“Well, that was exciting,” Ash remarked over breakfast, sounding not the slightest bit excited. “So, Faith, why don’t you tell us about this Church ritual of yours?”

What did you know? For all his zeal, he didn’t understand the Ascension Day ritual any more than I did. After we went to all the trouble of impersonating a demonic cult, kidnapping a hapless student, faking a blood sacrifice, and then knocking out most of a forgotten god cult in order to rip motes out of its adept – after all of that was when Ash finally decided to inquire into details.

Faith yawned at him broadly, but for once it might have been due to actual fatigue. She’d stayed out so late that I’d been sound asleep by the time she returned, and there were very faint dark circles under her eyes. Recalling what my archivist had revealed about her age, I studied her face for evidence of cosmetics but saw nothing but smooth, young skin. Her lips curved up in a lazy smile under my scrutiny, and she answered Ash’s question with a caricature of a yawn. “Ooooooh, you see, the Church of the Ecstasy of the Flesh has this ritual to turn people into demons.”

All questions about Faith’s true age vaporized. “What?” I yelped. “You can’t do that!”

“What?” Ash echoed. “Why would they want to do that?”

In response, Faith just yawned again, suggesting that ennui infected the entire Church hierarchy.

“Hypocrites!” he fumed.

“That can’t be possible!” I cried.

Stretching luxuriously, Faith drawled, “Sure it can. It’s easy. I’m not talking about the Skovlander I-stood-in-the-rain-too-long-and-now-my-liver-has-turned-into-a-tentacle kind of demons.” Her voice turned into a pathetic plea for sympathy halfway through that sentence, then shifted into horrified shock: “Or the Iruvian I-thought-it-was-a-good-idea-to-carry-around-a-shard-of-a-Demon-Prince-and-oh-my-gods-now-I’ve-been-corrupted!-How-could-that-have-happened?! type of demons.” From there, her tone modulated into querulousness: “Or even the Tycherosi my-great-great-grandmother-slept-with-a-demon-once-and-now-I-suffer-from-permanent-skin-discoloration variety of demons.”

“I’m hardly suffering,” objected Ash with some amount of genuine annoyance.

As for me, I clenched the rickety armrests of my chair and forced myself not to react.

She pretended not to hear him. “No,” she went on smoothly, “I’m talking about the actual, literal, take-a-person-and-tear-out-their-soul-and-then-put-in-demon-essence-so-they’re-a-demon-in-a-human-body sort of demons. Here, I can explain better with a diagram. Give me one minute!”

She bounded out of the common room and into her compartment. Loud rummaging and clattering filled the stunned silence.

“Ash!” Regaining my wits, I poked his arm over and over until he slowly turned towards me. “Ash Ash Ash! Is she telling the truth?”

Dazed, he replied, “Yes. Yes, she is…. She might be slightly exaggerating…but it’s true.”

I fled U’Duasha and the Demon Princes for a city that celebrated the conversion of humans into hybrid monstrosities?

Faith reappeared in the doorway, staggering under the weight of a giant blackboard and a box of colored chalks. Ash was still too shocked to help her, and I felt no inclination to do so.

“Why on earth would the Church seek to create demons?” he demanded with a ferocious scowl. “Not that demons are bad per se, of course – ” I made a little noise of dissent that he ignored – “but it doesn’t seem like the Church.”

“Doesn’t it? Then let me explain it to you!” Dropping the blackboard on the table with a loud crash, Faith pulled out a piece of pink chalk and started scribbling a googly-eyed stick figure on the left-hand side. “You see, here we have the idiotic victim – oh, sorry, I meant the high-ranking clergyman.”

“Are you claiming that they plan to take a high-ranking clergyman and put a demon in him?” I asked incredulously, glancing at Ash for confirmation.

His attention was entirely fixed on the blackboard.

Faith reprimanded me, “Shh! Busy drawing.”

Chalk squeaked, and an arrow shot out of the stick figure and diagonally upward into a box labeled “Refinement.”

“You take the clergyman, remove anything vaguely soul-like, and extract all his memories and personality. Then you put those purified bits back into him.”

She drew two arrows leading from “Refinement” back to the stick figure. She wrote “Memories” above one and “Personality” below the other. After contemplating her artwork for a minute, she added a question mark after the latter.

“No, that’s not quite right. High-ranking clergymen don’t have personalities. They’re boring all the time. All right. The rest of his unholy soul gets dissolved into electroplasmic energy, which probably powers lamps or something. Hey Isha, don’t you think it’s amazing that our streetlights are full of disintegrated clergymen?”

No, no, I really didn’t. “Where do the motes come in?”

“Patience!” she scolded. “We have to go in order or it won’t make sense!”

Moving to the right-hand side of the blackboard, she scrawled “Hollowing” in giant letters and boxed them. Then she drew a long arrow pointing to it and labeled that “The hopelessly foolish.” With a shake of her head, she crossed it out and wrote “Faithful” instead.

“Not that they’re full of me or anything,” she assured us with a giggle.

Doggedly, I stayed on track. “That’s the girl we identified,” I said. “Kallysta.”

“Exactly!” Faith dragged the chalk along the blackboard with a spine-tingling screech. Now a long arrow led from “Hollowing” back to “Refinement.” “Extra souls help with the memory and maybe personality distillation process!”

“How? Why?” demanded Ash.

“I could explain, but it’s all so very technical. Don’t worry your pretty little discolored head about it.”

“What happens to the victim afterwards?” I asked.

“The hopelessly devout?” Faith gave an uninterested shrug. “They get used for free manual labor, I suppose. They never complain. It’s the best.”

“Uhhhhhhh.” There were so many things wrong with that scenario that I didn’t even know where to start. Even the Gualim, Hollowed and bound to Demon Princes as they were, retained some vestige of consciousness.

“But why is it so important to use Tycherosi for this step?” Ash pressed. “We’ve seen that they were targeting Tycherosi.”

“Patience!” Faith chided. “Young people these days! Always in a hurry!” Very slowly and deliberately, she filled in the bottom half of her diagram, moving back across the chalkboard towards the stick figure. “You see, because the Tycherosi are part demon, their souls have very special properties that make them ideal for binding demon essence to human bodies.”

“Whaaaaaat?” I yelped.

“Exactly!” Faith beamed at me. “I knew you’d like that part!”

She scribbled a cartoon tentacle at the bottom, labeled it “Demon (dead?),” and drew an arrow pointing to a box called “Binding.”

“You coat the demon essence in Tycherosi souls, like balls of mochi. It’s delicious! Wait, that’s not quite right. It’s not really the full Tycherosi souls – just the binding agent refined from them. It’s tastier that way,” she assured us, as if we needed convincing. “Or maybe it’s more like an emulsifier than a coating? Like a demon mousse? Hmmmm….”

I was never going to look at mousse the same way ever again. (Not that I’d eaten it in years or was likely to in the near future, but still.)

“And now, we have ‘bound’ demon essence! It’s the perfect soul replacement! You couldn’t find anything better to complement a clergyman’s memories and lack of personality!” Faith finished off the flowchart with a long arrow pointing back at the stick figure. “Ta da!” Dropping the piece of chalk, she doffed an imaginary top hat and took a bow like a circus ringmaster.

Ash and I gaped at the blackboard and then at each other.

“What the hell?” he snapped. “Is this to make their high-ranking clergy insanely powerful or something?”

“Nooo,” said Faith, sounding annoyed at her prize pupil’s slowness. “It’s to replace their souls, obviously.”

“But why?” I asked.

“Because the soul is the embodiment of sin, or something along those lines.” Standing back, Faith scrutinized her diagram as if it were a painting in an art gallery. “Oh, no, that’s still not quite right!” With a frown and a pout, she picked up the pink chalk again and started modifying her possibly-dead demon cartoon. She added a circular head with x’s for eyes, contemplated it for a moment, and sketched a second tentacle. Then she wrote under it, “Totally not Setarra.”

Setarra, Setarra, I’d heard that term before. Where? “What’s a Setarra?” Was it a type of Akorosian demon?

“No, no, no, try to keep up, Isha,” Faith complained. “I just wrote that it’s totally not Setarra. It’s irrelevant!”

Where had I heard it? I must be slipping if I’d forgotten a piece of intel and its source. “Yes, but – ”

Slowly, as if he couldn’t quite believe his own train of logic, Ash said, “The Church thinks that the soul is evil, so it’s going to replace it with – ”

I interrupted, revulsion in my voice, “A demon?”

“Yes. It’s perfectly obvious to me,” said Faith. “Isn’t it obvious to you? Demons are not-souls; hence, they’re better than souls.”

“Even for the Church of Messed-Up Theology, this is ridiculous,” proclaimed Ash.

“Amen!” I agreed fervently.

“Faith,” he asked, “are you really saying that all the high-ranking members of the Church have demon souls?”

“Only those who have Ascended.”

“So the top levels of the Church are all demons?” I repeated in disbelief. Having already answered the question to her own satisfaction, she ignored me. “Faith! Answer the question! And Ash, tell me if she telling the truth!”

Faith just pulled a chair up to the table, collapsed into it, and slumped over the blackboard. “I’m going back to sleep. Wake me if something interesting happens.”

I barely refrained from smacking her on the back on the head.

“All right, so that’s the Ascension Day ritual,” Ash said determinedly, glowering at the diagram. “Where do the motes come in?”

“Oh, the motes,” said Faith, as if she’d completely forgotten about such a trivial detail. Dumping out her chalks on the board, she took her time selecting the perfect yellow one. “This matches the color of the Unbroken Sun, doesn’t it?” she inquired, holding it up for us to inspect.

“Yes,” said Ash.

“No, no, it’s not quite right. Maybe this one is closer.” She dithered between the two shades of bright yellow and marginally-less-bright yellow while Ash and I fidgeted and grew ever more restless. When she’d tormented us enough, she started drawing little yellow stars on the right side, around “The Faithful” arrow. “See? That’s where the motes go. We insert them into the adorable Tycherosi vic– I mean, girl. She gets Hollowed….” Faith added more stars to the “Hollowing” box. “The motes stay in her soul when it’s converted into binding agent….” More stars appeared along the arrow pointing to the “Binding” box. “Then they get coated onto the demon essence….” She started adding stars to the box, hesitated, and drew dramatic zigzags around it instead. Finally, she finished off with more stars leading back to the stick figure and surrounding it. “Who knows what will happen when motes of the Unbroken Sun interact with demon essence? Maybe they’ll destroy the ritual and everyone involved. Maybe they’ll blow up the Sanctorium in an orgy of stolen souls and demonic essence!”

“What if they get neutralized when her soul is turned into binding agent? What if they don’t do anything?” I felt obliged to ask.

“I can’t imagine that would happen,” Ash pointed out. “There’s no reason for the Church to expect or take precautions against something like that.”

“It does seem like the least likely option,” Faith agreed. “Also, the most boring.”

“What’s wrong with this Church?” I complained, still studying the flowchart. “What’s wrong with the Akorosi?”

“Oh, Isha!” cried the only Akorosi in the room. “If you but gave up your life of crime and devoted yourself to academic pursuits, what a scholar you’d make! You dazzle me with your trenchant questions! You – ” At my expression, she dissolved into a bout of giggles. When she could speak again, she informed us, “The Church does seem to be desperate. At least, lately they’ve been desperately gathering Tycherosi souls, for some reason.”

In a cold, hard voice, Ash decreed, “Just another reason they all have to die.”

“All the Tycherosi?” gasped Faith, absolutely horrified by his betrayal of his countrymen.

“No!”

I decided that it was my turn to haul this conversation back on track. “All right, all right, how are we going to do this?”

Pacing back and forth along the length of the common room, Ash proposed, “Perhaps we could not make her last day of life hellish? Second-to-last day of life, that is. Her last day will presumably be demon infested.” His mouth twisted on the last words, which was certainly a funny sentiment for someone who claimed that demons weren’t evil, per se.

“Ash.” Faith rushed up to him and felt his forehead, fluttering like an anxious mother. “Ash, are you okay?”

He brushed her off impatiently. “Of course not! She’s Tycherosi!”

The sudden revelation rocked Faith back on her heels. “Aaaaah, I see! You feel a sentimental connection to one of your fellow countrymen!”

Forgotten off to the side, I raised my voice. “Maybe we can invite her to tea and put the motes in her cup.” I actually liked Ash’s idea of giving poor Kallysta one pleasant day before she sacrificed herself to a state-sponsored demonic cult.

Faith tsked and shook her head, disappointed by evidence of Ash’s and my compassion. “We don’t want to make her life too nice. She might decide not to be Hollowed after all.”

That raised another concern. “After the whole Kender Morland business, are we sure she still wants to be Hollowed?” His flock – the portion of it in the bar who shredded him with their bare hands, anyway – seemed to be well and truly disillusioned with Church doctrine.

Ash, religious-fanatic-in-residence, betrayed no trace of anxiety on that score.

Faith was the one to reply with a careless shrug, “Probably. The faithful tend to be pretty…faithful.”

Ash elaborated, “And she wouldn’t have been picked if she weren’t extremely so. Maybe we can invite her to the Sensorium, give her a good memory, and while she’s enjoying it, attune the motes into her. How does that work?” Snatching the nearest lightning hook, he waved it wildly, sending electroplasmic arcs crackling through the air.

I hastily ducked behind a chair.

Totally at ease, Faith eyed me with amusement. “Ash, while you’re flailing that around, can you please point it at Isha, as opposed to at me?”

He paid her no attention. One bolt of lightning seared an empty chair. A second bolt struck the one I was hiding behind mere seconds after I scrambled under the table.

“Seriously, Ash?” I protested from somewhere near Faith’s skirts. “It’s not that easy to find good chairs!” In fact, it had taken months of dumpster trawling to collect our mismatched set.

Switching off and leaning the lightning hook against the bar, Ash rolled his eyes. “We can buy more, Isha. We’re insanely wealthy. We could spend a coin and make this place look like a palace, but we’re extremely stingy – as we should be. Anyway, I like the idea of taking Kallysta to the Sensorium.”

Now that the excitement was over, Faith slid down in her chair as if drained of all energy. One of her pink slippers bumped me – on purpose, I thought – as I crawled back out. Through a wide yawn that distorted her words, she said, “I un-volunteer the Sensorium. We’ll invite her to our railcar for a nice day of tea, and crumpets, and biscuits, and mochi, and mousse….”

“We don’t want her here,” I objected. Even if Kallysta were going to be Hollowed the very next day, what if she let slip something during the process? Right now the Church had no reason to ransack the Old Rail Yard for heretics, and I preferred to keep it that way. “Take her to a teahouse. Brightstone is probably too fancy, but somewhere in Silkshore would work.”

“My, my, Isha, don’t you have expensive tastes,” murmured Faith, before suggesting, “Why don’t we take her to meet Nyryx? After all, we want to let her live her last day in the ecstasy of the flesh to appropriately satisfy her beliefs, and we want to perform this ritual somewhere private, far from the gaze of disapproving observers.”

“And you think we can do that in the middle of Catcrawl Alley?” I asked sarcastically. The dockers and sailors might be drunk, but they weren’t that drunk.

“Nyryx has a room,” Faith replied. Then she grinned. “In Catcrawl Alley.”

Our discussion of Nyryx reminded Ash of something. “That clergyman she wanted us to kill – Preceptor Dunvil.”

“You mean the head of the Church in Doskvol?” asked Faith sweetly.

“Yes. Do you think he’s a demon too?”

“He must be, right?” I pointed out. “If all the high-ranking members are demons?”

Since I’d already answered for her, Faith didn’t bother.

Reading her body language, Ash mused, “If it were any other institution, I’d laud its ruthless pursuit of power – but it’s not. It’s the Church.” His face hardening, he said savagely, “If I were going to sacrifice someone, I’d at least give her some happiness first. I hate the Church!”

I absolutely agreed. I didn’t know which was worse: the Demon Princes of U’Duasha, who openly ruled Iruvia through the Houses, or the demonic clergymen of Doskvol, who bedazzled the masses with drug-fueled orgies. “We have to destroy the Church.”

“Isha!” exclaimed Ash in shock.

Faith leaped out of her chair and threw her arms around me. “You say the sweetest things!”

For once, I didn’t fight free. “So do we have a plan?”