And so he dances down the aisle, leans over the lady tied to the bed, and—holding a knife to the neck of the man lying next to her—who just happens to be me, myself: Bob Howard—asks: "Woman, you tell, where is Fuller Memorandum? Speak now, or will cut throat of All-Highest."

I LIE IN THE GRIP OF A GREAT LASSITUDE . I'VE BEEN LYING here for what seems like decades, staring with unblinking eyes at the star-pricked canopy of black silk above the Skull Cultists' altar. I know, distantly, that I am in extreme danger; I'm in the middle of a monstrous summoning, and lying like a drunkard next to a bound but still deadly Iris while her minions panic and try to fight off the eaters outside the chapel is not a life-expectancy-enhancing situation. But I can't move. I don't even feel tired; I feel dead. Some kinds of summoning cause serious physical fatigue, possibly via a mechanism not unlike a mild form of K syndrome, and this would appear to be one of them.

The black sky above me, pierced by the flickering light of unfamiliar constellations, blows like a chill wind through my awareness. I've seen this sky before, I realize; where? Oh. Yes, the canopy of the altar-bed of the Black Skull mirrors the chill starlight that sluices across the desiccated plain surrounded by the fence of impaled corpses that I dreamed about, the fence that locks the Sleeper in the Pyramid in somnolent darkness. I'm not the only one to see that skyscape when I close my eyes, I think.

I can feel Iris nearby, her mind slowed and frustrated, defocused by the bindings woven into the ropes that trim the altar of the sex-magic cultists that used this chapel before her own people moved in. She's angry, terrified, embittered; I could almost feel sympathy for her if my right arm didn't remind me constantly of what she stands for, who she is. There are the eaters, torpid and in some cases well-fed, resting in their bony chrysalids in the porous earth beyond; and there are other human lives upstairs, some of them familiar. They're coming this way. One of them, not so familiar, is almost here already—

Something touches my neck, as a voice speaks, in a thick eastern European accent: "Woman, you tell, where is Fuller Memorandum? Speak now, or will cut throat of All-Highest."

Bastard. I'm lying here helpless and I can't even tell Laughing Boy that I'm not the All-Highest! That, and the Fuller Memorandum happens to be snugly jacketed in the folder I'm clutching to my bosom with arms like lead weights: this is not looking good. Close to panic, I try to twitch a finger or blink an eyelid—anything to reassert control over my own treacherous body.