Adrian Goldsmith volunteered to crawl out into the darkness.

Gavin let him go.

They built a second fire—a decoy. They put it up the road, and then they built a third down the road.

The third watch came. Ser Gavin began to despair that he would have to add Toby to his butcher’s bill. His brother wasn’t moving, and neither was Father Arnaud.

Ser Gavin started to pray.

Gabriel was not so much unconscious as deep in his palace—by far pleasanter than screaming his lungs out at the pain from his crushed and mangled right leg. Even as it was, a tidal wave of pain would, from time to time, push him out of the aethereal and into the real. Where he would be painfully aware of his loss of blood, of how cold he was, and how little time he had left to live.

He tried to sort the shaman’s memories—those he’d managed to take. His sublimation of his opponent had been too fast and too thorough. And he’d spent the power foolishly. His shields—his emergency spells—had been far too powerful. He could see, now—too late—the error in design that allowed them to seize every scrap of his power, like a tax collector seizing a poor man’s assets.

He replayed the other daemon’s cut at his head. His unprotected head.

I should have died. But I didn’t.

And now—even now—I should probably be dead.

It occurred to him to work out why he was alive. There was a small, constant feed of potentia coming from outside. He could feel it.

It occurred to him—time was a problem in the palaces—that he should try to find Father Arnaud.

To think was to act.

He stepped across into the chaplain’s memory palace and found himself in a darkened chapel. It was beautiful—the lectern was a magnificent bronze of a pregnant Madonna with her hands crossed over her stomach, standing quietly. A magnificent stained-glass rose window rode over him, set—in the freedom of the memory palace—as a three-dimensional rose roof that rose like a cupola of glass. On the window were portrayed scenes from the life of the saviour, but it was too dark to determine what, exactly, they were.

Indeed, it was very dark, and very cold, and Gabriel’s first thought was that the light behind the window was fading.

“Arnaud!” he called.

To think was to find.

Father Arnaud lay in the midst of his place of power, arms out-flung. He smiled at Ser Gabriel.

“Welcome,” he said. “It might have been better if we had been this way when I was alive.”

“Alive?” Gabriel asked.

“My body is passing,” Arnaud said with some humour. “In the real, I have perhaps twenty heartbeats left.”

Gabriel reached for his link, checking, like any veteran magister, for enough ops to heal.