Giselle seemed to surface through the thoughts on her face. The priest was still very much alive. “Yes,” she said thickly.

“Axe, Wha’hae,” Favour said.

Long Paw was standing over the man he’d behanded.

“Wait,” Giselle said. “I must try something.” She still had the priest at sword’s point.

“Somewhat that’s worth the fate of the fuckin’ world?” Favour asked.

She looked at him.

“Try it. I need an axe anyway.” They all knew how hard it was to “kill” the not-dead. And what lay inside them.

She let go her long sword with her left hand and wrapped an arm around the priest like a lover forcing a kiss, and then jacked him by his shoulder joint, hard. She dislocated his shoulder, at least. Then she took the middle of her blade in her left hand so that it forced his bent head farther down, locking his head against her steel.

He screamed.

“This is so fitting,” she said quietly. “Though I have no idea if it will work.”

She forced the priest, step by step, across the floor to where the broken shards of Kronmir lay in a terrible caricature of crucifixion on the torture table. “You were talking to this creature?” she asked the priest.

“I was ordered. Oh, by the Blessed Virgin, I was only—”

“So they talk,” Giselle said. “To you.”

“Please please please please . . . It is angry, it doesn’t want that body . . .”

“This body is ruined,” Kronmir said in the flat voice of the not-dead.

Giselle knew exactly what was speaking. She could feel it in her head, and see it in his eyes. His right eye; the left still showed the wound where . . . it . . . had entered.

She shifted her weight slightly. “Why don’t I give you this one instead?” she said.

“That is acceptable,” Kronmir said.

Then she forced herself to do it. She fought her terror of the Odine, and her revulsion at what Kronmir had been made. She forced the priest’s face down and down against the priest’s incredible, desperate strength with the inexorable arm lock and the keen edge of her sword. Down and down, inch by inch, until the priest’s face almost touched Kronmir’s like a pair of lovers. And the worms slithered out of Kronmir’s eye. She fought her revulsion while the worms emerged in bloody sinuous horror and took the screaming priest. His struggles stopped slowly.

Wha’hae, entering with an axe, turned away in revulsion.

“Acceptable,” said the priest, who suddenly stopped screaming. The voice was flat. “Much better. Only the shoulder is damaged. I will begin repairs.”

Giselle swept his legs before he could effect full control, and with two blows of her pommel broke his knees.

The not-dead did not cry out. But its arms lashed at her, and she kicked one, stepped past.

“This is not useful,” the voice said. “We are in pain. Stop this.”