She was laid on the table. It was cold on her bare skin, and she would have flinched away if she hadn’t been strapped firmly to it. To her left someone moved with soft, deft movements. Though she couldn’t see him, she knew it was the High Cleric. Her mind flickered. This wasn’t, she realized, the first time she’d been strapped to the table in the room with the knives, the room where she’d watched the water carrying boy tortured and lied about her belief in God.

The mental flicker danced on the edge of full-fledged panic.

High Cleric Radden appeared above her, his face well lit by the white tile, not a single shadow to be seen. That was important to her though she couldn’t remember why.

“I must tell you, Devorah, you have been one of my favorites. Getting you to scream has required some creativity.” He held one of his small, thin knives, just on the edge of sight, and he twirled it so it caught the light.

Devorah bit her tongue to keep from screaming. That had become her goal.

“I will kill you, eventually, of course,” the High Cleiric said even as he traced the knife gently down the center of her naked torso. “When I tire of you. But it has been such a joy to break someone so strong.”

Devorah choked on her own blood. She’d bitten her tongue too hard. She coughed and the cough made her feel feverish. She recognized the signs of coming illness.

“You’d better do it soon,” Devorah said, neither angry nor brave.

High Cleric Radden laughed. It was his real laugh, not the laugh meant for others to hear. It was high and cold, not at all suited to his thick-chested, warm-eyed appearance.

“That’s why I like you so much, child. Let’s start with the toes today, shall we?”

Devorah kept from screaming as long as she could. Though it made her bite her tongue and swallow blood, though it encouraged him to be creative, it was her only weapon.

• • •

Devorah was ill.

She lay curled on the cold, tile floor, the bright light compounding a fever headache, shivering with chills, her body coated in sweat. She took her breaths short and shallow, her throat and chest raw with wracking coughs. She couldn’t eat and only drank a little water. Her cell smelled of sweat and bile.

The High Cleric had not come to visit her in quite some time. Perhaps he had tired of her. Perhaps he was letting her get used to his absence. Perhaps he would wait until she had recovered her aplomb then come take it away.

She hadn’t visited the room in her mind for… for a long time. She couldn’t get there. Every time she tried, her head exploded with pain which ripped her chest with coughs which made her shiver with chills and fever. So she stopped trying.

She still couldn’t sleep, so the fever and chills, cough and headache, were augmented by jittery joints, grainy eyes, and fuzzy thoughts. But that didn’t stop the nightmares. They were almost comforting, for they were familiar: monsters in the shadows, bugs crawling over her skin, a young woman bound in chains.

But sometimes her dreams were more detailed and less familiar.

She dreamed of Piety Churchstep, her little sister. The small, white-haired girl hunted the undead, using her powers over light and thought. These dreams made her happy.

She dreamed of Vharmap, her creation. She dreamed of his convalescence and the men and women he had made like himself, who he controlled. One of these men, not as… filled out as the rest, knelt before Vahramp, who lounged on an opulent bed in a dark room. The kneeling man wore the black coat and red stole of a cleric, the once expensive fabric now stained, worn, and tattered.

“Tell me about this… what did you call it?”

The kneeling man cleared his throat, a nervous habit, and said, “It’s called an Intersect. It’s when one of the Realms moves through our Realm. Three of the Realms, the Abstract Realms, do that all the time without any noticeable effect.”

“Yes, yes. But you said something about a light Realm.”

“The Twilight Realm. One of the Outer Immutable Realms. Yes.”

“Explain.”

“You must forgive me sir. I… I wasn’t fully aware when I said those things. I was… hungry. I wasn’t thinking.”

Vahramp smiled. “Yes. Hungry like you are now. So hungry that you might divulge any information for just a taste of blood, eh Father Berek?”

Father Berek shuddered.

• • •

“God’s Crotch is stinks in here.”

“Don’t let His Worship catchin’ you talk like that. He’ll—“

“Yeah, yeah, I know. He’ll cut my tongue out. And that’s probably not all.”

Devorah neither moved nor acknowledge the company. She remained curled in a tight ball on the tile floor. At least the tile was cool against her feverish skin.

“What does he want with the wretch?”

The other laughed. “What does he ever want?”

Two sets of large, rough hands grabbed her under each arm and hauled her up. Devorah opened one gummy eye just enough to see the bright white of the tile.

“She weighs barely nothin’. I could just as easily toss her over my shoulder.”

“This one is classified as extremely dangerous. We carry her together.”

“Bah. I’ve seen flowers more dangerous than this girl.”

Her feet dragging across the floor, Devorah was hauled from her cell and down the hall. She neither knew nor cared where they were taking her or why. They dropped her and she fell into a heap without protest, letting her eye close. When the water hit her it was shock enough to make her scream, her eyes flying open. She tried to stand, but the pressure of the water and her weakened body conspired to keep her off her feet. Her stomach roiled and she vomited. She tried to stand again and fell, cracking her head on the floor. Her stomach clenched again but nothing came up but a mouthful of bile, mucus, and sputum.

When the water did stop, she coughed, igniting the throbbing in her head and chest.

The shock brought a moment of clarity.

Two muscled men in white stood just outside the shower room, chatting. Just behind them stood the twins she sometimes couldn’t remember. Those twins, she thought, must be key, for when they were around, her head felt fuzzy. It was a difficult thought to keep ahold of.

The two large men came into the shower room. She watched them with a peculiar combination of dread and anticipation. But why, she wondered, should she anticipate their arrival. It would only mean being carried somewhere she was unlikely to enjoy.

If only there wasn’t all this cursed light.

The muddled thought hurt her head. She closed her eyes against the pain, and though the light continued to penetrate her eyelids, an image stood forefront in her mind’s eye: a short, rounded bit of leather wrapped wood, an item for which she had no name. But in the same way she knew the twins muddled her mind, she knew the item would clear it.

When one of them picked her up around the waist and tossed her over his shoulder, laughing over the objections of his companion, the man’s belt was just within her grasp. The leather-wrapped bit of the item was just beyond her fingertips.

She reached, stretched her fingers, elbow, shoulder to their utmost. Her middle finger brushed the hilt of the item, the cudgel, and she gasped at the momentary rush of energy. Desperate now, she began to struggle, squirming and kicking, reaching. The man holding her tightened his grip, but her skin was still wet and she slipped through his grasp. As she fell, she grabbed at it, but her hand only brushed across its surface before she cracked her head again on the tile floor. Her vision greyed over and her ears were filled with a high-pitched tone that throbbed with her headache. The momentary rush when her hand touched the weapon was scattered by the head blow.

“What did you drop her for?”

“She started squirmin’.”

Laughter. “I told you we shoulda’ followed instructions.”

Devorah blinked hard. When her eyes opened, she could see as though through a long tunnel filled with light. At the end of the tunnel was a face twisted in anger.

“She’s bleedin’ off the top of her head.”

“His Worship is gonna’ take that off your hide.”

The angry face widened with fear then narrowed with anger. Devorah did not feel the blow that put her on her back, but she did feel her right hand crushed under a solid–booted heel. She probably screamed.

“Aw, come on now what did that help?”

“It made me feel better.”

He grabbed her by the wrist of the broken hand and she gasped. She felt herself about to vomit again, and in a moment of retaliation, she forced herself to focus through the pain, to see the face of the man who held her. His face was round, almost child-like, and stubbled. He had small, black eyes and a broad, crooked nose, and his scalp was shaved bald. As he hauled her to her feet she let her thrice-roiled stomach empty itself and spat it at those black eyes.

Cursing, he staggered back and drew his cudgel. It hadn’t been her intent to provoke him into drawing his weapon, but now he had she saw an opportunity. He swung at her head and she instinctively put her left arm up to ward off the blow. She felt the crack of the weapon on her forearm and was sure a bone had broken. Though it sent pain shooting down her arm, she grabbed for the weapon and, finally, her palm smacked into it, her fingers closed around it, and the familiar strength flooded her, chasing the pain away.

In a matter of moments she jerked the cudgel from his grasp and slammed it against the outside of his knee. A wet pop preceded his collapse. He shouted, surprised more than pained. Devorah wasted no time cracking him on the head hard enough his eyes rolled up. He fell face first onto the tile. All before the other man could reach for his weapon.

The other man, leaner and taller and with a shaggy shock of hair, swung at her sloppily. Devorah thrust the end of cudgel against his armpit. He grunted and dropped his weapon. She cracked her cudgel against the front of his head and watched him drop.

Breathing hard, dripping with exhaustion, Devorah looked around for the twins, the two thin, nervous young men who clouded her head.

How can they be hiding in plain sight? The curse of constant light was abated by the weapon in her hand, but when she opened herself to any stray secret thought, she only encountered a strong mental shield. But that must mean someone is here. Someone who can hide from me.

She swung out blindly and felt nothing.

It seemed wrong to her that she should be encountering a mental shield at all. The power of reading secrets was passive, receptive. She didn’t actively seek them out but let them come to her.

She swung her cudgel again, not with any hope of striking her target, but out of frustration.

She closed her eyes and reached to that shield that shouldn’t be there. She touched it with that part of her mind that knew secrets. What she felt was cool and smooth, completely unlike her own liquid shield. If she were to compare it to a tactile sensation, it would be the same tile that covered every surface of this prison. For a moment, the tile and light were gone, and the twins appeared. The men stood flush against a dingy, grey stone wall, no better lit than an average dungeon. They stared at her, fear plain in their collective expression. The secret of her imprisonment was laid bare. The light-reflecting tile, the secure mental shield everyone wore, the chronic amnesia, had all be projected into her mind by these two men. Apart, one was a weak telepath, the other a weak photokinetic. Together, they were her perfect jailers.

And then they were gone and the white light returned.

Devorah lashed out at where they had been and felt her weapon connect with a body. The white tile flickered in and out of existence.

In a disorienting strobe of light and shadow, she saw one of the brothers drop to his knees, clutching a broken arm. She struck again, letting her instincts guide the strike. But the other of the brothers intervened bodily, and she struck his shoulder a glancing blow.

The false tile melted to nothing. The mental shield that had blocked her vanished as well. With a thought, Devorah wrapped herself in her own liquid shield. She looked at the men huddled on the hallway floor, one cradling a broken arm, the other shielding him, both terrified.

She pointed her cudgel at them. “Stay out of my head.”

They nodded, frantic.

She turned and looked up and down the hall. At one end was a dingy shower room and a pair of unconscious guards, their white clothes not so white as she remembered. At the other, the hallway met a T-junction. Though she held a weapon and all the energy that came with it, she was still suffering from multiple head blows, a broken hand, and exhaustion. She wasn’t certain she could just walk out. On the other hand, traveling the shadows was just as strenuous.

She turned to walk to the T-junction, when High Cleric Radden appeared around the corner.

He planned to kill her. In one of the pockets of his humble robes was a brown leather case, and in that case was a set of small, shiny knives, knives like he’d used to torture the water carrying boy. She wouldn’t give him the chance. Despite her exhaustion, headache, and broken hand, she sprinted at the cleric, intent on clubbing him to death.

High Cleric Radden’s secret thoughts were strangely cold. There was no passion in his intent to kill her, only clinical interest. Even now, as he shifted focus from his future intent to the immediate, it was all cold. He switched smoothly from thoughts of knives to a much more violent and immediate method of killing her. She watched his mind focus on the tiniest bits of reality. She watched him pull them apart, aligning a specific subset. And when the pressure built to its breaking point, the High Cleric could only channel the energy, he could not fully control it.

In desperation, Devorah pulled at the shadows, wrapping in them like a favorite blanket.

Lightning threw the hall into stark contrast, washing out color, deepening shadow. Devorah pulled herself to that shadow. The pressure of the the travel, even so short a travel, was enough to black her out. When she came to, she was assaulted by the stench of burnt bodies.

High Cleric Radden still stood at the end of the hall, the fingers of his right hand smoking. He was looking for her, unconcerned that he’d just killed four of his own men. He saw them as no more than tools, pieces on a chessboard. The twins had been valuable but expendable, the guards less than pawns. She shuddered to think how close that thinking came to her own.

Devorah kept the shadows close and stayed as still as she could: her eyes went dry, muscles stiff, breathing shallow.

The High Cleric scanned the hall, his cold thoughts betraying nothing until a moment before he acted, his mind separating and releasing a blot of lighting at the deepest of the shadows.

Devorah reacted without thinking. She pulled herself into the shadows without destination. The breath was expelled from her chest. She lost her grip on what little consciousness she had left. Devorah slipped from the shadows to the cosmos.

From the cosmos, she could feel her power expanding, like water poured into an infinite bowl. With this much power, she realized, she could pluck the secrets from any mind in any place, no matter their shields, could raise entire cemeteries of undead to her bidding, could drown the world in shadow. Here, there was no pain, no fear, only freedom. Though she had been wary of the cosmos before, this revelation made her see the advantages. From here, Khulanty would be nothing but a chessboard, its people pawns to her whim.

But the thought reminded her of High Cleric Radden’s and jarred her to her senses. With her last conscious thought, she pulled herself from the cosmos to the shadows and wherever they would take her.

• • •

Father Berek knelt before Frederick Vahramp, but she knew that only because their thoughts were open to her. The kneeling cleric was emaciated and delirious. He had not deteriorated to the state of ravenous monster she was familiar with, but neither was he as almost human as he’d been when last she’d seen him. He was babbling.

“An Intersect is a time of great power, master.”

Vahramp was growing impatient. “Yes, you’ve said this before. But how do I get the power?”

Father Berek laughed, a high-pitched giggle better suited to a madman. “Why, you must be there of course. You must go to the heart of the Intersect. Reports clearly indicate that those who are present are… changed by the event. However…”

“Damn you, cleric!” Vahramp struck, fast as he’d ever been, and sent Father Berek sprawling. The frail old man crumpled where he fell. “Where is the Intersect? What do I do when I get there?”

From where he sprawled, Father Berek babbled.

“Star charts. Tristam liked star charts. Tristam, my old friend. It was all he and Willow agreed on. So sad. So…”