"Don't say my name," he answered. He turned to Eric. "Put her into some room or cellar. Where you had her before. Keep her there for three hundred years. Like Camillo. She can learn that way."

"Malach," said Ruth. "Malach."

"Not to you."

"But I'm yours. I'm to go with you."

"You're not mine. Go into the furnace. Burn up. Finish."

Tray said, "Miranda, can I have a sweet?"

"Yes, dear," said Miranda. "Lots and lots of sweets. Hold my hand."

Then Eric must have gestured to Kei and to Michael, because they came together and took hold of Ruth in her blood.

And they began to carry her, as if to her execution, up the other side of the stairs.

They had incarcerated her before. When she killed. Then. That time, she was silent.

Now Ruth screamed. Not like the other girl, not like a machine. These were raw cries, to which every pore of the body responded. The wails of sacked Troy and Jerusalem, the blinded shrieks of Hiroshima.

Malach stood under the stairs, and listened.

Rachaela saw him listen, his face like a shell in ice.

And then they bore Ruth past her, and Rachaela reached out her hand— "Ruth—"

And Ruth cried, "Malach—Malach—"

Her screams went on, her cries, the repetition of his name. Up into the pinnacles of the house.

"Dear God." Rachaela put her hands to her lips. She was torn open, as if Ruth had been born again out of her body. But Ruth now, finally, at last, was dead.

CHAPTER 43

HADES.

Through the dark a monster had passed, sucking slowly at the moistureless black milk of the vaulted tunnels. It was vacuuming up the asbestos dust that clung to the walls and roof. Secret thing of night, no one must know the poison that pollinated the airs under the earth.

Like the inside of a wine cask, a barrel, these passageways, the scattering coils of rails, like carelessly cast rope.

The Underground by night.

And now, after the monster had passed, the man came walking.

Malach moved without a sound through the labyrinth of the tunnels. He took another branch, and the rumbling of the monster died away.

Mice cheeped from their own city of holes and runnels.

The aroma of this Hell was like that of an old chimney, soot and dirt and unreal atmosphere heated too high and inadequately cooled. In places were lights, in others not. Sometimes deep-throated breezes blew, odored with distant electricity, for somewhere a train had passed, some carrier between the closed stations.

Malach's face, now lit, now lost. Impossible to read there anything, not even when thick, choked light began to shine back on him from the darkness.

The clink of implements along the rails, like .trapped miners, tapping with their last strength, for rescue, which would never come.

Malach moved down the tunnel and entered the light.