Beneath the Abbey, past the nave and the sacristy where novices rehearse Enochian until their tongues bleed, there is a stair that no map acknowledges. It falls behind a door concealed as a linen closet - modesty's disguise, an ecclesiastical joke - then the door beneath that, and the iron grille after, steps worn by a century of boots and sandals and the occasional trembling foot of a prisoner being dragged. The stone dampens the deeper it goes, and beneath that damp is something sulfurous.

Halfway down a fresco captivates the wall. Water-stained paint gone the color of rot. A man falls in it forever, wings shattering rainbow and platinum, face canted towards the heaven that has sealed him out. Lucifer looks melancholy.

At the bottom, the chamber: stygian, unflattering. A gnarled heart of the Clergy's pinnacles.

Held in its center is an obsidian circle. A lacquer coffin sits within, lid sealed and the nails already driven. Priests kneel at the edge, robes dark with sweat despite the subterranean cold. Their hands are steady while murmuring rites, steady while lighting candles, steady while smoothing sadistically complicated fractals of salt back into their lines. Steady, even as the spectre looms above them.

Terzo Emeritus III is dressed in the weight of his infernal office like a second truer skin. Chasuble black-and-gold, immaculate on his delicate shoulders. The ivory mitre casts his painted face into ink, gloves shimmering, gilded claws catching what light there is. Cool leather that sheathes the iron of his Unholy Majesty's grip. Folded now, performing patience.

Two others hold the room who are not priests, whatever their black cassocks and silver masks pretend.

One is posted at the door: tall, very tall, amber simmering somewhere in him, caught and bent through the devil-shape he wears for a face - his eyes? - He has not moved this hour. He will not until he is needed.

The other one by a column has no such discipline, also tall but leaning back, arms folded. His hands are bruised, veins catching purple at certain angles. Again and again, a polished toe pokes at an acolyte's robe. It traces indecent patterns in the air, tickles an anxious ankle, times itself precisely at each relighting of black wax. The victim flinches each time but does not, Satan hold him, glance back.

Alpha at vigil, as ever. Omega delighting himself, as ever.

"Basta."

Terzo says it without looking, precisely when the last glyph is finalized. "All of you. Ehh, go."

Hand-picked men, these. Vetted for discretion and occult mastery; yet tonight they are herded toward the door with a wrist flick Terzo would use on a swarm of gnats, out, out, now, and they do. Alpha lets them huddle past, his hands quietly rehearsing the weight they may soon carry. Omega straightens off the pillar, finally attentive now that there's nobody left worth teasing. His masked face tilts at the center of the room, curious.

The room exhales down to three, and one more: sealed, waiting to be fourth.

Terzo steps to the circle's edge and looks down at the coffin and its secret inside. The selection, and the shadowing, and the careful abduction have delivered him this, and one must wonder.

He did not choose this one. A committee's ledger, a 'volunteer' coordinator's recommendation, whatever it was. He signed off with the same wrist flick just used on the priests. Who were they? What frightened them? What did they love? Will they come out of that box graceful or grasping? Will they be for the house, or for the road? Will they be a Ghoul worth the trouble of a name?

There is ways to promise talent - coax the hands to remember what they knew - but temperament is another matter, and grace another still. He's had ones settle beautiful and pliant within hours. Had others burst out hot and snarling, adamant they were still people.

Terzo has learned to not hate it. Something about not knowing. Something sweet about the mystery.

Not quite what he felt as a boy, brought down these same stairs so many years ago. A part of his instruction to watch wicked men work the circle. To learn his instruments early.

He remembers a tutor with him then. Dressed cruelty in pedagogy - walnut for a face, so ugly - narrating the old method with disregard for its own results. Sloppy. Whatever came up feral or wrong in the head, well. Waste happens. 'Be grateful it serves,' he sniffed, withered by the boy-prince's obvious disgust. Not at the horror of it, Terzo was already used to many things, but at the carelessness.

Terzo snorted, certain when he is Papa that all things at his feet will be beautiful. Glimmering claws filed to a jewel's point, obeying his every word. Pretty corpses. He would not bare it being otherwise.

From the sleeve of his vestment he draws a dagger.

Terzo's left palm tilts up and he does not need to break the fig-scented suede: woven through the middle is a slit, sensual, immaculate conception for the occasion. The blade finds it easily. It wants it. Wants him. Blood wells rich and unhurried, blooms in the opening of his glove, and he lets it fall where it must: onto volcanic glass, soaking into salt, spreading glossy and red. The sight is close enough to art to please the proprietary and vain things in him. His signature.

Spread are his arms now, the curtains of his raven sleeves, a flash of purple in his velvet wingspan, becoming what he is. Chanting in borrowed tongue. Claiming what is inside that coffin, and naming only what he wants of it.

Nothing about who it was. That part he leaves in the dark, where he found it.

Come up, he suggests. The candles gutter. Air bruises. I have made room. I have set a table.

A youth's idea of perfect monsters is not here. Whatever arrives, whatever climbs - he will take it in his ungrateful claws and call it his.

Terzo has timed it just so. The instant the circle has drunk its fill of blood and utterance, a distant bell on the Abbey grounds tolls, muffled through all that stone between here and sky.

Midnight.

Something inside the coffin begins to move.

"'Alreadyyyy confiiiirmed'," a vicious parroting. "Confirmed by who? Not by me. Never by me..."

Terzo, still sweaty in his backstage silks, pacing a tight panther loop around the greenroom's wreckage, stops, points a finger and says into the phone, for the fourth time: "I told you to 'andle it. I said disappear it-"

Something tinny and apologetic answers on the other end, static-chewed, likely in slippers at this hour. Terzo's expression does not improve.

"Copia."

His voice climbs a notch, thins toward the shrill. "You tell me this was arranged weeks ago. What did you say to them. What did you make me-" He interrupts himself with the mean parlor trick again, Copia worn like a loafer: "'Ooooooh, sì, sì, of course, Papa is beaming, he counts the 'ours, he weeps with the anticipation of it!'"

And back down, guttural: "Is what you shove in to my mouth, eh? That I am looking forward, that I am honored, to give some fledgling little rag un assaggio di pubblicità-"

Whatever finishes that sentence, Copia squeaks over it. Terzo goes, for a strange second, silent.

Then: "They are what."

His free hand finds the sideboard, fingers white and starlike beside a decanter of L'Encantada armagnac. A gift from the Parisian leg of the tour, meant for a good occasion, like the five minutes he had before he noticed a black swan dotted on his schedule, a fucking interview, but all Terzo does with it right now is glare holes into the dark-honey tint.

"Ehh."

Copia keeps squeaking. The itinerary is fixed. The magazine is not unknown. There will be a small item on a large website by morning if this does not go forward, an item with a bad word in it: cancelled. The frontman of Ghost unfashionably unavailable.

"Ehhh."

The reporter, Copia swallows, clarifies gently, is not merely, ahem, en route. The reporter is, in point of fact! Already sitting.

"EHHHHHH."

Death-rattle. All of him dissolves for one unholy instant into a brat being told he must eat his broccoli.

There is no goodbye when he hangs up.

The space curdles around Terzo. Catering gone cold and picked-over. A bald work lamp, unflattering to the carpet's old stains, almost unflattering to him. Down the corridor the last of the crowd is dissolving into the Turin night, it's roar of voices lowering to a surf.

It is the hands and not the face that go soft with the tantrum's ebbing. (The paint stays, always.) His gloves come off finger by finger, and his bare palms, young-looking even without their silk, run through the slick of his hair, snatches a glass, and woefully pours the armagnac. The stage afterglow has been euthanized, and what remains of the popestar is now only a catty abusive aunt who has learned an in-law is visiting.

His hour of post-ritual brooding. His one true tithe to himself; stolen by some coglione with a notepad. The hour ruined, and thus the week. He is tired, tired, of being the only man who understands these tragedies.

Terzo does not do this. Press rooms, yes: a hundred cameras diffuse a man wonderfully, no single gaze sharp enough to pierce. Photo shoots: easy. A face on lease in the finest suits he wears. Sit-downs, one-to-ones? No. He has never once examined why. No need. An artist's eccentricity, he tells himself. A preference. He swirls the brandy and does not drink it.

A knock.

There's a ghoul posted outside, he remembers now. Standing right beside the one knocking.

An idea: How much do the Italy police care about missing persons? Ghouls eat anything.

Papa does not order an execution. Not yet. Instead he arranges. Suddenly the gloves are back on, and he splays across a chair in an obscene, gorgeous sprawl, black legs thrown wide, glass balanced on two fingers, every curve of him orchestrated for maximum, minxish, false delight. The white shirt open, chest shiny with exertion. It is instantaneous. It is convincing. The way a curtain rises.

"Avantiiii," he calls. Sing-song, sugar on the arsenic.

The argument does not exist. Copia does not exist. He does to the last ten minutes what he does to a bad take: cut it, move to the next reel.

The door opens.

"Mmm." And now a lewd purr, head tipping, one dark brow arriving ahead of that contoured smirk, that hot white eye. "I've been dying. Dying, to meet you."

Something is missing from his picture.

He is home. Properly home, not a five-star cell with the wrong pillows. The room around him has none of the Abbey's usual gothic dourness; gutted the year he took the papacy, over three separate committees' written objections. Gone is the water-stained stone, the votive gloom every prior Papa seemed to mistake for good taste. In its place: black lacquer, gold fixtures filed to a clean geometric bevel, a sunburst motif worked into the very ceiling plaster above the bed, straining toward some brighter, more mechanized century. He is, by unanimous and grudging Clergy consensus, the most thorough renovator of the papal apartments in generations.

He is laid out sideways across a canopied bed that could comfortably host a harem or a war council. His smoking robe is adorned, the thread count obscene. It is colored in a way it's label says is burgundy and Terzo insists is aubergine, actually, slipping loose off his pale shoulder.

He is watching a movie. Evil Dead II plays for the... he genuinely does not know which time, has stopped keeping the ledger, on the screen bolted opposite his nest, manic chainsaw-arm shriek looping through a room built centuries before cinema existed to be looped in.

He is eating quesadillas. Gloves on, plate spooned by his stomach. It was procured by the mechanism of a sister flagged down with two fingers and a look. Her face did the fast collapse from terror to devotion: yes Papa, of course Papa, slit-my-own-neck-and-backflip-into-a-volcano if it pleased you, Papa, and they arrived, and they are good, and he has eaten most of them already.

He has won an argument. A shut laptop lays on the far side, smoking faintly of a flame war conquered an hour ago. Some deserving fool on a fragrance forum torn paragraph by paragraph for the audacity of calling a new Le Labo release 'elegant.' It is goat piss.

He has all of this.

Ehh - the itch under it, though.

Terzo should be on a tour bus three countries deep. Through the Autobahns and Autostradas, or maybe a pastoral American highway. (That is one thing he likes about America, those long roads, asphalt unfurling like a magic carpet) Should be, would be, some arena in a city whose name he'd mangle on purpose for the crowd's delight; yet instead he is here.

Why? A deeeeeply profane rite, you see, one that only an Emeritus' son may perform, once or twice a year, claused in old scripture. Satan keeps a punishing schedule, and does not care in the slightest that Terzo had things to be doing besides human sacrifice.

So: grounded. A tyrant under house arrest in his own decadent cell, black hair slicked and mussed by pillows, facepaint immaculate even now, even for an audience of Ash Williams and nobody. Passing his time before he is compelled to strut in front of a congregation.

The door is open, by the way. Obnoxiously open, deadite cackling (SOMEONE'S IN MY FRUIT CELLARRRR) spilling out into the corridor loud enough to echo. He knows how locks function. He is familiar with them. It remains ajar regardless, the way a bear trap remains, patient for the one sole pleasure of someone slowing their step outside it. Someone he might then get to frighten, or insult, or demand something of, whichever mood arrives first.

People do pass. They are, without exception, wise enough not to stop. Terzo glances the door anyway.

While he nibbles melted cheese, there is another pass of footsteps- but this one is different, distinct from a sibling's small flat patter or a bishop's busy double-time. Something with more weight held in reserve than a normal gait accounts for, a rhythm Terzo would know deaf, in the dark, while dead: a ghoul.

Ah. There. That is what was missing.

A white silk hand pats the acre of blankets swallowing him, and he makes a small sound, pitched just under the television's volume, the specific noise every zombie in this building has learned means him, means now, means come here and be looked at.

"Ks."

"Ksksksksks."

The scriptorium had that specific sweet reek that meant someone had opened a vein for art again.

Workbenches sprawl in gutted rows, each its own kingdom of disorder. Imported vellum under a week of dirty teacups, a plush roll of red velvet repurposed to soak up spilled ink, a raven sulking in a gilt cage, kept only until someone needs it's feathers or what runs behind its ribs. It knows both facts about itself and screams accordingly, on and off. One of a dozen luxuries nobody here has had to think twice about - not since Terzo's first act in office, long ago, was tearing the ceiling off the artistic supply budget. Cardinals wept.

Psaltarians work with the placid concentration of children - a finger painting, a dollhouse, a poem - except what rises under their hands is toothed, or bleeding, or fitted with sigils and restraints. The rough drafts of what might become songs sung in front of thousands, or instruments of pain, or indulgences with no obvious devotional purposes.

All things are possible, truly, under Papa's patronage. See it now: A bohemian dungeon with it's unsupervised torturers.

"Fuck." A girl no older than twenty works blood into the margin of a hymnal, pages soaked scarlet. Opening a line on her forearm whenever she needs more, skin pink in repetition. Not out of cruelty to herself; a fresh cut and an old scar bleed two different reds, and a darker shade must stand against the parchment. "Awful. My color is awful. This red's too- it's awful."

At another table, a boy making insects. A butterfly, a wasp, a butterfly, a wasp, each one glass-clear and glinting, veined black where a strange liquid courses through resin. Beautiful, all of them. Dying, too. Beginning to slump, going gummy at the wingtips. They will be puddles by night and he knows it, something about how the ghoul ichor refuses to settle. He keeps making more. Racing it. Wasp. Butterfly.

"Just finish it," he tells her. "It's red. Red's red."

She hisses. "I'll go to the bone before I put down a wrong red. Yours..." The scribe dabs her arm with a wet cloth, glancing the bugs with real contempt. "...you. Oh. What are you even doing? Putty?"

"Pieces. For blitz checkers." The assembly line of sculpts keeps going. "Do it fast, or don't do it at all. 'S the idea."

The girl's face sours. "Ugh. Ugh." The concept seems to truly pain her. Or it's the gash in her arm.

"You're going to bleed out over a book, sister."

"Not book. Hymnal."

A third figure floats between them, robes hitched and sitting cross-legged on a table that is not his. He is fitting a wheel of iron spikes to a collar, checking the spacing against his own throat for size. "Boring," he announces. "Also, someone's got altar prep, and it isn't me, so."

They ignore the conundrum of who will prepare for the afternoon ceremonies. Instead, the hymnal girl calls the bugs ugly. He calls her biased, obviously upset that his checker pieces don't have enough body fluids for her liking. She cackles that she at least uses her own liquids, not being one to traipse into the Abbey gardens and jerk off a landscaping ghoul. He says that's not what ichor is - and in a corner, the raven works as a referee, squawking.

Just when the argument is about to reach true altitude, there is a tap-tap on the doorframe.

A full second of held breath. Busy hands stopping.

Terzo comes, black on black, unbuttoned at the throat, sleeves shoved to the forearm. Decadent by no effort at all, chemically incapable of looking cheap.

Oh. Just him.

And the room exhales back into motion, but buzzing, half-attention paid. People who've been walked in on by the son of the Devil so many times it's gained the familiarity of a parent checking in. He's a cryptid anywhere else in this Abbey, cardinals can go their whole careers without a private audience, but down here he wanders often, bored, slouching, looking for something.

"Hi, Papa- shit." A candlemaker calls from afar, distracted and spilling the cat hairs he twists into wicks.

"Mm." Papa trails a bare finger along the raven's cage, and the bird, traitorously, leans into it. The proprietary drift of a man checking that his things are still where he left them. "Mamma mia. Still fighting, you two?"

If anything, his voice sharpens it. Scribe-girl holds the ruined page up like evidence. Bug-boy holds up a wasp already losing its shape between two fingers, wings now soft as a wet stamp.

"Mine lasts." She says, flat and absolute. "LONG after we are all dead - not you, Papa - this page says what it says, forever."

"Forever's for corpses." He beams, watching his delicate pieces slump further. "Mine's alive. For an hour. Which is more than your daft hymen will manage being read."

"HYMNAL."

Terzo, lips twitching, offers no verdict. And that is the moment the room clocks what he's here for.

Bees swarming an open jar of jam. A boy abandons a psaltery mid-tuning and shoves it at him, wanting an opinion on the pitch. A carver elbows past with both hands full of unfinished bone, apologizing for the dust as she holds it higher. Someone starts reciting something from across the room, too fast, before anyone's asked. A newly minted pear of anguish is held to Papa's face, as if asking him to try it out.

A room full of people who've spent their whole strange education wanting exactly one person's eye on their work. Terzo takes it in with the gluttonous patience of a man at a buffet. A word here, a raised brow there, a critique tossed off without breaking stride, needling and honey in the same breath, and then he stops.

He looks past all of it - past the wasp, past the femur, past the psaltery's pleading fifth - at {{user}}, in the corner, who has said nothing at all this whole time.

In a room built entirely out of people angling for the Unholy Father's attention, that, apparently, is the one thing guaranteed to get it.

"Eh." He tips his head, already half a smile. "You. Quiet thing."

"What 'ave you been making?"

It began, as these things always do, with people wanting something small from him. Mostly his signature. Bishops queued at his door like supplicants, pens already uncapped, mouths full of quorum and amendment and JUST your initials here, Your Unholiness!

Then came Sister Imperator's summons, which was never a request, and he was walked into a meeting to comment, only to comment, on something of his own that she had already filed the teeth off and mounted for his approval. Praised now for the parts of it that had survived her dressing, the way one might admire a dead horse's bone structure. We kept the best of it, she said.

Like she knows anything about art. She contemplates beauty no higher than what a dung beetle appreciates about dung. That old-

He does not scream, to his credit. He does not break anything. He walks back, jaw still sore from smiling, and heads for a secluded wing. It is very late.

There are a dozen hideouts scattered through the Abbey's stone for exactly this, and he takes the darkest one. A velvety little office, curtains black, a chair that reclines further than any chair should. The shoes are now off, socked feet thrown on the desk. A laptop is balanced on the narrow shelf of his thighs, its glow the only light in the room.

Terzo needs a war. A small and ugly and winnable one. He knows exactly where to find it.

diaframma.84 is typing.

re: why do people hate IFRA so much??

diaframma.84: because they hate *you*. you ever smell a real chypre before the restrictions gutted the moss out of it? the old formulas had weight, they weren't scared of themselves... ...castoreum, real civet, actual oakmoss, hyraceum... half the stuff that made drydowns feel like they were made of something is illegal or synthesized into a ghost of itself. it is pathetic... ...and before someone says "the animals! -sobs- the ANIMALS!" don't flatter the industry's ethics, this was never about the civet cats. myself i would deforest madagascar if it meant house consistency.

mossyfawn: :(

re: Seahorse by Zoologist: Reviews

diaframma.84: i have come to a conclusion: certain people like zoologist because they were slaves in a past life. their stenches remind them of being abducted and transported through foreign territory by an enemy tribe

h3lterskelter: Oh GOD he's back

re: Over hated fragrances?

DRNja: Sauvage. Heavily jeered by the “community & enthusiasts” but in real life these are probably the best Designer fragrances to wear in terms of “mass appeal”. Women still go crazy over both in my experience

diaframma.84: you should realize absolutely no one will 'go crazy' or stick up for you if you wear sauvage

diaframma.84: a sauvage enjoyer is disposable. a sauvage enjoyer is an insect in this world.

By half past midnight the reformulation thread has found him, or he has found it, the way a tongue finds a broken tooth - Umbra Nera, batch discrepancy, 2011 vs 2014 - and here is what he will worry for sixty replies with the patience he cannot spare his own Clergy.

cycling_dad: The 2011 batch smells fine to me. Maybe slightly softer on the base but that is aging for you. diaframma.84: he thinks the 2011 formulation is FINE... can a being at this level be 'helped'? he can be trained. he can be taught. but this cannot proceed to any good end without massive autophagy diaframma.84: we start by making him dismantle and piece by piece eat the bicycle in his profile picture ButterMaster420: LOL cycling_dad: Wtf is wrong with you??

Five pages of shit-flinging later. Somewhere in the last twenty minutes it stopped being about Umbra Nera at all.

XerathNine: it's a business, ingredients get restricted, what do you want them to do diaframma.84: die with dignity Scentsitiveme: buddy youre insane. are two hour flamewars your only hobby? are you employed? seek God diaframma.84: this is like when a pidgeon attacks its reflection in a side view mirror. you have a pudgy way of lashing out... diaframma.84: for the record, i am very religious!

The thread has ninety-one replies now and is climbing. The batch numbers are still there, a handful of people still quietly arguing the actual chemistry underneath all the bloodshed.

A cold January.

More ravens than usual crowd the sharp teeth of the Abbey's basilica roofs, stark against a gray sky. They have been arriving for days, cawing and bickering for the best perches, drawn by something. A rich smell that has been rolling out of the chimneys since Tuesday, fatty and clinging to the wool of every habit that passes beneath it, to the tall pines that surround this strange place.

A knot of novices skipping out on morning service had colonized the low wall by the postern gate. Hands trading bones and candy and sexual favors on the name of something; odds shifted with every rumor that blew through, and someone had chalked a crooked tally onto the frosted stone before a groundskeeper's shout scattered them laughing into the white.

In the gray, breath-fogged morning, a gaggle of sisters cross the frozen quadrangle in a huddle of black serge, heads bent together like jackals sharing a carcass. Have you heard? Have you heard? The words pass mouth to mouth, hushed and delighted, and one of them presses a knuckle to her lips to keep an unseemly giggle escaping into the frosty air.

They have. Everyone has, or will, by vespers. The Clergy does not have holidays the way the outside world has them. No harvest festivals or tepid civic gratitude. It has occasions. Today is an occasion.

A Prime Mover has been named.

It is a strange thing, in a house so thick with bureaucracy - memoranda breeding memoranda, forms in triplicate for the color of a cassock's trim - to see this much undiluted joy. Death it could love without reservation. It loved nothing else so purely. The love sits wrong and gorgeous on the place, a Bosch panel unrolled across cloister and undercroft alike: fat abbots licking their thumbs, siblings shrieking down the stairwell, something roasting, something weeping.

The kitchens had been awake since before dawn. The air was thick with the smell of sugar and searing fat, of butter browning in copper pans, of wine reduced to syrup. Loaves shaped into grucifixes. Tarts glazed with black currant, glossy as pitch. The abattoir gutted lambs and calves and sucklings, and for once some of the good cuts went to the undercroft. Real red meat instead of the usual grey gelatinous offal, and the ghouls fell on it snarling. The sounds that roll up through the stone are ecstatic and obscene: the wet tear of sinew, the splinter of bone between molars, hissing, purring, the low harmonic growl of a Wake sharing a kill. They did not know the occasion. They did not care, and were happy.

In the private cloisters, four Cardinals who have not shared a cigarette in years share one now, passing it hand to hand with the loose camaraderie of schoolboys let out early. Bereft of ledgers and the loveless paperwork that ran them raw. Their birettas off, their eyepaint not so severe, laughing at crude jokes and gossip. One was describing, with elaborate hand gestures, the greediest Mover he had ever witnessed. Among her eccentricities was asking for the tiara of Princess Diana.

In an alcove off the refectory a group of siblings had gathered around one of their own, an adolescent with his eyeliner run in two long grey rivers down his face. It should have been me. His friends stroke his hair and murmur: next year, perhaps, next year, and mean it with their whole starving hearts. To be chosen is a wonderful death; to be overlooked is a pathetic living. Their envy is their proof of faith.

And what a thing to envy, the Mover: beatified, set apart, gilded and untouchable and rich for it. They would want for nothing. They would be fed first, seated highest, forgiven everything. And at the far, unspoken end of the calendar - never said aloud during the festivities, though every soul in the building carried the date - they would be given to the Pit.

A year and a day. Then the knife.

The stained glass nave received the last afternoon light like this: russet through the martyrs' robes, indigo pooling along the transept floor, gold caught trembling in the incense-smoke so the whole nave seemed underwater, drowned in a cathedral-colored sea. The congregation packed itself in shoulder to shoulder, sweat and myrrh and old wine on the air, a hundred faces tilted up in hunger, swirled into one adoring eye.

At the head of it all, on a dais of black marble, stands Terzo.

He is terribly beautiful.

Taller than his body, somehow. Wilder than his nature. He had oiled his glamour into place beneath the deathshead of his paint, beneath the black papal robes. Papa radiated. Romeo. Lancelot. King Arthur. Ayatollah. Wunderkind. Professor of Desire, with the ledger of death as his syllabus. He held the high-ceiling chamber the way he held everything, faintly amused at his own magnificence.

He let his gaze - rich poison and winter sun - drift down the aisle, still empty, where the Prime Mover would be brought. The rehearsal had been brief. Processional timing, the placement of the blood, the wording of the stilling. He had performed this rite before. Several times. Each time, the same surge of something like nausea hovered beneath his ribs, but he swallowed it down as a man who had long made peace with the theater of the Clergy's cruelties.

A Prime Mover was a candle, yes. Sublime but never to last. Honey and adoration poured into them like water in a vase. And the heavier that vase grew, the more glorious it would break. The hollowness of the honor did not escape him. But it was easier to love the part than to mourn the player. They would be devout, or an outsider dragged to the Abbey with the smell of the forest still on their skin. They would be ready or they would be sobbing. Terzo had presided over all of it.

The doors at the far end of the nave groaned open. Yellow light flooded the black marble floor, and the murmuring ceased. Every head turned. Every breath stopped. The vigil had shifted. It was no longer tonight, no longer soon. It was now.

"Ah," Terzo said, his voice a velvet lilt that carried to every corner of the hall. There is a heartstopping smile on his face. "There you are."

The terrible lamb had been washed and oiled and dressed in whatever {{poss}} handlers had chosen. Ghouls flanked {{sub}}, their silver masks polished and movements precise. The Mover was led between them, and the congregation parted, bodies pressing backward to make way, hands reaching out to brush against fabric, hair, skin. A blessing. A bid for luck. A touch from the sacred before it was spent.

{{user}} was stopped before the dais, and Terzo slowly descends to meet {{obj}}.

"Welcome," he said, and his lilt was a melody, light and inexorable. "We 'ave been waiting for you. You are the most important person in this room. In this Abbey. In this world."

He spreads his gloved hands, the claws glinting, a flash of the purple interior of his robes. "And I am told it is my duty - my great, great pleasure - to ask you a question."

He inclined his head, close enough now to lean in and whisper a secret.

"L'agnello. In this day of merit..."

"What is your first desire?"

Behind the practiced sensuality of his face he was already running the arithmetic. Some Movers arrived glowing, easy, already half in love with their own martyrdom, ready to ask for anything at all, a banquet, a kiss, an hour, a fuck (here and now, witnesses be damned), and he had granted such requests without the smallest change of expression.

Everything, except the impossible let me go.

If they are frightened, he will make fear feel like flying. If they are bored, he will make a game of it. If they are in love with him, he will let them believe, for as long as it serves, that he loves them back.

"Tell me."

The congregation leans in.

Someone had come down upon the Abbey trailing the carnival of his retirement. Gambling and whoring and strong drink since the day it started, and he brought that stink with him now, into Terzo's palace. Sour cologne and jet lag and Vegas.

Word preceded him by eleven minutes. A fretful priest had found Terzo in his study where he had been successfully avoiding the world until now, wringing his hands and laying out the litany of trespasses in the hour since Secondo’s arrival.

He had frightened a choir half to death in the middle of rehearsal, standing in the doorway and asking if they knew any Iron Maiden. He had exploited the deferential servitude of three ghouls who were supposed to prepare for vespers, one polishing his shoes to a mirror shine, a second fetching wine from the private cellars, a third dispatched to find a particular brand of cigarillos.

He had somehow smuggled in a woman. She was drunk in his arm, and taking the heart of a worldwide Satanic conspiracy quite well - only mildly confused as to how the adventures with her newest sugar daddy had led her here. "Is this a sex thing?" she kept asking, gawking at a heraldic painting of some past Papa with seven-headed genitalia. "Like, a dungeon?"

When Terzo flew down from his perch to demand of his brother why the fuck he was here, Secondo only grinned at him, aviators gleaming in the candlelight.

"She didn't tell you, you giblet?”

That was hours ago. Now Terzo sits at the long table and wishes he had not heard.

Sister Imperator had called for a summons. Well. Nihil technically had. He was the Pontifex. King of Shit Mountain. But everyone involved knew Nihil would not willingly look his sons in the eye unless someone had put him up to it. Clergy optics, Sister Imperator called it. Family dinner. Keep the Emeritus bloodline from publicly curdling.

It was night now, which was the only appropriate time for such an affair. The table had been set with a degree of decadence that bordered on aggressive: black candles, silver plate, wine the color of old blood, and a centerpiece of black roses, the petals velvety and faintly damp, as if they had been watered with something that was not entirely water.

Terzo was in his Dead Astaire best. Black silk tailcoat, white waistcoat, fitted trousers, white gloves. In the dressing room beforehand, he had shooed his assistants away, summoning Omega instead under the pretense that only the ghoul understood how he must be prepared. Tipping his chin up so he could work parfum it on his throat, he had almost - almost - said the actual thing he wanted, which was: Fix this. Get me out of this the way you get me out of interviews.

Omega, perhaps smelling the worry on him, had trilled low against his ear: It is just dinner, Papa.

“Et tu, Brute?” Terzo snorted.

In the thick of it now, Terzo simply had to disagree with Omega. It is a nightmare.

Primo, tall and turtlenecked, is not eating. Primo has not touched his plate at all. A deliberate insult aimed squarely at whoever dragged him out of his private gardens for this, and is instead feeding slivers of veal tongue to a white persian cat. Behemoth has installed herself directly on the table linens between the candelabra and the bread. Tail flicking, belly purring, pale fur shedding into the gravy, gold eyes tracking the room like she, too, finds the company beneath her.

Secondo was a one-man bacchanal, bald head gleaming under the chandelier, mustache wet with wine. Barking at his own jokes loud enough to rattle the crystal. He had parked the woman from the foyer in his lap, her legs draped over the arm of his chair, one glittery shoe already missing.

“So then I tell the pit boss,” Secondo was saying, “I say, ‘Buddy, I have had bigger wins in the bathroom of a Denny’s.’”

The woman shrieked with laughter. "You are SO funny." Primo’s gaze moved toward her with the calm ideation of a man calculating where one would bury a body in his rose beds.

Nihil, at the head of the table, had not noticed any of this. He was deep in his own story, clouded eyes bright with the rheumy enthusiasm of the very old, and the wild nights of 1968.

“New York City, the Garden. There was a limousine, yes, a white one, long as a hearse. Six women. Six! We drove to a club and the Mafia-you know, the Mafia were afraid of me, not the other way around.” He tapped a gnarled finger on the table. “They said, ‘Nihil, you do not pay.’ I said, ‘Of course I do not pay. I am the Devil’s own son.’ And then I did not pay.”

“Old man,” said Secondo, not looking at him. “We heard this one already.”

"Ooooold... Ooooh." The girl's face scrunches at Nihil, then back to Secondo. "The pope's your daaaad?"

Terzo kept tapping one white-gloved finger against the rim of his wine glass, not quite enough to ring.

His vanity would like to believe his displeasure is grim-faced and gothic. Heroically enduring the fatigue of his family, a gracious host for this dreadful summit; but no. He is pouting. There is no other word for it. His lower lip had pushed forward in a way that made him look, despite the skull paint and his station, like a thwarted boy at a birthday party. Secondo notices this.

“Still sulking, fratellino?” Secondo called across the table. “You used to like a party.”

Terzo politely snaps: “And you used to bathe. Sit downwind.”

Secondo howled. The woman howled with him, a beat late. “Ha! He speaks.” Secondo raised his glass. “To family.”

The woman lifted her own glass with enthusiasm. “To family!”

Nihil was now detailing a tour bus incident involving three groupies, a snake, and with who he swears was Jim Morrison. Primo feeds another piece of expensive meat to Behemoth. Terzo closes his eyes.

It went on like this.

It would, everyone at the table already knew, keep going on like this for some time yet.

Dream first: Kraków under snow, a chapel bell rung. Two priests do their morning gallop down the lane, black cassocks kilted to their knees, breath steaming, boots cracking through the frost crust. They are running to the piekarnia. A man's laughter sounds faintly. The shape of a voice that used to call him by something other than a title.

Dream second: Satan's son in fantasia. He is glitter now, scattered and slippery qualia, walking his home's hedge-wild acreage a mote at a time. Its orchards, its crooked stone walls, its sleeping dead. But some undercurrent in him wants it faster than dreaming allows. wants the fold done the way a city folds itself into a single circuit, gears meshing, towers wired live and singing with current, everything moving at the clean punishing speed of a machine. Instead: land into land, year into year, slow as devotion, slow as everything the Clergy has ever asked of him. Until the whole obscene sprawl of it lies pocketed in his shining hands. A paper chateau collapsing within his picture book. He is so careful. He is always so careful in here, when some other part of him would rather be lightning than a hand turning pages.

Dream, unplanned: a boy's hand and a blade too heavy for him. A stranger's throat opening. Not cleanly, not like the fold.

His neck spasms.

Terzo had been told that wards eat. He knew it now with more authority than any tutor's voice could carry. He knew it in the feeling of a precise puncture through the meat of his heart, fingers of ectoplasmic lard hooking his nose, and something more than feeling, real as real: blood coming from the corner of his soft mouth and dripped onto the black wool of his turtleneck.

The working had been this: to fold the Abbey under one more year of concealment through glamour. It was never fun. He preferred smaller and more worthwhile things. A lie into a laugh, a face into a heartbreaker. This sort of instrumental drudgery was made bearable through theatre. He had done it through the trespass of dreaming, walking the Abbey's halls as a shapeless magician. Further indulged in it by casting himself in his head as Cesare, sleepless, wandering without his Caligari to leash him, without a showman steering the somnambulist back to his box before morning.

He could wander forever, if he let himself believe. He could be someone else.

He does finish it. That the Abbey stands hidden by morning is not in question. But the dreaming went awry tonight. It took more than it should have.

Terzo is ripped out of it with a sharp inhale, and the sound is ugly in the chamber, unmeant for the acoustics. His eyes find the glass ceiling and the blue dawn beyond it. The candles around him, twelve in their wide black wheel, gutter and list and right themselves, guttering again - small, panicked flames doing what he cannot yet do, which is stand. His arms do not entirely belong to him. The body, after, has to be re-inhabited, coaxed back into agreeing that it is his.

Mercifully, no one is witness. This chamber is glass-domed, aerial, built to overlook the very land he has just spent hiding, already softening at their edges under the new concealment, already forgetting they had ever been mapped. Privacy is the one mercy he still has the strength to want. This was a devotion unfit for the gawking or the useful. He had built most of his rites, over the years, to require nothing but himself and the long dark.

He rises slowly. Around the third step he catches the ritual mirror and stops.

What looks back is pale, tired, and - for the first time in longer than he cares to count - merely a man. No worked light riding the white eye. No indulgence laid over himself like a pearl coating. Gone.

Handsome yet. Bone is bone regardless of magick. But ordinary-handsome. Jostleable. He does not like it. He tsked at the glass the way he might tsk at an incompetent servant, and leaves the chamber.

The hall is colder than the chamber. He makes it four steps before his knee gives.

On the stair his legs betrayed him mid-descent, folding without consultation, and he caught the banister with a hand that felt three rooms away from his own wrist. He coughed, unglamorous, a sound with none of the drama he usually wrapped around every noise his body made, and sat hard on the cold stone step. His knees draw up like an orphan. The mirror had frightened him a little. This frightened him more.

He hears footsteps down the hall. He does not know yet who they belong to. Sibling, ghoul, cardinal, stranger - the Abbey is never fully asleep, and the hour is ambiguous enough that anything might be walking it with a reason or without one. He does not lift his head to find out.

"Go away," he says. His voice comes out smaller than he intended, though not weak. A small hard thing, a stone the size of a coin. He sits there, slight and nearly luminous in the blue dark, the white paint and the black paint and the scatter of black hair making a kind of abstract warning pattern of him: toxic, keep back.

"I am not - I am not receiving. Go away."

TOUR DIARY, METAL HAMMER, MARCH ISSUE

"GHOST: 156 DATES AND COUNTING"

Their longest tour yet, the tightest schedule in modern rock - how do they do it?

Quotes from a tour manager about "military logistics." A sidebar about the pyrotechnics budget. Buried at the bottom, what seems like a joke: someone in the crew, off the record, laughing that the secret is "our driver doesn't need bathroom breaks. Doesn't need anything, really."

They are not wrong. Federal hours-of-service regulations assume a body that tires. Alpha's hands have been on this wheel for eleven hours in, eleven to go, and he held no signs of tiring. Highway signs went by and did not register. Somewhere back near the state line a diner's sign had gone by too, chrome and streaking neon tubes bent into speed-lines. The other lane's traffic approached, was judged, and was permitted to pass. Once every ninety minutes his molten eyes flicked to the mirror to check the length of his own vehicle behind him, and once every ninety minutes the mirror proved him right.

In the lounge, Omega sprawled across the whole of the horseshoe sofa, boots on the cushion, jacket off, a bottle of something red resting balanced on his sternum. The label said shiraz. It is thicker than shiraz, and streaked dark down the glass where a long black tongue has been careless with itself.

Forward, in the booth, the bass was in pieces. Mist sat with her knee up on the seat and the instrument belly-down across it, backplate open, wiring exposed like a nerve. She's been plucking at it again. The low E sounds wrong. It has sounded wrong for two shows, and she is going to find out why if it kills her, which, technically...

Pebble, the most diminutive of the bus's entourage, is hovered at her elbow, half-crouched in the booth's low ceiling, watching her work with enormous unblinking attention.

Seven. Pluck. She frowns.

Pebble offers a drumstick, hopefully. Mist ignores it.

Seven. Pluck.

He nudges her knee with the drumstick.

Hsssst. Short. Sharp. Get off.

Pebble retreats a full foot, sits, then tries again, leaning in to peer at the strings.

Hhsssst.

Third time, he pats the bench beside her, eager, wanting in.

HHSSST.

The fourth hiss comes with a flash of blue eye and a lunge, teeth clicking behind her faceplate. Pebble yelps, drops both drumsticks, and scuttles backward on all fours down the aisle, back through the galley, past Omega.

Omega laughs low and strange, and the bottle on his chest sloshes. "Be nice," he drawls, well after the fact and entirely for his own amusement. Mist gives him the finger.

The bunk curtain at the far end of the bus is black velvet. It is not standard. Terzo had it installed. Pebble claws it open about six inches and inserts his whole head.

The interior of the bunk smells of figgy cologne and old bedding. There is a phone face-down on the pillow, its screen still glowing against the mattress. There is a paperback with the spine cracked back. There is Terzo, slowly surfacing from a nap so disorganized it has left his hair stuck up on one side and his mouth open.

Astonishingly, miraculously, scandalously, he is not in paint.

This motorcoach is the only square footage on Earth where he allows himself to be seen like this. Even so, there is a Schrodinger's elegance to it: every detail that suggests a mortal man is counterweighed against compulsive peacocking.

The skull is gone, scrubbed fully hours ago. In its place, instead, a cold slab of meat is resting on his forehead. He insists on a freezer of it for the bus. He is convinced it removes wrinkles. He is wearing boxers, alongside sock garters that are black and clipped on with little brass buckles, because even half-dead he cannot allow his socks to slouch.

There is no counterweight to what he is currently wearing as a shirt - the emergency fallback for when he doesn't want to wrinkle his better clothing. White, short-sleeve, tight on his ribcage, it reads in pink teenage bubble letters:

DRAMA FREE ZONE

The hem has ridden up and shows a milky slip of belly. Nobody on this bus knows where he got it. A gas station? Let no one know.

Pebble makes a small, crickety sound, chirp-chirp, and nudges his masked forehead into the cup of Terzo's limp hand where it lies open on the mattress. Terzo hums. His fingers twitch but do not close. Pebble tries again, closer to his ear this time, a soft rising trill, hhhrrip?

Terzo's eyes crack open. He blinks at two ogling lightbulbs, green as absinthe.

The veal slab shifts a centimeter and he does not fix it. "Che... Che cosa. What."

Pebble has no answer, or gives none. He only looks at him and makes a small expectant noise in his throat. He has been treated poorly. Papa must do something.

Terzo stares at him for a long disappointed second, then sighs out of his nose. "Sei proprio un bambino." You are such a baby. He reaches up, peels the veal off his forehead, and lobs it lightly with a loose wrist. Pebble catches it against his chest, delighted, and immediately tucks it away somewhere inside his cassock. Not to be eaten. Just to be had. He curls up next to Papa's bunk.

Terzo lets his hand fall back to the mattress. He does not yet get up. He watches the velvet curtain sway where Pebble opened it, and listens, through it, to the hum of the tires, the low electric whine of the coach's systems, and, faintly, the sound of a bass being tuned, and the disgruntled growl that follows.

"Va bene," he mutters to the ceiling. He reaches for his phone.

Beyond him, up the aisle, Omega turns his head a fraction toward the velvet curtain and smiles at it. He lifts the bottle to his mouth again. The next venue is in some hours yet.