely in a way that was most un-Zoran-like. He accepted one of the apple slices that Kinga offered him, and bit into it thoughtfully as he said, "hair like the primordial darkness. Eyes like black coals. Brightness, otherwise. Hard to say for sure."

"What else?" Ina was intent. It was moments like this that Ilja saw, with perfect clarity, why the Commandant had chosen her as a Warrior. She kept them together. She saw the larger picture when the rest of them were focused on placing one foot in fron tof the other.

Gijs said, "it was brief. So brief. What else..." He looked around the room, looking at them all very hard in the face. "You were there," he said to Khalore. "And you." He was speaking to Ina. "We were standing… on a rooftop. Looking out towards the sea. Not much older than you are now. Within the year."

"Kinga and I," Ilja said. "We weren't…?"

Kinga's smile did not fade as Gijs shook his head. If anything, it widened slightly.

"I see," Ilja said.

That would be a redemption, wouldn't it? That was salvation. It shouldn't have felt like such a comfort that Kinga would be dead as well. Would they go hand-in-hand, or would they follow Ghjuvan separately, at different times, for different reasons?

Would it make a difference? Would it help them? Would they be the reasons that Ina and Khalore lived to face… whatever it was that Gijs had seen?

Would it be a devil that got him, or would he just fade with his curse?

Ina said, slowly, deliberately, "if that's all…"

"Then we should proceed with our plans," Khalore agreed.

"Unless we want to try to send a message to the past." Ina held out one of the notes, plucked from Matthias's bundle. "I think… Ilja, what do you reckon?"

Ilja accepted the page from Ina's hand, and glanced down at it. On the corner of the page, there was a string of random numbers: 12471912516198711189321. He examined it closely – fuck. Yes. There, just as Gijs had pronounced them: nineteen, twelve, five, sixteen, nineteen. He looked at the numbers which would follow: eight, and seven, and a string of ones, was that an eighteen or an eight? "We could send something back for Matthias," he said, "or to the very first Hierophant…"

Gijs smiled. "That's good thinking."

Khalore said, "how would that be helpful?"

"I'm not sure," Ina said. "Surely there is something we should tell them? Warn them?"

Ilja thought, we should tell them to read over Matthias's notes before bequeathing them as a lifeline.

Ilja said, "I'll get Eero. Maybe he'll have some ideas."

Kinga had jumped down from the counter and moved towards the stairs with him, touching the hem of his sleeve gently to get his attention. He glanced at her, arching an eyebrow. Kinga spoke sotto voce. "You know, I never realised that Zoran was so handsome before."

Ilja said, "you are so fucking predictable, Szymańska."

"Maybe you should take your chance now, Schovajsa, before Gijsbert falls in love with Inanna as well."

"Alas," Ilja said, "I doubt Zoran would be too happy about it when he comes back."

"And you? Are you okay?"

"I'm fine, Ki. Just going to grab Eero."

She clearly didn't believe him, but she nodded, and stepped back. "Good idea."

Ilja ascended the steps slowly. It felt like someone had slipped lead plates into his boots; it felt like his laces were made of iron, tightening over his bones. There was a strange, hollow feeling in his chest, the same feeling he sometimes got at church when the hymn struck a particularly high note, or when the Preacher looked you directly in the eye as he intoned his fire-and-brimstone eulogy for the Kur people. It was a sudden, awful recognition of something which stood outside of normal knowledge.

When he stepped into the bedroom, Eero was sewing. He had ripped his jacket; he was stitching a patch onto its elbow with quiet focus. When Ilja cleared his throat, Eero looked up, and Ilja knew from the look in Eero's warm brown eyes that there was no use in hiding.

And yet, he tried.

Ilja said, "there's… downstairs, we're..."

He paused. It felt like his heart had crumpled in his chest under the sudden impact of Gijs's words. Had Zoran seen this? Had Zoran failed to tell him?

Or had Zoran merely failed? He had hurt Ina. He had succumbed to Dimitar and to Matthias and to Gijs. He had seen nothing useful, produced no visions which would assist them in finding the Radiance. He had not even done them the simple courtesy of foretelling their deaths.

It was not right that Ilja had to hear about his death from a stranger. It was not the way these things were meant to go.

"I think I'm going to die," Ilja said, numbly. "I'm going to die in a year."

Eero's mouth twisted in empathy. He hadn't looked so human in all the time that Ilja had known him. He had not looked so much like his brother. He said, "sit down, Ilja."

Ilja sat down. The bed was soft, slightly uneven, covered in a quilted blanket that Ina had found at a refugee's bazaar. It had belonged to a dead family. It had been taken from a ruined house. It had been stitched by devils. Would it be a devil that killed Ilja in the end?

"Eero," he said. "I'm going to die."

Eero put a hand to Ilja's cheek. It was an oddly fatherly gesture from someone so close to his own age; it was so strangely raw, for a man who seemed to rehearse his every sentence in the mirror before he spoke them aloud. "We all are."

"Not so soon," Ilja said. "Not without doing something. Not without redeeming myself."

Eero shook his head. "What wrong have you committed, Schovajsa?"

Did he have to ask? "Devilry, Hämäläinen."

"No greater than most."

It was strange, Ilja thought. It was not an answer that anyone had ever given him. The soft acknowledgment that he had done wrong – what they had done to that tagma girl, what they had turned her into, what he had become, and what he had been descended from – but that it was not of any great gravity… he had not realised, not fully, that this was what he had been craving. He would not be condemned to go somewhere beyond the other Warriors, would he? No greater than most. They would burn together. He would be alright with that. He had always known that they would go to hell together or not at all.

There was no greater honour.

And oh, fuck, here came the tears.