Salome paces the long-shadowed length of the dewy foothill I’ve manifested. It’s my first time hosting my sisters since the fight. All the humans are back in place, in the autumn valley we overlook. Stephen the truck loser is finally in the taphouse full time. Being bounced from one afterlife to the next in a divinity-sized lipoma was enough of a binding agent to bring him into the fold, I suppose.

  “What I want,” she says, “is an I’m sorry, Salome.”

  “I’ve surrendered. I’ve admitted your superiority. I’ve agreed to join your foolish faction.” Ganea’s gauntlet twitches. “Is it not clear that you’ve won?”

  “I don’t care about winning—”

  “You should.”

  “I want to know that you understand and accept your misdeed, and that you regret it and feel poorly about it, enough to say sorry to me.”

  “I’m not sorry,” Ganea says. “I’ll lie if you want—”

  A triangle ding as Salome smacks her forehead. “Gan.”

  “But I don’t regret Gliese 682 Scorpii. We fought, and I won. I’m not sorry about that.”

  “Are you going to apologize to Irene?” Bina cuts in. “You ripped her in half, Gan. That’s so mean.”

  Ganea sits silently. We’re arrayed around a copy of the stone-slab table from Bina’s demesne. I loved the look of it, just as I loved the look on Bean’s face when she saw I’d manifested a copy. There are few higher compliments between Old Ones.

  “It’s all right, Bina,” I say. “We attacked Ganea. She was within her rights to—”

  “I am sorry, Irene.” Ganea’s grinding voice interrupts me.

  I blink. “You are?”

  “I knew the fight was turning against us. The tactically advantageous thing would have been to disable you temporarily. I tantrumed and over-committed.”

  “So you’re sorry you lost,” Salome says.

  She nods. “And.”

  She falls silent. I wait patiently. Next to me, Caspar’s hand rests on the knee that pokes through the slit in my dress.

  “I’m sorry about how badly I hurt you, Irene.”

  “Thank you for your apology, Gan,” I say. “Accepted. Please think about doing the same for Salome.”

  “Fine.”

  Salome crosses her arms. “Fine, you’re sorry?”

  “Fine, I’ll think about it.”

  “You disemboweled me,” Salome says.

  Ganea crosses her arms right back. “Vivisection is nowhere near as bad as bisection.”

  “Salome.” Bina leans past the inspector curled in her lap. “Maybe let’s just drop it for a while?” My sister’s manifestation has undergone a growth spurt. Her proportions are the same, but she’s now around eight feet tall. Caspar glances at the inspector lounging across my sister’s expanded lap like a house cat, and she glances back in a distinctly smug manner. “Until we’re all in charge.”

  Salome takes a beat and visibly decompresses. “For now, Ganea, you can make it up to us by getting your crazy murder-warlock involved in our plotting.”

  “No,” Ganea says.

  Salome’s springtrap patience compresses again. “What do you mean, no?”

  “Butcher,” Ganea calls. Her voice rings across the valley like an air-raid siren.

  The Butcher crests the hill and stands before his goddess. He wears a crisp linen stand-collar uniform, gray as slate and pinned at the breast by her tombstone icon.

  “Mistress.”

  “We finally come to it,” Ganea says. “You’ve been bested.”

  “I’m sorry.” His eyes are fixed on the ground. “I failed you.”

  “You were glorious.” Ganea leans down and rests one finger on his shoulder. “My splendid murderer. Even outnumbered, even without my power. How you shone. The art has lost its finest practitioner.”

  He looks up. “Then—”

  “I haven’t forgotten my promise,” Ganea says. “Your fight is finished. You honored me.” Her finger hooks behind the Butcher’s neck and brings him closer. “What I do now—standing in humanity’s defense—is to honor you in return.”

  The Butcher touches his forehead to hers. “What will I do, then? How can I serve?”

  “Be happy.” Ganea’s stoplight eyes flicker shut. “Open the little taphouse you told me about. Live your life with the same poise with which you took the lives of the weak. Then return to my side in the hereafter. That’s all.”

  “I think,” Salome says, her voice on its vibratory edge, “that I’m missing some context.”

  “I swore to my warlock that when someone finally outfought him, he could stop killing,” Ganea says. “Now you have, and he can. He has a life to live. I promised him.”

  “Wait.” Salome’s facets flash. “No no no. We need him.” She looks for my support.

  I nod. “He’d be a really useful asset, Ganea. I get you had a deal, I do, but—”

  “If you need more manpower, have Salome’s shapeshifter pick up a weapon some time,” Ganea says. “I swore an oath to him. I won’t take it back.”

  This isn’t what I had in mind. “But Gan—”

  “No, Irene.” She stands. “Would you break a promise to your consort?”

  “It’s different with me and Caspar,” I say. “We’re lovers. We’re engaged.”

  Ganea just stares at me. I look from her to the Butcher. She’s five times his size and made predominantly of bloody, rusted metal.

  Caspar coughs.

  “Gan,” I say. “Are you—”

  “I’ll fight against Eight with you, in our dimension,” Ganea says. “My warlock, I free. If you refuse to allow it, we can pick up where we left off.”

  Salome issues a woodwind sigh. “Did I miss something? Is everyone here in bed with their human these days?”

  Ganea’s red eyes whirl to her. “Quiet, mirror witch. Don’t compare the Iron Butcher to these kine.”

  Salome literally bristles. Her angles spike out like ferrofluid. “Mirror witch?”

  “Oh!” Bina raises a pseudopod. “That reminds me. Me and Jordan are girlfriend/girlfriend now.”

  Salome gets her form back under control. “She’s sitting in your lap, Bean. I’d figured.”

  Jordan sips a ginger beer mule from a copper mug as her mistress’s pseudopods rest possessively on her shoulders. “Y’all pretend I’m not here, ladies.”

  “There’s really no need to bring the mortals to every council, people,” Salome says. “This was supposed to be sister business. And Irene’s out here in her consort’s jacket. Saoirse manages not to involve hers.”

  “Hmm?” Saoirse glances up from the millipede she’s plucking the legs from.

  I wrap Caspar’s oversized sleeves around me. “Adaire is right there,” I say.

  “That’s because you all brought yours. I won’t keep mine out if the rest of you aren’t. That wouldn’t be fair to her.”

  Adaire folds her hands in her lap. “Thank you, mistress.”

  “And you are sleeping with her,” I say. “She told Caspar.”

  Salome gives Adaire a sharp look. “That’s a simple reward for service, by request. It’s not the same thing. I don’t pretend like the manifestations I summon bear my genuine emotions, or that it affects our concordat.”

  “So you get nothing out of it? Playing hide the Salami?”

  “I think we should make Adaire ask that,” Bina says. “So she can’t lie.”

  Jordan lets out a giggle so girlish at Bina’s pronouncement that I have to double take to make sure it came from the inspector.

  Salome fans a protective forearm in front of her servant. “Nobody’s gonna order my warlock around but her mistress, thank you very much.”

  Adaire finds some sudden fascination in my evening’s wispy cirrus clouds.

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  “I think mirror witch is a cool thing to call someone,” Jordan says.

  “Very cool.” Bina plaits her warlock’s hair. “I bet Sal’d think so if it wasn’t Gan saying it.”

  Salome glowers. She surely would.

  “At least she’s willing to fight in heaven, right?” I murmur to Salome. “She’s just about the only one who would do anything more than tickle Eight’s hide if it came down to it.”

  “If it comes down to that, I quite think we’re hyper-fucked,” Salome says. “But maybe she could buy us a minute or two.”

  “Two,” Ganea says.

  We glance over. I didn’t realize she was listening to us.

  “I could hold my own against Eight for about 150 seconds before she devoured me,” Ganea says. “I’ve gamed it out.”

  “Salome’s right that our aim should be to prevent it entirely,” I say. “But if you’re volunteering…?”

  “I am.”

  “Then thank you, Gan.”

  “Mom! Guys! Look at what I can do!” Peat Moss see-saws up to the table on two trembly legs. “I came from all the way down there.” He points down the hill with one aloft hoof.

  “How about that.” Caspar gives Peat a scratch on the ear. “Been practicing, huh?”

  “Peat Moss!” Saoirse claps her hands. “How lovely, dear.”

  “That’s actually way hard if you aren’t used to it,” Bina murmurs to Jordan, at the edge of my hearing. “Bipedal inclines.”

  Jordan nudges her fuzzy stomach with an elbow. “You did seem more comfortable on all fours.”

  Bina gives this a scandalized giggle. “Ohmygod Jordy stop.”

  “Doing this on Diamante would be weird, right?” A burst of courage and Peat Moss balances briefly one one leg.

  “The yokels might think so,” Caspar confirms. “But that’s real impressive, kiddo.”

  Peat Moss beams. Okay, I admit it. The fawn’s kind of cute. “Mom, can I have hands?” He wobbles up to Saoirse. “With thumbs? Like Caspar and Jordy?”

  “Of course.” Saoirse prods his hoof. Its cloven fold deepens and splits into fleshy fingers. “Just evoke them when you need them, darling.”

  “This is so fucking cool.” Peat holds his new hand up. “Caspar, look!”

  “Oh,” Caspar says. “Goodness.”

  “Real freaky looking, Peat.” Jordan finishes her mule. Bina refills it immediately with the flick of a pseudopod.

  Peat wiggles his new fingers. “Can I have a gun?”

  “Oh, hey now—” Caspar shifts.

  Saoirse plucks her left forearm off with a sound like dry twigs cracking. She transmogrifies it into a pistol and passes it to the fawn. “Here you are, dear.”

  “Fuck yeah.” Peat takes the gun and points it into the air. He pulls the trigger and it clicks. “Cas, how do I turn off the safety?”

  Caspar flinches to his feet. “Peat, how about you give me that and we can walk you through some basic safe—no come back please slow down you don’t wanna run with that yet Peat.” My husband chases the cheerful fawn as he teeters away from the stone table.

  “That seems as good a place to adjourn as any,” I say. “Ganea: we formally accept you into the alliance. Your refusal to bring your warlock, we’ll look past.” I hold a palm out. “Welcome aboard, sister.”

  My hand barely fits around her proffered pointer finger. But a shake’s a shake.

  ???????????

  A blue dawn. The icy light shows them their breath, swirling in the air. The Butcher rubs his wrists as Caspar cuts the ties loose.

  “Suppose this is where we part,” Caspar says. He extends his hand.

  The Butcher takes it. “I suppose so.”

  The gesture isn’t as awkward as mine with Ganea, mechanically speaking, but the camaraderie remains a band-aid over the bullet hole of the war these warlocks fought.

  “You got a name?” Jordan asks. “Besides Butcher?”

  “Not a real one,” the Iron Butcher says. “Not yet. I’ll pick from one of my aliases, I suppose.” He stretches his legs stiffly and climbs from the pile of temple seat tchotchkes. He looks at his reflection in the passenger side mirror. “Would you let me evoke again? My nose is broken.”

  “Oh. Sure.” Caspar feels his own abrasions under his clothes as, with a crackle of reforming cartilage, the Butcher channels Ganea’s power. I’ve assured Caspar that I can handle his lingering injuries, but he repeatedly insists I save it all for myself.

  “Where’s next?” Jordan asks.

  “I hope you’ll understand,” the Iron Butcher says. “But I can’t tell you. I’m new. Can’t let any of it follow me.” He shoulders the provisions they gave him. “You only have a little time left on Diamante. Even less if you aren’t lucky. Don’t wait around on the forever.”

  Caspar puts his chilly hands in his pockets. The Butcher’s pronouncement discomfits him, breaks some of the barky detachment he’s grown to this world. This light which already feels false. His imperfections and his injuries, his fatigue with the smiling lies of his old faith. He sees this warlock freed, and feels as though he should desire the same freedom, rediscover the erstwhile love he had for his little mortal life.

  But he doesn’t. I am Irene’s creature, now, he thinks. He corrects himself: Irene’s husband. And the quaver in my warlock’s faith drifts away again, almost.

  But his thumb brushes the finger where, in my demesne, he wears my ring. It isn’t there. It’s all prologue, this time on Diamante. It’s before chapter one. He must remember that. Why can’t he shake the feeling that he’s living in the conclusion?

  They burn the van a mile off-road. Sizzling leaves of bunting and scraps of pennant drift away in firefly spirals.

  Jordan boosts them a sleek wood-paneled coupe as its replacement. A smaller ride for their reduced headcount. It’s just Cas, Jordy, and Peat Moss, now, and without Tilliam’s sullen glare and Adaire’s staged theatrics, the mood is brighter. The inspector fritters the miles away, teaching the fawn a litany of creative curse words beyond the fuck and shit concepts he already knows from the natural world.

  “I know what cum is,” Peat says. “What’s a dumpster?”

  “A real big trash can,” Jordan says. “I’ll point one out for you when we’re in Relic City.”

  “They make dumpsters for that?”

  “Jordan, we’re already killing people in front of him,” Caspar says. “Maybe we preserve what innocence we can, huh?”

  “I don’t want to be innocent,” Peat Moss says. “I want to be—what did you say, Jordan?”

  “A badass pussy magnet,” Jordan says.

  “I want to be a badass pussy magnet,” Peat Moss says.

  They’re in the diocese's heart now. Pastornos itself. Relic City. Peat Moss sits squeezed between Caspar and Jordan, fiddling with the inspector’s lighter, fascinated by his new spell.

  The first day, they check into the cheapest hotel they can find that isn’t completely carcinogenic. With the cold and the war whittling down the foot traffic, it’s easy enough. Their room isn’t even that bad—just cramped and situated close to the highway. But close your eyes and those rushing cars sound like the tide, almost.

  On one wall hangs a picture of the Suzerain, crackled and textured to look like an oil painting. His deep-set eyes disappear almost in the caves of his aged face, visible by their gleam.

  Jordan hangs a towel over it.

  They take an evening in Settler Square. They resolve to get the stately, old-world homework stuff out of the way today and then really hit the tourist bucket list the rest of the week. They take in the donjon outside of which the first Saint, Cancroth, burned himself alive. The first Suzerain took his oath before the sooty mark.

  “It’s been there this whole time?” Peat Moss whispers, as they hold up the binoculars from the viewing platform the guards shepherd the pet-owners onto.

  “They re-burn it with butane torches every quarter,” Jordan says.

  “Oh.” Peat turns his head from the binoculars and blinks. “What a crock.”

  Dinner is thick slabs of saurbraten, smothered in rich, buttery gravy. Peat gamely tries some and concludes that dessert is great, but he’s going to stay herbivorous.

  Caspar and Jordan eat and look outside the bird-wire window, to a Basilica Administorum across the street, spiking out of the ground like the crest of a coronet, and thrice as gaudy. Whirling heraldry so dizzying, it solidifies into a coral reef on every corner of the pyramidal thing. That’s the kind of place you go to get your permits renewed in Relic City. Positively pedestrian by Pastornos standards. The regality ought to be blowing Caspar’s eyelids back, but he’s barely looking at it.

  He’s watching the guard outside the place. The one in the Dominion Suit. The first one he’s ever seen outside the serials. They don’t do it justice. Seven feet of mirror-polished steel and death angel tracery. A true figure of Pastornist supremacy. Within range of them; close enough to speak to, not that an on-duty Dominion would ever respond. Close enough to reduce them to quivering swiss cheese with those autoguns, too.

  A knot of pilgrims flocks nearby, ooohing and taking photographs in front of him.

  “You ever see one of those before?” Caspar eyes the suit’s huge gauntlets, the autoguns twin-linked on each forearm, ammo belts hanging and threaded with white roses.

  “They had one come through to the Chamchek inspectorate,” Jordan says. “He was there hunting a fugitive. Target must have been a real sonofabitch, since they aren’t meant to leave Relic City. Wouldn’t say it, but we all knew it was a warlock. That’s what those things are for. Ninety percent of inspector jobs, they were just decimations or air fresheners. Actual warlocks in the Chamchek diocese, you send a half dozen inspectors minimum, and you feel blessed if one survives. Warlock in Pastornos, they send one Dominion and sleep like a baby. Used to daydream of being one. Cut through a ‘lock like butter, pose like a serial hero, nail a vestal priestess or two.”

  “You reckon we could take one down?”

  “You, me, and Peat?” She smirks. “Oh, yeah. No problem. Reckon one of us might even survive.”

  “You said air freshener,” Caspar says. “What’s an air freshener?”

  “That’s, uh.” Jordan looks at the ground. “Inspector slang for a kind of inspectorate job. You smell something funky in a village, but you don’t know where it’s coming from, and you reckon if you do nothing, they’ll be emboldened. And you’ll have to come back later, do a decimation. So instead, you pick yourself someone who won’t be missed and do some creative writing, find a charge. Make one up. Hang them in public, to cover up the funk. An air freshener. Get it?”

  Caspar chews his tongue. “That’s pretty ghoulish, Jordy.”

  “I was a ghoul, Cas. Remember?” A rueful little chuckle escapes her. “I was a monster.”

  She leaves dinner unfinished.

  The street lamps throw rococo textures through their gilded cages as the warlocks return to the hotel. Peat Moss snores in Caspar’s arms. He glances at Jordan now and then. The inspector is uncharacteristically somber. She walks by a whole trolley load of gawking pilgrims without so much as a derisive aside.

  “So,” Caspar says. “You and Bean.”

  “Hey.” Jordan perks up and prods his arm. “You’re not allowed to call her that.”

  “You two got together, though?”

  “Yessir.” The inspector’s returning to the present as she says it. Or at least a much more recent and enjoyable past. “That’s a special woman, right there. When she’s around Irene and them, she’s more of a little sister. But just by ourselves, you’d be surprised. She’s a lot more mature than you’d expect.”

  “She is a thousand years old.”

  “And a tentacle is a lot different from a strap, tell ya that.”

  “You didn’t need to tell me that.”

  They lay Peat Moss on a nest of spare clothes and tuck into their flatboard beds. Caspar spends twenty minutes trying to get comfortable, and decides that, if there’s no ease to be had with his bedding, he might as well moisten his throat. He finds a drinking glass and stalks to the bathroom.

  When he turns back from the tap, he sees the paperwhite light thrown across Jordan, sat up in bed. There’s a sober expression on her face.

  “Can’t sleep,” she says.

  Caspar fidgets on his feet. The unalloyed late-night talk. He’s never been good at it. Reminds him of his insomniac evenings, of gun oil and falling out of love.

  “Is it nerves? Is it, uh, something with Bina?”

  She shakes her head. “That air freshener thing today. Brought it back. Got to me, a bit.”

  “Ah.” Caspar clicks the light off in the bathroom and cloaks the room in shadow again.

  “I kept myself together some nights, caught sleep, by telling myself that by my hand, they found peace.” Jordan turns over. “And now it’s kinda true. But then. Before. Every innocent person I killed is in pain. Endless, horrible pain.”

  Her cheeks are damp.

  “Sometimes I remember how fucking evil I am,” she says. “And the good things, the friendship, the love. It’s all—”

  She falls silent. Caspar edges back over to his own bed, projecting what comfort he can to his sister warlock.

  “You don’t know the sort of person I am,” Jordan says into the dark. “How bad it got. In my head, I mean. How closed I was. You should have just let me drop into Heaven. So I could feel a fraction of the pain I inflicted on this world. Bina should have gotten someone like you. Someone who deserves this second chance.”

  “You can poor-me about it if you want, Jordan Darius. I won’t play along. The suffering down in the wasteland, that wouldn’t be justice. Wouldn’t fix a thing.” Springs creak as Caspar sits on his bed. “You and me know now the gods are just people, too. Strange, powerful people, but they don’t control fate. Justice, penance, it’s not fake, I guess, but it’s in our heads. Things just happen, because they happen, and the only meaning behind suffering is the meaning we give it. So maybe you’d feel you were getting what you deserve for a while. But you’d be the only one. Nobody else to see it. And then you’d lose your mind and forget. And then it wouldn’t mean anything at all.”

  He hears the shudder in Jordan’s breathing.

  “This,” he says. “What you’re doing. This is real penance. Putting yourself to work to save everyone you damned. This counts. Anything else would be unacceptable.”

  Jordan slides back under the covers to the silty sound of the bedclothes parting. “Thank you, Caspar.”

  “You’re welcome, Jordy.”

  “I never liked very many people at all on this planet. Helped with the job. Only my family. My fathers, my siblings, their kids. But that’s you, too, now.” Her hand snakes out from the sheets and reaches into the space between their twin beds. “Brother.”

  He takes it. “Sister.”

  He holds her hand until she falls asleep.

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