Blood soaked the ground. Blood soaked the world.

All around and high above, the golden mosaics blazed with faces which seemed now transfixed in horror as they beheld this slaughter. Saints and saints and saints. Flames rose and danced. Piles of books were burning! Icons were smashed into pieces, and statuary lay in heaps, smoldering and blackened, the gold gleaming as it was eaten by the flames.

"Where are we!" I cried out.

Memnoch's voice was right beside me. He was sitting, collected, against the stone wall.

"Hagia Sophia, my friend," he said. "It's nothing, really. It's only the Fourth Crusade."

I reached out with my left hand for him, unwilling to let go of the veil with my right.

"What you see is the Roman Christians slaughtering the Greek Christians. That's all there is to it. Egypt and the Holy Land have for the moment been forgotten. The Venetians have been given three days to loot the city. It was a political decision. Of course they were all here to win back the Holy Land, where you and I have lately been, but the battle wasn't in the cards, and so the authorities have let the troops loose on the town. Christian slaughters Christian. Roman against Greek. Do you want to walk outside? Would you like to see more of it? Books by the millions are being lost now forever.

Manuscripts in Greek and Syriac and Ethiopian and Latin. Books of God and books of men. Do you want to walk among the convents where the nuns are being dragged out of their cells by fellow Christians and raped? Constantinople is being looted. It's nothing, believe me, nothing at all."

I lay against the ground, crying, trying to close my eyes and not see, but unable not to see—flinching at the clang of the horses' hooves so perilously close, choking on the reek of the blood of the dead baby who lay against my leg heavy and limp like something wet from the sea. I cried and cried. Near me lay the body of a man with his head half severed from his neck, the blood pooling on the stones.

Another figure tumbled over him, knee twisted, bloody hand grasping for anything that would give him purchase, and finding only the naked pink child's body which he threw aside. Its little head was now nearly broken off.

"The veil," I whispered.

"Oh, yes, the precious veil," he said. "Would you like a change of scenery? We can move on. We can go to Madrid and treat ourselves to an auto-da-fe, do you know what that is, when they torture and burn alive the Jews who won't convert to Christ?

Perhaps we should go back to France and see the Cathars being slaughtered in the Languedoc? You must have heard those legends when you were growing up. The heresy was wiped out, you know, the whole heresy. Very successful mission on the part of the Dominican Fathers, who will then start on the witches, naturally. There are so many choices.