The ground shuddered with the whirring and thumping of distant machinery.

  Two kinds of incense hung heavy in the air; a bluish haze just above head-height, and a greyish one at the floor.

  Four prisoners waited in their cells. Even these cells were suffused with incense, piped in through the vents, lest the prisoners try to hang themselves on the censer-chains or eat the burning coals. They were dead men, that was beyond all doubt, but their deaths were neither theirs to decide nor to carry out.

  Metal on metal approached. Two of them shrank back in their cells, each bearing a black halo around his forehead. One didn’t, because he had dissociated entirely, believing that if he delved deeply enough into delusion his punishment would pass him by just as the hours did, or that he would simply drop dead when one of his grafts’ signal failed to reach his benefactor. He, too, possessed a black halo, one that extended downward and swirled across his face and down his neck, his skin bulging and peeling at the edges as the curse writhed beneath it. The last one bore no such thing, and he didn’t shrink back because he had made no attempt to deceive the witch-inquisitor or to withhold anything he knew, and so had not tasted the bite of her curses.

  One by one, their cells opened. One by one, they were led out like animals, each having his forehead and wrists bound by black wrappings that thrummed with lilac magic, tethered to the slim wrists of the owl-faced woman with eyes in her hair, Yazata Heptaxia. Each, except for Aldritch — for he had no wrists to bind. He had no arms at all, and so only his head was bound.

  She led them through the Audunpoint Inquisitorial Office, its walls black stone dark and foreboding, its shuttered windows letting in only thin rays of false, sodium-yellow “sunlight.” From all around, from the walls and ceilings and even the floors, there gazed the countenances of long-forgotten figures both real and mythical, for this was not a building of the Twin Churches’ making. This was an ancient temple that had stood here, in this place, since times immemorial, and which would stand here for millennia to come. It had merely been eviscerated and reanimated by the Twin Churches for their own purposes.

  This was the Second Auxiliary Temple of Audunpoint, concealed wholly from sight within the north-west of the city. To the eyes of all those without the permission to see, this compound didn’t exist, for on the surface it was a tangle of various church-affiliated facilities and seemingly secular buildings, joined to the temple proper by subterranean tunnels. A city within the city, inhabited entirely by over three thousand Twin Churches personnel.

  It was within this “Invisible Temple” that the Audunpoint Inquisitorial Office had been established for the duration of Yazata Heptaxia’s stay.

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  And it would be within the Inquisitorial Office that the execution of Aldritch Herebor, Joseph Ogura, Youssef Radanov, and Hegio Calvus would be carried out.

  Slowly, the thumping and whirring of machinery grew louder, and Yazata’s metallic footfalls synchronized in perfect lockstep to that noise. The foreboding sound of the pipe organ soon reached them, too, rising in volume. Hegio Calvus stumbled and fell, but Yazata continued, dragging him behind her for half a minute before she yanked on the bindings in her hand, dragging him to his feet by his wrists and jerking the others forward.

  Eventually, they reached a particular chamber, one deep within the compound, one among the few built from naught solely for its purpose. Its floor and walls were bare to the naked eye, concealing myriad hidden implements; this chamber, among a handful of others, concealed enough machinery behind its walls, beneath its floor, and within its ceiling, that it would suffice to equip three dozen grafting clinics or mechanic’s workshops. Overseeing it all from above, there loomed the brass upper half of Zavesh the Grafter, majestic hair trailing down to the floor like a metal waterfall, arms held in the usual elbows-out gesture of wrenching open his own chest cavity with his bare hands. In front of him stood the figure of Igaria, clad in a flowing, hooded robe and with no distinguishable facial features. She stood atop a seven-spoked wheel in the Inner Wheel Configuration, with the spokes jutting like rays of light out of a smaller inner wheel, with seven distinct figures hefting each spoke. All the detail was of course lost to the eyes of the four who were being brought to their deaths, the only thing any of them took note of was the statues’ imposing stature and the undeniable, almost oppressive aura of the sublime that flooded the room even more densely than the incense smoke, smoke which somehow didn’t seem to stain anything.

  The music, then, revealed itself to originate from what one would expect, this being a pipe organ just behind the statue of Igaria, its mechanisms threaded seamlessly into Zavesh’s hair, using the statue as an enormous resonator. One could feel each tone reverberating in one’s bones, and the playing produced an impenetrable illusion of the Zavesh statue’s three golden hearts beating.

  Yazata, giving the four no time to settle, dragged them from the entrance to the middle of the chamber, in front of the statue of Igaria. She made them line up side by side, and, drawing out a heavy scroll, she unfurled it and began to read.

  “Those hereby condemned: Aldritch Herebor, Joseph Ogura, Youssef Radanov, and Hegio Calvus, shall be put to death. No final rites shall be given, for the method of their execution is in itself the most final of rites. The hereby condemned are to be subject to the Astral Body Ablation, by which their souls shall be stripped clean and cast unto Kenoma to reincarnate in any world other than this one, each upon a distinct bearing such that they may never reunite even by sheer chance. The only remnants of the hereby condemned’s Astral Bodies are to be souldregs, to be recorded and subsequently annihilated by the True Eidolon Barzai. Consider this our final mercy, for there are far worse fates than this. Be cleansed from our world, and stain not another.”

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