Hard to do with Sublime V in front of you every day.

Tabill Talab was troubled. He wasted no time once Hecht recognized him. "I'm having a problem no one else seems to notice. I feel a bleak future closing in. For everyone."

Talab was the eternal pessimist, chosen to balance Titus Consent's overconfidence. "Do explain."

"I talk to our couriers. I talk to merchants. I talk to refugees. I ask for reports from our agents in the republics because their ships visit all the ports of the Mother Sea."

Hecht nodded. No point hurrying the man. Talab could get where he was going only along an engineered path.

"No matter where the reports originate, they always mention upswings in the activities of the Night. Not big stuff. Not yet. Just more sightings, more encounters, more malicious mischief getting more virulent."

"Only the minor spirits remain unbound."

"Unbound and unconstrained. But becoming more numerous. They're running from the ice, too."

"Which we expected. Right?"

"Yes, sir. But what hasn't been considered is the fact that the things of the Night have always been more common along the edges of the ice, where societies are more primitive. Out there some of the big ones are still running loose. When the ice advances, and establishes itself permanently in places like the high mountains, all the wildest surviving free shades are pushed into tamer country."

Hecht nodded. No one talked about it much – yet – but that was a logical and obvious development. "That's generally recognized. It's started already."

"Yes, sir, it has. What I don't hear discussed is what that means for the Night."

"Yes?" Talab might be headed where most people were afraid to go.

"When people get pressed together you get what we already have here in Brothe. Worse poverty. More violence that's deadlier. More organized criminal activity. More racism and prejudice. All because you have more people trying to live off the same limited resources.

"The same thing happens with the things of the Night. Only they start to combine into stronger entities. Not often willingly. They just keep getting bigger and stronger if they can devour their own kind. They get angrier, more hateful, and malicious. When they're strong enough, and big enough, they turn into the Night things from old scary stories."

"The ice will gift us with a new round of monster gods?"

"If it advances far enough. Possibly a crop as ugly as those who cursed the earth before modern religions hammered their deities into a more benign shape."

The God of the Pramans, the Chaldareans, the Devedians, and the Dainshaukin enjoyed the same lineage. The Dainshaukin saw Him fierce and psychotic and disinclined to be a nurturer or giver of rewards. He was a punisher, the Punisher, the source of all misfortune, and would happily do you in because He did not like your haircut.

Devedians had a better deal. Their vision of the Almighty visited miseries only when they were earned. He could be appeased without a human sacrifice.

"It isn't something we can do much about. Except keep our heads down and hope… What?"

Titus Consent said, "You're forgetting the soultaken."

"I haven't forgotten. They…" Hecht noted what had to be a warning glance from Talab to Consent, nearly invisible in its subtlety, reminding him that his staff had other loyalties.

The soultaken had been men from another age conscripted by their gods so they could open a pathway out of a northern sort of hell. The dead heroes preserved there could then storm forth and destroy what those gods feared most: the Godslayer. Someone who, by happenstance, had learned that even the greatest of the Instrumentalities of the Night could be rendered subject to the wrath of men.

Else Tage had slain a bogon, a baron of the Night, in Esther's Wood in the Holy Lands, saving his war band from an attack initiated by a source he never identified. Later, he and the Devedians of Brothe destroyed one of the soultaken meant to silence him before knowledge he did not know he possessed became general.

The All-Father god of the pre-Chaldarean north himself perished trying to extinguish that knowledge. Prophecy fulfilled.

Piper Hecht remained largely unaware of the full implications of what he had done. The Devedians were not unaware. Their Elders knew who Piper Hecht used to be. They knew what he had done. They knew he had won a fierce reputation amongst the Instrumentalities of the Night, and that those forces would have exterminated him long since had they been better able to distinguish one mortal from another.

The biggest had to use something like the soultaken to find an individual.

Although a brilliant commander and leader, Piper Hecht, under whatever name, sailed through life in near ignorance of what he really was. He was feared by powers and people of which and whom he was unaware or was insufficiently suspicious.

"What about them?" Hecht did know that he was woefully ignorant about all that. Other than that a string of murders had culminated in the emergence and passing of major Instrumentalities during the Calziran Crusade.

Hagan Brokke observed, "The soultaken were just a foretaste of what's coming, I think. The gods themselves have begun to take a real interest in mundane events."

"Gods?" Clej Sedlakova demanded. "There is only one God!"

"Excuse me. For want of another label. High Demons, if you prefer. To borrow from the Dainshaukin."

Those monotheists recognized a mind-boggling array of lesser supernatural entities arranged in several parallel and inimical hierarchies.

Hecht smiled. "I don't much care." No one took exception. Even Sedlakova was disinclined to insist on strict conformance to dogma. "I'll think about it. Though that's something more suited to the Collegium. Colonel Smolens. To my earlier point. I'll be out of touch. You'll have to deal with whatever comes up. I shouldn't be gone long."

Smolens asked, "Do we know where you are? Do we admit that you're not around?"

"If you're pressed say I'm not available. You really won't know where I am." Though he would not bet against the Deves keeping track.

"How long? At the most?" Titus Consent asked.

"As long as it takes to finish what I need to do." Meaning do not get up to anything he should not. "Good. Enjoy yourselves. Oh. You wanted a private word, Titus?"

Consent betrayed what might have been a glimmer of fear. He whispered, "Outside the Castella. I'll walk with you."

Hecht nodded. Not inside the keep of the Chaldarean religion's most ferocious defenders? What a surprise.

Hecht waited till after they crossed to the shore and were headed downriver, toward the Memorium. "More problems with the Elders?" The Seven, the Elders of the Brothen Deves, were a pain as big as the heads of the Five Families, or members of the Collegium. They could not leave Titus Consent alone to get on with his sacred work.

"Not yet. I'm sure there will be. That isn't it. Yet."

"Well?"

"Noe is almost to term."

"Uhm." Hecht knew Consent's wife and sons by name but had yet to meet them. Deves did not mix with Chaldareans socially. "Congratulations."

Consent stopped. He shuddered. Hecht halted, back to the jungle of monuments to Old Brothen emperors, generals, and dictators, and their triumphs. "What is it?"

"Noe and I have discussed this for months. We want you to be the baby's godfather. And Principate Delari to sponsor us. If he will."

Hecht did not get it right away. He still had to get the hang of being Episcopal Chaldarean. "Godfather? I didn't know Deves did that."

"Not the Chaldarean way. My brother would do it. If I had one. Since I don't, my uncles should get the job."

Hecht finally caught on. "Are you talking about converting?"