“The moon, Stanley!” she whispered. “Oh, look at the moon, would ye!”

He looked up, and what he saw set his heart thumping, but he tried to speak reasonably and calmly. “Come now, Pettie, it’s dust, that’s all. Be reasonable, dear, ye know how the wind’s blown these last few days, and no rain to knock down what it carries; it’s dust, that’s all.”

Yet it didn’t look like dust.

“I know what I see,” whispered Pettie.

Above them, Demon Moon grinned and winked one eye through what appeared to be a shifting scrim of blood.

Chapter VII

TAKING THE BALL

1

While a certain whore and certain bartender were still gaping up at the bloody moon, Kimba Rimer awoke sneezing.

Damn, a cold for Reaping, he thought. As much as I have to be out over the next two days, I’ll be lucky if it doesn’t turn into—

Something fluffed the end of his nose, and he sneezed again. Coming out of his narrow chest and dry slot of a mouth, it sounded like a small-caliber pistol-shot in the black room.

“Who’s there?” he cried.

No answer. Rimer suddenly imagined a bird, something nasty and bad-tempered, that had gotten in here in daylight and was now flying around in the dark, fluttering against his face as he slept. His skin crawled—birds, bugs, bats, he hated them all—and he fumbled so energetically for the gas-lamp on the table by his bed that he almost knocked it off onto the floor.

As he drew it toward him, that flutter came again. This time puffing at his cheek. Rimer screamed and recoiled against the pillows, clutching the lamp to his chest. He turned the switch on the side, heard the hiss of gas, then pushed the spark. The lamp lit, and in the thin circle of its radiance, he saw not a fluttering bird but Clay Reynolds sitting on the edge of the bed. In one hand Reynolds held the feather with which he had been tickling Mejis’s Chancellor. His other was hidden in his cloak, which lay in his lap.