“You’re lying.” She made her knife thick and sharp and heavy, a cleaver built of light.

“I’m in your head. I’m your worst memories of me, your greatest fears. And the greatest fear of all—the one that still makes you sweat at two in the morning when the world’s quiet—is that I was right all along. That I was right, and you are—”

Her blade parted skull from spine.

The voice stopped.

“Come back,” she told the Blacksuit. “I’m ready.”

*   *   *

She nestled the skull in a lead-lined box filled with packing immaterial and followed the Blacksuit to the lowest levels of the Temple of Justice’s evidence locker, past impounded drugs and weapons and grails and tools and artifacts too strange to describe with a single word. She placed the skull box beside his personal effects and warded them thrice with shadow and silver to prevent Craft from leaking in or out. When she closed the door, the light above clicked from red to green.

She woke that night, on her bed in her coffin-sized bedroom, to moonlight through the window. A goddess sang.

Tara’s heart beat fast. She lay in her own sweat and waited for dawn.

*   *   *

The day after Tara moved into her new office, once she unpacked her books, installed the nightmare telegraph, set up the astrolabe, and routed out the spy in the lobby, she laid a piece of cream-white paper on her desk and wrote, in large ruby letters at the top: “In Case the Survival of the Moon Goddess Seril or the Presence of Her Gargoyles in Alt Coulumb Should Become Public Knowledge Before She Regains Sufficient Power to Defend Herself.”

This did not leave much room on the paper. Fortunately or, rather, unfortunately, she did not know what to write next.

She stared at the paper. She clutched the pen barrel between her teeth. She threw a tennis ball against the wall and caught it until her neighboring tenant asked her to stop. That consumed roughly two hours, during which no further words appeared on the paper. She walked Alt Coulumb’s streets. She immersed herself in its libraries. She consulted the stars and the scholars of Craft, though in the latter case she kept the details of her query general. She spoke with gibbering horrors from beyond the edges of time, and erected elaborate palaces of possibility, networked and interlaced contingencies, none of which satisfied.

After all this, she returned the paper to her desk and wrote, in small letters beneath the overlong heading: “We are probably screwed.”

Then she burned the paper, because it was a stupid document to leave lying around, even in an office secured by the finest geases and traps she, a graduate of the Hidden Schools, could Craft.