The office was an ongoing argument between a man and his space that the man was losing badly.

  Books had staged an occupation of every surface, annexing the floor in strategic piles and sending advance columns up the walls. Research tools of obscure purpose had been wedged into the remaining gaps like settlers in territory they had no right to cim. The desk was visible only in the theoretical sense — you understood that a desk existed somewhere under there, the way you understand a river exists under heavy ice. The room's one window let in light that immediately went to work illuminating dust.

  Anderson stood in the centre of it, or as near to the centre as was accessible without a map.

  The man behind the desk — somewhere behind the desk — was talking. He moved around Anderson with the distracted energy of someone conducting an examination they find genuinely exciting, which would have been endearing in a room with more floor space. He was mumbling. She caught fascinating and specimen and a long stretch of technical vocabury that arrived and departed without nding.

  David stood in the only unoccupied patch of floor, arms folded, wearing the expression of a man who has witnessed this before and made his peace with it.

  "Which is supposed to mean something to me," Anderson said.

  The man stopped. He looked at her as if she'd said something refreshingly unexpected. Then he threw the book he was holding over his shoulder. It stopped mid-arc, floated briefly, and settled itself onto a pile behind him with a precision its thrower had not intended.

  "I'm sorry — I do go on," he said, with the energy of someone who knows they go on and considers it charming. "Mickel. Head Mage of Carnelian's Inquisition. Just Mickel is fine — no point wasting time. You are?"

  "Anderson, I think," she said. "As for the rest—"

  "Anderson," David said from the corner, as if completing a citation. "Of House Dreamer. A Capital noble with moderate wealth and a very interesting house." He looked at Anderson's face as he said this, watching it.

  It moved. Briefly. Went confused, went somewhere else, and then came back as a smile that arrived a beat too te to be entirely convincing. Mickel had already looked away.

  "Now." Mickel's gaze had the quality of a mp that's been lit for something specific — bright, and not for the room. "You have one job: make her less confused."

  "I am already giving her my simplified brilliance," Mickel said.

  "Answer her questions. Then stop until she asks more."

  The books shifted in the silence that followed. One fell off a shelf. Mickel looked at it with the expression of someone who would deal with that ter.

  "As you wish," he said.

  Anderson looked at them both. Then: "What exactly happened to me?"

  Mickel leaned against something she hoped was stable. "A very dangerous thing tried to take you over," he said. "But it took too long, and its choice of location was suboptimal." He looked to David.

  "Priority," David said.

  "And," Mickel continued, at speed, "it is an Aspect of a Great Nightmare. Before you give me that face — they are Great Beings sealed by the gods the Inquisition follows. Even sealed, they feed on the world's suffering, growing stronger, cutting away pieces of themselves to create Aspects. Sending those Aspects out to feed further, to break, to gather. All in the name of the great father and mother. Fascinating, isn't it, how—"

  He stopped.

  "So I'm a frozen meal," Anderson said, "that's still alive because whatever ate me had poor digestion."

  "What a revolting way to phrase—"

  "It was a metaphor."

  "Stick to facts. Don't traffic in the devil's words."

  "It was a metaphor. Why are you—"

  "The devil's words is what they are."

  Anderson turned a look at David that communicated, clearly, a request for intervention.

  "Just continue," David said.

  Anderson breathed. "My next question is important." She straightened slightly. "Why is everyone so calm? That thing — the one with the purple scales — it seemed considerably more capable than anything I saw in that room. Yet you treated it like an inconvenience. Why?"

  Mickel's brightness shifted into something more serious. "There will be signs," he said. "When the thing inside you loses control of the vessel — and I mean both yours and any other Aspect host — there is a window. Approximately one day where both are completely vulnerable. Difficult to detect in most circumstances." He paused. "But if you know to look for it, you can find an entire situation where both are at their weakest."

  "Can't it simply wait it out?"

  "If its mind is intact, yes. And that is the issue — most lose their minds eventually. Particurly when they're the sole survivor of a failed mission." He tilted his head. "The simplest preventative is company. It must hurt to hear. But the difference between medicine and poison is thinner than you'd like."

  "Speak for yourself," David said, with something almost like humour in it.

  Anderson looked at both of them. "Now you joke," she said. The frustration that came through was specific and directed inward as much as at them — the frustration of someone who expected the worst and keeps finding something more complicated.

  "What else do you want to know?" she asked David.

  "You're beginning to develop an edge," David said. He reached somewhere and produced a musket, which he threw. She caught it badly, nearly dropped it, managed not to. Mickel moved behind her immediately, as if by habit.

  "You're going to learn something useful," David said. "We don't have the luxury of sending out an Inquisitor who can't hold a weapon. Tomorrow, your first lesson."

  Anderson held the musket and looked at it.

  "What," said Mickel, behind her.