A diminutive man in a sharp tuxedo opens the door and gestures me in. A mask with a curved, beaklike nose obscures the upper half of his face.

Of course.

He doesn’t speak as he escorts me through the foyer to the back of the house and down two flights of stairs to a small chamber that widens into a broad tunnel. Nor do I ask where he is taking me as I follow him through a series of corridors lit by a string of electric lights, past grottoes with multiple exits in the ancient subterranean maze.

By the time we arrive in a cavern shored up with ancient brick, I can hear the drum of that industrial drone. Can sense the Utod gathered in this underground hive.

Trilling laughter echoes from a neighboring tunnel that glows like a great yellow eye. A second later a woman trips into the cavern as a man catches up to her, gold rings gleaming on his fingers. She’s short-skirted Baroque, down to her creamy stockings and bow-tied boots. A second woman in a powdered wig stumbles out of the passage after them, skeletal teeth glowing faintly on red-rouged lips. There’s an air of richness about all three of them, as though this were the truest noble court, the one in Zagreb a thrift-store imitation. But they fall silent the moment they see me: unmasked in the cargo pants and shirt I’ve worn since yesterday. I feel the heat of their eyes on my back as the butler leads me away.

By the time we reach a corridor lined on either side by stone pillars topped with rough-hewn heads, I am certain I am in chambers as old as the earth itself.

The sentinels are replaced farther down with human versions robed in black. Their white masks hover in the shadows between electric torches, seem to float without bodies at all. At the end of the corridor: a carved double door attended by two robed figures, white faces turned toward me in frightening uniformity. It is the same featureless mask and robe Nikola wore to court in Zagreb, a thing of nightmares, multiplied as though by mirrors. They are so still I wonder if they even breathe . . . until I see the eyes of one follow me.

My skin crawls as I move past them.

Not all of them are Utod.

The white-faced forms swivel inward as I pass. The last two open the doors. I walk directly into the chamber—and the presence of Nikola.

He stops me, five steps in, with a lifted palm. And I see the round voice box set in the mouth of his vacant mask. But he is not alone.