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my other eye.’
    Olc’s mantis-mouth clacked with rage, her tentacles sweeping about Faltana’s faltering shape, poised to begin ripping at the flesh.
    You would volunteer your sight?
    ‘Only for you, my Love – my Sacred One! I would volunteer my heart!’
    What good would you be to us, blind – or dead?
    ‘I deserve no better. Punish me as you think fit.’
    A tentacle took Kate by the throat, and the fang, still dripping with Faltana’s blood, poised before her eyes.
Succulent little grub. Why have we, with our hunger, kept such meat aside? Soon it will be your turn to feed the Beast. But there is one who has violated our blessed sanctuary with this message of lightning! This one, with its accursed power – we must destroy it, but only after we have sucked the power from its bones. Thus may the grub live only as long as it provides the bait
.
    The Witch tossed her acolyte’s eye into the pit.
Wretched servant! Because of your carelessness, the Beast must be fed an alternative diet. We will feed it one in ten of your acolytes. In the meantime, we will punish this grub in a manner that pleases us
.
    ‘Mistress – let me lash her to an inch of her life.’
    Kill it and you will feed the Beast.
    ‘No – Mistress! I am ever careful to inflict pain without lasting wound. Yet even such wounds as I inflict heal too fast. There is a power about this one. I know not what. Yet it is as if some guardian …’
    Faltana raised her whip, as if to demonstrate, but a sweeping tentacle struck the chief succubus, felling her to the floor.
    A guardian, you say?
    Another tentacle rose to sniff at Kate’s brow, then slid down over her body, sniffing all the while, until it came to her right hand, where the flickering crystal matrix was still faintly visible.
    Here is its comfort!
    ‘Then let me cut off its hand.’
    Stupid servant! Thus is it communicating with the bearer of lightning. We wish this communication to continue.
    ‘But Mighty One – I have sensed such cunning. A plea, perhaps, to some additional source?’
    Olc shrieked:
What source?
    ‘Please do not be angry with me, Mistress. I only wish to serve.’
    There was a prickling silence, in which the creeping tentacles appeared to pulsate, as if driven by some invisible heart. The clatter of the jaws rose to a rapid crescendo.
We sense a presence! Ach -the Old One! She would not dare to enter here!
    But the Witch fell silent again, as if deeply thoughtful.
    Perhaps the Earthspawn is more dangerous than we imagined? Yet we must not kill it immediately. Instead we must discover a way to use it to our advantage.
    ‘Let me teach it a lesson.’
    A lesson, yes. But not your way. It is a weakly thing, little more than skin and bone. There is another pain, a pain of the spirit, yet one that would provide no escape through death.
    ‘What is your wish, Mistress?’
    Put it to silence in the bowels of nowhere – where there is nothing to be heard or seen, or felt – where it will survive long enough to serve our will, yet where there is but hunger and deprivation to torment the senses.

The Council-in-Exile
    As evening fell on the following day the clanging of a great bronze bell pealed out from some source deep in the old city, echoing far and wide through the streets of Carfon and carrying over the choppy waters of the estuary. It was the signal Milish had been waiting for, the summons for Alan to appear before a plenary session of the Council-in-Exile. After the tiresome week of waiting Alan now felt that he had had little time to prepare himself. The Council-in-Exile, as he understood it, was drawn exclusively from some kind of nun-like order, sworn to silence when it came to outsiders. In the past they had been ruled by the reigning High Architect, but since the martyrdom of Ussha De Danaan that role had been served by a Pretender-in-Waiting. As such the summons of an outsider to their presence was an extreme rarity, and such a summons to a male – and an alien male