As a ribbon dancer uses the subtlest play of fingers to make her silks weave cyclones through the air, so, with a tiny twist of her mancatcher, Madame turned me to kneel at Dominic’s feet. I had not seen him since just after the assassination, when I flew off on my last doomed effort to save Bridger, leaving in the hospital the bandaged wreck of Dominic Seneschal, and the body bag which contained the once-living Sniper doll whose synthetic fingers had pulled the fatal trigger. I gasped as I looked up. Medicine does wonders, but Dominic’s recovery was still a wonder half worked. His hands and face were masked in a wetly wrinkled gossamer membrane, meat-scented like an amniotic sack, which fed and monitored the new muscles and skin which the doctors had grafted on to replace what had been flayed off by the friction of Dominic’s impossible ride on the outside of Sniper’s getaway car. In another week the skin and lips would set again into that cruel, conniving beauty which commands all Madame’s creations, but for now the canvas was too wet to look like anyone. Dominic still wore black like his Maître, but the elegant French tailoring was half covered by a Japanese haori jacket, an embroidered geometric pattern, black on black, with the gold-trimmed red trefoil of the Mitsubishi Executive Directorate glaring on either breast like blood.

«Do you mean Sniper or today’s blasphemer?» I asked.

«The Chief Blasphemer,» Dominic wheezed, as if even repeating the epithet fouled his tongue. «Today’s can pollute this Earth a few days longer; I hear she never pulled the trigger.»

I gulped, wincing as the mancatcher’s steel prongs scraped my throat. «Sniper is our Master’s enemy, and ally to my personal enemy Tully Mardi; I’ll willingly—»

«I did not say thou wouldst do it,» Dominic growled back. «Thou wouldst offer her a fast, dignified death.» His facial membrane stretched and crinkled as he leaned close. «The blasphemer loves thee like a bash’mate, does she not, Mycroft?»

I hate hearing Dominic discuss Sniper in French, which lacks the ‘it’ pronoun the living doll so loves. “You know it wasn’t really Sniper who pulled the trigger. It was the doll.”

«The doll died at my hands first, but the blasphemer was the mind and will and architect. Is Kraye guiltless of the thousand murders perpetrated by his pawns?» The harsh German of Perry’s true name rolled like a curse off Dominic’s tongue.

I frowned. “Right now I think much of the world would say Madame is guilty of them, since Kraye was originally her pawn.”