Through those gems of wonder and woe he witnessed the rise of the Dek Harcuru and the Fall of Xadanys and all the doomed dynasties between. Rattanak saw the histories of entire empires that far eclipsed the greatness of his own, from their humble beginnings to their imperialistic expansion to their inevitable downfall. Many were now buried under sand and time, as forgotten as this tomb in which the August One intoxicated himself on raw understanding. Bygone too were his own domain and claims to birthright. Rattanak saw that the world was dominated by those outside the natural order, that the ancients played history like a game of Utopis and even those scions and paragons were themselves pieces. Liches and entropic outsiders and grandmaster magi and things from the far deeps of the cosmos and sea all clashed over ephemeral scraps of land and fleeting glory. Rattanak's ambitions were dashed upon the rocks by witnessing the rise and fall of so many others such as himself. Worse than the futility of conquest, Rattanak understood with great ennui, was awful infinity itself. That the worlds were endless in number, and the planes of existence as well. The Emperor once thought himself a god. Now he knew that he was a speck of sand in all the wastes. He began to understand sorcery was not a fitting tool for those who sought power and in truth made a slave of those who wished to master it. All were destroyed from within by the hubris of it. Every single record of conquest Rattanak could find in that vault of knowing led to the same ultimate outcome—and that was oblivion.

— • —

Without warning or explanation the August One went quiet. Halo woke to find himself in rare control of his own body again. Had Rattanak found some way to slip from his gemmed prison and enter the greater world—or yet some other dimension of existence entirely? Had he achieved enlightenment, transcendence, nirvana? Or had the pharoah delved so deeply into the minds of his erudite victims that he had lost all contact with the physical plane? Gone were the hobgoblin's endless streams of ambitious thought and plans of ultimate conquest, replaced by a silence nearly as unsettling. Halo was sealed in a tomb with the blade. He pressed against its lid. It moved not at all. His supernatural strength was gone.

"Rattanak, are you there?" Halo asked with his mind and then his lips. "Mouth? Narder? Anyone?"

No one. His runes had been tampered with, he now saw, many of their lines brutally severed. Halo did not fully know the function of the compromised glyphs, denied the meaning of the very sigils he himself etched under torment. He screamed but knew there was no one to listen.

"There is no point," said Rattanak. "In time it is all dust, as I said but did not understand. My conquest means nothing. I see that now. I have come to know too much—and now all there is left to do is forget."

Halo's mind went to his father Leofrick who spoke so strongly against sorcery and the sheer nihilism and corruption it brings. How right that man had been.

— • —

The figure in Halo's mind emerged from the 'Angry Chambers' himself an angry man. The Senate had bickered on many points that day and in the end had voted against Leofrick's particular interests. First the majority went against him on the forced conscription of women to serve as nurses on the fronts (he said nay and they said aye), and then a competitor of Leofrick's had been selected to redraft the Nation's customs protocols in the island territories known as the Gnamem Chain (home to a race of lizardmen with fine scaly skin and faint vestigial gills, rumored to be descendants of mermaids who mated with sailors—or the spawn of frogfuckers and toadfuckers). Leofrick would have to grease more palms, win more allies, eliminate more foes. He had other sources of income in place that had once been steady and well-lubricated streams of coin but things were drying up. But new prospects were on the cusp, many of them thanks to his widespread military contacts. The manufacture of weapons, the transport of supplies for the war. His new enterprise of 'god biscuits' for the soldiers... "godwater" with a new name, smite in an altered and Diluvian-approved form—now sanctioned by the Nation to allow its troops to battle for hours on end without pause. And though Leofrick's pressure got up in the wake of a frustrating day such as this, he was ultimately a cool-skulled man with such matters. Any law made by society could eventually be overturned or manipulated or broken. What troubled him more were those certain unwavering laws that all men must obey no matter their wealth or station. Those of nature—the law of hunger, the law of sickness, the law of death. It was to those truths he must quickly attend. Father Death's own patience was running out. Leofrick's teeth had ached for some time and had started to become loose in their seats. He watched the other senators and aristocrats succumb to the graying and the twisting of their bodies and ultimately the dying. He was not so ready to go. He had once thought himself so, prepared to bequeath his empire and all his knowledge and web of contacts to his son Donric who seemed born with a halo 'round his head. Leofrick saw a strength in Donric he did not have in himself. True honor. Patriotism. Wisdom. He spoke of all those things to his son, yes. Of nation and family and sacrifice. But he did not fully believe those lofty words himself. He was too much a realist for that. Leofrick's fatherhood had been a sham. He lied for the better. The aging senator wanted an heir that he could march out proudly before his peers. A successor with a chestful of medals. One that could perhaps hold higher office than he someday. Perhaps even become the Minister of the Shield, if he played his cards right. It wasn't out of reach. But all hope of that legacy was gone with Halo's vanishing. At least for now. And now Leofrick had been summoned by Ogerius and his army of advocates to the courthouse to testify on his son's history and character. They meant to harpoon his bloodline, a casualty in their larger and longer war against the secret arm of their own army. Leofrick had encountered "The Ogre" in passing on occasion, and the old highman had no good words to say about the events at Fort Nothing, nor his son's role in the saga. Rumors spread that Donric had been a deserter. A recreant. A coward.

Leofrick did not concur. Found new purpose in the coming fight for his son's honor. Insisting that Mulia sign that damnable form did not mean he wished Donric dead. Leofrick simply knew that the piece of paper was just that—paper. It held no sorcerous power to make the Reaper dead. It was simply another revenue stream available to the twins, his granddaughters. Mulia would be a fool to turn that aid away on principle. The woman had no source of coin beyond Donric's army pay and that would not support such a house at such an address. And now she had taken in that orphan girl. Leofrick knew he'd end up paying their way until Astrid and Amelie could be married off and it grated on him. He had been born into the middle of a high-stakes game with the pieces already scattered across the board and needed every dime to expand his influence and holdings or he would be crushed by other men and women even more reptilian than himself. That was the world they had inherited. The world that always was.

He rode by carriage through the gates of the Julian Wall and into Gallowshade and peered past the curtain at the passing cityscape. Even these relatively safe residential streets in the shadow of Fetterstone Prison were not clean of filth. Packs of rascals in search of no good and no god. A man in a tall hat giving it to a fat whore in an alley. A cart hauling a hacking pile of half-dead plague-sufferers to be dumped into some less fortunate ward. The prison walls heaved into view. Bodies hung from its front gates and ramparts. Runists and anarchs and gobs and ylfs and even a couple fafnir—but no rakshasa for the Diluvians dared not so publicly rankle the djinn. When Leofrick got out of his vessel and made his way for those brooding gates he knew the first question he would ask of his host.

— • —

"Why meet here?" Leofrick said to the Warden as he took a seat in the same chair Skinner himself had occupied not very long ago. "I would much prefer the Mandrake Inn and its spiced ciders—and spicier wenches—to these cold halls. I don't have very fond memories of this place."

"Just be thankful you were held in the Silver Cells during your stay," said Hotch from his office window. He looked down on the prison yard where a scrabble of convicts were being made to fight for the entertainment of the guards.

"Prison is prison," said Leofrick. The two had developed a working relationship ever since Leofrick's stay in this immense lockhouse years before. They now found clever and diabolical ways to put the inmate population to work in supplying the war effort with manufactured goods and lined their own pockets handsomely in the process.

"It's safer behind these walls," said the Warden. "I never leave Fetterstone anymore. It's madness out there. Skinner is still on the loose. He knows about us and is clearly hellbent on taking revenge. The cook who served us that night has been found dead with his neck slit. Did you know that? Strotham Yard says the palms of his hands were skinned away. Skinned. Red with blood, lest the symbolism be lost on you. Skinned, lest you missed that too. Fetterstone is surrounded by walls thick as houses and is shielded by hundreds of guards. It's perhaps the most secure place in all of Camshire. I have everything I could ever need right here. Food. Servants. A cell block full of women. I've made the office next door into my quarters. I'd like to see that vigilante try to cut my throat and skin these—" He held up his palms. "—in this fortress."

"The circles of fate," said Leofrick. "Once Skinner was your prisoner here. Now it appears to be the other way around."

"You mock me."

"He is one man, Hotch."

"All it takes is one man," said the Warden. "Of course you feel safe. Yes, you were in that room with me in your own mask, eating the young—but Skinner doesn't know you from the Shepherd. It's me he wants."

"Rest easy," said Leofrick. "Our agents will catch him. They are everywhere. And he is but a gnat."

— • —

That gnat knew better than try to face the Sinners' Club head on. Skinner would play it smart. Like a True Reaper. He would stalk the degenerate cannibals. Study them. Then he would either leave a trail of crumbs for Strotham Yard to follow right to Hotch's doorstep or find a way to deal with the Club and its master himself. Skinner watched Inspector Croose from afar and tried to judge whether Valen's replacement could fully be trusted. It was possible that the Sinners were powerful enough to buy any man, sworn to the law or no.

Skinner was at once deadened and galvanized by what he had seen in the basement of that abandoned manor house and everything that led to it. He had become numb, a machine. He set aside his human needs for some time when this business was finished. Until the Sinners were undone he would be a Reaper through and through. Fuck their oaths and medals. He needed no coronation from other men. He would be loyal to his own code.

With adversaries now on both sides of the law, Skinner would have to stay low as he stalked his foes and laid his patient traps. As a marked man the fugitive was forced to keep to the endless passageways beneath the city and the rooftops above. He could show his face nowhere. But he now had a mask to wear, another gift from the Sinners—the gilded smirking face he'd stolen that night in Old Sablewood. With that madcap visage Skinner would mock his enemies from the shadows and strike fear into their fiendish hearts. It would be Skinner versus the Sinners. And who knew how many other of the secret conspiracies and whisperings that permeated the counterculture of Camshire were also true, if the Club itself was? The sea-worms infecting the brains of the elite? The 'chem-neys' that were said to spew mind-control agents into the air across the city? And what of the big-dog rumor of them all? Could the Umbrali exist? That cabal of thaumaturgists who are said to mastermind all the world's wars and politics and commerce from the shadows? A secret and twisted mirror image of the shield, star and coin?

A door opened from across the alley and light flooded into the littered street. A silhouette spilled out of the frame. The figure that emerged from the sinhouse lumbered on three legs. It was Church walking on his cane. He turned and made his way down the steaming alley. He had no guards—the man appeared to prefer traveling alone, even with his most dangerous occupation. Skinner saw subtle signs of arcanery afoot in Church's doings as he studied him. People seemed not to notice the man as he moved through crowds of commoners. There were times when the limping conspirator seemed to momentarily vanish in the shadows. However Church achieved such acts of obfuscation, Skinner had learned a useful skill in those Fetterstone years, and that discipline was patience. He focused on his quarry's every move and followed closely.

Church's steps carried him to a great gash that cut through an entire neighborhood. It was a remnant from the gargantuan blast that had freed Skinner from Strotham Yard's grasp. The cause of that explosion was still a mystery to him. The tendril of destruction had in an instant sawed through the tenements and the streets and down into the sewers below many levels deep. The burghers had created a network of rickety walkways and ramps to allow passage from one side to the other. Many who had lost their homes made new ones in the now-exposed tunnels and catacombs within the gash. Some had draped curtains or constructed patchwork walls to create privacy for themselves in their new barrows. Others did not bother. A menagerie of the unabashed slept and ate and did smite and croakweed in the living diorama. They looked to Skinner like raggedy dolls in some dystopian dollhouse. A cross-section of misery. Strata of despair and hunger. One madman called out from within: "The moons are in the wrong place! The moons are in the wrong place!"

Church went across a larger ramp installed for the street traffic above and Skinner took a smaller parallel walkway, keeping his distance. Church made his way into quieter streets, his cane clacking against the stones. They were alone now. Ready to kick out that bad knee should he fail to get the initiative, Skinner drew out his knife and moved in for the kill.

— • —

When Inspector Croose examined the scene early the next morning they found Church dead with the palms of his hands skinned and bloodied. His runed cane was also missing. There had been no witnesses except one small terrified child who saw the killer escaping through the alleys after the slaying. When Croose asked the youngling to describe the murderer all she could muster through her fearful tears was the following:

"It was the Banshee!"

— • —