“Didn’t your mommy tell you never to make a deal with the devil? What I give I can take. String him up!”

Behind him, Claude grunted, and something crashed into the back of Billos’s head. He felt himself falling, but was out before he hit the ground.

HE CAME TO SLOWLY, TO THE SOUND OF HEAVY BREATHING and the pain of twisted joints. Light filtered past his eyes, and he saw the sky above, black and boiling, just above the nearly bare branches of a large oak that hung over him like a menacing skeleton.

Something wet dripped on his face. Sweat from the flushed face of a throater who leaned over him, pulling on a rope they’d slung over the thickest branch high above.

The full realization of what he was up against hit Billos, and he jerked his legs in a moment of panic. Pain shot down his bones. They’d tied his arms and legs back like a hog’s, so that any movement from his arms only pulled his legs back behind his hips and vice versa.

“String him up,” Claude said.

“Wait!” Billos cried, or tried to cry—he managed only a grunt.

They hauled him up by a rope. He left the ground facedown, arms and legs arched behind his back, barely able to hold back his screams.

The rope jerked with each pull, sending stabs of pain through his joints.

He heard the cackling then, from a porch on the back side of the temple where they’d dragged him. Black watched with arms crossed, smiling.

“Go ahead and let it all out, baby. They deserve a scream.”

Billos stared into the man’s eyes, set above curling lips. Black eyes that didn’t appear to have any pupils. And in those dark, oily pools, Billos could see himself screaming. Clawing his way up, as if the man’s eye was a tunnel into the abyss, and he, Billos, was being sucked in.

He blinked, and the image was gone. Only Black now, smiling at him with shiny white teeth and dark eyes.

“The books, Billos,” Black said. “I need the books.”

“I . . . I don’t know . . .”

The throaters tied the rope off to one of the porch posts, leaving Billos to sway a few feet above a large circle the men formed. The rope creaked above him.

Black paced, arms still crossed. “If that’s the truth, then I have no use for you; you do realize that, don’t you?”

He hadn’t thought of it that way. Words failed him in the face of the pain. Below, one of the villagers approached, dragging the Scab’s large Horde sword. He gripped it with both hands and looked up at Billos.

“Do you know what happens to the stomach when it’s sliced open in your particular position?” Black asked.