Who was He talking to? It was annoying.

The voice didn’t sound at all like Ember’s Olympian baritone. One time they realized they could take a shortcut, and they nearly headed Him off—they got a glimpse of His flickering haunches disappearing up a spiral staircase.

“A close shave!” they heard Him say. “Nearly caught!”

This was followed by a weird high quavering moan.

The three of them stopped in a vaulted gallery they knew from Castle Whitespire. Aboveground it would have been brimming with sunlight. Here they looked out the windows into depthless blackness. They could see the bright ring of water far below them, the surface of the upside-down swamp, a drowned sun swimming in it like a yolk in a silvery egg. Once in a while a few upside-down fish skittered past the windows.

The hooves started again, closer.

“I don’t get this,” Josh said. “Dude is a god. If He really wanted to get away from us He would just apparate or whatever. Either He wants to be caught or He’s leading us into a trap.”

“Let’s find out,” Janet said.

Now that was some leadership right there.

“I think He’s heading up to the solarium,” Poppy said.

“Great, then He’s stuck. No way out.”

“So we’ve got Him trapped.”

“We could even just stay down here,” Josh said, “and not go up there.”

“What, and starve Him out?”

Even Poppy rolled her eyes.

“Let’s get this over with and get out of here. This place is creeping me out.”

“Yup.” Janet was coming around to Poppy. ’Nother couple of decades and they might even start getting along. Janet unslung her axes, her Sorrows, and took the stairs at a sprint. You don’t live in a castle full of spiral stairs without getting calves of adamantium. She heard Poppy whoop and head up behind her.

That quavering moan again.

“Goodness!” the voice said, up ahead, a genteel English tenor, not in its first youth, with a wee bit of a chuckle in it. It was an Edwardian comedy voice. “Alarums and excursions!”

It pissed her off. The fucking Chalk Man was down on his hands and knees. You think this is a joke? Alarums and excursions? I’ll show you a fucking alarum. Pounding up the steps, right behind Him now, she got a whiff of His divine oily wool, weirdly sweet. Even she was feeling the burn in her legs. She should have stretched.

“Stop! Jesus! We just want to talk!”

We just want to talk about how fucking dead You’ll be after we kill You.