Near the peak of their ascent they could see the black beams of the roof and another huge hole where a portion of it had given way. Then they were at the top, in a circular room with more loopholes in the walls … and both Matthew and Devane were struck to silence because in this realm of Satan they were not the only bodies here.

The child was—had been—maybe six years old. A boy fair-haired, fair-skinned, now nude, the brown eyes still open in shock, the wrists and ankles bound by twine, the flesh around the gaping wound in the chest dark blue with the violence of the cutting. Upon the child’s forehead was another cutting: the inverted Devil’s Cross that Cardinal Black was so fond of inflicting upon his victims. On the floor there was a sheen of dried blood and a clay bowl with the charred remnants of what Matthew knew had to have been the child’s heart. Around the bowl were several burned candle stubs stuck to the floor. And upon the walls …

“Hm,” said Devane, a sound of judgement even from one so damned as himself.

Upon the walls were strange symbols scrawled in the child’s blood. And not just a few, but an outpouring of communication to the cardinal’s deity. Through his daze of revulsion and the sickness in his stomach Matthew recalled that Black was of a freakish frame, being extraordinarily thin and stretched to the height of six-five or thereabouts, his face and long-nailed hands also stretched to disturbing dimensions. With that height Black had been able to reach the top of the walls, and so there too were the symbols—thousands of them, it seemed, overlapping, bleeding together, running down in gory rivulets, a mad novel from a demoniac author, a paean of devotion to the father of Mother Deare’s ‘father’.

“Steel yourself,” Devane said, when Matthew turned away to breathe cleaner air through a hole in the wall. Devane stood over the body. “Interesting,” he said, as one might remark while looking at a crushed insect. “Human sacrifice to Satan,” he continued. “Quite a fellow who’s got that book of poisons.”

“A fellow? Is that all you have to say?”

“I don’t mourn the dead, Corbett. They have left a troubled world. And while this to you is a terrible sight, I have seen worse. You might also, before this is over. It might be your own heart cut from your chest while you’re still alive.”

Matthew was about to reply—to say what, he wasn’t sure—when he realized that through the hole admitting cleaner air was also the sight of a village at the bottom of the cliffs, nestled against the sea. “I’m looking at Adderlane,” he said.

Devane pushed him aside. The spyglass came up.

“Well?” Matthew prompted.

“A Welsh fishing village, a harbor, some fishing boats and poor hovels … not much else, and no activity I can see.” He moved the glass’s view further out toward the ocean. “No mortar ship in sight. Nothing out there. I think they’re long gone.”