So all she had to do (though quickly, because the clawed critter’s crossed half the distance between us already and only a fool trusts the arrow-flight paradox to keep her safe) was seize and redirect that purpose. I can ease the pain, if you help us.

She offered a simple contract to the bone-thing.

It fell in a clattering cascade. Wing tips drew sparks from stone walls as it tumbled. It landed in a crouch, so close it could tear out her throat before she blinked.

It did not.

It knelt.

She set her hand on the skull between its horns. Her fingers traced the bone’s grain. “Think I’ll call him Oss,” she said. Glancing over her shoulder, she caught Shale staring. “Come on. Let’s finish this before more show up.”

Oss drew its wings aside to let them pass, and followed.

*   *   *

Tara had hoped the next gallery might be the last, and for once reality conformed to her wishes without sorcerous encouragement. The chamber into which Shale and Oss followed her was the largest they’d yet seen, cathedral tall, thicketed with arches and outcroppings of red crystal. Ghostly fire danced on its walls and floor. She was no geologist, but even ignoring the rest of their excursion so far she would have suspected there was something unnatural about the cave.

Aside, that is, from the man impaled by lightning in its center.

He hung like a fly in an enormous spiderweb, or a specimen mounted on pins of light: three feet off the ground in the center of a lightning column, limbs splayed rigid, eyes shut. More lightning shafts danced from his body to the crystal in the walls and back, lancing him only to fade and lance again. She remembered Hidden Schools’ descriptions of brains, and the way a god looked splayed out in operant space beneath the knife.

Glyphs burned crimson on the man’s skin, sharper and cruder and more extensive than she’d ever seen. His entire body was a single system designed by some twisted thaumaturge—no patterns, no machine tooling, just pictograms carved into his flesh by hand. She tried to imagine the pain of such work, the distortion of the mind, the risk of soul-rot from so much Craft. Who would dare?

“Is that him?” Shale asked.

“Altemoc,” she said. “I think so. Matches the pictures. And those around him on the floor”—prone bodies covered by ghostflame—“must be his crew. Let’s go.”

She entered the lake of fire, and its flames shied from her feet. Beneath, where she expected rock, was a pane of what looked like diamond. Beneath the diamond coiled immense ropes of demonglass.

Tara blinked, and the nested thorns of light below nearly blinded her. Demon coils battered and scraped the floor. “Don’t look down,” she said, and knew from Shale’s drawn breath that he had.