He walked through the meeting hall and climbed the stairs to his living quarters. The door leading in was locked. He used another key, pushed the door open, and walked inside.

“I thought perhaps you weren’t coming back, Seraphic,” a voice greeted him.

He managed not to cry out, but only barely. He looked around, searching the darkness, but couldn’t see anything. He wondered for a moment if it might be Bonnasaint, since only he would be this daring, would risk violating his personal quarters by entering uninvited. But it wasn’t Bonnasaint’s voice.

“I’m over here,” the voice said.

A flame appeared, and a candle was lit. The candle sat on a table next to a padded chair, and a man sat in the chair. Skeal Eile could only just make him out—tall, thin, pinch-faced, and craggy. Old, and not in a good way. Weathered and worn down from the inside out. But not weak. Not vulnerable, for all his appearance might suggest. Skeal Eile could tell.

“Who are you?” he asked, managing to put some iron in his voice. “Who let you into my rooms?”

The response was mild. “No one. I let myself in. I needed to speak with you, and I saw no point in waiting outside like one of your supplicants. As for who I am, I leave it to you to determine that. A man possessed of your skills and singular talents should have no trouble recognizing me.”

He moved the candle off the tabletop and close to his face. Skeal Eile saw his features clearly, the same features he had made out before in the room’s dimness. The candlelight sharpened and defined those features, but did not reveal the identity of the speaker. Some old itinerant dressed in ragged clothes. What was that next to him? A bundle of rags?

“I don’t know you,” he told the other.

“Look more closely. Look into my eyes.”

Skeal Eile almost didn’t. Something in the other’s voice told him that he wouldn’t like what he found there, that he might even be putting himself in danger. But he was still angry at the intrusion, and he wanted to reclaim the high ground in this confrontation, so he looked closely at the other’s eyes and watched with terrible fascination as they changed from something human to something that wasn’t.

He felt his throat tighten and his mouth go dry. He had some magic at his command and thus some insights into things that weren’t known by the average man and woman. He had never seen a demon before, though he had heard about them in stories told of the old world, and he knew he was seeing one now.

“I do know you,” he said.

“I thought you might. Men of your sort usually do. They see themselves in me. Or something of what they wish they were.”