“I don’t know what you mean. Look, if you’re going to stab me or something, just do it. It’ll give me something new to think about.”

“No.” He leaned even closer, until the leathery flesh of his face was almost touching mine, and I could see his eyes moving wetly in the deep holes. His voice was strained, even desperate. “Tell it. Tell it why.”

“Tell what?” I could smell the faint odor of his decay even in this gray nowhere, the musty, nauseating sweetness of something that had spent a long time dead and undiscovered.

“Tell it why you go back. Why you help little thing. Why no run, save you.”

It took me a while. In my defense, may I remind the jury about the thousands of hours of sadistic torment I’d undergone. Anyway, at last the astonishing truth dawned: this horrible creature wanted to know why I’d gone back to save Gob. He had watched the whole thing, it seemed, not just Riprash’s meeting but what happened afterward.

“Why did I go back? Because it was my fault the kid was there in the first place.” It had suddenly occurred to me that maybe Stabby McMurder-Mummy was now searching for Gob too, so I tried to make the kid seem less important. “I forced him to come with me in the first place. He didn’t want to leave Abaddon. I was just trying to help him . . .”

“No!” It was the first time I had ever heard anything like anger out of Smyler. Ordinarily he was as weirdly cheerful as one of those old grandpas who don’t speak any English that you see sitting in the back of Chinese grocery stores watching the news in Mandarin. “No,” he said a little more calmly. “You no help. Angel help. You devil. Keefs tell me. Devil in angel clothes.”

“Keefs . . . ?” It sounded weirdly familiar. Again, it took me longer than it should have. “Wait a minute—Kephas?” Sam’s mysterious benefactor. The angel who had made the deal with Eligor and used the golden feather as a marker. “You know Kephas?”

“Keefs . . . Kephas so beautiful. Beautiful like clouds and silver.” And suddenly the thing smiled, a full display of those ugly little bottom teeth as well as the few nubs in its upper gums. “Kephas tell it, do my words, and it will be an angel too.”

“What will be an angel? What is ‘it’?”

Smyler pointed the knife at his own chest. “It. It will be an angel if it do everything right. Kephas says it will.”

Oh my sweet God, I realized. He thinks he’ll get to be an angel by killing me.

“I am an angel,” I said, slowly and carefully. “I’m Doloriel, Advocate Angel of the Third House. Are you saying that Kephas told you I was . . . some kind of devil? It wasn’t Eligor who sent you after me?”