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Karou almost panicked Her eyes darted back to the door she had come from She didn’t think she could reach it Instead, she pressed herself into theniche and held stone-still

They passed her, near enough to touch Karou feared that they would go into the shop and close the door behind thee place She was ready to cry after them to prevent it, but they bypassed the door Her panic subsided In its wake, soer at the years of secrets, as if she weren’t worthy of trust or even the barest details of her own existence Her anger made her bold, and she determined to find out more--as much as she could while she was here This chance, she suspected, would never coa turned into a stairwell, she followed

They were tower stairs, a tight corkscren The spiraling descent made Karou dizzy: down, around, down, around, hypnotic, until it seeo down like this forever There were small slot s for a while, and then they disappeared The air grew cool and still, and Karou had the ia in snatches, and could make no sense of their conversation

"We will needThere has not been an onslaught like this in decades" Brimstone

"Do you think they have their eye on the city?"

"When have they not?"

"How long?" Twiga asked with a quaver "How long can we hold them off?"

Briht she couldn’t bear any s got interesting

Really interesting

The stairs spilled out into a vast, echoing hall Karou had to hold herself back to one on, but when she heard their voicesaway, rendered small by the immensity of the space that sed them, she crept out after them

It seemed she was in a cathedral--if, that is, the earth itself were to drea over thousands of years of water weeping through stone It was a massive natural cavern that soared overhead to a near-perfect Gothic arch Stalagmites as old as the world were carved into pillars in the shapes of beasts, and candelabras hung so high they were like clusters of stars A scent was heavy in the air, herbs and sulfur, and s the pillars, teased into wisps by breezes es in the carven walls

And below it all, where Bri nave, there weren’t pews for worship, but tables--stone tables huge as e they must have required elephants to haul theh to accoh only one of them actually did

An elephant, laid out on a table

Or… no It was not an elephant With clawed feet and a head that was sorizzly bear, it was elsething Chimaera

And it was dead

On each of the tables lay a dead chiaze fluttered, erratic, from table to table No two of the dead were alike Most had some human quality to them, head or torso, but not all There, an ape with the e it could only be called a dragon; a jaguar’s head on the nude body of a wo theest over a man

He was nad, too He hat Karou and Zuzana would have called, with the s smiles of connoisseurs, a "physical speciated, all the edly pronounced On his powerful chest was a down of pure white hair, and the hair of his head hite, too, long and silken on the stone table

A fug of incense hung thick around hi from a kind of ornate silver lantern suspended fro a steady fuht, like those twirled about in Catholic Mass Brier there a esture Karou couldn’t decipher Fondness? Sadness? When he and Twigawall of shadow at the far end of the nave, she crept out of hiding and went to the table

Up close, she saw that the , his face unlined He was very handso not quite real

He was also not quite huh nearer to it than most of the chis transitioned at h to beco backward-bending canine feet and black claws And his hands, she saere hybrid: broad and furred across the backs like paith hu paled that way, and that was how Karou saas etched on his skin

In the center of each palm was a tattooed eye identical to her own

She took a startled step back

This was so key, but what did it mean? She turned to the next table, the lion-maned creature Its hands were simian, the flesh black, but she could still make out the hamsas on them

She went to the next table, and the next Even the elephant-creature: The soles of its mammoth forefeet were marked Each of these dead creatures wore the hahts hammered in her head the way her heart thu on? Here were dozens of chimaera, and they were dead and nad--without, she noted, any visible wounds--and laid out cold on slabs in soround cathedral Her own haine how

She circled back around to the first table, the white-haired ainst it She was conscious of the scented smoke from the thurible and had a moment of anxiety when she realized her hair would be infused with the sive her away to Yasri and Issa when she snuck back into the shop The shop The thought of cli back up that interminable corkscrew made her want to sink down into fetal position Her wounds throbbed They were seeping through the bandages, and Yasri’s bal off She hurt

But… this place These dead With her muddled head, Karou felt unequal to the ht before her, its ha her She laid her own beside it to compare the marks, but his lay in the shadow of his body, so she reached out to lift it into the light

The marks were identical She saw that as herfroish senses

His hand, his dead hand… it arm

It was not dead

He was not dead