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temple walls.
    Unhooded now, with teeth bared and his face swollen and bloody, he started back across the bridge. His robe was torn and hung in strips about his arm. He swung a savage glare over the other mourners, who parted like a dark river before the bow of a ship, crowding as far from him as they could, only to follow his retreat with shrouded eyes. Nervous voices hushed as he passed.
    Mr. Nettle continued across the bridge with blood pounding in his ears and only silence in his wake.
    In the shadow of the girders at the Gatebridge entrance, he held his daughter over the edge, over the darkness, and looked down at the rumpled fabric covering her face, at the strands of hair that hung out from the cloth. Tears mixed with the blood on his cheeks as he dropped her into the abyss. The white shroud flamed for an instant in the gaslight and then she was gone.
    The cleaver handle dug into his ribs and, for all its cost, he felt like throwing the damn thing far into the abyss too. What use would it be to him now? How could he ever get close enough to his daughter’s murderer to use it?
    To kill an angel, he’d need to find a far more dangerous weapon.

3
    DILL AND RACHEL
    D ILL WOKE WITH a jolt, gasping for breath, still in the grip of his nightmare. He’d been alone somewhere in cold, crushing darkness. No, not completely alone: there had been a girl.
Black eyes, red lips, white teeth
. Even as he tried to remember, her face faded, leaving him with nothing but the feeling that, somehow, she’d been both beautiful and hideous.
    Had she been crying—or laughing?
    It was morning, and he was lying facedown on his mat in a pool of his own spittle. The candles had burned down to stubs of tallow. Ash smouldered in the hearth. Sunlight streamed through the stained glass in the eastern wall. Dill’s gluey eyes focused on the image portrayed in the window. His ancestor Callis, Herald and commander of Ulcis’s archons, held his wings outstretched and his sword aloft before a group of cowering heathens. Motes of dust drifted before the glass angel, changing from pink to blue to gold.
    Dill sniffed, wiped his lips on his sleeve of his nightshirt, and rose stiffly from his mat. He stretched arms, legs, and wings before he realized his eyes were itching terribly.
    He groaned.
Please…not today, not for the ceremony
.
    But no amount of pleading would make a difference. Dill’s eyes were the wrong colour: completely inappropriate.
    Nerves
. He was bound to be nervous. The darkness in his dream had unnerved him.
    And today I wear a sword for the first time.
    He would have to attend to his eyes later; first he had to wash. The water in his bucket was freezing, but he drenched himself until he gasped, then stood naked, soaked and shivering, with his bony arms wrapped around his ribs, his feathers damp.
    The uniform lay there on the stool, precisely folded where he’d left it last night, a stack of heavy velvet, fine brocade with glints of silver. The boots standing beside the stool were new and smelled of polished leather. But the sword above the mantel outshone all else.
    The blade beckoned him, but he couldn’t touch it, not yet. Everything must be perfect first, and he had to take care of the snails. There were only seven this morning: one by the hearth, one under the window, the others clinging to the walls at various heights. The largest was the size of a walnut, the smallest the size of his little fingernail. Gently, he removed them and put them in the snail-bucket along with the others. About forty in it now, he noted. The promise of rain must be bringing them out in such numbers.
    Wherever did they come from?
    Dill had spent years trying to figure it out. There was a narrow space under the balcony door, and also under the door to the stairwell, through both of which they might have entered his cell, and there were also a few dark holes where mortar had crumbled from the damp walls. But he’d watched those same openings for hours