And everything looks like it’s coming down to this corridor here, and the open doorway gaping blackly at the end of it.

Alexei glides towards the entrance, then pauses briefly on the threshold. It’s a cul-de-sac, and every instinct warns him not to go in-at least, not without a couple of fragmentation grenades to clear the way. But there’s a quiet sobbing sound coming from inside, a woman’s lamentation. (And if the mission target is present, it wouldn’t do to cut up hard.) He adjusts his goggles, then flashes his infrared torch briefly at the ceiling.

A confused jumble of impressions: bodies. Mattresses arranged in concentric rings around a pit, leading down to an altar. There’s a four-poster bed behind the altar. The sobbing comes from a figure on the bed. Sacrificial victim, thinks Alexei. There are bodies, some new and some old: this is not a novelty. The idea of rescuing a victim from the cultists, however, holds some appeal-especially as she might know where they will have taken the mission target. Alexei is Spetsnaz through-and-through: the product of an incredibly harsh training system, ruthlessly self-disciplined, and trained as a soulless killing machine. But he’s also intelligent, a misfit who was a round peg in the square hole of the regular army, and possessed of the romantic streak that leads some men into professional soldiering. Given an opportunity to rescue a damsel in distress and expedite his mission goals at the same time, Alexei will go for the gratitude shag. And who can blame him? It’s been a hard night’s work.

And so he dances down the aisle, leans over the lady tied to the bed, and-holding a knife to the neck of the man lying next to her-who just happens to be me, myself: Bob Howard-asks: “Woman, you tell, where is Fuller Memorandum? Speak now, or will cut throat of All-Highest.”

I LIE IN THE GRIP OF A GREAT LASSITUDE. I’VE BEEN LYING here for what seems like decades, staring with unblinking eyes at the star-pricked canopy of black silk above the Skull Cultists’ altar. I know, distantly, that I am in extreme danger; I’m in the middle of a monstrous summoning, and lying like a drunkard next to a bound but still deadly Iris while her minions panic and try to fight off the eaters outside the chapel is not a life-expectancy-enhancing situation. But I can’t move. I don’t even feel tired; I feel dead. Some kinds of summoning cause serious physical fatigue, possibly via a mechanism not unlike a mild form of K syndrome, and this would appear to be one of them.

The black sky above me, pierced by the flickering light of unfamiliar constellations, blows like a chill wind through my awareness. I’ve seen this sky before, I realize; where? Oh. Yes, the canopy of the altar-bed of the Black Skull mirrors the chill starlight that sluices across the desiccated plain surrounded by the fence of impaled corpses that I dreamed about, the fence that locks the Sleeper in the Pyramid in somnolent darkness. I’m not the only one to see that skyscape when I close my eyes, I think.

I can feel Iris nearby, her mind slowed and frustrated, defocused by the bindings woven into the ropes that trim the altar of the sex-magic cultists that used this chapel before her own people moved in. She’s angry, terrified, embittered; I could almost feel sympathy for her if my right arm didn’t remind me constantly of what she stands for, who she is. There are the eaters, torpid and in some cases well-fed, resting in their bony chrysalids in the porous earth beyond; and there are other human lives upstairs, some of them familiar. They’re coming this way. One of them, not so familiar, is almost here already-

Something touches my neck, as a voice speaks, in a thick eastern European accent: “Woman, you tell, where is Fuller Memorandum? Speak now, or will cut throat of All-Highest.”

Bastard. I’m lying here helpless and I can’t even tell Laughing Boy that I’m not the All-Highest! That, and the Fuller Memorandum happens to be snugly jacketed in the folder I’m clutching to my bosom with arms like lead weights: this is not looking good. Close to panic, I try to twitch a finger or blink an eyelid-anything to reassert control over my own treacherous body.

“Untie me and I’ll take you to it,” says Iris, quick as a flash. “Please?” I can just about see her batting her eyelids at Laughing Boy. Then she adds: “You’d better cut All-Highest’s throat before he wakes up. He was going to sacrifice me-”

I try to shout, She’s lying! But nothing comes out of my throat. I am not, in fact, breathing, I realize distantly. Am I dead? I wonder. Am I undead? I’m not one hundred percent clear on the clinical definition of death, but I’m pretty sure that lying trapped in my own unbreathing body meets some of the requirements. I don’t know about the continuity of consciousness bit, but maybe it’s a side effect of the binding ritual they used. If I had my phone I could go online and google it, but zombie don’t surf. I feel the knife blade move, and I really start to panic-

“Nyet. Is already dead. You take me for fool! Where is Fuller Memorandum? Tell and I release.”

The knife is at Iris’s throat; I lie beside her, paralyzed and apprehensive.

Iris’s breath ratchets harshly through her throat. “The file All-Highest is clutching. Be careful, you don’t want to touch his skin by accident-”

But she’s too late.

Alexei, Laughing Boy, pulls the Fuller Memorandum from my hands. As he does so, he makes momentary contact with one of my fingers. And the inevitable happens, because this torpor that’s come over me-the torpor associated with the summoning, and the control of lesser eaters, and with K syndrome-is symptomatic of something else: I’m hungry.

IN THE BACK OF AN AMBULANCE SPEEDING TOWARDS THE ROYAL Surrey Country Hospital with lights and siren, an old man opens his eyes and whispers, “Good job, boy.” The paramedic, who is looking at the EEG trace, glances at him in surprise.

The stroke victim tries to sit up, struggling against the straps that hold him on the stretcher. Then he frowns thunderously. “How long was I out?” he asks the paramedic. Then: “Forget that. Turn round-I want you to take me to Brookwood. Immediately!”

SECONDS LATER, BARNES AND HIS MEN COME THROUGH THE DOOR with a strobing flicker of light bombs and a concussive blast of stun grenades. They’re ready for business: they’ve got Mo and her singular instrument ready to suppress any residual occult resistance. But they’re too late.

The screaming is mine; I’m yelling my throat out: a weird, warbling abhuman keening that doesn’t stop until the squad paramedic gingerly sticks me with a battlefield-grade sedative. Which takes some time: when they find me I’m lying on a vampire prince’s bed, covered in gore, with a lump missing from my right arm, and my eyes rolled up in my head so that only the green-glowing whites show. It takes them a while to confirm that I’m safe to approach; and a while longer to get an insulated stretcher down to the chamber and strap me down onto it.

Iris is sobbing, cringing away from me as far as the ropes will let her. She can’t get very far, though: she’s weighed down by the body of the dead Spetsnaz trooper, a black ring-binder lying on the floor beside him.

As for Alexei, he’s dead: eaten by the thing the cultists tried to make of me. Their sacrifice bit a huge and vital chunk out of my soul; after the power of my death-magic ran down, I was all but inert until Alexei unintentionally filled up the hole. I don’t think he intended to do that. I didn’t intend to do that, certainly: I’m no necromancer. But when they’ve performed the ritual of binding upon you, trying to turn you into a vessel for the Eater of Souls…

You need to eat.