The Inquisitor holstered the weapon. 'You really don't know anything about firearms, do you?' He hefted his mace and began walking in a slow, careful arc as he attempted to flank our enemy. His mace wouldn't have the reach of our opponent's two-handed sword, which meant I was going to have to provide a distraction if Quentis were to make good use of it.

'Have you tasted fear, little bird?' the God's Needle asked, swinging his warsword over his head with incredible speed before bringing it crashing down against the back of a disoriented man trying to flee, just like a forester felling a tree. 'Do you taste it now?'

'You know, I would,' I said casually as I raised my blades into a forward guard to give me the greatest reach, 'but there are so many of you God's . . . is it "God's Pins"? I forget. Anyway, I'm actually having trouble keeping track of the ones I've killed, so I thought perhaps I should name you after flowers. How would you like to be called "Dandelion"?'

The man's grin was intact, but his eyes narrowed. He reached down to the ground and lifted a dying man up by his throat. 'I have drunk the blood of Saint Ebron-who-steals-breath,' he said, and squeezed, almost effortlessly snapping the man's neck. 'Three nights ago I drank the blood of Saint Forza-who-strikes-a-blow,' he went on, flipping his sword in his hands to hold it by the end of the blade and swinging it like a hammer behind him where the crossbar crushed the skull of another pilgrim. 'And last night' he kissed the fingertips of his left hand like a patron praising his meal 'I tasted the blood of Saint Marta-who-shakes-the-lion.'

I suppose it's doubtful that my last prayer was heard, then.

Without warning, the God's Needle flipped his weapon in the air again, grabbing it by the hilt and then swinging the blade out behind him. Quentis Maren's head would have come separated from his shoulders had he not ducked down low. Dandelion had apparently expected that, though, and he kicked the Inquisitor in the chest, knocking him flat on his back. The nightmist made echoes of Quentis' hoarse gasps for breath as he scrambled backwards, trying desperately to stay out of range. Dandelion, looking only mildly interested, stamped towards him and raised his heel, preparing to crush Quentis underneath.

A thought came to me unbidden. Two seconds: just hesitate for one moment longer and the leader of the Inquisitors will die, leaving us one less problem to deal with. One less person who could threaten the people I care about.

I took two steps into a run and jumped as high as I could. I'm absolutely going to regret this later, I thought as I kicked out with both feet against Dandelion's ribs and he went toppling sideways. He fell onto one of the dead bodies on the ground a softer landing than the one I got, for my shoulders hit the courtyard stones, sending a shockwave lancing down my arm.

Quentis managed to get his feet under him and swung his mace at the madman's head, but Dandelion got his arm up in time and blocked the blow. The thick chainmail of his sleeve denied us even a broken bone that might have slowed him down.

If Sedge and Beltran had been wearing mail like that, I realised, more than a little horrified, I'd be dead right now.

Dandelion reached out a hand and grabbed Quentis by the ankle, yanking him off-balance and sending him crashing to the ground again.

This isn't working. He's going to outlast us.

I got myself off the ground and thrust my right rapier as hard as I could into what looked like a weaker point in Dandelion's chainmail, and by some miracle I managed to break through one of the links and the blade went into his side. He turned and looked down as if he'd just been bitten by an insect. Without even a trace of fear, he raised his hand in the air and closed it into a fist. Hells, I realised, he's going to smash my blade with his bare hand.

I withdrew the blade and immediately thrust for his eye a tricky target on the best of days and I was right; the Needle was too quick, weaving to the side and sweeping his heavy sword up diagonally. I lunged off my right leg, dropping my arm to my side and felt the gust of wind as Dandelion's sword passed by. I used the opening to stab him in the thigh, but once again, it made not the slightest difference.

Quentis swung his mace with both hands and smashed it into Dandelion's back. The chain links clattered under the blow, several tiny pieces of twisted metal falling to the ground but Dandelion paid it no heed, instead just backhanding Quentis across the face with stunning force. The Inquisitor's mace fell to the ground as he struggled to stay standing.

We can't keep fighting this lunatic as if he were a normal man. He doesn't care about being hurt.

I brought my left rapier down in a diagonal slash and drew a line of blood across Dandelion's face, and the distraction was enough to make him focus his attention on me. 'Quentis,' I said, 'we can't win like this. Give me the bastard's neck.'

Without waiting for a reply, I stepped in close enough for the Needle to reach me with his warsword, and exactly as I'd anticipated, he raised the weapon high in the air. If that blade comes down, there are going to be two Falcios for the Gods to curse. Quentis, bless his black Inquisitor's heart, leapt up behind the big man and reached around his chest, grabbing the collar of the chainmail shirt and yanking it down. It moved just enough to reveal an inch of our enemy's throat, and even though Dandelion drove an elbow back into Quentis' ribs, the Inquisitor hung on for dear life. In that gap of time and space he gave me, I lunged and drove both my rapiers into the centre of our enemy's throat. The tips pierced flesh and then ground past bone to come out the other side.

The Needle looked confused for a moment, and then he opened his mouth, as if he had something funny to say, although nothing but blood came out. Even then, even with all the damage done to him, the madman strengthened his grip on his sword still held aloft and prepared to bring it down on me. I stepped in and using all my remaining strength, I pried my rapiers open like a pair of scissors, and tore Dandelion's throat apart.

His head hung there for a brief instant, suspended only by bits of bone and strands of flesh, while blood pumped out of the severed veins and dyed his chainmail scarlet, then it dipped low, as if he were bowing to me, conceding a match well fought amongst friends. I stepped back just as the God's Needle toppled to the ground and lay there amongst the remains of his victims.

There was silence for a little while. The remaining mist swirled around us as Quentis and I stared at each other, our dead enemy's body laying like a bridge between us. 'So that's what they're like,' Quentis said, his words punctuated by coughs, his otherwise refined features marred by blackening bruises. His own blood streaked his short blond hair.

The world felt strange to me, quiet and still in a way it hadn't been in a long time. The things I usually do without thinking at the end of a fight became conscious steps to follow: I took in a slow, deep breath, waiting for any signs of internal injuries to make themselves known to me pain in the ribs or wetness in the back of the throat. When none came, I placed both my rapiers in my right hand and reached into my coat for a small cleaning cloth. There was no pain in my shoulders or arms. I carefully wiped the blades as Quentis watched, a little stupefied himself, I think. The rest of the pilgrims approached us, slowly, tentatively. I think they too were wondering what in hells I was doing.

I turned my head as I worked, surveying the scene, but also testing to see if my vision was blurry that would have been a sure sign of either head trauma or loss of blood. My eyes caught sight of a bag, perhaps a foot wide, sitting not far from where the God's Needle had stood. The nightmist, I thought idly.

I replaced the rapiers in their scabbards. A lot of people were staring at me now, waiting for me to speak or fall down or do something useful. Maybe they just thought I was crazy.

'Falcio?' Quentis asked. 'Are you all right?'

I wasn't crazy, though. My head was clear for a change. I wasn't hallucinating or injured; the surge that came from life-or-death combat had begun to fade, but not so much that exhaustion was overtaking me yet. I was perfectly balanced in that moment, and I wanted to take advantage of it.

A man shows up in the middle of a closed courtyard full of pilgrims. He's wearing chainmail and carrying a huge two-handed sword, but he isn't noticed. He might have come in with one of the carts that stood a little way along the road in front of the entrance to the courtyard, but that would have been too long a walk to hide a weapon that size.

I looked around a little more, not quite sure what I was searching for until the very moment I found it. There, a few yards away, was a heavy brown cloak sitting on a pile of wooden boards. So, a labourer then, walking in with his materials. He'd covered up his armour under the cloak and brought the sword hidden under the armload of planks.

Once inside the courtyard, he would have dropped the boards, then removed his pack containing the nightmist and set it off. Then he'd dropped the cloak and drawn his sword from where it lay hidden among the wooden planks and begun his work.

'It was perfect,' I said aloud.

The plan had factored in the closed gates of the courtyard, the mental and physical state of the pilgrims, the way the guards would react protecting the palace and their Lord rather than acting to defend those outside. Pure chaos, I thought, manufactured, measured and doled out precisely as someone had intended. I could see all of it now, all except that one piece that kept eluding me: who had planned it.

'Falcio,' Quentis said. He was pulling gently on my arm. 'We should go inside now.'

'Not yet,' I said. 'I'm waiting.'

'Waiting for what?'

The thing about chaos and terror is, you don't create them just for the fun of it not when you've got the kind of intellect capable of devising and executing a plan like this so well, so seamlessly. You do it for a reason. You do it to send a message.

'You can come out now,' I called out into the courtyard. The pilgrims looked up at me, a sea of confused and frightened faces.

I kept waiting for one of them to break to suddenly crack a lunatic's grin and tell me what all this had been about. They didn't, but instead, I heard the sound of a horse-cart creaking its way up the road towards the courtyard gates.

The mist was still thick in places, but I followed the sound until I stood at the outer gate and saw a young boy of perhaps eight years hauling on the reins, bringing the pony that pulled his cart to a stop. It was a simple, open-backed wooden box with wheels. Inside was a thin black length of fabric shrouding what I could already see was a body. The boy hopped down from the seat and walked to the back of the cart.

'Step away from there, son,' I said.

He looked over at me through the iron gates, not a trace of fear on his face, innocent as the morning dew.

Please don't tell me the world's been set afire by an eight-year-old.

'Are you Falcio?' he asked.

'I am. What's your name?'

He looked unsure for a moment, then shook his head. 'He told me only to give you the message. Nothing else.'

Quentis appeared at my side. 'Why don't you come inside and give us the message then.' He reached out to open the gate, but it was locked and neither of us had the key.

Before I could turn to call for one of the guards, the boy stepped back and brought a hand up to his neck. I saw the glint of metal. It looked like a small iron thimble on his little finger, but there was a half-inch-long needle at the end of it. I heard gasps behind us and realised that many of the pilgrims had followed us. I glanced back and saw some of the guards with them now.

'He said it would be quick,' the boy threatened, still holding the tiny needle at his neck.

'Don't,' I said. 'Just . . . don't move.'

The boy seemed unperturbed. 'He said you'd probably need to spend some time trying to figure out if you could talk me into giving myself up. Are you going to do that?'

'Why don't you tell us your name and we'll go from there?' I asked.

The boy shook his head. 'He said I should tell you that I have a mother and a father. I have two older sisters and a baby brother, born last harvest. He said to tell you that they would all be dead if I didn't do as I was told.'

I considered how fast I could draw one of my throwing knives, and whether I could hit the boy in the shoulder in time and not end up killing him by mistake myself. Then I wondered if perhaps Quentis' pistol might fire now that the nightmist was dying out. I glanced at the Inquisitor but he shook his head, evidently having had the same idea himself.

The boy looked up at me quizzically. 'Do you need more time? Or can I give you the message?'

'Go ahead,' Quentis replied.

The boy waited, unmoving, until I said, 'Say what you came to say.'

He reached back with his other hand and lifted the cloth to reveal a woman's corpse beneath. The body was naked, clothed only in dozens, maybe hundreds, of tiny red lines the last faint traces of blood. She looked thin, withered. The boy removed the rest of the cloth so that I could see the iron mask covering her face. 'He said to tell you that this used to be Saint Laina-who-whores-for-Gods, and that you probably shouldn't invoke her name so much any more.' The boy waited for a moment, then said, 'He said you might find that funny.'

'Then he doesn't know me very well,' I said. 'What can you tell me about the man who sent you?'

The boy's eyes narrowed for a moment, then he took in a deep breath and held it before letting out a long, preposterously theatrical sigh. 'He said to do that if you asked about him. You've never met him. You never will. That's why you can't beat him.'

The words my wife or rather, my hallucination of Aline had uttered came back to me. He needs no mask of his own. But was the boy telling the truth, or was this a ruse to keep me from seeking out my opponent among the plentiful enemies I already knew? It might be a lie, I thought, but if so, it's a lazy one. 'What does he want?' I asked, knowing I wasn't likely to get an answer but unwilling be shamed into not trying by a child acting on the orders of a madman.

The boy perked up at that. 'Oh. He said you'd probably swear some kind of oath or make a threat before you got to the point.' He paused again, mumbling a bit as if rehearsing the words, then he looked back up at us. 'He said to tell you that there aren't many Saints left now, but that he'll stop hurting people just as soon as he gets the one you've been keeping from him.'

Ethalia. He wants Ethalia. 'Tell him he can-' I stopped myself. Enough. Stop playing his game. There was only one thing I could hope to gain from this situation, which was some tiny shred of information I could use later. 'If I agree, where should I bring her?'

'Oh, he said you don't need to take her anywhere,' the boy said. 'He has people who will come and get her. Lots and lots of them. If you keep standing in their way, all that's going to happen is more people will get hurt.' The boy looked past me to the crowds of pilgrims. 'You don't have to die, you know. Your crops don't have to wither. The Gods are very angry with you, but he said to say that they'll forgive you once the last false Saint is dead.'

My fists gripped the iron bars between us. Here was the real reason why the boy had been sent, why the God's Needle had massacred these people. The message wasn't for me. It was for everyone else. He wants them afraid so that they'll give up Ethalia.

The sounds of grumbling started behind us, but I ignored them. The boy was still looking up at me. He still had the point of the short needle against his throat. 'Do you think he'll really let my family go?' the boy asked, speaking for himself for the first time.

I looked into his eyes. I'd been wrong about him being an innocent. That had been taken away from him before he'd begun this journey. I thought about lying to him, giving some small hope to his last moments.

'He won't let them go,' Quentis said, 'for the same reason he told you to put that needle to your throat. You can't save them, child. Come inside. Let us help you.'

The boy didn't move. 'He showed me something before he sent me here, you know.'

'What was it?' I asked, as gently as I could. We had lost this fight before it had begun.

There were tears in the boy's eyes now. 'He showed me that there are worse things he can do to my family than just kill them.' With that the child pushed the needle attached to the thimble on his little finger into his throat. He slumped back against the horse-cart and gently slid down to the ground.

CHAPTER FORTY.

The Love of Gods

'Falcio?' Quentis said, for perhaps the fifth time.

I was still clinging to the gates even though one of the guardsmen had come and opened them. The boy was still lying on the ground, next to his ragged little cart. His skin was a perfect pale white now, his lips blue as a clear sky. The little pony that had pulled him all this way was looking over at its master, doubtless wondering when the boy would get up to feed him.

'Falcio, there's nothing more you can do here.'

The wooden surface of the cart was clean, as were the wheels. The only dirt I could see had obviously come from the journey up the road to the palace. He told the boy to clean it just before he got to the gates to make sure there wouldn't be any evidence to follow.

'So many dead,' a woman moaned, inching closer with several others of the pilgrims.

I looked around at the courtyard. Guardsmen had come to collect the dead, but the pilgrims were making them wait while they said final prayers over strangers and loved ones alike. They began surrounding us. 'The Gods have turned against us,' an old man said, stumbling forward, leaning on a crooked staff that matched the curve of his back.

'Because of you,' a young woman added. She was pretty, with a flat nose and bright red hair. There was iron in her eyes. 'You've brought this on us, you and your false Queen and your false Protector and your false Saint.'

An elderly woman took my wrist in thin, crinkled fingers. She pulled me towards the bodies in the centre of the courtyard. Not knowing what else to do, I followed. 'There,' she said, pointing to a man nearly split in two by the God's Needle's massive sword. 'My husband,' the words tumbled out in a single sob. 'Why is he dead while the ones you love still live, Trattari?'

I said something then, something I shouldn't have. I must have known it was a bad idea because I'd muttered it so quietly that only Quentis had heard. 'Falcio . . . don't,' he cautioned.

A wiser man would have heeded the warning. I didn't. 'Because I fight for the people I love,' I said.

They heard you that time, I thought, as the pilgrims started constricting me. Quentis tried to grab my shoulder but I shrugged him off and drew my rapiers. 'Have I offended you?' I asked the mob. 'Have I offended your Gods? Is that what it takes to make you fight? Is that what was missing when one man came amongst you and began cutting you down, one after another? Should he have spat on a statue of Phenia, Goddess of Love? Or perhaps Argentus, God of Coin?'

The guardsmen were starting to inch forward, not yet drawing their weapons but I doubted they'd let me go on for long. What good is this? I asked myself. What is there to gain? Do you want them to attack you?

'Come on!' I shouted, 'show me your vengeance.' I spat the next word. 'Tristians. "The people of sorrows" the Avareans named us when they brought us here in chains to work the mines. Too bad they never took the chains off.'

Somewhere in the crowd I saw a young man clasp his hands to the centre of his chest the way one does when praying to Purgeize, God of War. 'That's right,' I said, 'pray for the Gods to come down and smite me. Use the great power of your faith to make them strike me dead here and now.' I spread my arms out to the sky and looked up. 'I'm right here, you bastards! Come and get me!'

'That's enough, Falcio,' Quentis said. His mace was in his right hand and I wondered if he was planning to protect me with it or knock me out. He'd be doing me a favour if he did, I thought.

I sheathed my rapiers. My voice was quieter when I said, 'Keep praying. Bow before your Gods. Kneel before them.' I started back to the palace entrance. 'It's all you're good for.'

I pushed past the guardsmen who had, I noted, finally drawn their weapons, and grabbed the heavy pack of nightmist the attacker had left behind. The last thing we needed was for some pilgrim to start weeping over it and set the damn stuff off again.

'You know,' Quentis said, following me back to the palace, 'people are quite wrong about you. You give really terrible speeches.'

I felt something soft and wet hit the back of my coat. I didn't bother to see what had been thrown at me.

Quentis did glance behind us. 'Not especially grateful to us for saving their lives, are they?'

'You get used to it,' I said with a sigh.