He stared in utter bafflement until the flame found his fingertips, and he flicked the match out. The Chaplin standee was leaned against the wall, right where the window was, a lone sentinel and last agent of defense. His vantage point, a balistraria, a slit cut through the stone and designed for archers.

Hugo moved Chaplin aside, and patted the edges of the opening, which curved up at the ends like a smile. The lower jaw was equipped with what looked like twin sets of stubby wooden teeth, one interior, one exterior. Hugo passed to and fro, watching how, with the change in perspective, one could make them seem to mesh like gears, and then he said, “Oh!”

If you happened to be armed, and looking out this tight slit, the twin sets of teeth were a marvelous way to spot your target. In other words, it was a medieval gun sight. He wished his father were there to see it.

He stood by the balistraria to study the landscape, the clearing in the snow flanked by trees, and then, needing a place to sit, he dragged a hay bale toward him.

Outside, snow fell, a clump of it.

Hugo startled. It was the curse of the sentry to realize that the Arctic night was never really silent, that it meant nothing when snow fell from branches, branches snapped, the crust of snow collapsed with strange, phantom groans.

After removing the clip of bullets from the pouch around his neck, he sighted down the barrel of the Springfield, awaiting a skulking, spidery presence.

A single figure approached, bundled in a thick, lumpy coat. He waddled like a penguin, dressed in so many layers that his arms came out at a twenty-degree angle. His rifle was slung over his shoulder barrel-downward, indicating he was an idiot. Making no effort to disguise himself, he ambled to the center of the clearing. He turned in a gentle circle, 360 slow and confused degrees. He scratched his face. Then, hands on his hips, he yawned.

Hugo wasn’t sure he could shoot a yawning man. The target had the shambling fatigue of a Bolo. He dressed in disgusting, patched clothing like a Bolo. But in this light (“a traitorous moon so bright as to confuse both kings and fools”) anyone could look like a Bolo. He was three-quarters sure it was a Bolo, which meant he was one-quarter unsure. Shouldn’t there be at least five or six of them if they were storming the monastery?