“My lord?” a choked voice crackled out of the dim beneath the altar. “Lord Mammon?”

“Don’t be an idiot,” said another voice. “That’s not him.”

It took Yehuda Leib long moments of blinking to discern who had spoken.

At the foot of the dais, rows of rough wooden chairs stood in parallel, and among them, several figures sat waiting.

“Are you sure?” said the first voice again, a wide, anxious man with big, watery eyes. “Is it you, my lord?”

“No,” said Yehuda Leib.

A derisive snort came from a spindly woman slouching over two chairs at once. “I told you.”

“But when?” cried the man. “When will he come?”

“You must be patient,” said a third voice, a little fellow with a perfectly round head.

Yehuda Leib chose a seat near the third fellow. As he sat, he felt the wood beneath him squeal and complain.

“Psst,” said the round-headed fellow, beckoning, and Yehuda Leib leaned near. “You see him?”

The third fellow pointed at the anxious, portly man, who had begun to pace.

Yehuda Leib nodded.

“He’s come for a loan.”

“A loan?”

“Yes. And he hasn’t yet decided what to offer as security. If you listen closely, you can hear him bargaining with himself.”

At just this moment, the anxious man paced by, and Yehuda Leib heard a snippet of his muttering: “How long? Thirty, forty thousand years? But would he even accept that?”

The round head of the third fellow shook softly. “It’s no wonder we’re still waiting. Why enter into negotiations when your opponent is already doing the work for you?”

This made a certain kind of sense to Yehuda Leib: with every passing moment, the man’s own anxiety was stripping off layer after layer of resistance.

“Now, over there,” said the third fellow, gesturing with his domed forehead, “is a demon who’s come to buy something back that she sold off long ago. But she’s by no means certain that she’ll be able to afford it.”

Through the gloom, Yehuda Leib could see the spindly woman chewing idly on her lower lip.

“She came prepared,” said the round-headed fellow. “She had a price in mind when she walked through the door. But the other one’s anxiety is wearing away at her. Little by little, the highest price she’s willing to pay is rising.”

Yehuda Leib was disquieted to see that the round-headed fellow was smiling.

His teeth were very small but very, very sharp.

“She’s ripening,” he said. “Like fruit on the vine. And so my question is this: Do you bring any pressing business to tempt Lord Mammon? Or shall I have a nap?”

Yehuda Leib nodded eagerly. “My business is urgent.”

The round-headed fellow turned his beady black eyes on Yehuda Leib. “Oh?”

“Something was taken from me and sold to Lord Mammon without my permission.”