Ever restless, Gorial and Ghila had moved their guises to Nilghorde. Using her social prominence, “Arcus and Adaline” had quickly been absorbed in the branch of the city’s elite who delved in such depravity. Both Morden and his father had noted with marked curiosity this couple. A member of a royal House accompanied by a wolfish brute, striking all the more when they’d shed their clothes before even the drunkest voluptuary had undone her button. As the orgiastic mass broke off into pockets, Morden staggered forward, grabbing his wine and his robe, introducing himself to this inspiring duo.

  “I am so sorry, birthday boy.” Adaline soon said, “But we don’t do that.”

  Aroused indignity was a new sensation. Though she was an aging beauty, this thing under an unkempt ponytail of sweat-soaked hair was a beauty nonetheless. Besides, Morden mused, not hiding his smile, he was getting older too. His examination ran down her body, ending at a pair of heels supporting lean, long, muscular legs, pale white as the moon.

  He lifted his eyes, restating his demand: “I wish to play with you, alone.”

  Her smirk was not the kind he was used to. “I’m sorry—”

  “What?” Morden fired. “Come to my orgy just to turn Chapwyn? Your man here.” Arcus had been standing alongside Adaline, fully nude and silent, but as Morden eyed him as a barracks sergeant would his feeble recruit, Arcus’s mouth begin to open. Morden continued: “He doesn’t mind. Does he?”

  “Young lord.” Arcus placed a hand on Adaline’s hip. “We embody liberation, yes. But even liberation has its rules. As the lady said, we don’t do that.”

  “Prudish,” Morden snarled. “Pious hypocrites.”

  “Young lord,” Adaline said, “you are still most welcome to join us.”

  The crowd had ceased its thrusting to gather round, all soon whispering this pair had to be mad. Who else would argue with Morden? The crowd’s vexation exploded when Arcus begin arguing with thin air. “Oh, let the Ordrid have his way, Arcus—shut up, you foul ghou—sire!” Arcus’s face thrust forward, toward Morden’s confused frown, then seemed to shift, appearing for an instant to look almost like a dog’s. “Sire, spare this idiot, I mean me, he doesn’t—Gorial,” Arcus grunted, his face now normal, then, stamping out his words, “Get. Back. Down!”

  From his seat Irion had watched this curious display. Aware of powers and creatures his son was not, he laughed and called out: “I don’t think you want to stick anything in that dead meat, Morden.”

  One of the worst duties as an armed guard in the mansion was having to stand rigid as even slaves humped and moaned. Irion waving them into blocking positions was a welcome respite. Cracking the head of a troublesome partygoer could vent even the most ardent jealousy.

  Their armor clanked as Morden missed his father’s point. “Yes,” he vowed, tossing his wine and tying tight his robe. “Dead meat they are.”

  Arcus and Adaline had heard the grim patriarch’s words. As had then, truly, Gorial and Ghila. The disguised ghouls divided their efforts. Adaline’s regal voice pled to Irion that her lover had been afflicted by legacies of the war. Arcus, hoping to assuage, took a step toward Morden.

  “We don’t want any trouble,” Arcus said.

  “You presume to negotiate with me? After humiliating me—in my own home—in front of my father, on my birthday?”

  Arcus had suppressed Gorial, who very well may have waded them through far better. The soldier uttered blunder after blunder until Morden reeled back and swung for his head. Arcus ducked, without thought balling his fist and putting the squealing lord on his back.

  “Guards!” the young tyrant cried. But Irion held up his hand. Though the soul who peered out from Irion’s eyes was another, the first Irion had been fifteen during the war with the Conqueror. Not yet a man, he’d taken up arms against those who’d aimed to smite his House. Morden, by contrast, would flail a slave’s back to tatters but shivered at the thought of combat.

  “No, son.” Irion’s words seemed not only to echo but grow. “This fight is your own.”

  Morden scampered to his feet, running to his clothes and retrieving his dagger.

  “My lord,” Adaline pled, crawling on all fours to take Irion’s hand and kiss it. “Show him mercy. This is one big misunderstandin—”

  “Show mercy on him?” Irion gazed down upon this creature. “Don’t you mean us, foul eater of the dead?” Adaline reeled back, plopping her haunches on the cool marble. “Look at what my son wields. Look! Yes, you see. It is true your kind fears iron.”

  He knew the answer, as did she, as did Gorial screaming deep inside Arcus as Morden charged. Slashing wildly, Morden cut the backs and forearms of patrons, slave and free man alike. Arcus’s steps chose a tactical retreat, all the way to the main door before his back met the mailed chest of a guard. Arcus was pushed forward, almost losing his footing before ducking once more, avoiding the wet blade before lunging forward. Tackling his pursuer, he climbed atop, as he’d done to an Azadi once when he’d been out of arrows. He disarmed Morden easier than disarming his own woman from her playful whips.

  “No!” Arcus heard his enemy’s father scream. Or he thought he had. A stench was overpowering the room, oppressing all save Arcus. He hadn’t raised the dagger, though the thought was crossing both minds in his brain, surging with or shunting its blood. With one hand he pinned Morden by his throat, turning then to see the screamer.

  Adaline was gone. In her place was his sportive Ghila. Irion held her by her talons, saying nothing, staring menacingly, and at him.

  Only the guards held their places as the hall now laid eyes on the ghoul. Tables flipped, chairs were kicked over and garments flew as partygoers scrambled and slaves were driven briefly by thoughts all their own.

  Irion said, “Now shed your guise, warrior. Let us see you.”

  “This is done,” Arcus said, human as the next, taking his weight off Morden and handing him back his dagger. “Great lord,” he turned to Irion, “may our inconvenience to you end. We came only to—”

  Arcus screamed. Morden was clutching his most intimate parts, wrenching them so that a bright pain shot through Arcus as if he were about to be dismembered. Suddenly Arcus was clutching something too: the hilt of the dagger that had been plunged deep in his thigh.

  “Hold your positions!” Irion ordered his guards. “Or be turned into something fouler than this graveyard bitch here!” The guards stepped backwards to their posts, though even their lord’s command could not make them sheath their swords. They stood, dutiful, mouths hanging to the marble as ghoul breasts swung and her human lover pulled free Morden’s dagger then used it to open the boy’s throat.

  Every eye that was left in the place, even Ghila’s, turned then to Irion. The face of the grand architect had turned a paler shade of white, though his head never moved nor lips gave the faintest quiver. After a moment he released the ghoul, waving his men toward their murderous guest of honor. “I want him alive.”

  Romance never held much sway in the mansion. Certainly ghouls were not to be spared. Arcus was beaten to a quivering pulp. Through the guard’s legs he saw Ghila make her escape. He couldn’t blame her.

  The slaves who’d sought refuge near the stables suffered a new terror at what barreled out of the house and past them. Last they saw, as was reported fervently to their master, was a grey, bristly rump scaling the outermost wall, then it was gone.

  *

  “You like that?” a guard growled, tightening the collar around Arcus’s throat. “Ghoul-lovin’ scum.” The torch-lit sublevel they were in, once reserved for slothful slaves and recalcitrant solicitors, housed many a torture device. None better than the preferred garroting chair. The guard eased the chair’s crank back a notch, allowing Arcus to gasp as he fought against the clamps pinning his limbs.

  Through the past few hours, enough sweat had pooled under Arcus to send preoccupied guards slipping to the stones. One did right then, perhaps taken out of his concentration by the sounds of footsteps now descending the stairs. Quickly recovering, the guard burned another blotch into the prisoner with the tip of his red-hot sword.

  “My lord,” the burner said. “He be good an’ primed, just as you ordered.”

  Irion stepped beyond the threshold of the stairwell, wiping his hands dry of some pungent oil before tossing a rag into the blazing stove. The coals turned green for an instant. “Thank you, Moath,” Irion said, then asked for the guard’s sword. Swinging it to the praise of his men, he whipped it upright and examined its blade.

  For the moment able to use his throat, Arcus collected his hate, and his courage. “Chances are,” he croaked. “You’ll be able to do a bit better with a weapon than your son.”

  One of the guards was marching over to deliver a mailed slap but was halted. “My son,” Irion said, drawing closer. “Yes. It is fortunate that we’re not up where you insisted on killing him. The sun is rising.” The guards all looked at one another. Irion turned and said: “Leave us.”

  As a sundering of boots and armor filed up the stairs, Irion closed within a breath of Arcus. He held one hand over Arcus’s bare chest, clenching his fingers as if gripping his heart. Then he whispered a word.

  Arcus melted away, replaced by an expansion that burst the ropes around his stomach and strained each and every clamp with an excruciating metallic whine. Gorial’s roar sent the guards clattering, not down but up, leaving, as their lord had wished, Irion alone with the huffing, puffing ghoul.

  Irion had not seen such a creature since taking his new form. Eyes that had never witnessed the foul metamorphosis glanced up and down the grey skin, sleek as a shark’s though mottled and roughened in places by the rot of a fungal white. Irion admired the square, set jaw. He caressed with the tip of a finger the boar-like tusks protruding through exhales of steam. Gorial rolled his big yellow eyes, following Irion as the iron-wielder moved to his side.

  “You wish to speak?”

  If his massive hands had been free, Gorial would have clasped them together. “Please!” the ghoul replied. “Have mercy, dark lord. I could not overpower that pesky human, as you have. His spirit was strong, too strong.” The bound ghoul begin to cry. “Too strong for poor, pitiful Gorial—but you know what?” The ghoul brightened, exposing a grinning cavern of fangs and broken teeth. “I have crawled his mind as a tunnel. He has family, alive. With your blessing I may visit them. Wreak on them the sorrows your family has this night suffere—”

  “I am listening.”

  The ghoul elated. “Yes, yes, you let me go—if you let me go. I’ll bring back, to you, to you, lord, the entire pack. Peasants and Chapwyns, food for the slaughter.”

  “But I am now a Chapwyn, dearest ghoul. You did not know?”

  Gorial looked at him a long while before answering. A Chapwyn? Certainly the iron he swung heedlessly gave him the appearance of those holy hunters who occasionally descended to become martyrs in their burrows. “Well, lord, be that as it may, I—”

  “You know my favorite line in their blubbering scriptures? I think I shall tell you.” Irion bent lower, sniffing rot-ridden hair before whispering in the ghoul’s pointy ear. “Vengeance is mine.”

  “But, my lord—”

  “Guards!” Irion yelled up the stairs. “Prepare a cage!”

  *

  Irion often told his House that Chapwyns were good only at providing torture with their ludicrous laws. But this hot morning, he laughed aloud at the thought of how wrong he’d been. Still going after a night without rest, he’d ridden ahead of his men. He hid a yawn as the on-duty priest hammered home his weariness worse than wine.

  “And you are sure this will do?” the young priest asked.

  “You get good sunlight here, correct?”

  “Oh, quite. This courtyard was built for no other reason than to pay homage to the sun.” A flat stone altar middled the place; once brimming with allegedly Ansul’s favorite flower, now reserved mainly for penitent floggings when theology students forgot their verses or dozed off in the choir.

  “Excellent. We will provide the chains.” Irion looked at the three walls and the open gate in the fourth. “I assume some of your brethren will wish to attend?”

  “Absolutely—once their scriptorium duties are satisfied, of course.” The priest took note of his own excitement and hung his head.

  “There should be room,” Irion said. “I alerted one of the other churches on my way here.”

  “Splendid. Actually, I think I hear them now.”

  It would take a lot longer to mobilize a brood of groveling priests. The morning’s prayers weren’t over yet. But the priest was not deaf: wagon wheels squeaked and clacked on the cobblestones just before the courtyard.

  “Oh,” the priest said. “Your men, I see.”

  The other priests soon came. They’d spent the better part of their collective morning calming their startled flock over rumors a ghoul had been seen running about the city. The clergy was soon holding their noses. All but the oldest, most seasoned leaned forward. The few veteran priests who knew what waited under the blanket prepared for their young brethren’s excited repulsion—which raged the moment a turned-showman guard dramatically uncovered the cage, exposing a naked, muzzled monster. Amidst cheers and prayers and one running for a puke bucket, the consensus emerged; it was a sign from Tersiona herself that such a creature was being chained to the stone altar, though they were unaware that muzzling the ghoul had cost Irion’s guard force two of its finest.

  By noon, word had weaved through every church in Nilghorde. A body of priests and seminarians jammed the courtyard or joined Irion’s men atop the wagon and its empty cage.

  Those who’d hoped to keep the righteous cleansing a private one were prompted to slither through the crowd and return with loaded censers. On its back, covered in chains, the burned and prodded terror rotted before their very eyes. As the day burned on, incense and prayers could not keep the smell of the thing inside the hollow square.

  “I swear,” the on-duty priest said at Irion’s side. “It’s starting to look human. Is this right?”

  Through the steam Irion also saw the returning of ordinary bones, the curled darkened hair of an ancient Azadi male. Tapping the priest’s censer, he said, “Don’t tell me you’d pray it stay a beast.”

  Irion’s men had been properly instructed. As accustomed as anyone to witnessing the bizarre, they tightened down the chains as the body shrank. But nothing could be done about the muzzle, too small now to prevent those in the courtyard and all beyond to shutter at the ghoul’s dying wails. Gorial, who amongst his pack had not only been daring but a hotheaded rebel when parley no longer held promise, gnashed at the air, yelling, “I’ll eat your mother! Come back as your inbred fathers and fill those praying mouths with that pathetic piece of flesh that brought you into this miserable fucking world!”

  Irion’s men, looking to their lord for approval, followed suit, smiling without laughing until their faces hurt. Not sharing their mirth were the clergymen. Some stood shocked, others covered their ears. The rest descended on the changing ghoul, attacking him, first verbally, then with censers swung like footman flails.

  Unnoticed by the enraged holy mob, the ghoul began arguing with itself. Of the guards who still watched Irion, they all witnessed his demeanor change. So much so they stowed their good mood and begin exaggerating the postures of their duty. The moment Irion heard the ghoul scream “Arcus,” the Ordrid held up his hand.

  The captain of his guards boomed. Every Chapwyn in the courtyard, from the most distraught student right down to the frothing fist-beaters, all ceased their doings and turned their eyes.

  “Noble and pious,” Irion spoke to them calmly. “It has come to my attention this creature still needs more cleansing, a cleansing that is beyond the powers of the sun. I beg of you, let me take this child of the night back, to private chambers, where I am better suited to rid us this particular breed of fiend.”

  Entire tomes were written on how to deal with ghouls. Chapwyns had practically patented cleansing by a full day’s exposure. But the newest friend of the growing church had a power the priests truly envied. If they spoke with the subtle command that this dark-garbed saint did, they’d belong to a church made entirely of beatific bishops.

  “Very well,” the on-duty priest said. “Just please, take this man—I mean ghoul away.”

  *

  That evening, three Ordrids, selected by Morfil and sent from the keep, chanted over Morden. The corpse had been brought down on a bier without wheels and matted by leaves and minerals from Irion’s securest vault. As the ghoul was originally being toyed with in the garroting chair, Irion had personally prepped the body, bathing it in a preserving oil that wreaked of amniotic fluid and semen. The chanters continued their monastic tones as Irion, showing now his weariness, prepared to invoke a second resurrection.

  From the chair Arcus watched Irion practice concentrated movements of the hand. The warrior’s back ached and burns still seethed on his chest, though the sun had gone and moon had clearly risen. He fought the familiar wrist clamps as Gorial blathered in his skull.

  “You got us into this—fuck you!—no, fuck you! If it were me, I’d just of rather died in Azad.”

  “Impressive, Arcus,” Irion said through the ring of guards. “That you’ve held onto those bones—or should I say, latched onto them then refused to let go? That flesh isn’t yours after all, is it? Certain, then, you were a warrior. This means you were the one who killed my son, not the ghoul who ate you. Which…” Irion’s shift in tone alerted the guard manning the chair. The guard moved into position, tightening the collar a notch as his lord continued. “Which is why you are back in that chair.”

  “Look, it wasn’t up to me—yes, it was. Sire, it was Arcus. He—” Another tightened notch ended the afflicted rabble.

  Irion stared down at Morden’s loins and throat, both covered in ribbons of silk, adorned in the most potent heraldry. “I shall let him cut out your stout heart,” he said to Arcus.

  Performed by the right necromancer, the dead could in fact be resurrected a second time. It was only the very real chance of the corpse’s exponential degrade that discouraged such work. But Nilghorde knew Morden as his stepson, never mind the odd coincidence whispered by many how they looked alike.