Bitterlich fell backward off the stairs, a swan dive into the void that made Isabelle’s heart stutter despite the fact she knew damned well he could fly. His whole body rippled like a flag in the wind, and he looped upward again in the form of a nightprowler bat, all black furry body and leathery wings. He orbited her several times chittering.

“One of these days you’re going to turn into an ox by mistake, and I’m going to laugh,” Isabelle said.

Bitterlich made one last pass and flittered away into the darkness.

Isabelle took a deep breath, let it out, and said, “All men are children.”

“He is an animal, not a man.” Isabelle found herself suddenly in a tunnel, long, dark, and narrow. Behind her, a great slavering beast howled for her blood.

Run! The urge nearly whelmed her, but she knew she was standing on a stair, surrounded by ways in which to fall to her death. She forced herself into a crouch, grabbed the pole for an extra point of stability, and waited for the errant memory to fade.

When at last she could find herself in space again, her right foot had nearly slipped from the step. The longer she went between draughts, the larger and stickier the ghost stains became, and the longer her hallucinations lasted.

Isabelle sat on the step, clinging to the quondam metal pole with her spark-hand, and waited for her racing heart to slow. Clearly her ancestors did not care if she lived or if she died. Most likely they were too broken and diffuse to care about anything. She had on occasion turned her attention inward and peeked into that mental space that her ancestral chorus resided. The Fenice called this space the everdream, and it seemed to exist at least partially strung out in some esoteric direction that had nothing to do with ordinary three-dimensional volumes. It was the same sort of construct as a Seelenjäger’s soul vault, the place where they kept the soul skins of the animals they’d absorbed.

Yet whereas Bitterlich described his Seelengewölbe as carefully constructed and meticulously organized so that his soul strings didn’t get tangled, Isabelle’s head space was absolute bedlam. Bits of past lives swirled like shards of a stained-glass window in a vortex. When she chanced to touch one of the spinning panes, it sucked her in, immersing her in sudden experiences—she was a man, a woman, a judge, a fugitive, betrayed, triumphant—before flinging her out again. And every time the ghost shards took a little more of her with them.