He said again, Don’t pay any attention to Belial. He thrives on it. It’s not real. It’s illusions. Nothing more. Demons won’t kill those they owe a debt to. Knock, knock.

“Who’s there?” she said.

Spell.

Sister Emilia’s throat was so dry she could barely speak at all. The pommel of her sword was blazingly hot, as if she had her hand in the heart of a forge. “Spell who?”

If you insist, Brother Zachariah said. W-H-O.

And when Sister Emilia understood the joke, it was so very ridiculous that she laughed in spite of herself. “That’s terrible!” she said.

Brother Zachariah looked at her with his sealed-off face. He said, You didn’t ask me if Silent Brothers had a good sense of humor.

Belial had stopped speaking Abyssal. He looked incredibly disappointed in them both. “This is no fun,” he said.

What did you do with the adamas? Brother Zachariah said.

Belial reached down into the neck of his shirt and drew up a chain. Dangling on the end of it was an adamas half mask. Sister Emilia could see his skin go red and then grow raw and festering and yellow with pus where the mask touched him. And where he touched the mask, the metal flared up in coruscating ripples of turquoise, scarlet, viridian. But Belial’s expression of proud indifference never changed. “I’ve been using it on behalf of your precious mundane folk,” he said. “It strengthens my power as I strengthen its. Some of them want to be people other than themselves, and so I give them the illusion of that. Strong enough that they can fool others. Other people want to see something that they want, or that they’ve lost, or that they can’t have, and I can do that, too. There was a young man the other day—a boy, really—he was to be married. But he was afraid. He wanted to know the worst things that might happen to him and the girl he loved, so that he could prepare for them and go on bravely. I hear he wasn’t that brave after all.”

“He put out his eyes,” Sister Emilia said. “And what about Bill Doyle?”

“That one, I think, will have a remarkable life,” Belial said. “Or else end up in a lunatic asylum. Care to wager which?”

There shouldn’t be a Shadow Market here, Brother Zachariah said.

“There are many things that shouldn’t be that are,” Belial said. “And many things that aren’t that might still be if you only want them enough. I’ll admit, I hoped that the Shadow Market would provide better cover. Or at least a warning to me, when your kind showed up to spoil my fun. But you weren’t distracted at all.”