“Behind the altar, get them!” The mob swarmed toward Jean-Claude’s position.

Jean-Claude drew rapier and main gauche and heaved himself over the rail into the main gallery, landing with an inelastic creak of his knees.

Two cultists rushed him. Jean-Claude stepped into the one on the left, ducked his flailing club, and ran the main gauche between his ribs, then shoved him back as the second cultist swung a fireplace poker where Jean-Claude’s head had just been. A flick from the tip of Jean-Claude’s rapier slit the man’s throat, but two more were already on him.

Two more gunshots banged, and the air around Jean-Claude’s head clouded with gun smoke as Marie leapt on the altar and unloaded two of her six pistols into Jean-Claude’s attackers. Both men went down and a space cleared up, but it was like blowing a hole in the water, for even more filled in.

“Get the one with the box!” Jean-Claude shouted. He stabbed a cultist whose eyes were green with glimmer oil. Too intoxicated to care, the man ran up Jean-Claude’s blade to the hilt and stabbed with his knives. Jean-Claude let go of the rapier to avoid being perforated, decked the cultist in the face with his left hand and then bore him backward into his fellows.

Marie fired again, but Jean-Claude couldn’t see what she’d hit.

A blade flashed to Jean-Claude’s left and a cultist fell, moaning. Djordji appeared beside him.

“I see you loses your sword,” Djordji said, skewering a cultist and guiding his body into the path of another. “You learns nothing I teaches you.”

“Fight now. Critique later,” Jean-Claude said, drawing his pistol and shooting a cultist who had climbed up behind Marie.

“Kill the heretics!” shouted the leader. “Gut them on the altar of their—”

Marie’s pistol ball turned his shout into a splat and he pitched backward.

The crowd clogged up the far end of the worship hall, climbing over a pile of bodies they’d made in their panic. Two temple knights had been slain, though they’d winnowed the cultists.

Down from the shadows at the top of the octagonal dome stooped a great pyrebird, black oily smoke trailing from its charcoal wings. It landed next to the reliquary and spat tongues of flame that ignited tapestries to either side of the dais.

The pyrebird’s form blurred. It billowed upward and outward and solidified into a shape that was almost a man, if a man had cloven hooves and the head of a black goat with long scimitar-shaped horns. He wore robes the color of fresh-spilt blood and a sleevelike hood that covered his face except for his caprine beard and scarlet eyes.

“Hasdrubal,” Jean-Claude growled. “You’re late.”

The remaining cultists circled their leader. He crouched and hefted the reliquary in a large, blunt-fingered hand. Flames leapt from the tapestries to the old wooden beams.