His right hand began to hurt. The duke had a good understanding of the darkness of his own head; he knew that he was manufacturing pain because he feared the leper. He resisted his own urge to look at his hand; he told himself the throbbing was in his mind. But the last of the lepers actually flinched when handed the coin; the horrible man had no lips and no nose, and yet he had the effrontery to pull away from the duke’s coin.

One of the soldiers at the duke’s side gave a low hiss.

The duke’s hand was black, and the black was spreading rapidly up the veins of his arm and under his shirt cuff. The leper shrunk away.

The duke gave a choked scream.

His chamberlain grabbed his shoulders. “Your Grace! We must cut it!”

The duke spun away. “Out of my way!” he bellowed. The pain was incredible. He couldn’t think. Fire played around his lips; his soldiers flinched.

One of the soldiers cut down the nearest leper, and people in the square began to scream.

The whole skin of the Duke of Mitla seemed to split apart and the duke’s head opened as if cut with a battle-axe.

The man who had been the nondescript bundle of rags grabbed the beaten woman by the hand and hauled her along as if she were a child. The soldiers were killing indiscriminately, but everyone was trying to escape the creature that seemed to be clawing its way out of the duke’s body. Whatever it was, it was turning black. It moved with incredible speed, but it bludgeoned into the wall of the cathedral garden as if blinded, and cannoned into a trio of screaming women.

They were ten paces away, and the nondescript man went into an open house door on the square and out the kitchens into a small garden, where the gate was open. He dragged the woman behind him. His right hand had a burn mark across the palm, and so did hers.

They went through the gate into an alley.

Up the alley to the back of the cathedral.

The bundle of rags shed his rags and his face makeup and became a notary in fine, but difficult to describe, brown and grey wool.

“Sorry they beat you,” he said in unaccented Etruscan.

“Worth it,” the woman spat through her split lip. “Why is he so hot?”

“No idea,” said the man. “I still don’t know what just happened.”