. . . I turned and saw on the far wall, only a few feet away in this claustrophobic space, a ragged-edged poster of Mont Blanc bearing the legend L’Empire du Ski. Déjà vu ran through me like a tide of needles.

And turning my head had made me catch a near-subliminal glimpse of something else. A splash of red, under the near end of the mattress, almost at my feet. I squatted down on my haunches, feeling a mixture of reluctance and grim triumph. I was close to the answer now—the source of everything. I slid my hand under the mattress to lift it up.

And a jolt of pain slammed through me as if I’d touched a bare electric cable. From hand, to arm, to heart, to all points of the compass.

I snatched my hand back and spat out a curse.

Or rather, I tried to spit it out, but it wouldn’t come. Silence took root in my mouth, my throat, my lungs. Silence fell on me like the grubby blanket, like a bell jar slipped over my head and shoulders, like a handkerchief soaked in chloroform.

No, that was panic and overreaction. I wasn’t dizzy. I wasn’t losing consciousness. I was just completely unable to make a sound. I mouthed words, and I tried to push breath through them to bring them into the world, but nothing happened. My voice had gone.

Lifting the corner of the mattress more carefully this time, from above, I was able to see why. The red wasn’t congealed blood, after all; it was a circle, inscribed in dark red chalk, with a five-pointed star inside it and a series of painstakingly inscribed marks at each point of the star. In other words, a ward put there by an exorcist. Normally, the text written in the center of a ward like this would be ekpiptein—dismiss—or hoc fugere—get out of town. Here it was aphthegtos— speechless.

I straightened up, feeling a little shaky. I knew what Gabe McClennan had been doing here now and why nobody at the archive had reacted to the name. He’d never visited the archive itself at all. This was where he’d come, and this was what he’d been brought in to do.

But why silence the ghost instead of sending her away? That made no sense at all. It wasn’t as though McClennan would have offered a discount. If anything, the binding spell was harder than a straight exorcism.

Whatever the answer was, one thing was now explained. This was why it had been so hard for me to get a fix on the ghost, even when I’d been so close to her. She was bound by this ward, and its strictures hemmed her in like a straitjacket—a straitjacket sewn onto her soul. The change in her behavior made sense now, too—the sudden flare into what had seemed like motiveless violence. She was responding to this necromantic assault.

The ward ought to have had no power over a living human being, but the psychic sensitivity I was born with had left me wide open to it. What I was suffering now was like snow blindness or like the deadened hearing that follows after an explosion. My voice would come back, but it could take minutes or even hours.

A feeling of claustrophobia crashed down on me and made my heart race. Even my breath was making no sound in my chest or in my mouth. A voiceless pall hung over and around me. I turned the other corners of the mattress over, not expecting to find anything. But at the far end, closest to the wall, there was a broad, dark brown stain on the underside. The color was pretty much unmistakable. So was the bitter almond smell of stale blood, which had been masked until I got this close by the sharper ammonial reek of the piss bucket.

I was conscious that anyone finding the upstairs door open could cross the room above me, see the light on down here, and lock me in with a single turn of the key—assuming that this was an anyone who had the key in his pocket. It wasn’t an idea I liked all that much. I retreated to the stairs, cast one more look around the grim place, and headed back up to street level.

The upper door had swung to. I opened it and stepped out into the first-floor room. Just the one step, then I stopped dead. The room was dark; the light from the basement cell barely made it up the stairwell, creating only a strip of fuzzy gray in front of me, sandwiched between broader areas of indelible black. While I was in the basement, someone had turned the upstairs light off.

All I had by way of a weapon was my dagger. It was intended for exorcisms, not for self-defense, and I didn’t bother to keep it sharp, but it might make someone think twice if I waved it around. Standing stock-still in the dark, and grateful now for the absolute silence of my breath, I slid it out of my pocket and held it down at waist height, ready.

Then I smelled her perfume—that terrible, polecat’s-arse musk that bullied its way into your brain and reprogrammed you so that you loved it.

And I heard her laugh—soft, mocking, utterly without mercy.

“It won’t help you,” Ajulutsikael murmured almost caressingly, and I knew she was right. She was faster than me, and stronger. She could see in the dark. She could take the knife out of my hand and pick her teeth with it before slamming it back into my guts, and there wouldn’t be a damn thing I could do about it.

Hoping to throw her off balance and maybe postpone the inevitable, I tossed the knife casually away into the dark and took out my whistle. It wouldn’t work; the aphthegtos ward would stop any sound at all from coming from my mouth. But such as it was, the pathetic bluff was all I had.

She wasn’t fooled. Either she could sense the magic of McClennan’s sigils hanging on me or she could just tell from my face that it was a bluff. I heard her heels click on the floor as she strolled unhurriedly toward me. She knew there was nothing to fear from the whistle this time.

“There was a woman chained here,” Ajulutsikael said. Her voice was the same throaty murmur, but it was from a lot closer this time. She was a couple of steps away from me and just right of center. If I ducked her first charge, I could fake left and make a run for the door. But there was no way I’d ever reach it. There was a moment of terrifying silence during which I tensed and got ready to move. Then she spoke again, from even closer. “Did you chain her?”

I shook my head.

“Did you keep her as your pet until you tired of her? Alone? In the dark? Was the stink of her fear sweet to you?”

All I could do was shake my head again, more urgently. Who rips my head off gets trash, more or less, or at least takes their own chances with the resale value—but dead or alive, I didn’t want to be associated with this hell-hole.

“A pity. It would have been more enjoyable then. But I’m going to eat you anyway.” A kind of anger came growling and graveling up from under the feline playfulness. “I’m going to make you pay, man, for the indignity of this summoning. For being made to dance on a chain at the whim of these stinking bags of meat. I’m going to take you slowly. You will love me as you die, and you will despair.”

I could actually see her now; my eyes had adjusted to the point where she showed as a darker splodge of shape against the background darkness. A fluid blur of black, as deep as midnight.

I threw out my arms in a sort of shrug—the closest I could get to pleading for my life. Her hand fell on my shoulder, turned me round to face her. I hit out, and my fist was caught. I pulled away, and she drew me close— then threw me effortlessly across the room so that I slammed into the sofa, toppling it, and rolled over and over across the floor until I hit the base of the wall beyond.

“Let’s make ourselves comfortable,” she whispered.

I was winded and stunned, but I braced myself to make some kind of a fight of it. I got up on one knee, which was as much as I could manage.

What happened next I can only describe in sound, because that was all that I was aware of. There was a series of heavy impacts, as though a bunch of guys with hammers had hit the far wall on the same command, but slightly out of synch. Ajulutsikael grunted in surprise and pain, and the window shattered. Not just the window, in fact. With a loud, indiscreet crash, a corner of the plywood panel snapped clean away and tumbled out into the street. Yellow light from a streetlamp flooded into the room.

It showed Ajulutsikael in a defensive crouch, hands raised in front of her face. A bottle came whipping through the air toward her, and her right arm came across in a blur of motion. She smashed it out of the air in an explosion of glinting glass and incandescent drops. It didn’t help her. The jagged shards of glass slowed as they fell, turned and leapt back up at her, slicing at her flesh, stinging her like brittle bees. As I stared, trying to process what I was seeing into some kind of sense, a shard from the broken window, a triangular wedge about eight inches long, parted the air like a dart and buried itself in her back.

Spasmodically, only marginally under my conscious control, my head jerked around. The ghost was standing

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