“A living human,” he went on, “or two, complete with soul. Now”—he said briskly, and I heard a chair being pulled across the wooden floor and the creak of the ancient floorboards as the count settled down in it—“the question is, who shall it be?”

“Ah, yes, a very vexing question, I can well imagine, your grace. Who shall it be? Indeed! A sorrowful task, picking the right merchandise,” said Snivelwurst carefully. He wasn’t sure what Karlstein was up to, and he didn’t want to say the wrong thing.

“To be sure, Snivelwurst. But in this case there’s only one thing for it. It’ll have to be my nieces.”

A silence then, in which I imagined Snivelwurst putting his finger to his jaw and pretending to consider this suggestion; and in which I nearly sank to the narrow floor in a deadly faint. I’d been cold enough already, Heaven knows, but now I felt as if some cunning mechanism inside me had overturned a bucket of ice-water and let it cascade down the length of my spine. I listened carefully—they were speaking again.

“…quite easy,” the count was saying. “The beauty of it is, there’ll be no one about poaching. These damned peasants are so superstitious that none of ’em’ll show their warty noses outside on All Souls’ Eve; but even if they did, there won’t be anyone in the forest—they’ll all be down in the village, getting drunk and preparing for the shooting contest!”

“Magnificent!” said the secretary, and I heard a slippery, shush-shushing noise that puzzled me for a moment until I realized that he was rubbing his wet hands together. “Truly Napoleonic, Count Karlstein!”

“Zamiel’s going to appear at the hunting lodge at midnight. We’ll take ’em there tomorrow, Snivelwurst, stay the night, come back on Friday—and leave ’em there asleep with the door locked. That won’t keep him out, but it’ll keep them in—eh? His Dark Majesty can gobble ’em up where they lie, or make ’em scamper through the forest for a while, as he pleases. I shan’t miss ’em.”

“Oh, nor I, your grace! Pair of hoydens!”

You greasy little liar, I thought. They’ve never given you a moment’s trouble; lively they might be, especially Lucy, but for Heaven’s sake where’s the harm in that? And to lay them down, sleeping, as an unholy gift for the Demon Huntsman—that was a plan so evil that the author of Rudolph, or The Phantom of the Crags herself couldn’t have thought it up. I stood silently, my mind reeling and my heart beating like a drum. What on earth was I to do now?

Footsteps! The door handle turned! I shrank back against the stone wall and held my breath.

The door opened, the warm light streamed out, and the shuffling, ferrety figure of the secretary hovered in the doorway.