Damn. Marcus took a deep breath. All right. They can do whatever they want to her, and it won’t matter. She told you it won’t matter. As long as they don’t get her out of the city, and Janus wins, we’ll get her back. Sothe can track her down and make sure they don’t try to sneak her off to Elysium.

Sothe. Marcus groaned aloud. She’s going to have my head on a platter . . .

*   *   *

RAESINIA

Raesinia awoke.

Ever since she’d died, this wasn’t something that happened very often. The binding wouldn’t let her sleep, and it took serious injury to her head before she lost consciousness. The last time it had happened, it was because Faro had put a pistol ball through her skull, and she’d awoken upside down in the river, impaled on a rock.

This time, she was reasonably certain her unconsciousness had to do with the knife the Penitent Damned had shoved into her brain, and she wasn’t sure if the circumstances of her awakening were better or worse. On the positive side, she was out of the river, laid out on a rocky strip at the base of the water battery fortifications. This was surely better than being upside down and impaled.

On the negative side, the handsome young man dressed in black sitting beside her was almost certainly the same Penitent Damned who’d stabbed her, minus his obsidian facemask. He was watching her with intense interest, and she would have shifted away from him uncomfortably if she hadn’t been more or less dead.

The binding was hard at work, though. Having rebuilt her brain and restarted her consciousness, it moved on to resealing her skull and knitting up the rents in her throat left by the Penitent’s knife. Once those were closed, it wrapped around her heart and squeezed tight. Her pulse slammed against her chest and through her skull, so hard she thought she would burst, and stuttered a bit before getting back to its regular rhythm. Raesinia coughed, sending up a small spray of water, and drew a ragged breath. Her body tingled all over as the binding got round to fixing all the little bits and pieces that had gone haywire when her heart and lungs gave up the ghost.

“Remarkable,” the Penitent Damned said. “Five minutes ago, I would have sworn to the pontifex you were dead.”

Raesinia coughed again, then managed to rasp, “You get used to it.”

“I imagine,” he said. “I have read about the Eternal Warrior, of course, but I have never been privileged to see it work. Does the time it takes to repair you depend on the degree of the injury?”

“Usually,” Raesinia said, then remembered that she didn’t owe this man any answers. He smiled at her silence, and looked out at the river, where the Rosnik had been.