‘A lie I spun for Beneth,’ she explained as the man resumed his examination of the ex-priest’s crowded flesh. ‘I needed Heboric to support it. I needed details of the cult. He told me. You mean to call on the god.’

‘Found it,’ he said.

‘Now what? How do you reach another man’s god, Baudin? There’s no keyhole in that mark, no sacred lock you can pick.’

He jerked at that, his eyes glittering as they bore into her own.

She didn’t blink, revealed nothing.

‘How do you think he lost his hands?’ Felisin asked innocently.

‘He was a thief, once.’

‘He was. But it was the excommunication that took them. There was a key, you see. The High Priest’s warren to his god. Tattooed on the palm of his right hand. Held to the sacred mark – hand to chest, basically – as simple as a salute. I spent days healing from Beneth’s beating, and Heboric talked. Told me so many things – I should have forgotten all of it, you know. Drinking durhang tea by the gallon, but that brew just dissolved the surface, that filter that says what’s important, what isn’t. His words poured in unobstructed, and stayed. You can’t do it, Baudin.’

He raised Heboric’s right forearm, studied the glistening, flushed stump in the growing light.

‘You can never go back,’ she said. ‘The priesthood made sure of that. He isn’t what he was, and that’s that.’

With a silent snarl Baudin pulled the forearm around to push the stump against the sacred mark.

The air screamed. The sound battered them, flung them both down to scrabble, claw, mindlessly dig into the rock – away . . . away from the pain. Away! There was such agony in that shriek, it descended like fire, darkening the sky overhead, spreading hairline fissures through the bedrock, the cracks spreading outward from under Heboric’s motionless body.

Blood streaming from her ears, Felisin tried to crawl away, up the trembling slope. The fissures – Heboric’s tattoos had blossomed out from his body, leapt the unfathomable distance from skin to stone – swept under her, turning the rock into something slick and greasy under her palms.

Everything had begun to shake. Even the sky seemed to twist, yanked down into itself as if a score of invisible hands had reached through unseen portals, grasping the fabric of the world with cold, destructive rage.

The scream was unending. Rage and unbearable pain meshed together like twin strands in an ever-tightening rope. Closing in a noose around her neck, the sound blocked the outside world – its air, its light.