A priest stood at the altar with two attendants. I recognized them by their white robes as initiates. At their distance they were dwarfed nearly to nothing. Somehow the priest was not. In the midnight-blue drapery and white beard of an adept, he stood tall, arms outspread, and I feared him. Yet he wasn’t moving, praying, anything…Smoke from the hanging censers drugged my lungs. The choir droned and shrilled above me. I had never felt more daunted.

  Hauling my glance away, I forced myself to study the layout as if this were an enemy fortress to be penetrated: which it was, for me tonight, whether or not it bore any guilt for what had happened to my little girl. The thought of her started a rage brewing that soon got strong enough to serve for courage. My witch-sight didn’t operate here; counterspells against such things must have been laid. Normal night vision was adapting, though, stretched to the same ultimate as every other faculty I had.

  The noncommunicants’ section was as far as could be from the altar, at the end of the extreme left side aisle. So on my right hand were pews reaching to the nave, on my left a passage along the north wall. The choir loft hung over me like a thundercloud. This isn’t helping me figure out how to burgle the joint, I thought.

  A monk went past me on soft-sandaled feet. Over his robe he wore a long surplice embroidered with cabalistic symbols. Halfway to the transept he halted before a many-branched sconce, lit a candle, and prostrated himself for minutes. Rising, bowing, and backing off seven steps, he returned in my direction.

  From pictures, I recognized his outer garment as the one donned by choristers. Evidently he’d been spelled and, instead of taking straight off to shuck the uniform, had acquired a bit of merit first. When he had gone by, I twisted around to follow his course. The pews left some clear space at the rear end. The choral balcony threw it into such gloom that I could barely see the monk pass through a door in the corner nearest me.

  The idea burst forth like a pistol from the holster. I sat outwardly still, inwardly crouched, and probed from side to side of the basilica. Nobody was paying attention to me. Probably I wasn’t even visible to celebrants or worshipers; this placement was designed to minimize the obtrusiveness of infidels. My ears, which beneath the clamant song picked out the monk’s footfalls, had detected no snick of key in lock. I could follow him.

  Then what? I didn’t know and didn’t greatly care. If they nailed me at once, I’d be a Nosy Parker. They’d scold me and kick me out, and I’d try some different approach. If I got caught deeper in the building—well, that was the risk I’d come courting.

  I waited another three hundred million microseconds, feeling each one. The monk needed ample time to get out of this area. During the interval I knelt, gradually hunching lower and lower until I’d sunk out of sight. It drew no stares or inquiries. Finally I was on all fours.

  Now! I scuttled, not too fast, across to that shadowy corner. Risen, I looked behind me. The adept stood like a gaunt eidolon, the initiates handled the four sacred objects in complicated ways, the choir sang, a man signed himself and left via the south aisle. I waited till he had exited before gripping the doorknob. It felt odd. I turned it most slowly and drew the door open a crack. Nothing happened. Peering in, I saw dim blue lights.

  I went through.

  Beyond was an anteroom. A drapery separated it from a larger chamber, which was also deserted. That condition wouldn’t last long. The second of the three curtained openings gave on a spiral staircase down which the hymn came pouring. The third led to a corridor. Most of the space was occupied by racks on which hung surplices. Obviously you borrowed one after receiving your instructions elsewhere, and proceeded to the choir loft. At the end of your period, you came back this way. Given six hundred and one singers, reliefs must show quite often. Maybe they weren’t so frequent at night, when the personnel were mostly clergy with more training and endurance than eager-beaver laymen. But I’d best not stick around.

  I unsnapped the sheath from my inner belt and stuffed my knife in a jacket pocket before stepping into the hall. Lined with doors for the length of the building, the corridor might have been occupied by any set of prosaic offices. Mostly they were closed, and the light overhead was turned low. A few panels glowed yellow. Passing by one, I heard a typewriter. Within the endless chant, that startled me as if it’d been the click of a skeleton’s jaws.

  My plans were vague. Presumably Marmiadon, the priest at the Nornwell demonstration, operated out of this centrum. He’d have returned and asked his brethren to get the stench off him. An elaborate spell, too expensive for the average person, would clean him up sooner than nature was able. At least, he was my only lead. Otherwise I could ransack this warren for a fruitless decade.

  Where staircases ran up and down, a directory was posted on the wall. I’d expected that. A lot of civilians and outside clergy had business here. Marmiadon’s office was listed as 413. Because an initiate in the fifth degree ranked fairly high—two more and he’d be a candidate for first-degree adept status—I’d assumed he was based in the cathedral rather than serving as a mere chaplain or missionary. But it occurred to me that I didn’t know what his regular job was.

  I took the steps quietly, by twos. At the third-floor landing, a locked wrought-iron gate barred further passage. Not surprising, I thought; I’m getting into officer country. It wasn’t too big for an agile man to climb over. What I glimpsed of that hall looked no different from below, but my skin prickled at a strengthened sense of abnormal energies.

  The fourth floor didn’t try for any resemblances to Madison Avenue. Its corridor was brick, barrel-vaulted, lit by Grail-shaped oil lamps hung in chains from above, so that shadows flickered huge. The chant echoed from wall to wall. The atmosphere smelled of curious, acrid musks and smokes. Rooms must be large, for the pointed-arch doors stood well apart.

  One door stood open between me and my goal. Incongruously bright light spilled forth. I halted and stared in slantwise at shelves upon shelves of books. Some few appeared ancient, but mostly they were modern—yes, that squat one must be the Handbook of Alchemy and Metaphysics, and yonder set the Encyclopaedia Arcanorum, and there was a bound file of Mind—well, scientists need reference libraries, and surely very strange research was conducted here. It was my hard luck that someone kept busy this late at night.

  I glided to the jamb and risked a closer peek. One man sat alone. He was huge, bigger than Barney Sturlason, but old, old; hair and beard were gone, the face might have belonged to Rameses’ mummy. An adept’s robe swathed him. He had a book open on his table, but wasn’t looking at it. Deep-sunken, his eyes stared before him while a hand walked across the pages. I realized he was blind. That book, though, was not in Braille.

  The lights could be automatic, or for another worker in the stacks. I slipped on by.

  Marmiadon’s place lay several yards further. Beneath his name and rank, the brass plate read “Fourth Assistant Toller.” Not a bell ringer, for God’s sake, that runt…was he? The door was locked. I should be able to unscrew the latch or push out the hinge pins with my knife. Better wait till I was quite alone, however. Meanwhile I could snoop—

  “What walks?”

  I whipped about. The adept stood in the hall at the library entrance. He leaned on a pastoral staff; but his voice reverberated so terribly that I didn’t believe he needed support. Dismay poured through me. I’d forgotten how strong a Magus he must be.

  “Stranger, what are you?” the bass cry bayed.

  I tried to wet my sandpapery lips. “Sir—your Enlightenment—”

  The staff lifted to point at me. It bore a Johannine capital, the crook crossed by a tau. I knew it was more than a badge, it was a wand. “Menace encircles you,” the adept called. “I felt you in my darkness. Declare yourself.”

  I reached for the knife in my pocket, the wereflash under my shirt. Forlorn things; but when my fingers closed on them, they became talismans. Will and reason woke again in me. I thought beneath the hammering:

  It’d have been more luck than I could count on, not to get accosted. I meant to try and use the circumstance if it happened. Okay, it has. That’s a scary old son of a bitch, but he’s mortal. Whatever his powers are, they don’t reach to seeing me as I see him, or he’d do so.

  Nonetheless I must clear my throat a time or two before speaking, and the words rang odd in my ears. “I—I beg your Enlightenment’s pardon. He took me by surprise. Would he please tell me…where Initiate Marmiadon is?”

  The adept lowered his staff. Otherwise he didn’t move. The dead eyes almost rested on me, unwavering: which was worse than if they actually had. “What have you with him to do?”

  “I’m sorry, your Enlightenment. Secret and urgent. As your Enlightenment recognizes, I’m a, uh, rather unusual messenger. I can tell him I’m supposed to get together with Initiate Marmiadon in connection with the, uh, trouble at the Nornwell company. It turns out to be a lot more important than it looks.

  “That I know, and knew from the hour when he came back. I summoned—I learned—enough. It is the falling stone that may loose an avalanche.”

  I had the eldritch feeling his words weren’t for me but for someone else. And what was this about the affair worrying him also? I dared not stop to ponder. “Your Enlightenment will understand, then, why I’m in a hurry and why I can’t break my oath of secrecy, even to him. If he’d let me know where Marmiadon’s cell is—”

  “The failed one sleeps not with his brothers. The anger of the Light-Bearer is upon him for his mismanagement, and he does penance alone. You may not seek him before he has been purified.” An abrupt snap: “Answer me! Whence came you, what will you, how can it be that your presence shrills to me of danger?”

  “I…I don’t know either,” I stammered.

  “You are no consecrate—”

  “Look, your Enlightenment, if you, if he would—Well, maybe there’s been a misunderstanding. My, uh, superior ordered me to get in touch with Marmiadon. They said at the entrance I might find him here, and lent me a gate key.” That unobtrusive sentence was the most glorious whopper I ever hope to tell. Consider its implications. Let them ramify. Extrapolate, extrapolate. Sit back in wonder. “I guess they were mistaken.”

  “Yes. The lower clerics have naturally not been told. However—” The Magus brooded.

  “If your Enlightenment’d tell me where to go, who to see, I could stop bothering him.”

  Decision. “The night abbot’s secretariat, Room 107. Ask for Initiate-Six Hesathouba. Of those on duty at the present hour, he alone has been given sufficient facts about the Matuchek case to advise you.”

  Matuchek case?

  I mumbled my thanks and got away at just short of a run, feeling the sightless gaze between my shoulder blades the whole distance to the stairs. Before climbing back over the gate, I stopped to indulge in the shakes.

  I knew I’d scant time for that. The adept might suffer from a touch of senility, but only a touch. He could well fret about me until he decided to set inquiries afoot, which might not end with a phone call to Brother Hesathouba. If I was to have any chance of learning something real, I must keep moving.

  Where to, though in this Gormenghast house? How? What hope? I ought to admit my venture was sheer quixotry and slink home.

  No! While the possibility remained, I’d go after the biggest windmills in sight. My mind got into gear. No doubt the heights as well as the depths of the cathedral were reserved for the ranking priests. But the ancient mystery religions had held their major rites underground. Weren’t the crypts my best bet for locating Marmiadon?

  I felt a grin jerk of itself across my face. They wouldn’t lighten his ordeal by spelling the smell off him. Which was another reason to suppose he was tucked away below, out of nose range.

  Human noses, that is.

  I retraced my steps to the first level. From there I hastened downward. No one happened by. The night was far along; sorcerers might be at work, but few people else.

  I descended past a couple of sublevels. In one I glimpsed a sister hand-scrubbing the hall floor. Duty? Expiation? Self-abasement? It was a lonely sight. She didn’t spy me.

  A ways beyond, I encountered another locked gate. On its far side the stairway steepened, concrete no longer but rough-hewn stone. I was down into bedrock. The wall was chilly and wet to touch, the air to breathe. Modern illumination fell behind. My sole lights were candles, set in iron sconces far apart. They guttered in the draft from below. My shadow flapped misshapen around them. Finally I could not hear the mass. And still the path led downward.

  And downward, until after some part of eternity it ended.

  I stepped onto the floor of a natural cave. Widely spaced flames picked stalactites and stalagmites out of dense, unrestful murk. Hands of Glory burned over the mouths of several tunnels leading away into the dark. Quickly I peeled off suit, socks, shoes, and hid behind a boulder. The knife I clipped back onto my elastic shorts. I turned the Polaroid lens on myself and pressed the switch.

  Transformation seized me. I dropped to the ground as hands and feet became paws. For a minute bones, muscles, organs, nerves were fluid, then they reached their wolf shapes and firmed. Instead I held tight in my diminished cerebral cortex the purpose I had, to use animal senses and sinews for my human end.

  The feeble illumination ceased being a handicap. Wolves don’t depend on their eyes the way men do. Ears, feet, tongue, every hair on my body, before all else my nose, drank a flood of data. The cave was not now a hole to stumble in, it was a place that I understood.

  And…yes, faint but unmistakable from one tunnel came a gust of unforgettable nastiness. I checked a hunter’s yelp barely in time and trotted off in that direction.

  The passage was lengthy, twisting, intersected by many others. Without my sense of smell for a guide, I’d soon have been lost. The lighting was from Hands, above the cells dug out of the rock at rare intervals. It was public knowledge that every candidate for primary initiation spent a day and night alone here, and the devout went back on occasion. Allegedly the soul: benefited from undisturbed prayers and meditations. But I wasn’t sure what extra influences crept in subliminally as well. Certain odors, at the edge of my lupine perception, raised the fur on my neck.

  After a while they were drowned out by the one I was tracing. Wolves have stronger stomachs than people, but I began to gag. When finally I reached the source, I held my breath while looking in.

  The dull blue glow from the fingers over the entrance picked out little more than highlights in the cubicle. Marmiadon was asleep on a straw pallet. He wore his robe for warmth; it was grubby as his skin. Otherwise he had some hardtack, a jerry can of water, a cup, a Johannine Bible, and a candle to read it by. He must only have been leaving his cell to visit an oubliette down the tunnel. Not that it would have made any large difference if he didn’t. Phew!

  I backed off and humanized. The effluvium didn’t strike me too hard in that shape, especially after my restored reasoning powers took charge. No doubt Marmiadon wasn’t even noticing it any more.

  I entered his quarters, hunkered, and shook him. My free hand drew the knife. “Wake up, you.”

  He floundered to awareness, saw me, and gasped. I must have been a pretty grim sight, black-clothed where I wasn’t nude and with no mercy in my face. He looked as bad, hollow-eyed in that corpse-light. Before he could yell, I clapped my palm over his mouth. The unshaved bristles felt scratchy, the flesh dough-like. “Be quiet,” I said without emphasis, “or I’ll cut your guts out.”

  He gestured agreement and I let go. “M-m-mister Matuchek,” he whispered, huddling away from me till the wall stopped him.

  I nodded. “Want to talk with you.”

  “I—How—In God’s name, what about?”

  “Getting my daughter home unharmed.”

  Marmiadon traced crosses and other symbols in the air. “Are you possessed?” He became able to look at me and answer his own question. “No. I could tell—”

  “I’m not being puppeted by a demon,” I grunted, “and I haven’t got a psychosis. Talk.”

  “Bu—bu—but I haven’t anything to say. Your daughter? What’s wrong? I didn’t know you had one.”

  That rocked me back. He wasn’t lying, not in his state. “Huh?” I could only say. He grew a trifle calmer, fumbled around after his glasses and put them on, settled down on the pallet and watched me.

  “It’s holy truth,” he insisted. “Why should I have information about your family? Why should anyone here?”

  “Because you’ve appointed yourselves my enemies,” I said in renewed rage.

  He shook his head. “We’re no man’s foe. How can we be? We hold to the Gospel of Love.” I sneered. His glance dropped from mine. “Well,” he faltered, “we’re sons of Adam. We can sin like everybody else. I admit I was furious when you pulled that…that trick on us…on those innocents—”

  My blade gleamed through an arc. “Stow the crap, Marmiadon. The solitary innocent in this whole miserable business is a three-year-old girl, and she’s been snatched into hell.”

  His mouth fell wide. His eyes frogged.

  “Start blabbing,” I said.

  For a while he couldn’t get words out. Then, in complete horror: “No. Impossible. I would never, never—”

  “How about your fellow priests? Which of them?”

  “None. I swear it. Can’t be.” I pricked his throat with the knife point. He shuddered. “Please. Let me know what happened. Let me help.”

  I lowered the blade, shifted to a sitting position, rubbed my brow, and scowled. This wasn’t according, to formula. “See here,” I accused him, “you did your best to disrupt my livelihood. When my life itself is busted apart, what am I supposed to think? If you’re not responsible, you’d better give me a lot of convincing.”