The wight sped toward Skall. I sped after her. Skall stood calmly as the two of us descended upon him; and at the last moment, he simply held up his hands and said, «Stop.»

My legs froze, my brain froze… even my arm, swinging down with the decapitating stroke, simply stopped dead in the air as if trapped in ice. The wight, however, seemed immune to whatever magic Skall used to paralyze me. She closed the remaining gap and seized Skall's arms with the ferocity of a rabid dog that has finally found someone to attack. Hissing gleefully, she dug her claws into his wrists and squeezed.

For several seconds, Skall didn't move a muscle. Then, slowly, he twisted his arms in the wight's grasp, so that he could grasp her wrists as tightly as she held his. The two stood there clutching each other, the crimson light of the wight's eyes flaring brighter and brighter in the dark corridor.

The embrace lasted almost a full minute, while I stood by helpless, unable to move. Slowly, the hatred on the wight's face changed to puzzlement, and she tried to pull away; but Skall held on easily, without a hint of strain. The fire in the wight's eyes continued to grow, casting two blurs of scarlet on the gray stone wall. At the last moment, she turned over her shoulder to look at me, her rotten face grimacing with fear and confusion. Then her entire body burst like a soap bubble, showering the corridor with a spray of cloying red dust.

«Remarkable,» said Skall. His robes were crimson with the dust, his face powdered to the color of blood. With a sudden surge, strength returned to my limbs and I could lower my sword arm. «Remarkable,» Skall said again. Turning his back on me, he walked off into the burning Mortuary, completely ignoring the flames.

«Where have you been?» Yasmin asked. She had just retrieved her backpack, and was once more holding my charcoal sketch in her hand. The wight she'd been fighting lay chopped into pieces on the pavement.

«I've just had a chat with Factol Skall,» I told her.

«Did you learn anything?»

«That I never want another chat with Factol Skall.» I poked the pieces of Yasmin's wight with my toe. Red dust spilled from the sword wounds. «Is that dust typical when you kill wights?»

«I don't know,» Yasmin answered. «I've never fought a wight before.»

«Maybe one of our colleagues has.» I looked down the street in the direction Oonah and Kiripao had pursued the thieves.

Yasmin followed my gaze. «Should we go after them?» she asked.

«You go ahead,» I told her. «If our friends chase the enemy into the Hive, you'll have a hard time picking up their trail… but then, Oonah's the sort to leave marks as she goes. Deliberate scuffs in the dirt, arrows drawn on the pavement, that kind of thing.»

«What are you going to do?»

«I want to examine these wights more closely. They've piqued my curiosity.»

«All right.» She looked at me keenly for a few moments, as if trying to put some emotion into words. Finally, she simply said, «Watch your back, Cavendish.»

Before I could reply, she was running down the street, a lean figure in tight black dragon-skin. I tried to burn the image into my memory; it was something I'd want to sketch later on, and who cared if it didn't earn money.

Dust.

Red dust pouring out of the wounds instead of blood. And underneath the robes that the wights wore as disguise, their ragged clothes were clogged thick with another kind of dust, a fine silt that reminded me of sculptor's clay.

I stroked the silt, then licked a bit off my finger. It had a soft nippy taste, like weak curry powder. Maybe these wights had a hide-out in a spice warehouse. However, the dust wasn't yellow like curry – on first glimpse, it had a light tan color, but on closer inspection I saw it was actually a mix of white and dark brown particles.

Red dust, white dust, brown dust… what I needed was a dwarf, a dwarf of a fanatical dwarvish bent: the kind who studies soil the way a lecher studies women. We had a few such dwarves in the Sensates, forever bringing in new minerals for everyone to sniff, lick, and eventually chew. It was only by the grace of healing spells that I still had a full set of teeth; at that moment, however, I would have welcomed one of those rock-kisser dwarves with open arms, if he could identify all these different types of dust.

Without such knowledge, I could only take samples of the dust and hope to get them identified later. For the brown and white dust, I ripped away a scrap of wight's clothing that was heavily imbued with the stuff; for the red dust, I tore off a page from my sketchbook and held it under one of the wight's wounds, catching the sifting dribble that took the place of blood. Carefully, I folded both samples and tucked them into my pocket.

As I straightened from examining the last wight, Hezekiah galloped around the corner of the Mortuary. «Britlin,» he shouted, «come on, hurry!»

«What is it?»

«Wheezle and me,» he gasped. «We've cornered the shooter.»

I followed Hezekiah, and as we jogged he explained what had happened. He and Wheezle had scoured the area around the front of the Mortuary in search of whoever set off the explosion – not an easy task, given that most of the buildings had burst into flames. The boy and the gnome found several hiding places where someone might have shot a fireball or flame arrow to ignite the oil-soaked giant; but all those spots had been empty. With each passing moment the search for other such locations became more difficult, as people from nearby houses began to fill the streets, screaming at the fires and trying to organize bucket brigades from the closest wells.

In the middle of this growing confusion, Hezekiah had spotted a familiar face in the crowd. Leaning casually against a half-demolished stone wall stood one of the three men who participated in the fireball attack on the City Courts – the heavily-bearded basher with his hair bleached white. Tucked into his belt was a wand Hezekiah immediately recognized: bone-white ivory, speckled with glitters of red.

The man (whom Hezekiah dubbed Bleach-Hair) had stayed for a few minutes to watch the mob's frantic response to the fire, then walked away into the Hive. Hezekiah and Wheezle had followed at a distance, hampered by the growing crowds who had come to gawk at the fires. Once, my teammates actually lost their quarry; but they tracked him down again by running toward the noise of a fight in the next street.

By lucky chance (lucky for us, anyway), Bleach-Hair had turned a corner and run smack into the Parade of Dancing Ecstatics, as it wound its never-ending way through the byways of Sigil. Hezekiah only knew about them thanks to a brief explanation from Wheezle; but I was thoroughly familiar with the Ecstatics, having danced with them for three solid days several years earlier.

The Ecstatic Parade has continued without stop for more than four centuries, a drunkenly riotous assemblage of anyone who wants to join, prancing through the city streets according to the whims of whoever happens to be at the head of the line. A short distance behind the leader is a group of ten people called The Carriers of the Cow. They do not actually carry a cow; all they have is an empty wooden platform which is, I might add from experience, bristling with sodding splinters. Perhaps when the parade started so many years ago, the platform actually sported a cow, whether a living animal or a statue. Sometime over the centuries, however, the cow disappeared, and now only the platform remains.

Not even the Guvners remember what the parade is intended to celebrate, nor how it all started. The people who join it are simply people who want to dance and bub wine till they pass out in the street. Some dancers bring wine of their own to get themselves started, but that's seldom necessary; it's considered enormously good luck to donate drink to the parade if it passes you. When I danced in the parade elderly grandmothers begged me to take their hooch, in the belief that giving such a gift would help their arthritis. Who knows? Maybe it did. The women certainly seemed limber enough as they ran after me with their homemade moonshine.