PROLOGUE

Norwich Abbey
Midwinter, 1140

He was aware of the Beast's presence long before he set foot inside the cathedral. The structure had that stink about it: not stone and incense as was to be found normally, nor the damp reek of iron from the nave's guard rail, or weevily wood from the scaffolding the stonemasons used to do their carvings. Or beeswax or rat-fur or the urine of beggars asleep or dead here on the wooden pews in the central aisle, wrapped in their traveling rugs. No, it was none of these things.

It was that smell--sweetness--

Grendel von Sydow stepped to one side of the door and drew his sword. The sweetness intensified, as if the Beast understood instinctively the nature of the invasion and was taking precautions to avoid a confrontation. But this awareness was of course impossible, thought Grendel, glancing around and suffering for lack of light of any real degree, even moonlight. They were unacquainted, he and the Beast. There would be no blood games this night.

A bone-hard frost was gathering on the inner walls of the cathedral, ghosting the stone angels which stood watch over the nave, etching the forestry of wood scaffolding marching inexorably upward into the northernmost clerestory. Reed lamps in iron baskets guttered weakly on each of the soaring stone columns and cast their flickering, heatless light across the nave. The only stable light by which Grendel could see these spare details came from an open hole directly overhead. Once a plate-glass observatory portal, it looked to have been smashed by a tremendous force from below; shards of colored glass, as sharp and deadly as the cold iron sword in his hands, were scattered everywhere, glittering, catching the errant light of the baskets and flashing like fallen stars.

Through the hole above drifted a light dusting of bluish nighttime snow--and wind, sweet wind. Shivering, Grendel listened intently to the frozen silence, the spare squeaking of the lamps turning in the winter gale flushing the cathedral with murderous cold.

He listened with tilted head, listened...until the sound came to him. That almost innocuous scrape, the busy scritch of something retreating deeper into the sanctum, so light, so airy, it could almost be the sound of a large rat on the escape or the shoe of one of the Bishop's horses shored up here in the cathedral stables against the bitter cold of midwinter. Almost.

Grendel waited anxiously to hear the familiar grunts and snorts of startled animals, the coughs and snores and dreamy murmurings of the beggars, the noises of subtle sleeping horror as the beast passed across the paths of the mortal and the alive and invaded their dreams with visions of their own deaths, and of darkness.

And yet nothing came. No sounds, no stirrings.

Odd, but not unusual. Grendel had found over many years that in his particular line of work, it was more often the besotted daydreams of bored monks or the overactive imaginations of choirboys which created the fearsome legends of ghosts and haunting demons. Stone angels which spoke and cursed. Were-beasts who drank the blood of unwary pilgrims. Yes, and most of it fodder to draw the faithless back into the folds of the Church, to draw power to it through the persuasions of mortal fear.

And he would have been almost certain that that was the exact case here. Except...what of that broken portal? He looked again at the shimmering shards of glass half-buried in snow, the exotic and awry lead patterns so reminiscent of the pagan symbols that the Bishop of Rochester was so fond of. Approaching it, he noticed many things about the window. As he had suspected, the glass had been broken from the inside by a sudden shove of force, the pieces cracked and allowed to fall in clattering pieces. And yet not a one of the shards had shattered on contact with the cobbled abbey floor. He knelt down and picked out one of the pieces from the bank of snow. The piece was triangular, quite heavy, and just as sharp as a dagger. He smelled it and detected again that particular sweetness. Like vanilla fields in Munich in August...

So the Bishop was not over exaggerating to say that many things were amiss here. Very good. He had traveled thousands of treacherous miles from home to reach Rochester, and generally speaking, he did not enjoy being led on wild goose chases that resulted in some soul's coy confession that everything recorded by the clergy had been a creative lie. He had encountered such behavior so often, sometimes he regretted leaving the mountains and his workbench to pursue this bizarre existence fraught so with danger and mysteries.

He had had his fill once, in a time before mortal life and happiness and, ultimately, misery. Before Ethel. He shook his shaggy head of snow-crusted beard and hair and told himself to cease this useless mental prattling. All that mattered now was the Beast and the Beast's whereabouts.

He stood up, still holding the piece delicately between his fingers, and turned his head to the sculpted ceiling and announced in a strong, surly voice: "I am the Daemon-Bane Grendel von Sydow, and by the power invested in me by the Great Mother, and by those who have gone before me, I command thee to show thyself immediately!"

There was a busy rustling from the shadows cast by the arches of the ambulatory. A rustling--but no response. None from the Beast, none from the beggars or animals. Curious. No--odd. Nothing in Grendel's training or experience recounted this pattern. Nothing at all. His summons, still echoing faintly down the many stone halls, was his only response.

He dropped the shard of glass at his feet. As he suspected, it did not shatter, only slammed solidly against the stone floor of the promenade and lay there, glistening darkly like whetstone.

The sweetness intensified, made his teeth ache. Taking his sword in a two-handed grip, Grendel inched forward into the shadows. Despite his fears and misgivings, of which he had many--too many--he felt compelled to move on, to determine the nature of this peculiar Beast. If it was so strange and powerful a creature as to ignore the summons of a Bane, then surely there was no limit to its evil. And if that was the case, and it was dwelling safely here, at Norwich Abbey, then surely the population of Rochester--or, indeed, the entire world--was not safe from its influence.

He moved on and the noise moved ahead of him. Fingering the iron guardrail, he searched among the dark forest of frost-glittered scaffold poles below the stone ribs that supported the vaulted roof high above his head. The sound seemed to shift, to rise and fall as softly as a whispered secret. Slowly, studiously, he let his gaze travel from one end of the cathedral to the other, from the nave to the ambulatory, from the lighted hole in the ceiling to all the pockets of darkness scattered throughout. But there was quite literally nothing to see. Nothing unusual to see in the dying glow of the lamps--nothing but the gloom of semidarkness beyond them.

Grendel was about to call again to the thing when a movement beneath the lantern of the tower caught his eye. A tall busy shadow momentarily engulfed the choir screen and then vanished up across the roof. Once more he detected the aching sweetness in the air and in his own teeth. But this time it was followed by the rustle of many slippery chainlike things sliding like metal snakes across the floor and walls. Cold beads of sweat gathered on his forehead and upper lip, despite the deathlike cold of the abbey. Never before had he found himself in this position, hunting a Beast whose nature was unknown, whose power and form were unversed.

Grendel closed his eyes and whispered the names of every uncaught Beast he could remember scribbled on the pages of the ancient Manifest. "Akkabal, is it thee? Ishtaz?"

No answer.

"Gibel? Lilith? Is your name Zahrim? What is your name?"

Still nothing..

"I am Grendel, a Bane, and I command thee to show thyself now!" he shouted.

No response but the shuffling, the slithering.

Grendel trembled, shifted his grip on the sword. He was now standing in the central aisle, near the pews, straining to hear the ragged sleeping breaths of the beggars who had taken shelter here this unfortunate night in the Bishop's cathedral. And yet he heard nothing. Nothing at all. The shifting and the gusts of frosty air which marked the beast's passage were far ahead, and so he broke off from the chase momentarily and pressed himself back into the shadows of the walkway. He approached the pew nearest the nave. Upon it huddled a slat-boned beggar under a loose Hessian blanket. Dead of the cold, he wondered? Or simply exhausted?

Reaching out a hand, he touched the back of the pew and jerked it violently back. He stared at his hand, the slippery darkness there. And now he smelled it: the reek of a dirty copper pungency. The sweetness of the grave. He raised his eyes and centered all his attention on the bundle lying upon the pew. And still it took him many moments to recognize the sight before him. No, he was not looking upon an old man in sackcloth; rather, what he had here was a naked creature, naked of clothing, yes, but naked also of skin, of muscle and meat. The creature was little more than a blood-slimed skeleton wrapped in burial cloth.

The horror of the thing froze Grendel with indecision. Never before had he encountered such an atrocity, never in all his travels, in all his battles with hell's army, was he witness to such utter and complete consumption. He quickly made the sign of the cross over the man's gory remains, calling down a silent blessing upon him, upon himself, upon all of the world against this hideous and unnatural invasion of evil.

The rustling sounds were growing distant and indistinct. Grendel realized the Beast was heading farther back, back toward the choir stalls where the Bishop's castrati slept their musical dreams. He scrambled between the pews and fleshless bodies—ah God, perhaps a dozen of them!--running as fast as he dared down the aisle toward the small spiraled staircase close to the northwest door that would take him down into the northern chapel. He peered down to the left through the passing archways as he ran and caught glimpses of the distorted, escaping shadow on walls and windows. It moved so fast, and not like a man, not at all. It moved like wind. But it was not uncatchable like wind.

Or so Grendel hoped.

He reached the stairway and flung himself down, taking the slippery steps two at a time. On the bottom he paused and readjusted the heavy sword he carried. He widened his eyes against the near-perfect darkness of the northern chapel and listened. His panting breath hung about him like a wreath of white smoke. Faintly he caught the sound of the Beast, and he knew it must have finally reached the choir stalls, or, God willing, had passed over them and into the lantern of the tower.

Grendel waited a few moments more, but no cries of horror and agony came from the castrati. He moved as quickly as he dared down the long promenade of the north chapel, listening for the faintest sound, feeling for the slightest change in the current of the air. He called down the Saints' blessing as he moved, called on the Divine Will, that all of the hellbound be returned to their master's kingdom, called on every power he knew of or suspected, sanctified or pagan, called and pleaded for their protection until he became aware of something new.

A new sound. A man--weeping.

There! He spotted it quickly now that he was looking for a human shape: a man crouched at the foot of a baptismal fount, grasping his drawn-up legs, a man weeping like a frightened child, a man who had seen something undoubtedly in the last few minutes which would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Grendel approached the man and knelt down. Man? It was but a boy he had found, a young beautiful boy wearing the long creased habit of a neophyte, his clothing and his ragged long yellow hair dusty from hiding under the fount. The boy looked up but said not a thing to Grendel. And yet his eyes said plenty. Such a young child and such old eyes!

"You're safe now," Grendel told the young priest. "It is no longer here."

The boy looked unconvinced.

"What is your name, Father?" said Grendel.

"Azazel."

Grendel nodded and urged the boy to stand with him. The boy did, but reluctantly. He looked all around the northern chapel as if expecting the creature to come pouncing out at them at any moment. He looked at Grendel's sword and his eyes grew older still and full of misery.

"I am a Bane," he told Father Azazel. "I will not harm you. I will harm the Beast you saw. Did you see it?"

Father Azazel nodded.

Grendel paused a moment to listen, but no sound came to him now. He said, "Can you describe what you saw?"

Azazel shook his head. "It is not anything which should be," he said. "We were frightened and we hid."

"Did you see where it went?"

Azazel glanced up at the clerestory loft.

"Did it fly?"

The priest shook his head, long unruly hair falling across his ashen face. Grendel glanced again at the clerestory; at last he saw the smears of blood on the flagstone, the tracks of something viscous as it escaped vinelike up the chapel wall and into the loft. What angel was it? What angel stole the last shred of flesh from human bones? Not Abbadon, the great angel of the Abyss. Not even awful Sammeal himself, the Prince of Demons.

And then the answer came to him:

It must be a new angel.

Or a very, very old one.

One so old, perhaps, that its name had long since been lost, even to the Manifest. Or a name never written down at all out of a stark, mortal fear of accidental conjuring.

The sound again. Grendel craned his head up. It came from directly above their heads. From the loft, yes. The whispering noise, the noise of something alive and busy. Something unnatural. He raced to the end of the chapel and began climbing the ladder to the loft, quickly, his sword at the ready. Only when he had all but reached the top did he slow and take a long silent breath.

A couple of rungs more and he would be face to face with the horror, the thing that had yet to be named. A thing, perhaps, that no man had yet seen and lived to tell of its sight.

Something took him from behind and he jerked around on the ladder, nearly slipping and taking himself and Father Azazel down with him. The young priest clung to the rungs for support like a little child to his mother, and despite the pity Grendel had for the boy, his anger at being taken unaware could not be ignored. "Go back to the chapel!" he hissed at the boy. "Go back now!"

The boy only looked past him to the loft.

Very well, thought Grendel. I will not be persuaded down because some young mortal fool will not listen to me! Among even his own kind he was old and not easily frightened or dissuaded. And though he felt very badly about human casualties, he had also learned that mortal souls were, by their own admission, foolhardy creatures. How many times had he told his own son Ethel to be careful? And what had happened there? What had happened? He could not be expected to act as the mortals' guardian angel! The Bane did not serve that function. Their purpose was older, more savage and primal than that. Taking his sword in both hands, he peered over the top rung of the ladder.

The thing leapt at him, screeching. A frozen draft of air ruffled his hair and beard. Grendel let loose a startled cry and covered his face with the sword in anticipation of the blow which must surely fall from the thing in the loft.

Birds! It was only the Bishop's waterfowl nesting up here.

Grendel dropped his hands as a pair of geese dropped past him, squabbling noisily. He laughed aloud as he levered himself up. Nothing! There was nothing up here. Nothing unnatural, anyway--only the Bishop's geese and swans nesting in the spare straw of the clerestory.

He took a few steps across the clerestory, then turned to find the young priest standing beside him. He gestured to the scattering fowl. "Birds, Father!"

"Yes," answered the priest. He looked upon them with little concern. "We know."

Grendel felt his laughter die within him.

We know.

We were frightened and we hid.

We. The royal dialect of the underworld.

Without another thought, without hesitation, Grendel swung his sword around and jammed half its length into the belly of the priest.

He expected it: the priest screaming, no scream of mortal pain and terror, but the hollow, echoing cry of the damned, the beast gripping the sword lodged in its belly, its unnatural body already absorbing the iron, the sword growing fiercely hot in Grendel's hands, he letting it go as the beast reeled back across the floor of the clerestory, scattering panicked birds, a snarl of startled anger and pain hissing through its sabre teeth. Grendel expected all these thing, had experienced them all at one time or another in his many years as a Bane—and yet, instead of this reaction, it simply stood there, eyeing him with somber understanding. Grendel let go of the sword and the element grew red hot, burning inside the angel's unholy body.

The angel's expression grew pitiful as it looked on him, looked on him with its large black birdlike eyes. Its ancient eyes. Eyes which had seen everything. Eyes which saw everything. "Even that which you conceal, Grendel, Bane of daemons," it said. "Toymaker." Its voice was soft and musical, utterly without accent. The voice he dreamed in, Grendel realized.

"And what do you dream, Grendel?" it asked, taking a step toward him. "Do you dream of being free, Toymaker? Do you dream of Ethel? Do you dream of killing him, your son, with this very sword?"

"Who are you?" Grendel whispered.

The angel advanced on him, the haft of the sword still protruding from its stomach. As Grendel watched, the iron burned bright candlelight white before melting into a riverwork of veins and arteries that raced up and down through the hellpit creature's body. In less than a few moments it was gone, the sword, vanished inside the angel's unholy flesh. Absorbed! Dissipated, so like a dream. But dreams, like daemons, are never so easy to dispose of...

"I am Azazel, the Shredder of Human Souls," it whispered, this thing, this thing that looked like a human priest but was not as it struck Grendel across the cheek and sent him reeling backwards off the edge of the loft and into the deadly fifty-foot plunge to the chapel floor below. "And you, Toymaker, have been absolved!"