At those words, Dradin would have run, would have taken off into the mist, not caring if Dvorak found him and gutted him, such was his terror. But then the creeping tread of the creatures resolved itself. The sound grew louder, coming up behind and ahead of him. As he watched, the shadows became shapes and then figures, until he could see the glinty eyes and glinty knives of a legion of silent, waiting mushroom dwellers. Behind them, hopping and rustling, came toads and rats, their eyes bright with darkness. The sky thickened with the swooping shapes of bats.

“Surely,” Dradin said, “surely there has been a mistake.”

In a sad voice, his face strangely mournful and moonlike, Dvorak said, “There have indeed been mistakes, but they are yours. Take off your clothes.”

Dradin backed away, into the arms of the leathery, stretched, musty folk behind. Cringing from their touch, he leapt forward.

“I have money,” Dradin said to Dvorak. “I will give you money. My father has money.”

Dvorak’s smile turned sadly sweeter and sweetly sadder. “How you waste words when you have so few words left to waste. Remove your clothes or they will do it for you,” and he motioned to the mushroom dwellers. A hiss of menace rose from their assembled ranks as they pressed closer, closer still, until he could not escape the dry, piercing rot of them, nor the sound of their shambling gait.

He took off his shoes, his socks, his trousers, his shirt, his underwear, folding each item carefully, until his pale body gleamed and he saw himself in his mind’s eye as switching positions with the Living Saint. How he would have loved to see the hoary ejaculator now, coming to his rescue, but there was no hope of that. Despite the chill, Dradin held his hands over his penis rather than his chest. What did modesty matter, and yet still he did it.

Dvorak hunched nearer, hand taut on the rope, and used his knife to pull the clothes over to him. He went through the pockets, took the remaining coins, and then put the clothes over his shoulder.

“Please, let me go,” Dradin said. “I beg you.” There was a tremor in his voice but, he marveled, only a tremor, only a hint of fear.

Who would have guessed that so close to his own murder he could be so calm?

“I cannot let you go. You no longer belong to me. You are a priest, are you not? They pay well for the blood of priests.”

“My friends will come for me.”

“You have no friends in this city.”

“Where is the woman from the window?”

Dvorak smiled with a smugness that turned Dradin’s stomach. A spark of anger spread all up and down his back and made his teeth grind together. The graveyard gate was open. He had run through graveyards once, with Anthony—graveyards redolent with the stink of old metal and ancient technologies—but was that not where they wished him to go?