"Wait. There's something else."

He looked at her. "The order to have the earl killed came from the highest level."

Icy fingers constricted around Josey's windpipe. She couldn't breathe. What did he mean, the highest level? The Church hierarchs? The prelate himself? They killed Father, and now they want to kill me.

She gasped and shook. Then, Caim put an arm around her and the air rushed once more into her lungs.

"Come on," he said, pulling her away. "We have to get out of here."

Josey leaned into him and felt his warm breath against her cheek. She needed the contact, to feel the touch of another living person. She felt like she was surrounded by ghosts. She looked back over her shoulder, but the alley and Parmian were gone, hidden in the night. For the first time, she realized it was raining.

"I know," she said. They hurried through the slick, black streets. "I know where we have to go to find the next piece to the puzzle."

Caim regarded her with an amused expression. Something flickered across his eyes, too quick to follow. A blossom of heat spread through her chest as she realized she trusted him.

She turned her head as the warmth spread into her face. She gazed into the sky, into the rain and gloom, to the heights of Esquiline Hill.

"I have to go home."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

shadow crouched by the riverbank where a gentle breeze pushed through the riparian jungle of rushes and cattails. Dark masses of silver-black clouds scudded across the starless sky. Somewhere an owl hooted, and the shrill howl of a coyote carried on the wind.

Amid the Memnir's sleepy currents, where the river slid past the fortified walls of Othir, Castle DiVecci perched on a spur of bare rock. The castle's white parapets loomed over the water like cliffs of alabaster in the waning moonlight. Banners hung slack from the sturdy towers.

A stone span joined the isle to the mainland, guarded at both ends by a gatehouse manned by soldiers of the Prelate's Guard. Othirians called it the Bridge of Tears for all those who had crossed and disappeared into the dungeons beneath the castle, never to return.

The shadow had no need of bridges. One moment it stood on the riverbank. The next, it appeared inside the castle's mighty donjon, in a hallway on the top floor.

The shadow listened as its sandals touched down. The rhythm of the castle was slow and steady, like the heartbeat of huge slumbering beast, broken only by the discordant groans of the damned far below in the catacombs.

Content, the shadow began to hunt. It crept past rows of closed doors and paused as it came around a corner. Firelight spilled from a doorway at the end of the hall. Two bodyguards in white-and-gold livery stood outside, leaning on the polished shafts of their immaculate halberds.

One of the guards looked up as the shadow approached, but too late to give warning as a swarm of inky globules dropped from the ceiling. The men jerked and tried to shout as the shadows wrapped them in tight cocoons, but nothing emerged from their straining mouths. The little darknesses devoured them in silence.

The shadow stepped over the dying men, through the doorway. Shelves of books lined the chamber walls from floor to ceiling. Logs crackled behind an iron grate in the broad hearth. A water clock on the mantelpiece dripped out time's passage. Above the fireplace was mounted a graphic bronze sculpture portraying the Prophet of the True Faith. The half-starved demigod hung by a noose on a twisted rope with an expression of supreme sorrow etched on his long, pained face.

The crackle of paper drew the shadow's attention as a thin hand, spotted with age, appeared over the arm of a massive cushioned chair beside the fireplace. It turned the page of a large tome before sinking once again out of view.

Levictus pulled back his cowl. There was no one else in the room. The darknesses, finished with their meal, pooled around his feet. He shivered as they scaled the hem of his long black robe and vanished within the garment. A long knife appeared in his hand. For many long years he had waited for this moment. He wanted to make it last, to savor this thing that had consumed his thoughts since the day, long ago, when armed soldiers came to his family's home and took them away, depositing them into cells under this very castle. His parents, both elderly and in failing health, had died under torture on the first night. His brother expired a few days later. Only he had survived.

A voice rose from the chair. Perhaps once strong with authority, time had left it weakened and wavering. "Gunter? There's a chill in the air. Could you bring us another warm brandy?"

Levictus crossed the intervening distance as a bald pate leaned around the side of the chair, followed by rheumy eyes and a wide nose. He made no attempt to hide, but strode purposefully toward his prey. The old man's rubbery lips formed a hollow 0 as the knife rose. The blade's dark surface drank in the light of the fire.

"Mercy!" the prelate cried. "Mercy in the name of Almighty God."

But Levictus had none. The knife sliced through the man's wrinkled flesh. Thick streams of blood poured down the breast of his snowy robes. It splashed on the book that fell from his hands. The firelight caught the spine and illuminated the golden words printed there. By Fire and Blood: Bringing the True Faith to the North.

As his victim tumbled to the floor, Levictus opened the folds of his robe and brought out a wooden box. He set it on the floor as he knelt beside the prelate's corpse. Blood pooled beneath the body while he worked.

When the deed was done, as Levictus stood and put away his prize, he studied the man at his feet. No archangels had rushed in to defend His Sublime Holiness; no thunderbolts had fallen from the heavens. For all his majesty, the prelate had died like any other man, less well, in fact, than most. So much for the vaunted power of the True Church.

A strangeness passed over Levictus while he stood over his victim. Something buzzed in his ear like a flying insect. He made a pass with his hands, whispered a sibilant phrase, and the sensation fled on soundless wings.

Levictus went to a cabinet on the wall and rifled through its contents. Leaves of parchment fell to the floor. Then, he held up a sheet to the flickering light. His eyes followed the neat handwriting down to the surprise at the bottom, stamped in a blob of old wax. He stuffed the paper into a pocket. Then, he stepped into the dark space between two massive bookcases and vanished.

He reappeared inside the city, speeding through the slumbering avenues, just another shadow under the sequestering cover of the night.

Caim pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders as he hunched on the rooftop. Below him, a blanket of silver fog shrouded the street in front of the Frenig mansion. Moisture dripped from the iron spikes atop the walls.

At least the rain had stopped.

Josey sat beside him, her arms propped on upraised knees, her chin resting on her forearm. He watched her in silence, studying her profile, not wanting to break the spell of her beauty. After Parmian's interrogation, Josey had been convinced that the answers to their problems lay within her father's house. Caim had given all the reasons they couldn't return to the scene of the crime-it wasn't a smart move, the place would likely be guarded, it was precisely where he would expect them to go if he were behind this whole charade-but his arguments had withered under her intense stare. Somehow she convinced him.

He almost suspected witchcraft.

Since then, she hadn't said much. Sitting beside him in the dark, she could have been a thousand leagues away.

Caim tried to put himself in her place. To find out that her late father had been the ringleader of a rebellious cult couldn't be an easy thing to swallow. It was simple for him. You lived and you died. What you did in the time between was your own business. And yet, how much of what he believed had been shaped by the uncaring world into which he had been thrust, a world that ground the weak and helpless into grist beneath its colossal wheels? Would he be so nonchalant about existence if his own past weren't so mired in brutality?