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sadly, simply.
    “I saved your life.” Bob whines.
    “And I’m saving your soul.” The Pilgrim answers, raising the sword and bringing it down as quickly as his mercy demands.
     
    This time the Lord’s Prayer comes, along with passages half remembered from a childhood more than a century past, the Pilgrim is still reciting them when Robert Tenant’s head rolls to a stop, the only thing reflected in the shards of a cracked mirror, apart from dying flames, as red as blood.

Chapter 2 :
     
    “Across an Ocean of Sand .”
     
    Innumerable grains of sand wash through the clown’s empty eye sockets, yellow grains shifting like the last seconds wrung from an hourglass. The clown resists the temptation to count them, it is a failing of his kind, of the dead, who have eternity to spend on such abstraction. Instead he sits up abruptly, his bleached-bone face dislodging all but a few of the dry particles from its smooth contours in a single motion. His much abused clothing is harder to clear of sand but a few blows against his empty ribcage send the yellow grains tumbling back to the desert floor. Satisfied at last, the skeletal troubadour reaches into his tattered suit of bells and rainbow hued, shabby velvet and draws forth a flute. Air hisses between teeth worn down to nubs by the endless sand and despite the lack of lips, produces a low, sad tune. This tune is the last remnant of a life long lost, the last spark of the soul that once animated the perpetually grinning clown. At the urging of some will other than its own, the clown sniffs the wind, allowing it to waft through the ragged hole in the centre of his bony face, then sets off across the featureless sand.
     
    Half the buildings of the old town are smoldering embers by the time the flute’s music touches the scene near the abandoned cart. A lizard, more timid than the carrion birds sharing in the feast of quickly drying flesh, scurries frantically into the gloom beneath the carts, finding cool relief in the shaded sand. The bone clown’s gaping eyes take in the scene with all the indifference of a cannon bore.   Nearly twenty bodies lie hacked and strewn about the half buried tracks. After a minute or so of studying the carnage the clown stops his soft tune and pricks up his head, causing the rusty bells dangling from his loose hat to jingle. This in turn sends the carrion birds, which had so far managed to ignore both his tune and his presence, spilling into the air in response to the sudden jarring sound.
     
    A voice, no louder than the buzzing flies, echoes through the clown’s cranial cavity. It is no insect, though, anything of any interest to that kind has long been picked clean. It is something else that stirs in the endless darkness behind that bleached skull. From within the emptiness of his skull other eyes share his vision and it is their voices to which the clown now listens.
    “ You see, he will make a fair tool if used correctly.”
    “Never that, the living are flawed tools at best. Brother, we should not be complacent in this one’s strength, it could be turned against us as easily as against the vampires. Remember we thought Leedon could be easily used and though he has not outlived his usefulness, each year he becomes harder to control.” Another buzzing whisper replies.
    “I need no reminding of that!”
    “Animal or man, it makes no matter, a general and a mule, both have the same flaw - they have minds of their own. In Leedon’s case this is unavoidable, the living only follow their own, without him we would never have brought down the Citadel.”
    “Indeed, we came close to victory then. If only he had done all that was required.”
    “But in the end greed prevented him from doing all that was needed. He did what he wanted rather than what he was told, that is a vice of the living we must accept and be wary of.”
    “We can trust the Captain to follow his own nature, at least! He hates our enemy and his obsession with the Gate