cfapter 4 TI-e pool

cf>apter 4: TI->e pool

Antigone broke the surface to find herself treading the icy waters of a subterranean pool. She could hear the lapping of water against marble. The obelisks that bordered this hidden chamber were of not of tar and wood, but of carved stone. Their markings were clearly of an older order, hieroglyphs both ancient and authentic.

She paddled to the edge of the pool and pushed herself up. Water streamed from her lithe form as she walked dripping from the silent waters. The marble was cool against the soles of her feet.

But what was this place?

When she was back on the Widow’s Walk, everything had seemed so certain. So right. All that was necessary was the proper resolve, the proper conviction. A leap of faith.

She had pulled off the trick before, many times.

Her dramatic leaps between life and death had become ritualized, almost theatrical. It was now something of a disappearing act. Now you see her, now you don’t.

True, she had never played her game of ledges on such a grand scale before, but the height should not cf>apter 4: TI->e pool of Suicides have mattered. Even the epic scale of the plunge from the observation deck should not have proved too great an obstacle. If anything, the heroic scope made her stronger, larger than life. And, she hoped, larger than death.

But something had gone amiss. She should not be here. She should have awakened in some hospital bed, broken in body but triumphant in spirit. She would smile up at the attendant through the bandages, her most winning smile, and express her hope that she hadn’t worried them.

That was the best part of the act. The look on their faces, it was priceless. It was all the applause she craved. That one look made it all worthwhile, worth coming back again and again. To be needed. To be somehow essential. So much so that it seemed life itself simply could not bear to go on without her.

Death was not big enough to hold her. It never had been. It always disgorged her, deposited her back here, under the sterile glaring lights.

“Worried us? Jeezus, lady, you’re lucky to be alive.”

He would have been half right.

The sound of a footfall in the darkened tomb ruined her moment. It jerked Antigone out of her reverie. She froze, instinctively dropping to a fighting crouch at the water’s edge. The plish of water falling from her body and striking the floor boomed in the darkness. It pinpointed her position.

A torch hissed to life, momentarily blinding her.

When she had blinked her eyes clear, she saw that the brand was held aloft by a huge ebon claw. Beyond it, she could make out only a hulking shadowy form that swelled in the torchlight, filling the room from corner to comer. Her eyes squinted, but the only detail of it widow$ weed5 she could make out was the glint of light off wicked canines. A mocking Cheshire Cat smile.

The voice was gentle, but vast as the sea. It filled the tiny grotto and caught her up in its undertow, nearly sweeping her feet out from under her. “You are shivering, little one. Come closer, into the light and warm yourself.”

She was suddenly aware of her nakedness and vulnerability. She wavered there, both afraid and ashamed to approach the light.

“Suit yourself,” the voice washed over her. “You will probably catch your death of cold. But perhaps that is not so grim a prospect for you as it once was.

Some manage to make themselves quite comfortable here, at the water’s edge. Some linger for years without ever daring to approach the light.”

Something brushed past Antigone’s shoulder. She wheeled to confront her unseen assailant, but found she could barely budge. She was caught, wedged in a great press of bodies, all crowded here at the water’s edge. She felt as if she were trying to draw breath, but she could not. She could not even remember why this might be important.

She tried to twist free, but only found herself pressed face to face with the man next to her. The top and back of his head had been violently blown outward.

His eyes widened in recognition, but when he opened his mouth to address her, the only thing that emerged was a wash of blood from the gaping hole in the roof of his mouth.

Antigone tried to push free of him, to spin away, to lose herself in the press. She reached out, groped blindly and latched onto something firm. A hand in the dark mass of flesh. She tightened her grip and pulled herself closer. A face swam towards her through the sea of bodies. For an instant she saw her look of relief mirrored in the other woman’s face. Then, just as suddenly, the look dissolved into one of horror and repulsion.

Antigone could not hold the other woman’s stare.

Her eyes dropped to their clenched hands and for the first time she saw long, exaggerated shreds of flesh trailing from the other’s forearms. They dragged the floor in her wake.

She would not scream. Antigone clenched her teeth over the rising panic and revulsion and cast about for some way out of the throng of bodies. The pool!

She fought her way back towards the sound of lapping waters, lashing out indiscriminately.

With a cry of relief, she picked out the outline of the pool’s edge. A bloated blue hand burst from the waters and groped at her ankles. She kicked out at it, backing away as it splashed heavily again into the water. It was not the pudgy, bluish fingers of the drowned child that repulsed and alarmed her. It was the sheer volume of bodies clamoring and clawing their way out of the Pool of Suicides.

Desperately, Antigone cast about for the only other landmark she knew in this vast landscape of flesh-the torch. She could barely pick out the flicker of the distant light. Unless she had totally lost her sense of direction, it had moved since she had last sighted it. Step by step, she fought her way forward. “I am coming!” she shouted. “Don’t leave me here.”

She saw a momentary opening in the press of bodies and immediately dove towards it, twisted and rolled. She could feel hands snatching at her, but they could find no purchase on her wet, sleek form.

There were no trailing robes for them to get a grip on, but she felt handfuls of hair tear away. She came wldow’s weeds to her feet, bleeding from a dozen small wounds. But she could feel the stirring of a draft on her face. She had broken free and there was only open space ahead of her. With all of her remaining strength, she sprinted away from the clinging hands of the damned.

She stumbled and came to an abrupt halt against a pillar. At least she had thought it was a pillar. Looking up, she saw the blazing glow of the torch directly above her. In the light it cast, she could see that the “pillar” was covered in a coarse black fur.

“Here you are, little one.” The familiar laughing voice wrapped around her like a blanket. But there was no warmth in it, only the whisper of the wind through exhumed skulls. “I had hoped you would find my company preferable to that of your peers, and here you are at last. But you are trembling! Where is the pelt that I gave you at our last meeting? Surely you have not left it behind? A pity. You seem even to have shed your skin-you are all pale and moist and wriggling. Hold still a moment.”

“But I don’t know how. ..I don’t know how I got here,” Antigone said miserably.

“Shh. Easy now, little one. Let us see.”

She felt his great soft paws close over her. As she sank into their warmth, she curled in upon herself. He rolled her in his palms like a ball of pliable clay.

It was as if her arms had gotten tangled up in her legs and she couldn’t quite get them all sorted out again.

She tried to cry out, but her words came out muffled as if her head were wrapped in layers of thick cloth.

“There, that is better. It is much as I first remember you.”

As the comforting darkness of the great paws peeled away, Antigone found herself faced with the indignity of being dangled upside down by one heel.

She batted at the tangle of long black skirts that hung down over her face.

“Set me down,” she managed to choke out.

“Or almost as I remember you,” the Jackal amended. The room suddenly righted itself and Antigone found herself once more upon solid ground. As she smoothed the trailing skirts back into place, she was struck by the contrast between her slightly ridiculous position and the solemnity of the ensemble. The long black dress was formal, but simple, almost shapeless. She felt as if she were sheathed in rustling layers-a pale reed girded dark against the marshes. The somber gown even smelled musty, of mothballs. It reminded her of desolate places-of moors, of gardens in winter, of churchyards.

There was no mistaking its function. I t was mourning dress. Widow’s weeds.

Even as she realized this, Antigone was struck with the similarity between this gown and her novice’s robes abandoned on the Widow’s Walk. Had it been only a lifetime ago?

It was not so much a visual similarity as one of feel, of purpose. But her old robes were a badge of her years of servitude to House Tremere and her hopeless struggle against the monolithic and impersonal stasis of the Tremere Pyramid. It was not a burden she was eager to take up again.

She found her hand straying, as if by habit, to where the interior cache pocket was on the novice vestments. She was startled to find a familiar shape there, nestled beneath the layers of fabric of her new garment. It was the outline of an ancient straight razor. 5 0 widow’s weeds Occam’s Razor. It too should have been left behind, abandoned on the precipice.

“Now, no more running,’’ the Jackal smiled down at her. “The way you flit between places is extremely distracting. It is a wonder you ever manage to finish a thought. Now, sit here at my feet. No arguments. I will be only a moment.”

Far overhead, the torch swiveled, leaving Antigone in shadow. The light revealed a set of stone shelves recessed into the wall of the tomb. Fragile clay . vessels lined the shelves-canopic jars-each one stoppered with a lifelike sculpted animal head.

The Laughing Guardian of the Dead ran one hand absently along the row of jars, as if reading off their labels, searching for a particular one. “Ah, here we are,” he called, removing one of the vessels from its perch.

“Antigone, Canis Aureus.”

He cocked his head at her curiously and smiled.

“Yes, we are of a kind, I think, you and I. Canis Aureus. Jackals by nature and temperament.

Worriers of the dead. But I am flattered nonetheless that you should take my name.” He smiled down at her and for a moment, she allowed herself to hope that he had forgotten whatever grim purpose he had been about.

“Come along now,” he said at last. “You have wasted time enough already with your splashing about.”

“But I don’t understand. What am I doing here?

What the hell is this place?” She shivered involuntarily and self-consciously crossed her arms over her chest, feeling very lost, alone and exposed.

“Nothing so prosaic as that,” the Jackal said. “This is merely a crossroads along that path. Do come along.”

He started off without waiting to see if she followed.

FrlC Grrffro He hadn’t gone far before he heard the slap of wet footfalls hurrying up behind him. He smiled his death mask smile. widow$ weeds Francesca Lyon emerged from the Greyhound station into the oily evening rain. She tugged angrily at the hood of the camouflage-patterned poncho, but her efforts did little to interrupt the steady stream of water running down her nose and cheek. The poncho was streaked and stained with ruddy patches from prolonged periods of kneeling in the red clay of excavations along Virginia’s Xdewater peninsula.

Back in DC, she had been a graduate student in colonial archeology at Georgetown University. But she supposed she had thrown all that out the window when she boarded that bus. She had not bothered with purchasing a return ticket. She was not sure that there was any going back at this point.

She slung her rucksack over one shoulder, lowered her head, and struck out into the rain. Her other hand was shoved deep within the poncho’s warm bellypouch. It was balled into a fist, clutching the note.

Sturbridge’s note. It read simply: ei-bNwqd *&+4+&- &u4G4edt&.a *s.

It was only three lines. Fifteen words. But those words had become an all-consuming obsession in the weeks since Sturbridge's visit.

She had tried to fight it off, of course. The sickness. The ravenous hunger. The dark stirrings.

She'd tried to convince herself that this wasn't all happening. She needed to talk to someone, to tell somebody about what was going on. About what had been done to her.

She couldn't very well go to the police. The DC police had enough real monsters to worry about right now. The gangs, the addicts, the rapists, the murderers-all the broken people that usually preyed upon the residents of the less-savory stretches of the city were now largely ignored, left to go about their business. Little fish in a big pond. The police had real problems on their hands now.

In the wake of the riots, the Mall in Washington, DC, had assumed the aspect of an armed military encampment. A vast tent city, overflowing with refugees and emergency workers, stretched unbroken between the Capitol and the boarded-up windows of the White House.

The Washington Monument jutted erect and defiant from the press of canvas and unwashed bodies-a finger pointed accusingly at the heavens.

Upon closer inspection, however, it was obvious that that the concerted efforts of innumerable vandals had taken their toll. As if sensing the prevailing wind, FEMA workers had at last overcome their awe and reluctance, erecting a makeshift scaffolding in order to paint a bold red cross on each of the obelisk's four sides.

The news broadcasts all carefully avoided the crux of the issue. No one wanted to admit that the nation's widow's weeds capital was now under martial law, and that even this extreme measure was doing little to restore order.

The police would only laugh at her. What would she say to them? That ever since she had driven a visiting professor in archeology to a conference in Baltimore she had been having these.. .cravings?They would think she was some kind of pervert. Not the kind they dealt with, of course. Hell, she had seen some of the unclean hungers of that mob in the Mall. If the police were not willing to step in to stop the butcherings and the roasting of human meat on the front lawn of the burned-out White House, they certainly weren’t going to listen to some coed who says that she’s acquired a taste for blood.

Chessie thought she might well be having a breakdown, or maybe even going all-out bull-moose insane. She wondered what that would feel like, to go insane. Was it somerhing that happened all at once, or did it creep up on you gradually, in stages?

Could you see yourself going insane? Could you sit back and look at it objectively and think that yes, it is certainly worse today than it was yesterday? Could you document the changes, perhaps keep a journal?

That way you might flip back through the pages and trace the inevitable and damning course of your own collapse.

Did you even know it when you went insane? Did you realize that something was wrong-and that that ‘something’ wrong was with you?

She wanted to go to Dean Dorfman. He had always been there for her before, even when no one else had.

He was her advisor. He would know what to do.

Dorfman’s specialty was in early American secret societies, but almost nobody on campus knew that. erlc ~t-tjftn Most of the students gave him a pretty wide berth. Not because he was some kind of troll or letch or anything.

But mostly because the administration only sent Dorfman the hard cases. The folks already on their third strike-the ones who were about to get booted out of school altogether. Yeah, Dorfman got all the winners: the folks so caught up in the drugs or the drink or the sex that they couldn’t find their way back out by themselves anymore.

But Dorfman wasn’t there now. Hadn’t been for months now. He was away on sabbatical. To Vienna, lucky bastard. And there was no reason to believe that he would be returning home before the start of the next term.

And that left her on her own.

Come to New York.

She didn’t even know why she was here. After what Sturbridge had done to her the last time, Chessie couldn’t imagine the professor would be glad to see her again. She would probably refuse to see her altogether.

Chessie had thought of little else these past nights.

She wasn’t even sure she would like what might happen if Sturbridge did agree to see her. But she had to talk to someone. Someone who knew what was going on.

Someone who could tell her why she was having these.. .feelings.

She thought briefly of going home. Not home to her family, that would be really stupid. But back to the mountains. It was the only place she had ever felt she had things in perspective. The only place she ever felt that she could get away from the pounding words, the clink of bottles, the clumsy scrapings of the key at the lock. widow$ weeds Maybe the madness didn’t have anything to do with Sturbridge. Or with what she had done. Maybe it had been there all along, lying dormant, hiding just below the surface of the skin. It could have been there for years, waiting patiently for someone or something to scratch through.

Her father would know, if anyone would. But she was damned if she was going to put herself within his reach again. Not even to find out the truth about what had happened to her.

Maybe it was all heredity, the dark hunger. A family heirloom. Her birthright. Maybe what Sturbridge did only drew it out of her, brought it welling to the surface.

Maybe, she thought, Sturbridge would know how to put it back. And to lock it down deep x) that nobody ever saw it again. So that it couldn’t hurt anyone else.

Or maybe Sturbridge would laugh at her too.

Chessie kicked angrily through a puddle, crushing her own reflection. There was no one else to go to now.

Resignedly, she set her steps towards Barnard College.

She had the feeling that Sturbridge might be in the habit of keeping late office hours.

Chessie shuddered, feeling the first rough caress of the dark hunger rising up within her. With a shudder, she shifted the rucksack to her other shoulder. She curled beneath it, trying to make herself very small. So small that the hunger might not notice her. She closed her eyes and pulled the poncho up tightly under her chin. Her lips moved with silent prayers that it might go away, if only just for tonight. She would be good, if only it would go away. But already she could smell its sickly-sweet breath. erir orifflr, She whimpered and sank further into the shadowed recess of the shop doorway. Where the rain, at least, could not touch her. wldowO weed3 As Sturbridge crossed to the circle of artfully arranged glass shards, her face composed itself into a dispassionate death mask. She straightened regally and smoothed down the worst of the creases in her robes.

A few arcane passes were all it took. Stephens stood before her once again, summoned back from the depths of the crypts where she had banished him. To the inverted circle that was the twin of this one. His face was still twisted with the same look of indignation.

He was mouthing the same curses and threats. It was as if he had never been away.

He raged on for some while silence, his words unable to prevail against the barrier of the mystic diagramma. He soon realized the futility of it and fell into a brooding stillness.

Sturbridge let him wind himself down. She let the silence hang between them, let the moment stretch until she saw his first uncomfortable shifting-until she was sure that he realized that he was at her mercy.

When she at last spoke, her tone was short, clipped, a voice accustomed to decades of command.

Frtc ortfftn “You are an intruder in my house. You have killed my novice. You will answer for these trespasses.”

Sturbridge bent to shift a jagged shard of glass, rearranging one of the diagram’s supporting glyphs.

This gesture breached the dam that had held back his words and they came tumbling out.

“...That young lady has a lot to answer for! And she’s not the only one. What do you mean by keeping me imprisoned here?’’ Stephens demanded.

Sturbridge ignored his ranting. “You will, no doubt, be pleased to learn that Ms. Baines is no further threat to you. I am not so pleased. Now, you will tell me who you are and why you have killed my novice.”

Stephens was having none of it. “Enough of this.

I didn’t kill anyone, as you well know. You and your ‘novice’ trapped me in this damned diagram.” He took an experimental step forward. His hands impacted the line of the outer wardings and he snatched them back again, cursing and rubbing at his wrists.

“I am Aisling Sturbridge, mistress of this house.

You will answer my questions. Then I will decide whether or not you should be set at liberty. I asked who you were and why you killed my novice.”

Stephens considered throwing some weight against the wardings and thought better of it. His strengths did not lie along those lines. He changed tack. “We just wanted to talk to the girl,” he said, a conciliatory note creeping into his voice. “My name is Stephens.

We’re here on an official inquiry, from the Fatherhouse.

I never even touched your novice and she was certainly still among the living when you messed with this diagram and sent me spiraling down into those catacombs. Look, I’m just trying to do my job. Can we go back to the chantry and discuss this? If something has happened to the girl, we’ll help you get to the wldow‘s weeds bottom of it.” He gave her what he hoped was a disarming smile.

“Just doing your job? You would have me believe, then, that you are an assassin by trade, Mr. Stephens?”

“Now just wait a minute. I never said anything like that. I’m an investigator, Ms. Sturbridge. From the Fatherhouse. In Vienna. Surely this doesn’t come as a surprise to you.. ..”

“You may address me as Regent Sturbridge. And please do not think that you will evade punishment by sheltering behind this flimsy pretence. You are no investigator.”

He opened his mouth to protest, but she cut him off sharply. “At this point, you are not even a representative of the Fatherhouse. If you were, you would have formally presented yourself to me upon your arrival-as all emissaries from the Fatherhouse are bound to do by the charter granted this house. Since you failed to do so, you are an intruder.”

“I assure you, Ms. Sturbridge, that we are exactly.. .”

“But let us say that you had presented yourself as was your duty,” she interrupted. “And that I were satisfied with your presumed credentials-and that I were, for some reason, inclined to request your assistance in an investigation. Then, and only then, I might choose to confer upon you the title of ‘investigator.’ Or I might just decide to call you ‘the Empress of India.’ To be quite frank, an Empress of India with my blessing is going to command a lot more clout in this house than someone that a Vienna bureaucrat may or may not have once called an ‘investigator.’ Are we clear on this so far?”

“I understand your feeling on this, Ms. Sturbridge, but our credentials are quite authentic. It would be my Frlc Cr-IffiD pleasure to present them to you formally, if you would just be so kind as to.. .” He gestured encouragingly at the confinement diagram.

Stutbridge’s gaze was unyielding. “If it is easier for you to ,appreciate your situation in terms of your confinement, Mr. Stephens, that is also acceptable.

Either way, the fact remains that you have no official position here. You are caught, quite literally, between two places. You are suffered to speak only at the mercy of my justice, to answer for what you have done. You are suffered to exist, I am afraid, only at the mercy of this admittedly treacherous diagram.”

“Are you threatening me, Ms. Sturbridge? Surely you know that to hinder the course of an Astor’s inquiries in any way is itself a criminal act. Brothers have met the sun for merely attempting to withhold pertinent information from us. To actually threaten the well-being of an investigator.. .”

Sturbridge smiled. “Ah, you misunderstand me, Mr. Stephens. I do not make threats. It is not, after all, I who am keeping you from your business. It is this thrice-damned diagram. If it were up to me, I would attempt to free you immediately. But I understand this diagram only imperfectly. I am afraid that if I attempted to free you now, I might-inadvertently, you understand-actually do you lasting harm.”

His face stiffened. Sturbridge could see that he had taken her point. But he rallied for a last desperate attempt. Locking their gazes, he said, “But I think you do know how to free me.”

All the force of his will and training was channeled through the tenuous invisible conduit between their eyes. Power crackled just beneath the surface of the innocent-seeming stream of syllables. widow's weeds Sturbridge held his gaze. Her voice was as cold as a knife thrust. “Shall I make the attempt then?”

His confidence wavered, but he was not about to “DO it,” he commanded.

She nodded slowly. “Kneel, then.”

This took him off guard. He regarded her questioningly.

T h e only way I can think of to free you is to carry this ill-conceived rite through to its conclusion. If you want to be free, you have to help. Or I can just scrub the attempt now, destroy the diagram and you can take your chances with the backlash. Your choice.”

He knelt.

“Now you will acknowledge me as the lawful regent of this house and you will pledge yourself to abide by my rules for so long as you are a guest here.”

He smiled and shook his head, laughing softly to himself. Gathering what dignity he could, Stephens rose slowly to his feet, brushing at the ash and soot covering the knees of his suit. “Very good, Ms.

Sturbridge,” he said. “You had me going there for a minute. Help you complete the rite.. .” ‘‘I am very serious Mr. Stephens. What I am asking is no more than the basic courtesy due me as your hostess. If you are not willing to grant me this, we have nothing more to discuss.”

He decided to try one more time. Maybe she could be made to see facts. “Look, you know I can’t do that, Ms. Sturbridge. My oath is to the Order. And my duty may very well compel me to do some things that, frankly, a lady such as yourself should not have to tolerate in a houseguest. We’re here to stop a series of brutal murders, Ms. Sturbridge. This is not something back down now. we take lightly. We’re going to do whatever it takes to make this chantry safe again. And if that involves stepping on a few toes and dispensing with a few social niceties-well, then I’d consider that a very small price to pay.”

“I see,” Sturbridge said at last. “You then will understand when I say that the risk of your death is far too high a price for me to pay for the luxury of having you at liberty. I cannot, in good faith, attempt to free you from this diagram, Mr. Stephens.”

“Then it would seem that we are at an impasse,” he said. “You cannot set me free-for fear of killing me, as you say. And we certainly cannot just remain here, glaring at one another until sunup. Any ideas?”

She did not return his smile. “Are you sure you will not reconsider? I offer you Ehe opportunity to place yourself under my protection. You will go free and no harm or reproach will come to you while you remain within my house. And you will also be freed from the indignity of being forced by your peers to do anything that might.. .weigh upon your conscience.”

He shook his head sadly. “Nothing personal, Ms.

Sturbridge. But I’m not sure what my promise to be on my best behavior would be worth to you, if I had to foreswear myself in order to make that pledge.”

“I had not taken you for such an idealist, Mr.

Stephens. Of course, if it is your wish to place yourself outside of my protection, I cannot be accountable for.. .”

“Would you prefer that I be more pragmatic, Ms.

Sturbridge? Frankly, even within the walls of your chantry, your ‘protection’ doesn’t have much of a track record. And if it comes down to either you or Vienna, I know where the smart money is.” wtdow‘s weeds Now it was Sturbridge’s turn to look taken aback. “I appreciate your honesty, Mr. Stephens. I see there is no changing your mind on this issue.

And that is a pity. Things would have been so much easier-for both of us-if you had agreed to pledge your support. Now, I’m afraid, we’re out of options.

You’re going to have to return to the crypts for a while. Tell me, are you well regarded among your colleagues, Mr. Stephens?”

Stephens shook his head at the sudden change of topic. “I’m not sure I follow you, Ms. Sturbridge.”

“Well, it occurs to me that your ‘life’-for want of a better word-may well be the only thing of value that I might bring to the negotiations with your companions.

Tell me, Mr. Stephens, would your fellow investigators find you more valuable alive or dead?”

His self-satisfied, businesslike demeanor was back.

“That’s not going to work, Ms. Sturbridge. The Astors are not going to negotiate with any hostage-takers. You start talking like that and they’ll just cut you down where you. . . ”

She shrugged. “Pity. I suppose the best thing, then, would be to arrange an accident right here. Oh, don’t bluster so, Mr. Stephens. Despite fanciful tales to the contrary, I am not in the habit of killing novices and houseguests. I only mentioned it because I would like you to think very hard about my offer during your confinement.”

He started to retort, but she waved her hand dismissively and his words cut off abruptly. He continued to mouth words of condemnation as she bent to the diagram and banished him to the crypts once more.

After his image had flickered out, she carefully unmade the diagram, sealing all hope of egress. She erlc orlfflr, wondered how long it would be before he was missed.

Then she set about reestablishing the portal link with the Chantry of Five Boroughs. wtdow$ weed3 “The last time you were here,” the Jackal-headed Warder of the Dead called over his shoulder, “I codd not get you to sit still. Do you remember? My silly little bird. But now, now you hang back. W h y is that, I wonder? Surely you have not come to fear me?”

Antigone stiffened. “I am not afraid,” she said quietly.

He did not contradict her. “The problem then becomes one of what we should do with you, little one,” said the Jackal. His torch had guttered out long ago.

Their journey through the cool subterranean passages seemed unending. He led the way forward holding the canopic jar up before him like a lantern. A diffused ruddy light emanated from it. It did not so much light their path as throw the surrounding shadows in sharper relief. Carefully, Antigone picked her way between the outcroppings of shadow, fearing a misstep in the dark.

Ahead of her, Anubis had emerged into a vast chamber, a formal audience hall. The dim red light gleamed on burnished gold, picked out a set of standing balances at the room’s focal point. The delicate device Eric Griffin stood easily as tall as she did. A hall of judgment, she thought. The idea did not comfort her.

An unsettling quiet hung over the court. Its only sounds were scattered scratchings, as of rats within the walls. The slow but unstoppable gnawing of the forces of decay and corruption.

“Here we are at last,” her guide said with obvious enthusiasm. “Please make yourself comfortable. I shall not be a moment.”

Antigone hung back in the entryway. She strained to pick out the slight telltale sounds from within. The scrape of a stylus from the room’s far corner might signify the presence of an unseen scribe recording the proceedings. The persistent clatter of claw upon stone surely indicated the restless pacing of some great beast along the wall opposite. There was no indication, however, whether it awaited judgment, or if it were a judgment awaiting someone else.

“That’s very considerate of you,” Antigone called.

“But I really won’t have you going to any trouble on my account. It would be a kindness if you would just show me the way back. Then I will be on my way. I would not dream of inconveniencing you further.”

Her host crossed to the scales at the room’s center and began adjusting the mechanism. “Not at all. It is a delight that you have returned to us. But you have put your finger precisely upon the problem, my dear. You did not think to provide for your return ahead of time.

You are now left to negotiate at something of a disadvantage.”

“But nothing like this has ever happened before,” she stammered. “I mean, each of the other times, there was never any question of getting back again. There was never anywhere to return from. I would just wake up, in bed, listening to the doctor confiding widow’s weed3 unpleasantries in hushed tones. There was never any of.. .this. What is this place?”

Anubis grinned but did not turn from his task.

“Look around you, little one. You are no stranger here.

You know this place as you know me. It is enough.

And we know you as well. You and your little balancing act, your game of ledges. Did you really think you would be able to escape us indefinitely?”

Antigone frowned and retreated a step up the corridor. “I don’t understand. I know you. But you don’t belong here. This is my rite. The dance along the precipice. It is something personal, something private, something intimate. And you are not a part of it-never were a part of it. You shouldn’t be here.”

“Ah, but here, in fact, I am.”

Antigone shook her head stubbornly. “No, this isn’t right. You are a product of a different time in my life, a later dynasty. Why, it wasn’t until I had learned the ways of the Pyramid that I even knew of your existence.”

“Is that the problem?” He shifted his attention to the other side of the balances. “YOU cannot unlearn the ways, little one. You know this. I am with you now and always shall be. Selah.”

“The rite cannot change,” she insisted. “It’s mine.

I created it. Only I can alter it. And I didn’t alter it.

Nothing has been changed-the sloughing off of the old skin, the taking up of a new name. ..”

He stepped back and examined his handiwork with a critical eye. “Quiet now, little one. You are correct; the rite has not changed. Where you are mistaken is in thinking that it somehow originated with you. It is older than you are, far older. It is as old as the magic of the pyramids, this journey from one life to the next.

Did you really think that you were the first? To play at your lethal game of knives and herbs and ledges? To flirt with self-annihilation and then to dance back away from the brink of the abyss? Surely the ceremonial trappings have changed-you now have guns and pills and gas ovens at your disposal. But the game is essentially the same, is it not?”

She braved his mocking grin. “No, that’s not what I meant at all. I know there have been others who have ... who have taken their own lives. But I was talking about my rite, my personal rite. It’s brought me through before. It’s got to work. I can’t be just plain.. .”

“Dead?” he asked. “Is that such a terrible thing?

Why, look at you! You are trembling, little one. Come here.”

She had already taken a step forward towards the comforting blanket of his voice before she realized it and dug in her heels. “NO,” she insisted. “There is a way back. There’s always a way back. The trick‘s not over until they put me back together again. Until I wake up to find the doctors pumping me full of polysyllabic elixirs and wrapping me in pristine white bandages. . . ”

He chuckled low in his throat. “That, little bird, is the oldest magic of them all. Do you not recognize its trappings all around you? It is no matter. All that need concern you is that the rite was given into my hands, long ago. And you must do the same-place yourself in my hands. It is enough. Be still, now. The pyramid is an integral part. You have taken powerful oaths, oaths of blood. You can no longer work your trick of flitting from one life to the next without going by way of the pyramid now and by following its rules.

And perhaps you never could. But that is another matter. We are bound together, you and I. It would be best if you were to resign yourself to this fact now.” widow’s weeds “But that’s just it. I’m not a part of the Pyramid any longer,” she insisted. “They turned me out, declared me a renegade, an outcast, a-”

“A jackal?” he interrupted, flashing that persistent grin. It was not quite mocking; it was more knowing.

As if he already knew her thoughts before she could give them voice. But perhaps all thoughts that would be spoken had already been spoken here. Perhaps all thoughts that could be spoken. Antigone found that grin infuriating. She kept picturing a jagged hole the size of her fist piercing the gleaming row of teeth.

“You are always running,” he said before she could even deny the previous charge. “It is the single defining act of your existence. It makes me dizzy to watch you.”

She shifted uncomfortably under his accusation, but caught herself and forced her body to go rigid. To hold its exact position. “That is not what I was talking about and you know it,” she said. “I meant that it is silly to insist on holding me accountable to the traditions of my people if they themselves have tumed their backs on me. They have severed me from that tradition in no uncertain terms. If they find me, I will bum.”

The Jackal waved dismissively. “You run from life, you run from death and now, it seems, you must flee even your own people. Why can’t you just be still? It is as if there were some great emptiness in the world and you must personally fill it up-with words, with frantic motion. If you will insist on wasting what little time remains to you, I might suggest that you at least apply your efforts a bit more strategically. You might, for example, attempt to bargain for your freedom. Many do. This might, in fact, be an ideal time to do so. Once the judgment has commenced, we will have little opportunity for such pleasant exchanges.”

At his words, an apprehension crept the length of Antigone’s spine. She was not eager to face the test of the Jackal-god’s scales. “Bargain? What do I have that you would want?” Antigone asked guardedly.

“The first sensible question you’ve put to me since your arrival. The suicides are always so self-involved.

It would surprise you how few of them actually bother to pose that most pertinent question. What do you have that I would want? Let me see. Already I have your heart.” He placed the canopic jar upon one side of the balances. The scales dipped noticeably and the Jackal-god frowned.

“What’s wrong?” she asked anxiously. What does he mean, he has my heart?

He shook his head sadly. “I will not conceal from you the fact that I am not optimistic. Your heart, I fear it is too heavy. You may have chosen an inauspicious time to die.”

“Inauspicious?! You mean there’s a good time to die ?”

When he spoke, he was no longer addressing her, but crooning over the tiny clay vessel. ‘Certainly, child.

It is good to die when the heart is unburdened. In the Weighing of the Heart, it is imperative that it balance precisely against the feather of Ma’at-what you would call Truth. I fear you have come back to us too late.

Your heart is full of discord and self-doubt. You have forgotten how the ancient trick is played, little onethe game of death and names. When you were yet a child, you knew. When you were yet a mortal, you knew. Now? Now, you have grown heavy with years.

It is better this way. You will go to the Devourer and life may begin anew.”

There was an eager gnashing of teeth from the prowling beast in the darkened comer of the Hall of w~dow’s weeds . . . .

Judgment. She felt, rather than saw, the great bulk of it stalking closer. She could catch only the vaguest hint of its blasphemous outline-like a cross between a lion, a hippopotamus and a crocodile-the three most feared ravagers that dwelt along the banks of the Nile.

“What are you talking about?” Antigone crowded closer to the scales and farther away from the encroaching beast. “I’m not going to any Devourer.

I’m going home. Tell me what you want from me, what I need to do to get home.”

Anubis circled the balances. Arriving at the far side, he turned towards the shadows and received a single black feather from a shallow beaten-copper dish.

Antigone could not make out how he had come by it.

She had a fleeting impression that it was placed in his hands by a woman whose bared wrists were so pale as to be almost ethereal. She did not know how they bore up the mass of the crude copper dish.

As the grail withdrew again, Antigone found herself squinting into the shadows, trying to make out its enigmatic bearer. Just before the vessel vanished, Antigone had a fleeting impression of a dark-maned apparition. The pale woman was all severe anglesshoulders, elbows, nose, jaw, all razor sharp. Her ceremonial robe seemed to be a patchwork of alternating tomb-dark and sepulchre-white diamonds-a harlequin magus.

“You stand at the fulcrum, the very crux,” the Jackal’s voice intruded upon her thoughts. “There are only two ways you may go from here. The first is by way of the Devourer. This path will not carry you home, but you will be freed at least from the Rota, the Great Wheel. And often that is enough. The second way, well, I don’t think we need concern ourselves with the second.”

Without ceremony, he placed the feather in the opposite side of the balances. The scales never budged.

The jackal turned his ebon claws upward, apologetically. “It is as I feared,” he said.

“NOW wait a minute. That’s your test? The damned clay jar weighs more than that feather! There’s no way those two are ever going to balance out.” She stalked angrily up to the scales.

“I assure you, my adjustments were exacting,” he said. “And they took into account the weight of the vessel. I am your patron here, Antigone. Your advocate.

But the scales do not lie. We must all abide by their verdict.”

She glared at him. There was a sound of something large dragging itself forward across the stone floor.

Antigone could not bring herself to look in that direction. “All right, you want to weigh my heart against Truth? We’ll weigh it against Truth. But it’s going to be against my truth, not that of some dusty old civilization that vanished from the face of the earth thousands of years before I was born. What kind of test is that?”

Her hand was knotted into a fist within the pocket of her robes. She drew out the wicked straight razor and flicked it open, she brandishing it against her selfappointed judge.

He made no move to protect himself, but looked slightly disappointed at this display.

“Occam’s Razor,” she said, casting it disdainfully into the balances-adding its weight to that of the feather.

The scales sagged noticeably.

“Or how about we pile on Diogenes’ Lantern? Or a volume of Aquinas’ De Veritus? That one ought to tip the scales in my favor; it’s got some heft to it.” wtdow’s weeds The Jackal stood unmoved before her outburst.

“You act as if they were all interchangeable, little one,” he said and smiled.

“Damn it, I want to be judged by my own peers, by the standards of my own people and culture. Not by some moldering old half-forgotten-”

“Have a care, my dear. In my house, words cannot be unspoken. And names, once they have been uttered, cannot be revoked.”

She fumed in silence, ashamed of her outburst, but not about to go gently into that good night.

“But seeing that you have chosen to respect my request,” he continued smoothly. “I shall honor yours.

You are quite certain you would like to be judged by the standards of your own people? Of your own Pyramid?”

At the word ‘pyramid,’ Antigone’s head jerked up.

She could feel the noose tightening, but a retrialany retrial-had to be preferable to the alternative. “I think I’ll take my chances among my own kind.” ‘So be it,” the Jackal intoned. “I will forestall the judgment of this court. You will have the opportunity to go among your own people. We will see what sentence they shall bring to bear upon you. But know this. Your reprieve is for a brief time only-no more than the blink of an eye in the final reckoning. When you next return to me, then you will face the sentence handed down by this court. Do you understand?”

Antigone could only nod. “Thank you. The Lord of the Dead is nothing if not just.”

“One thing more, little one. Do not think you will escape me. You will return to me, sooner or later. And what is more, you shall choose to return to me. I know you. Better perhaps than you know yourself. You cannot resist your little game of ledges. It is the only way you FrIC GrIjfIr, assure yourself that you’re are still ‘alive,’ that you are still vital. You are, in the grand scheme of things, only a little bird. Nothing more. And a little bird cannot resist making its perch among the ledges and cornices.”

Antigone made to interrupt, but he forestalled her with a raised finger. “In the meantime, you may return to the judgment and censure of your own kind. I do not envy you it, but you have chosen. Now, fly away home, little one.”

Fly away home.

At the foot of the Empire State Building, David Foucault, Channel 11 News, spilled his coffee, sputtered and nearly choked. “Jeezus! Look at that.

Jack, grab that damned camera!” He wiped at the long wet coffee stain that ran the entire length of his front.

He leaned way over backward-as he had a moment before, trying to get at the last drop of tepid coffeenow craning up towards the observation deck.

“Where?” Jack challenged. He had been the brunt of Foucault’s little jokes before.

David thrust an angry finger skyward, jabbing at the slight but unmistakable silhouette framed against the disc of the moon.

“Son of a bitch! How the hell did that idiot get up there?” Jack scrambled for the camera. In one single motion he popped the lens cap and thumbed the rolltape. The focus whirred even before the rig settled to rest on his shoulder.

“Damned if I know. Stairwell’s buried in rubble and I’ve seen the remains of that elevator car. You getting all this?” Foucault demanded. He looked around nervously. Already the initial pounce of discovery was giving way to a gentle apprehension. He was not a slow man, and the inevitable question of the point of impact widow’s weed7 *** and an understandable concern for his own safety were fighting their way to the fore.

“Not getting a damned thing yet,” Jack grumbled, squinting through the eyepiece and trying to blink free the moon-shaped retinal after-image. “You still got a bead on him?”

“Listen!” Foucault’s whisper was sharp, imperative.

A low whistling rush of air bore down upon them.

“Shit.” He began scrambling hurriedly around the van, toward the shelter of buildings across the street. Jack held his ground a moment longer. Two. Three. Then broke away under his partner’s barrage of profanities.

“All right, I’m coming.” He bent low, nearly double, cradling the camera beneath his chest. As if he would rather take the blow on his head than on his footage. He braced against the imminent impact.

Nothing.

“Real funny, asshole.” Having reached Foucault’s bunker, the doorway of a shop opposite, Jack punched his partner ungently in the shoulder.

“What the hell?” Foucault said. He walked out from cover, scanning the skies as if for an expected downpour that had suddenly failed to materialize.

A sudden breeze ruffled his seven strands of combover, but the only feature he could pick out in the inscrutable face of the night sky was the outline of a solitary night bird pulling out of a long dive. Struggling for altitude. A piercing mournful cry, and gone.

Cordelia careened around the corner of the Science Building and reeled out onto the quad. Her ears were singing with the heady rush of blood. She felt alive. More alive than she had felt in years. More alive than she had any business feeling.

Her whole body thrummed to a sort of low electric tone. She had to move-to keep moving! Running, pouncing through puddles. Anything to give it outlet.

If she stood still, tried to keep it all bottled up, she knew the power coursing through her veins would turn upon her. Twist her, curl her fingers, bend her back.

So she ran, abandoning herself to the ecstatic communion of the night.

The rain stippled the open ground between the ponderous academic buildings, but Cordelia was oblivious to the steady drizzle. If anything, it made a comforting counterpoint to the molten fire that surged within her veins. She skidded to a stop on the slick paving stones and pushed her hood back with one hand. Throwing back her head, she savored the plish of the icy droplets on her face, the chill seep of the rain burrowing under her collar and down her back. wlc Grtjjtn Long, inky strands of hair plastered themselves across the shoulders and back of that ridiculous mudstained poncho. She shook her head from side to side, feeling the wet slap as her hair beat against the cheap vinyl rain-slicker. She felt like singing or shouting or crying or giggling. It didn’t really matter which.

Cordelia opened her throat to the moon and the sound that escaped her was more animal than human.

And all the while, the stolen blood surged within her, rendering even the most mundane sensationsthe squeak of damp plastic skidding across flesh, the smell of wet hair-into something ethereal.

It was better than she ever dared hope it would be. Now she knew the reason behind all the horror stories, the dire warnings, the outright threats. This is what it was all about. What they were meant to bethe ultimate predators. This was her birthright, her legacy. And now that she had a taste of what that meant, she would not go back to feeding upon mere human chattel again.

How could she go back? To feel the blood of another of her own kind within her! To feel the stranger’s very life inside her-it awakened feelings she had though lost to her. Long ago.

It was more than just the hot rush of the vitae, surging through her, wracking her body with its power and dark majesty. It was intoxicating jumble of all of the other’s thoughts, her memories, her feelings. All of them, swallowed utterly.

Cordelia thought that if she could only keep still for a moment, she might-even now-reach out and touch those memories. Turn them over in her mind like jagged multi-colored shards of glass. Artifacts sifted from the sands of time and memory. She imagined herself piecing them together like a jigsaw puzzle, widow’s weeds painstakingly reassembling some snapshot of the life she had so suddenly and brutally taken.

The very thought that the other was inside her still, trapped there, sentenced to await Cordelia’s whim, to subsist on the scant crumbs of attention she might lavish on her or withhold as it pleased her-. it was sublime.

She would do it again. Oh yes. In a heartbeat.

Tomorrow night, perhaps. And the night after that.. .

The sight of Millbank Hall brought her up short.

The administrative building was the most public point of ingress to the subterranean Chantry of Five Boroughs, Cordelia’s home these last eight years.

She had spent each of those years under the shadow of what her sisters called the Sabbat Occupation. More old wives’ tales to keep the novices in their place. Seldom were Cordelia or her sisters granted leave to venture out into the big, bad city alone. There were monsters and bogeymen there, lurking in the shadows of alleyways-monsters that hunted young novices for sport-or for their very blood.

Yes, Cordelia thought. For their blood. I can see that now.

Tonight, Cordelia had not asked anyone’s permission to venture out. The chantry house was in chaos. Everybody was running around like a head with its chicken cut off. The talk in the novice domicilium was that some big muckety-mucks from Vienna had arrived and that they were going to clean house. And sweep the floor with Regent Sturbridge and anyone else who got in their way.

Screw them. Cordelia wasn’t about to get in their way. The best thing, she figured, was just to get out from underfoot. To let the worst of it blow over. And anything had to be better than sitting around the henhouse fretting with the fluttering black-robed poultry.

So she had set her mind on going out and getting drunk, rip-roaring drunk. She could still do that, if she put her mind to it, if only indirectly. Alcohol literally tore holes through her stomach at this point-ever since the Embrace. Her few experiments along those lines had proved disastrous.

But she could still catch something of the buzz secondhand. She could haunt the bars at closing time, pick out the marks who were much too sloshed to make it home unaided. And make sure they never got that aid.

So she had gone out tonight to hunt. She was going to kill somebody-maybe more than one somebody-and drink him bone-white. Her plan hadn’t been any more ambitious than that. She had no intention of even reaching for, much less tasting, the forbidden fruit. Honest. That part just sort of happened.

It had been so easy. That was the thing that stuck with her. Last call had found her in Antoine’s down off Broadway and 11 7th. The place tried just a bit too self-consciously to be a sports bar and never quite pulled it off. Its Manhattan address and clientele never entirely cooperated with its plebian vision.

She had been settled in for a while, peoplewatching, and had already scoped out the three or four most likely contenders, folks who probably should have been cut off by the bartender some time ago. She made it a point never to get her heart set on any one of them.

She was acting in loco fortunae here-the selfappointed stand-in for the fickle finger of fate. It wouldn’t be fair to make her decision based on personal preference. She wouldn’t choose based on which of wldowG weed3 her potential victims she found most attractive. She seldom had to reminded herself anymore that she wasn’t out shopping for a hookup, but old habits do die hard. Nor would she choose based on which was the most belligerent. As tempting as it might be to assume the role of self-appointed avenging angel, that was not her place either.

No, she would be patient and pragmatic. The ideal mark was the one that played along with her gameplan, unwittingly, but of his or her own volition. She had a simple formula she had worked out for it-a test that went into effect as soon as the barkeep bellowed, “Last call!”

It was simple, really. Most of the herd took that announcement as their cue to order another round.

The mark she wanted, however, was the one who pushed himself back from the bar and took his leave at that point.

For one, that meant he was usually leaving alone.

For two, the early departure gave her the opportunity to give the mark about a minute’s headstart. She didn’t do this out of some cavalier sense of sportsmanship, but because this precaution was preferable to having someone see you follow him out. It was rare that a chance mortal bystander could make any serious trouble for one of her kind, but it wasn’t unheard of.

In this case, her caution reaped an unexpected windfall. As she watched, a shadow near the doorway detached itself and followed her mark out into the street.

Although she was intrigued, she forced herself to count off the seconds, to give the pair a comfortable lead. To put them off their guard. She knew it would not be hard to find them again. It never was. She had already gotten the rhythm of the mark‘s heavy, reeling gait. Her keen predator’s senses would have little trouble picking it out again out in the mostly deserted streets.

Now, however, it was no longer so much the mark that interested her, as his pursuer. She could tell in a glance, in the brief instant before he vanished out into the night, that he was one of her own kind. It was more than the pasty complexion, the slight telltale reek of the grave that hung in his wake, the inhuman speed of his movements. These were all part of it, of course, but only part of it. There were a dozen small but distinctive clues that all added up to give him the aura of one who was no longer among the living.

Cordelia had become quite adept at reading these holistic auras in even the briefest of impressions. She was no Sherlock Holmes, able to trace labyrinthine threads of deduction from the scantest of evidence.

Sometimes she was hard-pressed even to reconstruct what the specific details were that led to her sweeping assessments. But she had learned to trust her instincts and snap judgments.

She still had no clear picture of what she was about to do when she caught up with them in an alley not two blocks from Antoine’s. The footfalls had turned from a drunken rambling to a quicker, apprehensive stride, and then had broken into a run for a few paces before falling silent. In the end, it was not the sound of footsteps, but a hushed ecstatic moan that had led her to turn into the alley.

She found the pair locked together like young lovers. The mark leaned heavily against the wall with his shoulders and one foot pushing back against the bricks. His bent knee was caught between the thighs of his pursuer, who leaned across him. The two ground together slowly, cyclically, in time to the spurt of blood wtdow’s: weedy between them. The dark pursuer’s head was buried in the hollow of the mark‘s throat and it was difficult to discern which was the source of the muffled moans.

Her unnatural perceptions told her that the sound somehow arose from both of them-that at this moment, they were little more than a single conjoined being. A very vulnerable being.

As she watched, a feeling stirred in her. She tried to ignore it, to push it down before it could distract her from what she must do. But it was already too late.

She had recognized the emotion welling up within her.

It was envy.

She could not strike now. Not while the motivation was personal. She would not. She was no murderer, she told herself and then repeated it-as if the repetition alone could summon conviction. She was no murderer. She did not kill out of anger, or vengeance, or envy or even pleasure. If she allowed herself to begin killing for her own benefit, where would it stop?

Quietly, she edged backwards out of the alley. The journey took exactly three steps and one lifetime, but by the time she had reached the street, she was in control once again. The dispassionate agent of fate and nothing more. And if, this night, fate had decreed two deaths instead of one, who was she to contradict it?

It would have been so much harder if she had recognized him, she thought as she pulled loose a slat from the broken pallet that leaned against the alley’s mouth. If he had been someone she knew or, worse, someone from the chantry. She did not know if she could have summoned up the necessary detachment to do the deed right, without her becoming a murderer, a monster.

She winced at the sound of the long wooden spike wrenching free. Her gaze darted apprehensively to the couple in the alley, but the noise failed to intrude on their ardor. She kept her gaze lowered as she approached, her eyes riveted on the small patch of ground just before her feet. At last, when she could no longer ignore their coupling, she lashed out.

The improvised stake struck true, pinioning the squirming eight-legged creature. Cordelia threw all her weight against it, felt the spike jarringly hit brick, and then twisted. Two voices raised themselves in a single scream, then choked and fell silent.

It was the heady aroma of the blood that brought Cordelia back to her senses. Both of her hands were covered with hot, sticky vitae. The savor of it filled her head and staggered her. One finger found her mouth, and then she was anxiously lapping at both hands, front and back, tongue darting between her own fingers. Trying to cram both hands into her mouth at the same time. Before a single drop could be lost.

When at last the shadow of the bestial hunger withdrew from her senses, she found herself trembling and slumped over the drained corpses. A restless energy wracked her body. She had to move, had to run, had to give some outlet to the potent vitae that surged within her. Before it tore her apart. widow's weedy When Antigone came to ground at last, she found herself alone, frightened and unsure of where to turn.

Her strange sojourn in the underworld had left her deeply shaken. The surreal experience certainly seemed as real to her as her nightmare plunge off the observation deck of the Empire State Building. By all rights, she knew, she should be dead.

She forced herself to her feet and set off at random.

The important thing now was just to move, to assure herself that there was still life-or some semblance of it-within her. It was a brisk quarter of an hour’s hike later before she succeeded in convincing herself that all this was real and not some further delusion.

Only then was she able to ask herself the pressing question: Where to go? Antigone knew she needed to get out of sight, and quickly. Once word spread at the chantry that she was wanted by the Astors, so much as being seen by one of her former Tremere brethren would be as good as a death sentence.

She needed to see the prince. That much had stuck with her. Even the Luciferian fall had not jogged Sturbridge’s parting words from Antigone’s head. Seek sanctuary among the Nosferatu, Sturbridge had said and, Tell them they will do this for the sake of the bones that lie beneath the regent’s blood.

Antigone had no idea what that cryptic pronouncement might mean, and furthermore, she was quickly coming to realize that seeking out the Nosferat prince and finding him were two very different matters.

She certainly did not know the location of the Nosferatu’s subterranean warrens, and the thought of aimlessly wandering the miles upon miles of sewer or subway tunnels in the hopes of stumbling across him was not appealing.

Aside from the handful of defectors from the prince’s camp that had joined up with the Conventicle, Antigone didn’t think she even knew any Nosferatu.

And although the renegades might welcome an opportunity to betray Calebros’ confidences, they would most likely ask some rather pointed questions about what Antigone planned to do with that information. Questions that might compromise their working together in the future.

She wasn’t entirely sure she even knew anybody who knew the prince. Aside from Sturbridge, of course.

But Antigone couldn’t very well go back now and ask for directions. That was when she thought of Johanus.

Of course! T h e adept had been away from the chantry for weeks, working closely with the prince’s own men to coordinate efforts to integrate the floodtide of refugees and opportunists pouring into the city in the wake of the Camarilla victory. Surely Johanus could at least get her in touch with someone who could get her in touch with the prince. But would he help her?

If there was one thing working in her favor, it was that Johanus had been so out of the loop of chantry widow’s weed3 events lately that it might well be weeks before he heard the first whisper of Antigone’s new outcast status.

That is how Antigone came to find herself elbowing her way through a crowd of undead refugees packed into a high-school gymnasium. The fact that the high school was closed for the evening did not seem to have any impact on the throng of newcomers that had come to present themselves to the prince. Prince Calebros himself was not, of course, on hand personally.

That would have made things far too easy.

In his stead, the swarm of displaced Kindred supplicants faced a small, haggard corps of representatives-cum-relief-workers who tried desperately to assist the descending horde of newcomers in finding safe haven and feeding grounds-that they might at least survive their first few nights in the city without inadvertently encroaching on the territory of others.

Even under ideal circumstances, there was an upper limit to how many Kindred a city-even one the size of New York-could hope to support. It was not just a matter of the number of warm bodies walking the streets. The mortal population had to be large enough not only to provide for the Kindred’s nocturnal predations, but also to conceal them. It was not enough that there be an abundance of victims, but rather that there be an abundance of victims that would never be missed.

The game of concealment was both ancient and pragmatic. The Kindred took this time-honored Masquerade very seriously. But in the past weeks, things had been stretched to the breaking point. The relief teams had documented the arrival of close to one hundred and fifty additional refugees pouring into the city.

These were the people of the aftermath. The Sabbat offensive had swept the entire Eastern Seaboard, toppling cities, slaughtering scores of Camarilla Kindred, and uprooting countless others from their havens. The floodtide of refugees had surged into New York as the last bastion of Camarilla strength on the East Coast.

No one was prepared to deal with the consequences of that floodtide. The city’s Kindred population had doubled within a single month‘s time.

And even the most staggering population estimates did not include the unguessed masses who had simply decided not to present themselves formally to the prince upon arrival, as prescribed by Camarilla tradition. The actual numbers could be a full order of magnitude higher.

Antigone pushed her way through the throng and up to the nearest station. It consisted of two folding banquet tables side by side with a large aerial map taped across them. The map was covered in strange symbols in Magic Marker-the meaning of which was not readily apparent to her. Over the tables hung a pasteboard sign that read “Manhattan.”

“I’m looking for Johanus,” she called to the man wielding a red marker. She had to shout to be heard above the tumult. “Johanus!”

He looked up and caught her eye. He had a haggard look, degrading into ill-disguised desperation about the edges. His vague gesturings in response to her question might have been intended to mean “Check over there,” or “He’s somewhere around here,” or even “If you find him, send him over here, quick.”

Antigone mouthed a thank you and sank back into the swell of the crowd. Various sensations materialized out of the sea of bodies, vied for her attention for a wtdow$ weeds moment and then vanished again without a trace. She was in turn jostled, prodded and groped. She smelled gunpowder, a sharp accent to the pervasive aroma of dried blood that hung over the room. She heard raised voices nearby, arguing some finer point of precedence in a preposterously thick Bronx accent. She nearly slipped on a scattered stack of twenty-dollar bills that had fallen neglected to the floor. There was the sound of newspaper tearing. A set of keys flashed, changed hands. An indignant young man demanded to see the prince immediately. Another leeringly offered Antigone “more suitable” accommodation for the evening.

Slowly, Antigone came to realize that there was much more going on within this hall than even the prince had ever intended. There was a double-blind here. Sure, she could see the concealed knife peeking out from behind the prince’s back. It was expected.

He was taking full advantage of the tradition of Presentation to further his own ends, to establish a firmer grip upon his newly-won city. By registering the newcomers and documenting their havens and feeding grounds, he gained critical intelligence. For the Nosferat, knowledge was the coin of the realm. Under less chaotic circumstances, a city’s Kindred would never have submitted to such an intrusion into their private affairs.

But there was a counter-movement here as well, lurking just below the surface. A purpose of which even the prince might be unaware. Carried along by the swell of the crowd, Antigone became acutely aware that not all those present in the rising tide of bodies were refugees. Many of the faces in the crowd bore the unmistakable mark of those who were wont to prey upon such newcomers. Under cover of coming to pay homage to the prince, an entirely different purpose was flourishing. A more sinister purpose. It was a burgeoning black market, trading in blood, favors, ready cash, safe haven, thralls, hope, protection, information and opportunity.

Just about everything-and everyone-present had its price. And most were willing to haggle.

Antigone found herself shrinking back from the surging currents of commerce and borne towards the outskirts of the crowd. It deposited her on a far shore, at the base of a cliff of bleachers folded closed for the night. She made her way along it to a thick knot of Kindred clustered before a pair of swinging double doors.

From the center of that knot, a tall man with fiery red hair and beard was trying to extricate himself from the press and the accompanying barrage of questions.

“The prince would be here if he could. No slight is intended. As you say, he could not possibly have known that you would be here this evening. He regrets that pressing matters keep him away at present, and will look forward to greeting you in a more formal venue, as befits your station, later in the month. Now, if you will excuse me.” Johanus managed to get as far as putting one hand to the door before he was again forestalled. He patiently heard out this latest inquiry.

“Yes, I’m afraid that is necessary,” he replied.

Antigone recognized the tone of voice the one-time Master of Novices customarily used in his oft-rehearsed lectures. “That way we can direct other newcomers away from your choice of preferred hunting grounds.

It helps prevent inadvertent trespass and, ultimately, messy confrontations in the streets.”

There was an indignant outburst which Johanus dismissed with a wave of his hand. “TOO intrusive? I widow$ weedy assure you, sir, that a few simple questions are far less intrusive than a dozen or so displaced Kindred accidentally stumbling through your territory. And nothing is permanent. The prince is most even-handed.

Once the present crisis has passed, I am sure he will amply reward those who have made sacrifices for his sake and for the sake of the city.”

Johanus caught sight of black novice’s robes fluttering towards him through the crowd. His eyes lit up at the convenient excuse this offered him. “But you gentlemen will excuse me. Here is the courier with the volatiles I requested from the chantry house.”

As he beckoned eagerly for the novice to approach, the crowd cautiously edged away. They had no desire for a near brush with anything that the Tremere might consider volatile.

Antigone froze in place like a cornered animal, realizing that it was not her that Johanus was gesturing towards. Pressing forward through the crowd, she could pick out the familiar form of Jervais. Jervais was the personal assistant, or, as he preferred to put it, “second in command,” to Eugenio Estevez, the Regent of the Maupassant Chantry. He seldom missed an opportunity to flaunt his lofty position or the freedom it afforded him. The Maupassant Room was one of the satellite chantries that reported to the motherhouse of the Chantry of Five Boroughs. They were, in effect, like individual campuses of the greater university.

Unlike its resident novices, Jervais pretty much came and went as he pleased from the fortified subterranean motherhouse. It was just one other thing he lorded over them. Antigone caught the flash of bright bands of silver at the cuffs of his dark robesthe insignia that identified him as a novice of the Third Circle. Jervais seldom missed an opportunity to flaunt his regalia before the other novices.

Antigone found herself acutely aware that she was out of uniform. After her leap from the Widow’s Walk, her own novice’s robes had been left in a heap upon the precipice. They had borne the blood-red markings at the collar, the mark of her yearned-for promotion to the Second Circle that she had been so long denied.

But she had, quite literally, left all that behind her now.

After her sojourn among the dead, she now found herself more humbly attired. Her simple black dress was worn and a bit frayed about the hems. It was totally without adornment or ostentation, plain, dark, and more than a little bit musty, as if it had been locked away in mothballs for a season. She could not say from which hidden horde of grave goods the grinning Jackal god might have liberated it.

Still, for all that, the costume suited her. She smoothed at the worst of the creases, reflecting that she had just laid her old life to rest. After nearly a century, she had left the familiar confines of the Tremere Pyramid. It was only appropriate that she should wear the Widow’s Weeds-the formal mourning dress.

She feared, however, that the plain black dress would not be dissimilar enough from her novitiate robes to prevent her being spotted and recognized. Whatever pretext Jervais had in coming here, he would surely be bringing Johanus news of the recent calamitous events at the chantry. Damn him.

Antigone tried to slip back into the anonymity of the crowd as she saw Johanus interpose his body between the throng and the exit. Swinging the door wide, he gestured for Jervais to proceed him and then wtdowO weedy quickly followed into the relative silence of the deserted corridor.

“Well that was a timely intervention,” Johanus whispered with evident relief, as the door swung slowly towards closed. “What brings you all the way out here to the asylum?”

Antigone watched the door swing to with an admixture of relief and alarm. She had no doubt that, if Jervais were to discover her there, the ambitious novice would not scruple to turn her in-if not to try to apprehend her himself. More likely, he would get Johanus to do it.

Damn it, she needed Johanus’ help to get to the prince and safety. Jervais could be, even now, undermining any footing she might have had with the adept. She hesitated, caught between the desire to follow the retreating pair and the consequences of being discovered doing so.

Just then, a hand latched firmly onto her forearm.

A rasping voice whispered in her ear. “It is all set.

Tonight, just like you wanted. Don’t worry, you’ve still got about an hour to clear out. Mind you, it wasn’t easy. I’ve gone to considerable risk, not to mention personal expense. But I’m sure we can find some way to make it up to me.. . .”

Antigone wheeled around, realizing as she did so that her opportunity to follow the two Tremere had just slipped away from her. She fixed the stranger with her haughtiest glare. He was short, grubby, with a twoday growth of beard. The butt of a pistol peeked from the top of his belt. It gleamed silver. Where his fingers wrapped tightly around her forearm, she could feel the hammer of his pulse. It distracted her. She realized that she had been through quite an ordeal tonight, and that she was hungry.

She forced the thought down. “You will take your hand from me. Now.” she said.

She needn’t have bothered to speak aloud. As she turned, he realized his error and immediately let her go. He was already backing away into the crowd and murmuring apologies.

“Sorry, lady. Thought you were somebody else.

Stupid of me, really. I mean, you two don’t really look anything alike, now do you? Sorry.”

Cursing himself, the curious little man disappeared back into the crowd. Antigone stared after him for a moment, less from curiosity than to be certain that he did not reemerge-perhaps to cover up his error by making sure that she could not interfere with whatever deal he had going down that evening.

Satisfied, she turned back to the double doors.

She cracked one open slightly and listened for the sound of voices. Her ears could pick out only the echo of distant footsteps echoing down the empty corridor. With one last backward glance to make sure her departure was not noted, she slipped silently from the gym. widow$ weeds cbapter io: Rendezvous A small voice directly behind her brought Cordelia out of her reverie.

“Excuse me. I was wondering if you could direct me to the archeology building?”

Cordelia turned upon the newcomer. She was slight, rain-matted and draped in a ridiculous mudstained poncho. She looked as if she could be a student here. That is, if one disregarded the fact that a student might be expected to know that the exclusive girls’ school was not anywhere near large enough as to boast an archeology building. That, and the fact that this pale, shivering “student” was, unmistakably, no longer among the living. Cordelia had a sense for these things.

“I know it’s late, but I need to find the archeology department offices,’’ Chessie said. “I’m looking for Professor Sturbridge.”

Cordelia almost laughed aloud. It was too precious.

She could feel the bubbling hysteria welling up within her, the potent vitae she had drunk seeking outlet. She shifted from foot to foot at the effort of keeping it all in. “Not from around here, are you?” she said, beckoning the newcomer closer.

Chessie shook her head miserably, scattering raindrops on all sides. erfc Grtffln “Look, it’s probably locked up for the night,”

Cordelia said. “But it’s just on the other side of the quad. If you cut between those two buildings there, you’ll run straight into it.”

“Thanks,” Chessie muttered, pulling the hood of the poncho down more tightly around her face. She turned and plodded her way through the puddles towards the opening between the two leering brick edifices.

Cordelia gave her a minute’s head start.

Eugenio Estevez checked his watch for probably the tenth time. Against the blue luminous backlight, the LED numerals stood out in sharp relief. 03:17. His superior was already fifteen minutes late and had, predictably, left him waiting in the rain.

He had called from LaGuardia to tell Eugenio to meet him out front of Millbank Hall. Polite inquiries about the flight in from Vienna had availed Eugenio nothing. Nor had any amount of hinting that a more comfortable reception at the luxurious Maupassant Room would better befit one of the Lord High Inquisitor’s lofty station.

“I’m afraid it’s business this time, Eugenio, not pleasure. And the sooner we get this unpleasantness wrapped up, the sooner I’ll be out of your hair. Now, won’t that make everyone rest a bit easier?”

“Nonsense!” Eugenio hastened to protest. “Your presence is not in the least an imposition, my lord. In fact, I have rather been looking forward to.. .” he said to the dead line. Eugenio smiled and gently replaced the receiver in its cradle. He always smiled when slighted. It didn’t matter that no one was there to widow‘s weeds *** observe the chivalric gesture. It was a habit that, to his mind, spoke of character in the face of adversity.

He supposed that some might construe standing in the rain for a quarter hour as character-building as well, although it did little to improve Eugenio’s disposition. Usually he would leave such unpleasant vigils to Jervais, his aide-de-camp. Eugenio was a man of some standing, after all. He had worked hard to get where he was. As regent of the refined Maupassant chantry, Eugenio was the public face of the Tremere Pyramid in Camarilla-liberated New York City. He had served as host to princes and justicars. High Regent Sturbridge relied upon him implicitly.

Perhaps too implicitly, he thought, peering out from the inadequate shelter of his umbrella. Its silver handle was sculpted in the shape of a caduceus-the entwined serpents of Mercury. The healer and messenger of the gods was something of a patron saint to Eugenio. They shared a common vocation-to bring fractious parties together, to start the slow process of patching up the raw wounds. Eugenio knew that the most efficacious medicines in his doctor’s bag were congenial conversation and luxurious excess, and he plied them to dramatic effect.

So why wasn’t it Sturbridge standing here, trying unsuccessfully to press herself back under the eaves of the campus administrative building and escape the worst of the steady downpour? Eugenio was afraid he might already know the answer. The very fact that the Lord Inquisitor and his team were here spoke volumes.

Something had gone terribly wrong at the Chantry of Five Boroughs. He wondered if that something had happened to Regent Sturbridge directly. He could think of few causes less monumental than the death of a Frlc crlfftn regent that would bring the Astors swooping in from Vienna to restore order. With no advance notice.

The regency was a position of consequence. In the wake of being selected to lead the Maupassant Chantry, Eugenio had immersed himself in perks of his newfound autonomy. Looking back now, he could see that this freedom had made him grow distant from Sturbridge and the motherhouse. It even made him somewhat resentful of efforts on her part to bridge the widening gulf.

If something was wrong, he should have known.

He should have been the first to know. He should have been there.

This was no way to find out-a phone call in the middle of the night from Vienna operatives jetting in to intervene. It wasn’t right that he should be so far out of the loop. He felt simultaneously resentful and guilty that this could have happened.

Eugenio resolved, on the spot, that he would do whatever was in his power to help ease this crisis and smooth out any ruffled feathers between his brothers from the Chantry of Five Boroughs and those from Vienna. H e was already drafting elaborate reconciliations in his head when the sound of spinning tires on the rain-slick pavement brought him up short.

The sleek gray Jaguar zipped around the comer and slewed to a halt diagonally across the parking space labeled, in stenciled baby-blue lettering, “Reserved.

Assoc. Dean of Interdepartmental Disciplinary Review.” The warning covered most of the parking space.

The headlights winked out and receded flush with the hood. The wipers clacked to a halt. The engine revved once and then fell silent. widow‘s weeds Eugenio stepped forward to the driver’s-side door, extending his umbrella in welcome until the rain ran unimpeded down the back of his starched collar.

Dorfman unfolded from the driver’s seat with a nod and a grunt by way of welcome as he accepted the proffered umbrella. “Good to see you, Eugenio. Hope I didn’t keep you waiting.” With his free hand, he flipped open a cellphone of Finnish contours.

“Not all at,” Eugenio sputtered, gazing wistfully at his commandeered umbrella. “I hope you did not have any trouble on your drive in from the-”

“Himes!’’ Dorfinan barked into the cellphone. “I’m right outside. Meet me at the main entrance. You got the security system locked down? Good. You with Sturbridge now? What?! What do you mean you haven’t.. . Shit. Look, just meet me at the front door.

Yeah, I’m on my way now. I can see it from here. Yeah, and I’ve got Estevez in tow.”

Dotfman snapped the phone shut on the voice from the other end. “Where’s Sturbridge?” he asked without slowing.

Eugenio hurried to catch up. “I take it she’s not at the chantry. And that your colleagues already are inside. I wish that you had told me of your itinerary earlier. I could have arranged a more appropriate welcome for you and your.. .”

Dorfman stopped cold, throwing up one hand for silence. He was peering intently at the shadowed passthrough between the two nearest buildings.

“It’s just this way,” Eugenio said, gesturing in the other direction, towards the main entrance to the subterranean chantry.

Dorfman hissed at him irritably for silence. Now Eugenio could hear it too. It sounded like a struggle.

To his credit, he was already moving, pressing forward to shield his superior from whatever new threat might materialize. It was a noble if ultimately futile gesture.

Dorfman was more than capable of taking care of himself.

Eugenio was the first to reach the pair. He recognized Cordelia by sight, of course, although they were only slightly acquainted and he would have been hard pressed to recall her name. He had seen her at formal gathers at the main chantry house.

The other girl, the one in the ridiculous camouflage rain poncho, he did not recognize. The point, however, was largely moot as the novice had obviously just drained her of the last of her lifesblood.

The puckered pink wounds at her throat gaped, but failed to surrender even the barest trickle of blood.

“Blasphemous!” He hissed before he could force his jaws to clench tight around the word. Diableriethe drinking of the blood of another Kindred-was the one unforgivable sin among their kind. To find this odious offense taking place, here, upon the very threshold of the motherhouse-and before the eyes of the Lord Inquisitor himself!-was unthinkable.

All this flashed through his mind in a single moment of revulsion. In that moment, Cordelia wheeled upon the newcomer with superhuman speed.

Her avaricious grin was tinted ruddy, trailing long viscous strands of red-the incriminating evidence of her grim feast. She jittered, surged with a restless energy that uncoiled suddenly, cracking like a whip. Eugenio was overwhelmed with the sudden ferocity of the attack. His hands came up defensively, but not quite quickly enough. widow‘sweeds He managed to catch her by the shoulders as she barreled into him, but her momentum bowled both of them over backwards, her teeth gnashing for his throat.

It is strange how, in moments of great peril, the most insignificant of details rise up to monopolize the attention, assuming an importance far greater than their due. Eugenio was acutely aware of this phenomenon as he found himself increasingly irritated by the distracting buzz of a gnat about his face.

He shook his head and blew upward to clear the insect from his eyes, all the while seeming only peripherally concerned with warding off the lethal fangs that pressed upon him. Another part of his mind found itself suddenly turning over the strange jumble of words that his assailant spat at him. It sounded surprisingly like, “Stop looking at me like that! I am NOT a monster.”

The buzzing in his ears grew stronger as his attacker repeatedly smashed his head into the puddle where the cobbles of the path met. This activity must have stirred up a cloud of midges. He could hardly focus enough to see her face clearly through the swarm. He squinted his eyes into mere slits in the effort to shield them from the horde of tiny stinging insects.

Cordelia could not have been oblivious to this new element either. She batted distractedly at one ear even as they grappled. Her swipe dislodged a sizable spider that had swung down to her shoulder. But that did not seem to lessen her irritation.

Eugenio took advantage of this brief opening to throw his weight to one side, overturning her and reversing their positions. Still, Cordelia clawed at her ear as they rolled. Her nails came away bloody.

Pressed as closely together as they were-for all practical purposes, cheek to cheek-Eugenio could see erlc Grtfftn LO 3 the tattered remains of the earlobe dangling from a thread of flesh. But that was not what held his attention.

Rather, it was the fat, oily, red and black body segment of a worm-as thick around as his thumb-protruding obscenely from the cavity of her ear.

Eugenio found himself caught in an increasingly ridiculous position as his chivalrous nature got the better of him. Having recovered from his earlier shock and at last gained the upper hand, he now discovered himself poised precisely at the crux between trying to bludgeon the girl into oblivion and politely, if rather uncomfortably, pointing out to her that she seemed to have something lodged in her ear.

He resolved the dilemma by deciding to focus his efforts on keeping the girl pinned down so that she could not do either of them any serious harm. With her vitae-fueled reserve of strength, however, this proved no mean feat. He was about to mention the futility of further struggle and offer her quarter, when he became aware of an unsettling shifting of the fabric where he gripped her sleeves. Or rather, an unsettling shifting beneath it.

He tried for a better grip but his hands could find no purchase. He suddenly felt a maddening, itching sensation scuttling up the flesh of his hands and wrists.

It spread like a fire, racing to his elbows, consuming him. He recoiled from her and lurched unsteadily to his feet, tearing at the exposed flesh of his forearms with his nails.

So involved was he with seraping away the creeping carapaced horde, he bardly noticed that he had only narrowly escaped the full (orce of the cresting wave. The flesh of Cordelia’s fa e-now seen only dimly through the cloud of cra ,9 ling, scuttling and flying things-streamed, pooled ahd ran like a liquid wtdow’s weeds until he could see the clear contours of the skull beneath. And once the fleshly barricade was breached, things only got worse. Squirming fistfuls of maggots squelched out from her gaping sockets, and darker things still uncoiled from the ruins of her guts. Eugenio turned away, dry-heaving, pressing a handkerchief to his mouth.

He caught sight of Dorfman out of the corner of his eye. The Inquisitor stood with one hand raised as in invocation. “Damned diablerists,” he muttered.

“Death‘s too good for the likes of her. They’re rotten, rotten on the inside.” He shook his head and crossed to where Eugenio was doubled over. “You okay?” He slapped him on the shoulder, producing another choking cough.

“I’m fine, fine,” he croaked. “But that! Did you do-”

“Of course you are,” Dorfman said. “You know either of the two stiffs?”

Eugenio nodded slowly, struggling for his composure. “That one is, or rather was, a novice here.

The other.. .” he shrugged.

Dorfman had already turned away and started back towards the main entrance. If he had stopped to examine the bodies, he himself could have identified the other, although he might have been surprised to find her here.

He flipped open the cellphone and keyed the speed-dial.

“Himes! Where are you? Yeah, I know what I told you, but I need a clean-up crew out front. Now. Yes, two of them. Estevez says one’s a novice, so I guess you’d better open a file. First o h l termination. Cause: Diablerie.

Judgment: Summary execution order of Dorfinan, Peter, LHI at.. .” he checked his Rolex. “03:32 hours. You got that? Good, log it. We do this one by the book.”

He snapped the phone shut, preempting further discussion.

“I don’t think,” said Eugenio, hastening to catch up with his superior, “that I care much for your book.”

“Nobody does,” Dorfman said. “That’s how I ended up with it.” wldow’s weed3 chapter 11: Rogue Adept ‘‘I thought you would appreciate a bit of advance warning,” Jervais said, glancing at the adept circumspectly. “This development has come as rather an abrupt surprise for many of us. Given your position, I feel certain they will wish to question you personally at the earliest opportunity.”

Johanus did not miss the tone in the novice’s voice.

Jervais wanted to make very clear that he had put himself in a delicate position to bring the adept this news.

“It was thoughtful of you to come to me,” Johanus said. ‘‘I imagine they would have gotten around to summoning me eventually. I will spare them the trouble and return directly.”

“Excellent,” Jervais replied. “I’ll accompany you, then.”

“You won’t be missed?” Johanus asked. “No, I won’t hear of it. You have done enough already. I won’t have you risking formal disciplinary action on my account.”

Jervais’ mouth was already open, deploying his carefully marshaled counter-arguments. He knew that, with the Astors in town, Johanus would shortly find himself the object of several very pointed inquiries. If