“Don’t humiliate yourself with excuses, Grigor. Clean it up and complete the assignment. Do not disappoint me again, I’m warning you.”

The line went dead and Grigor lowered the phone from his ear. He regarded it with hooded eyes as if by looking at the device he could see the weak, doughy face of the new Scriptor. His white fingers curled around the phone until they formed a fist. There was a screech of protesting metal and plastic, and then Grigor opened his hand to let the mangled pieces fall.

Silence washed through the darkness for several moments.

“Nothing ever changes, does it?” asked Hugo Vox.

Grigor turned. Vox stood at the foot of the dais, a glass of Scotch in his hand. In the year since he had first met the former King of Fear, Vox had dwindled from a bombastic fat man to a ghost. His flesh was as loose as his clothes, and there were dark circles under his eyes.

“You heard everything?”

Vox nodded. “Charlie’s old man treated you like dog shit and so did his grandfather. How the fuck did you put up with it this long?”

A grunt was Grigor’s only reply.

“Are you going to do what LaRoque wants?” asked Vox.

“Yes,” said Grigor.

The American nodded. “Because you want to, not because you have to, though. Am I right?”

Grigor gave that a single nod.

“Good,” said the American. “That works for us.”

Grigor made a slight gesture and one of his aides came hurrying out of the shadows. Grigor spoke to him in the language of the Red Order—a language Vox had learned well enough over the last year to catch the gist of Grigor’s orders. The aide bowed and scuttled away.

“It will be so delicious to hang him by the heels and let his blood rain down. I would not even drink it. I would let it pool upon the ground and then piss in it.”

“I like the way you think,” said Vox, “but we need him alive for a little while longer. Him and Rasouli.”

“Why? All we need now are the codes.”

He gestured to a small device that lay on a brass table beside his throne. It was a converted satellite phone that had been rebuilt with Vox’s own scrambler technology.

“Everything’s in motion, Grigor,” assured Vox. “A little more patience, a couple of tweaks, and then you can start your revolution and crack the pillars of heaven.”

The King of Thorns glared with red hatred into the shadows. “I wonder sometimes if I can trust you, Hugo.”

“You can definitely—” Vox suddenly doubled over as a ferocious coughing fit tore through him. He spat out the whiskey and reeled, catching himself on a stone wall as the coughs racked his wasted frame. The coughing fit lasted a whole minute during which Grigor did nothing except observe with a faint smile of amusement on his lips.