Baron Tamin gestured to guards who seemed to have gone quite deaf. The old warden leaned forward and blinked in dumb shock, attention drawn to the tournament. The warden’s nurse, whom Janel had described as Yoran-like in coloring, leaned against the box’s rails. Her hands rested on the carved wood, all her attention focused on Dedreugh and Count Janel. As Brother Qown saw her, he knew why Count Janel had mistaken her race.

Not only wasn’t she from Jorat, but she wasn’t even Quuros. She was Doltari, a race from far south of the empire’s borders, usually only seen in Quur as slaves.

A shocked roar from the crowd made him stumble, and he turned back to the fight to see Janel’s family sword spinning in a lazy end-over-end arc through the air. The sword embedded itself a scant few feet away from the covered cages by the execution stakes.

The count was unarmed.

Dedreugh/Kasmodeus grinned and swung back to finish the job. Arasgon started to move forward, but Janel shouted for him to stay back.

She ducked Dedreugh’s swing and began running for the stakes.

Brother Qown forced himself to focus on the task at hand. In any other imperial dominion, he wouldn’t trust the water in a horse trough, but the Joratese elevated horse care to religion. The horses were given cleaner water than the people.

He pulled a copper sun medallion from under his robes and began praying over the trough water. As he did, Qown saw the Doltari slave withdraw a smooth stone slab from under her bodice, where it must have nestled against her bosom. Then she removed a small blue-gray glass bottle from her basket and a hair stick from her white hair.

No, Brother Qown thought, not a hair stick. A calligraphy brush with a barrel sharpened to a point.

Another roar. Brother Qown tried to ignore it, but keeping his focus proved difficult when he felt the blast of heat.

He blinked. Heat?

He finished his blessing and looked over. Count Janel had ripped a post from the ground, using the thing like a mallet. The demon was …

Kasmodeus was on fire.

Demons were great fans of fire. They set fires whenever possible, basking in the glow, absorbing the heat. They fed on fire.

Setting fire around a demon who had been summoned by a wizard was a terrible idea, but this was something else: a demon possessing a corpse. Kasmodeus needed Dedreugh’s corpse. He needed that link to the physical world. Destroying his body might well sever the demon’s ties to the physical world and send him back to Hell.

But what had set him on fire?

A mystery for later. Qown scooped his flagon full of the now blessed water and started to run.

“There you are.”