Even from halfway within the ziggurat, my doubled vision could still see the top of the pyramid’s flat crown, as if part of me still stood inside one of the threads of power and spirit that weave the worlds. Overhead a churning circle of brilliance swirled in the sky. The eye of the gate opened. Howling and roaring, the Wild Hunt spilled back into the spirit world in a boiling mass of turbulent beasts. The layers and levels of the city emptied as all moving things converged on the height. Human-like presences solidified in the eight chairs: four black as obsidian and four white as snow. They had no faces as I recognized a face. Instead they surged with a force I could only describe and feel as hunger.

The horseman reined his mount to a halt in front of the dais. My sire was glowing, ruddy with a surfeit of blood. Slowly he bowed his head. Every line of his body was tense and tight.

Certainty infused me like a bolt of hot anger through my flesh: He hated the creatures who sat in those thrones. He wanted to slash his spear through every watching, waiting presence but could not because eight chains bound him, one to each chair.

Those chains like whips snapped, bringing the horse to its knees.

A voice like a hammer blow cut through him, turning the mounted horseman into a kneeling eru with wings furled as in pain. He knelt before them. Blood is power because blood binds.

A prince among slaves is still a slave.

He hadn’t been talking about Andevai. He had been talking about himself.

“Give us what is ours.” The eight personages spoke in one voice. “As you are required to do, because you are bound with the blood of the last feast, and because we bind you with the blood of this feast through the coming year.”

The Hunt was merely the conduit. The courts could not walk into the mortal world, so only their servants could bring them the mortal blood they craved.

The blood of the sacrifice poured out of a hundred wounds. Through the chains of binding they sucked the fresh blood of the kill out of his flesh and into theirs.

I licked the air. I tasted the blood of the kill, so rich and sweet, laced with the spice of power, the salt of life. My hunger swelled together with the hunger of all the many presences, the denizens of the spirit courts. The force of their ravenous appetites built like the front of a storm. I took a step, thinking to race back across the bridge that spanned the cleft and regain the staircase, for surely I could rush up to the height and claw in to take my share before they had drained it all.