I Loaded the Occult Panel

Coleman was in the column, and so was Skadi.

The moment the sack opened, they would fall right in with everyone else.

When the lord of the hunt said ”I won’t save anyone,” that included the two of them.

Richard’s thoughts raced. His shadow, along with the wisp of spirit inside it, would be shattered here.

At worst, he would be bedridden for a while. With [Gushing Spring], it wouldn’t hinder his future advancement.

Besides, the lord of the hunt wasn’t his real safety net anyway. The risk had a ceiling, and that ceiling was a library card personally signed by a Master.

Only one thing left him uncertain: the Mask of Hermes was on the shadow’s face. If the shadow died here, what would happen to the mask?

As for the gains, setting aside the one-of-a-kind messenger and the spoils from the Virtuosos, the most important thing was that he could finally shed the ”Honored Envoy” identity for good.

The trail from Apophis’s side had been tightening all the way down to that single name: the envoy who had suddenly popped up in the Wild Hunt, the one who had appeared alongside those three syllables.

If the Honored Envoy was torn to pieces right in front of the sack by those two tonight, the trail would go cold. Add in the lord of the hunt’s promise to hunt them down afterward, and those two would have their hands full just surviving for the next few years—they wouldn’t have the spare time to bother with anyone else.The shattering of his shadow was a gain in itself.

Even if he turned the offer down, the lord of the hunt would still ride down.

The sack would still open, and Coleman and Lillian would still plummet into it.

If he took it, at least there would be someone down there looking for a way out.

That left only one question: how to get them to climb back up on their own.

The Wild Hunt had a rope, yet the lord of the hunt claimed it wouldn’t save a soul.

Lying on his bed in the Imperial Capital, Richard thought fast. After a few moments, [Morphostructuring] pieced together a complete plan for self-rescue.

On the bed, the corners of his mouth curved slightly.

”I’ll take it, on a few conditions.”

The lord of the hunt lowered the Horn slightly from its mouth.

”Speak.”

”First, after we go down, the Old Scholar watches over Skadi and the forty-odd newcomers Loki recruited personally.”

The lord of the hunt grunted in agreement.

”Second, after the Honored Envoy shatters, that slip reading ’The bearer acts for the lord of the hunt’ goes to Skadi.

With the Honored Envoy gone, the Norse table can’t just fall straight back into Loki’s hands.”

”...Fine.” The lord of the hunt ran the numbers in its head.

”Loki collects the ticket fees, she holds the slip. The two of them will keep an eye on each other, neither able to swallow the other whole. Saves me the trouble.”

”One more thing.” Richard paused.

”In the ledger, under the Honored Envoy’s column, write ’shattered,’ not ’deceased.’”

The lord of the hunt didn’t answer right away. A long hum vibrated inside the Horn.

”What’s shattered... might be pieced back together. Fine.”

It hung the Horn back on its saddle and said, ”I’ll add a condition of my own, or it’ll look like I’m getting the short end of the stick.”

”Go ahead.”

”For one solar year, the Honored Envoy must remain shattered.”

Richard waited for it to continue.

”If you’re going to shatter, do it cleanly,” the lord of the hunt said slowly.

”For this whole year, the Honored Envoy isn’t allowed to seek out anyone he was close to—anyone others know about. No letters, no knocking on doors, no visiting in dreams.

That old thing from the Black Soil River has Mirrors that aren’t blind. Say a single word to anyone as the Honored Envoy, and it’ll trace that person right back to you.”

So that was it. Richard understood what it meant: if he was going to fake a death, he had to make it thorough.

Up on Cloud Ridge, the shadow gave a nod.

The Old Scholar recorded the deal in the ledger for both sides, then wrote the word ”Shattered” in tiny script beside the Honored Envoy’s entry.

While the ink was still wet, he sprinkled a pinch of fine sand over it.

Richard still had two things left to do.

First, he recalled two of the three wisps of spirit twisted into a core inside the shadow’s chest. Two of them unwound and traveled back along the invisible tether.

The inverted tree of light in the Seat of the Sun trembled twice, catching them.

On Cloud Ridge, the shadow grew faintly paler. Several hounds in the pack raised their snouts and sniffed, likely sensing that the Honored Envoy’s scent had thinned.

The lame little hound wriggled out from under the bellies of the other dogs, nudged the shadow’s boot with the tip of its nose to make sure he was still there, and wriggled back in.

One wisp was plenty for bait. Leaving the other two would just be feeding them away for nothing, stretching a recovery period of a few months or half a year out indefinitely.

For the second task, he reined his horse around and rode down the line of newcomers.

The forty-some newcomers sat atop dull-coated horses in a motley assortment of leather jackets, still clutching the receipts printed by that tiny shop in Copenhagen.

One of them, afraid the wind would snatch his receipt away, held it clamped between his teeth.

The shadow pulled up at the head of the column.

”Once we’re down there, give your real names.”

The newcomers traded bewildered glances.

The man who had been biting his receipt pulled the paper from his mouth, flipped it over, and pointed to the first rule on the back for Richard to see: Do not give your name. Hearing the commotion, Loki rode up from the rear, his face wreathed in smiles.

”Honored Envoy, about this... What I had printed on their receipts was...”

”The receipts cover things up here,” Richard said, not yielding an inch. ”Down below, I make the rules.”

Loki’s Adam’s apple bobbed, and he swallowed the rest of his sentence.

Most of the newcomers were already nodding, with Olaf Eriksson from Bergen nodding the hardest of all.

He had already given his full name once tonight anyway; giving it a second time made no difference to him.

A few didn’t nod.

A bearded man kept his head down, the photograph in his seaman’s book showing a face more than ten years younger than his own.

A thin man kept darting glances down the mountain, the unit insignia ripped off the military uniform he wore.

And a woman’s lips moved slightly over a name even she could barely remember.

The shadow rode past them without stopping.

He had said what needed saying. If they hid their names and ended up in someone else’s belly when the time came, they couldn’t blame him. The lord of the hunt blew a short blast on the Horn, and the column wheeled north in the sky above the mountain pass.

At the narrowest point of the gorge on the St. Gotthard side spanned the Devil’s Bridge.

The Swiss had buried several artillery batteries inside these mountains and reinforced the garrison after the war broke out.

Two sentries wrapped in gray wool cloaks stamped their feet in the snow.

A sudden wind rose through the gorge, and the younger sentry stopped stamping first.

”Did you hear that?”

”Just the wind.”

”There’re hoofbeats in the wind.”

The older sentry took his pipe from his mouth and cocked his head, listening for a moment.

Beneath the roar of the water at the bottom of the valley, another sound really was pressed low—dense and steady, moving south to north, as though the entire valley were being trampled under hooves.

The longer the young sentry listened, the clearer it became. He hurriedly crossed himself.

The older man stuck his pipe back between his teeth.

”Keep stamping. Don’t freeze—we’ve still got guard duty tomorrow.”

The young sentry started stamping again, harder than before, trying to drown the sound out.

Down on the valley floor, on the other side of the veil, the Reuss River was flowing backward.

Instead of running north, the water turned south, pooling silently beneath the bridge before vanishing without a trace into the shadow of the arch.

High above the bridge, the lord of the hunt reined in its mount.

”The Anchor?”

The Old Scholar pulled the bronze ring from the Vasa out of his saddlebag, followed by the half-broken iron nail.

”Bringing both?”

”Both!” The lord of the hunt gave a grand wave of its hand. ”Hang the ring on the outside for show, and thread the nail on the inside to hold the weight.”

The Old Scholar gave it a look, said nothing, and tied the pair to the end of the rope.

The Wild Hunt was that rope. Its head was gripped in the hand of the lord of the hunt, its tail was tied to the Anchor, and tens of thousands of riders hung along its length.

The lord of the hunt raised the Horn to its lips and blew a long, plunging note. Rider after rider, the column plunged into the flat water beneath the bridge.

The first layer beneath the surface was the nearshore, a stretch the veteran riders in the column could cross with their eyes shut.

Streets, rooms, and lingering reflections from mirrors drifted upward in sheets.

The newcomers stared wide-eyed. One man spotted his own kitchen floating past, a kettle of water still sitting on the stove.

He reached out to grab it, only for the Old Scholar to rap the back of his hand with the shaft of his pen.

”Don’t touch. That belongs to someone else’s house—it just looks like yours.”

Further down, the light thickened.

It grew thick enough to stir with a finger. When the horses’ hooves came down, the sound took a moment to float up from underfoot.

By the time it rose, it had changed shape: sometimes the ticking of a pendulum, sometimes a cough, sometimes the creak of bedboards as someone in the next room rolled over.

As the column descended deeper, the Old Scholar explained that the deeper they went, the more the strata were built from settled fear.

Whatever the people of an era feared, if enough of them feared it for long enough, those terrors took physical form.

The topmost stratum faithfully recorded the past two years of war: the mud of Flanders, the sand of Gallipoli, the shattered rock of the Isonzo River valley, the frozen snow left behind by the great retreat across the Serbian mountains, the seawater inside sunken hulls beneath the channel.

As Coleman rode across this layer of wet mud, he glanced down.

Bootprints were stamped into the mire alongside a tin box. Flattened as it was, a few letters could still be made out on the lid: Princess Mary’s Christmas gift box.

As he looked, his horse came to a halt on its own.

The wet mud slowly bulged upward, condensing into a large hand that reached for his stirrup.

The rider beside him grabbed his reins and yanked him forward: ”Don’t look at the layer where you died. Look at it, and you’ll want to go back.”

Coleman nodded and quickly turned his face away.

This layer held only seventeen months. Beneath it lay the entirety of the nineteenth century—a full hundred years.

Coal dust, gears, mine shafts, railways, lungs...

The lungs of miners, the lungs of textile girls, the lungs of children who grew up beneath smokestacks.

And meshing gears, packed with people mercilessly dragged into the machinery. Beneath the nineteenth-century stratum lay the Napoleonic era.

This layer was frozen solid, whole armies entombed within the ice.

The Grand Army retreating from Moscow in the winter of 1812—horses frozen dead, men frozen dead.

The frozen dead remained locked in the exact postures of their final moments: some with their necks hunched, some hugging their arms, some kneeling in the snow with chunks of horsemeat still clutched in their fists.

Suvorov’s men were in the ice too—the detachment that had crossed the Alps in 1799, frozen into a thinner stratum, fewer in number and huddled tight together.

Further down lay the age of plagues, the ground pitted with trench after crowded trench, every one of them blanketed in lime.

There were quarantined doors painted with red crosses and nailed shut with wooden planks.

There were bird-beak masks, their long beaks stuffed with herbs and their eyeholes set with round glass; there was a dead-cart piled high with bodies.

Below that, the rock strata grew older and older.

The bronze eagle of a Roman Legion stood planted in a swamp where the shields of three whole legions floated—the remnant of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD, where Varus’s three legions had been wiped out to the last man among the trees.

Further down were the burial mounds of the Celts: bronze swords, gold torcs, and severed heads soaking in well water. Looking at all this, someone in the column let out a laugh.

There really was strength in numbers. Ordinarily, coming down alone through a weak spot meant not only getting lost and never finding the way home, but having all manner of evil creatures swarm you from every side.

Now, riding the coattails of the Wild Hunt, living people like them could pass through unhindered.

Catching the scent of the Wild Hunt, those evil creatures didn’t even dare come close.

The riders rummaged right and left through all sorts of junk: amber beads, mute bells, chunks of ice with half a sentence frozen inside, copper shavings, a Roman bronze coin fished out of the swamp with the emperor’s face smeared away by mud.

As the column neared the end of the shallows, language began to spoil.

The young man wielding an axe swore under his breath, and the curse crawled out of his mouth as a bug and dropped down his chin.

Startled, he swore again, and another bug crawled out.

The more he swore, the more flustered he got, and the more flustered he got, the more he swore, until bugs were pouring from his mouth and crawling all through his beard.

”Quit swearing,” the Lobster Soldier said, pinching his nose. ”Your mouth is filthier than a night-soil cart.”

The young man clamped his mouth shut, his face turning beet red from holding it in.

One of the newcomers was bragging about how he had once hauled a five-hundred-pound sack all by himself on the docks of Copenhagen. The words drifted lightly out of his mouth, floated halfway into the air, and began to rot, stinking so badly that several people nearby dry-heaved.

Loki hadn’t said much the entire way, yet a small wad of gray mist floated above his head too—all the twists and schemes he had been turning over in his mind along the ride.

That mist smelled foul as well. Freyja leaned in for a sniff and pinched her nose: ”I say... what on earth are you thinking about?”

”Just figuring out how to double the ticket price for the next run.”

No sooner had Loki answered honestly than the cloud of gray stench swelled a size larger.

Hela promptly reined her horse to the side: ”That reeks. Stay away from me.”

Further along lay wells that made people dream of drowning, crows that called out names from behind, and patches of gray fog that pinned sleepers down into their bedding.

Scary as they looked, none of them could take a hit.

The moment tens of thousands of riders surrounded them, the hound pack tore in first, the horsemen followed, and half the time they didn’t even need to loose an arrow.

The newcomers hung back at first, but before long they grew bold enough to press forward.

The man who had carried the receipt in his teeth stabbed a crow with his short knife. Before the bird was even dead, he let out an excited yelp.

”This is...” He twisted around to shout at the riders beside him: ”Worth the ticket price!”

”Worth it!” several others shouted back.

The gathered loot piled higher and higher: a string of tooth beads, a bundle of stair treads, an examiner’s pencil, a small jar of gray fog.

There was also a glass bottle trapping that sudden jolt a sleeper gets when they feel like they’re falling from a great height.

Richard didn’t join in. He simply steered his shadow silently behind the lord of the hunt and the Old Scholar.

Tonight, his job had nothing to do with fighting.

The Old Scholar watched over the great sack, making an entry in the ledger for every item tossed inside.

”Keep it all together for now. We’ll divvy it up when we get back.”

Riding at the very front, the lord of the hunt didn’t so much as glance toward the sack.

The Old Scholar trotted up alongside it and lowered his voice: ”You don’t look too well.”

”Since when do I have a face?”

”Then the color of your antlers doesn’t look too well.”

The lord of the hunt didn’t make a sound. No matter how full they packed that sack, every bit of it was going to drop into the abyss in a little while. The more they packed, the more would fall—it knew that better than anyone.

It planned to tally every single lost piece and put it all on the Black Earth River Master’s tab afterward, collecting it back several times over. The more that fell, the more it would demand back.

Even so, watching its own haul get tossed into a bottomless sack made its chest twinge again and again.

”Pack it in. Pack more,” the lord of the hunt snorted coldly.

They reached the end of the shallows, the ground vanished underfoot, and the column dropped into a well.

Richard had visited the mouth of this well once before through his work as an automatic scribe.

Back then, guarded by the cat avatar, his hand had written on the paper by itself while his Inspiration only dared skim a few stray thoughts off the rim of the well.

Tonight, he was plunging into it on horseback.

The walls of the well spiraled downward, thick with drifting thoughts on all sides.

Some had drifted off the living, others had been left behind by the dead, curling in wisps denser than the fog of the shallows.

Once you descended into the Deep Realm, there were no walls of language left.

The newcomers quickly learned what that meant. Someone remembered the cabbage his mother-in-law used to boil—boiled so long it turned into a pot of yellow slop.

That taste dropped straight into everyone’s heads. Tens of thousands of riders tasted that pot of boiled cabbage at the exact same moment, and several veteran riders gagged right in their saddles.

”Who?!” the charcoal-hauler roared. ”Whose damn cabbage is that?!”

The culprit hunched his shoulders, not daring to own up.

The instant he hunched his neck, the thought ’Not me’ dropped straight into everyone’s minds as well.

Every eye around him swung his way, and all he could do was bury his face in his horse’s mane.

The moment someone thought ’So cold,’ everyone shivered in unison.

Another person remembered, ’I didn’t lock the door when I left,’ and an uneasy itch settled into everyone’s chest at the exact same instant.

Then someone thought, ’I need to piss,’ and everyone clamped their legs shut together.

The young man with the axe laughed so hard he nearly toppled out of his saddle.

With that laugh, his mirth poured straight into every skull, making even the most nervous newcomers grin along.

The Old Scholar let out a sigh that meant, ’Shut your mouths, all of you,’ and every single rider received it loud and clear. Right then, a bell rang out from deep within the well shaft.

Ding!

The laughter died.

Ding!

The second ring was closer.

The Old Scholar snapped his ledger shut and hugged it to his chest, his thought dropping into everyone’s minds: That was the corpse-collector’s bell.

Over a thousand years ago, during the Plague of Justinian, so many people had died in Constantinople that there weren’t enough graves to bury them all.

The corpse-collectors pushed their carts through the streets, ringing their bells as they walked, and at the sound of the bell every household carried their dead out to the street.

Ding!

A funeral procession rounded the bend from the far end of the shaft.

Coffin after coffin turned out of the depths, stretching on with no end in sight.

Behind them walked the mourners—thousands upon thousands of figures clad in black robes and black veils. Tens of thousands of people wept with the exact same face, chanting the burial verse:

”In the midst of life we are in death; dust to dust, ashes to ashes.”

The largest coffin in the funeral procession lay open, and the face of the corpse inside shifted without pause.

One moment it was a child, the next an old man, then a horse, then the skyline of a city—rooftops, towers, a harbor.

This was a Virtuoso fallen into chaos. It was a grand funeral unto itself.

By now it no longer knew whom it was burying; it simply buried whatever crossed its path.

And it just happened to be cutting straight across the entrance, squarely blocking the Wild Hunt’s path.

A chaos-fallen Virtuoso attacked whatever it laid eyes on.

Before long, black mourning gauze began sprouting from the bridles of the Wild Hunt’s horses, winding strip by strip around their necks.

Several hounds opened their jaws and howled—not a bark, but the long, drawn-out wail of a funeral wake.

A band of black trim sprouted along the hem of the Lobster Soldier’s red coat and crept inward; he slapped at it frantically, only for two more bands to grow for every one he beat down.

Anyone who stared at this funeral procession for too long would have their name carved onto a headstone. Under Richard’s control, the shadow quietly dropped back behind the lord of the hunt.

Saying nothing, the lord of the hunt raised the Horn.

Tens of thousands of horses lifted their hooves as one, and brought them down as one.

Boom!

The entire column became a single war drum.

Lying in his bed, Richard felt the drumbeat and the funeral dirge slamming back and forth against his chest, one fast, one slow, bringing a rusty taste of blood into his throat.

He released a burst of vitality from [Gushing Spring] to guard his heart, barely keeping himself from throwing up in bed.

The lord of the hunt lifted the Horn to its lips: ”Charge!”

Tens of thousands of riders wheeled their mounts around in the exact same heartbeat.

Those horsemen who had been laughing and joking moments before lost their faces the instant their horses’ hooves left the ground.

The Lobster Soldier’s face caved into a hollow skull, a gaping hole torn open in his belly.

A gash split the axe-wielding youth’s neck from his chin all the way down to his collarbone; fire erupted across the charcoal-hauler’s body, burning outward from beneath his skin.

Water dripped from the barefoot old-timer from head to toe, freezing halfway down to hang from his beard in icicles and baring a face made of solid ice...

Tens of thousands of dead men laid bare the exact manner of their deaths.

Fire blazed in the horses’ eyes, and the hounds stretched their jaws wider than their own heads, fangs jutting out as their howls layered one atop another.

The tens of thousands of riders smashed straight into the funeral procession, splintering a vast swath of the trailing coffins.

Black mourning gauze surged out from the shattered coffins, tangling around horses’ legs, riders’ waists, and the necks of the hounds.

The riders hacked away with their blades, but cutting one strip spawned two, and cutting two spawned four.

The newcomers huddled in the rear—some screaming, some covering their eyes, some vomiting all over themselves.

One man pitched out of his saddle, only for a veteran rider to snag him by the belt and fling him back onto his horse.

The lord of the hunt blew a high, piercing note, and all tens of thousands of riders drove their weight into a single point.

Hounds, men, horses, sabers, axes, and spears—all of them slammed into the joint linking the trailing mourners to the main procession.

The main funeral procession kept marching forward without breaking stride. The tolling of the bell grew fainter and more distant until the final ding dropped into the bottom of the well and vanished.

The well shaft emptied out, and the tens of thousands of riders slowly returned to their places in line.

Some of the black gauze fell away from the riders, though plenty remained stuck fast to their collars, refusing to tear loose.

Many of the veteran riders had grown translucent, thin enough that the face of the rider behind could be seen right through their chests.

The black fire on the charcoal-hauler went out. He looked around and grinned.

”Worth it. A chunk of that thing broke off—biggest haul of the night right there.”

”Worth it my ass, look at my coat...” The Lobster Soldier was still staring down at his jacket.

Richard glanced back toward Skadi at the tail end of the column.

Not a single thread of black gauze clung to the girl, likely because every breath she exhaled was too freezing cold for the mourning cloth to want any part of her.

The Old Scholar closed his ledger and let out a breath of relief.

Riding at the very front, the lord of the hunt hung the Horn back at its saddle and looked back over the column: ”Used up quite a bit of hoof-thunder, the pack took wounds, and the riders took wear and tear... Write it all down. Every bit of this goes on that old priest’s tab.”

Deeper behind the veil, the Black Earth River Master had watched the entire clash from start to finish.

That funeral procession had fallen into chaos ages ago; under normal circumstances, no one could boss it around.

This time, by putting out nothing more than a false shadow as bait, the Abyss Virtuoso had steered the procession right across the Wild Hunt’s path.

The lord of the hunt really was terrifying. Even if the Black Earth River Master itself got tangled up with that funeral train, it would have to shed a layer of skin just to break free.

Yet the lord of the hunt had driven the thing off with nothing more than a straightforward all-out charge.

Still, this probe had yielded solid results. The Black Earth River Master even quietly felt that paying such a steep price had been well worth it.

It slipped a Mirror out in secret and aimed it at the Wild Hunt column to take count.

One.

The surface of the Mirror flashed, reflecting a rider in the very front row.

Two.

Three.

It had plenty of patience, counting backward one by one without missing a single soul. Whoever the lord of the hunt yanked back first later on would be the one it valued most; and the one it valued most was either the person the Black Earth River Master was hunting for, or the one standing closest to him.

On the flank of the column, the shadow reached inside his cloak and pulled out a cloth bundle.

Richard had already activated the ”Face of the Reversed Envoy”—the veil did not recognize this mask as Hermes.

He tore away the burlap and flipped the Smoking Mirror around, aiming it straight at that bronze Mirror.

The bronze Mirror had just counted down the flank to forty-seven.

Its surface flashed, and reflected a black mirror.

The obsidian surface reflected the bronze Mirror, the bronze Mirror reflected the obsidian, and the obsidian reflected the bronze Mirror again.

Mirror within mirror, layer within layer, receding inward into unseen depths.

The bronze Mirror jammed, and smoke began to curl inside the obsidian.

Rising from the deepest reach of the glass, the smoke spilled over into the bronze Mirror.

Slowly, a table took shape within the smoke—long, endlessly long, its sides lined with seated shadows. At the far end of the table sat seven figures, each wearing a mask: a serpent’s face (Apophis), a falcon’s face (Horus), the long snout of an unidentifiable beast (Set), a woman crowned with a house-shaped headdress (Nephthys), a lioness’s face (Sekhmet), a cat’s face (Bastet), and a jackal’s face (Anubis).

The Smoking Mirror never reflected the one holding it; it reflected only what that person couldn’t let go of.

As Mortimer had said over breakfast in Genoa: the moment you open your mouth to ask whose empty chairs those are, it wins.

Out of pure instinct, the Black Earth River Master kept counting.

One, two, three... Counting down the line, its gaze habitually snagged on a few empty chairs—the seats of the shadows stolen away by the Abyss Virtuoso.

Taking inventory was an old habit it couldn’t break. Whenever it counted to an empty chair, it had to figure out what was missing, prompting the silent question: ’Whose chair is this?’

With that one question, the Smoking Mirror won.

The smoke inside the glass parted to either side, revealing a flight of steps.

High and steep, the stairway climbed to a small temple at the summit, where several faceless figures stood before the doorway gripping obsidian blades.

Inside the mirror, the old priest was already standing at the foot of the stairs.

It wore the same hollow, featureless face as ever, topped with the double-plumed crown of a pharaoh—a perfect fit inside the glass.

An empty face was precisely what the Smoking Mirror wanted; an empty face made it easy to slip a god’s skin right over top. Inside the mirror, the old priest climbed the first step.

The flutes it had been playing in the mortal world lately were none other than those seven members of the Black Earth River pantheon.

Speaking through their mouths and acting through their hands—those seven divine masks of the Black Soil River were its seven flutes.

As it set foot on the first step, the serpent-faced flute snapped, letting out a faint crack from inside the mirror.

At the second step, the falcon face.

At the third step, the long-snouted beast.

As the one holding the Smoking Mirror, Richard could see seven thin threads stretching out from the back of the bronze Mirror, running all the way southeast.

Across the Mediterranean Sea and over the desert they went, a human shadow tied to the end of every thread.

With every step the old priest climbed, another thread snapped.

And the instant a thread snapped, the tethered shadow came loose and slid back under its owner’s feet.

Down beneath the sack, the Abyss Virtuoso smacked its lips in deep displeasure.

Someone had just set a plate of pastries right in front of its nose, only for the plate and the tablecloth both to be yanked out from under it. In northern Cairo, on the roof of an abandoned mosque, Horus hadn’t slept a proper wink in days.

He was dozing against the base of the minaret wall, the safest spot he knew.

All of a sudden, the weight underfoot lightened. He opened his eyes and looked down.

Under the lamplight, his shadow lay stretched out quietly to the west, no different from anyone else’s shadow in the city.

Up on the eaves of the minaret, a peregrine falcon shook out its feathers, glided down, and landed on his forearm.

Horus stared blankly for a long time before burying his face in the bird’s feathers, hot tears welling in his eyes.

On the south side of the city, inside an unmarked room, Apophis was in the middle of trying to haul his own shadow back.

Having just laid out the ritual materials, he looked down to find the shadow by his feet back to normal, leaving him completely baffled for a moment.

The smoke inside the obsidian still hadn’t settled.

Snapping seven flutes wasn’t enough for it; hungry for more, it began reaching outward.

The smoke drifted toward Loki, and the stitches across Loki’s face pulled taut one by one.

The mask on his face gave off a faint glow, as though something were pressing outward from behind it. The living half of Hela’s face lit up as well, a flight of stone steps reflected in her eye.

The shadow whipped the burlap cloth over to wrap the Smoking Mirror, winding the cord around it three times and knotting it tight.

A final wisp of smoke brushed across the shadow’s face, where the mask of the golden ouroboros sat—and slid right off like water splashed onto oiled leather.

One by one, the stitches on Loki’s face slackened again.

He reached up to touch his face, feeling it over and over.

While the Black Earth River Master’s bronze Mirror was still locked in chaos, the sack yawned open, drawing the gaze of every Virtuoso near the Alps.

The Star Map Virtuoso was still twirling the stars at her fingertips. Everything she had calculated so far had proven dead on; now it all came down to what happened next.

Down in the Deep Realm, the first to slide in were the few hounds that had been lying at the edge of the pack.

Exhausted already, they slid straight down the slope the instant the sack opened.

Next went the horses, and after them the riders.

Tens of thousands of horsemen began to plummet. None of them could halt the fall—the dead had no reason to go upward.

Warhorses fell, hounds fell, and the Old Scholar’s sack crammed full of spoils plunged downward, the string of tooth beads rattling inside it. The lord of the hunt didn’t reach out a hand.

Sitting ramrod straight with both hands pinned flat beneath its thighs, it chanted over and over.

”I won’t reach out, I won’t reach out, I won’t reach out!”

The muttering poured straight into everyone’s minds.

Plummeting into the dark while listening to their own leader chant like a child outside a candy shop made for a truly pathetic scene.

From down below, the Old Scholar let out a shout.

”Lord of the hunt, cut the rope!”