Something powerful is drawing Ward back to Devil's Island. Something he thought he had forgotten. He must evade vicious lighthouse keeper George Jaggles in order to rescue it, but Jaggles will soon be the least of his worries. Because an assassin is...
A hand closed over Ward's wrist like a vice. The Brother spun him around and twisted his arm painfully behind his back. Ward cried out. The sound echoed down the corridor. The Brothers, for their part, were strangely silent.
Ward tried to elbow the man in the face with his free arm, but the Brother reached around and took hold of that wrist too. Ward kicked backwards, trying to connect with the man's groin; the Brother simply stepped back out of range, pulling Ward's wrists in opposite directions. The tendons in his shoulders screamed. The Brother spun Ward around to face the others. One of them stepped forward. He regarded Ward dispassionately for a moment, then took hold of his hair in one hand and twisted it, pulling it back to expose his throat.
Ward had to peer over his nose now to see the third Brother. He was a cadaverous man with high cheekbones and sunken eyes, silhouetted by a hatched semicircle of faint daylight at the end of the tunnel. He pulled a knife from his cassock. It was the double of the one that had fallen into the sea off Eblis Island. Its point, reflecting the light from the lanthorn guttering on the floor of the Vault behind Ward, seemed to dance in the air. When Ward had first lit it he had been worried it wouldn't last. It's going to outlive me, he thought now.
The Brother's face was alight with pious ecstacy, his eyes shining as if at some bright vision beyond Ward. It was the face of one who feels the hand of Hatto guiding his own. Ward's last and most desperate hope – that he might be imprisoned – evaporated. He was going to die down here like a nine, and none of his friends would ever learn what had happened to him.
The assassin placed the point of the knife against the soft skin just below Ward's ear. He wondered if there would be pain – if he would die fast or slow. He closed his eyes and tried to summon the dice in his mind. His thoughts went to the Bear and the Turtle, for it didn't matter to him where he was taken – and was it only his imagination, or did the skull lying against his chest grow a little warmer? It seemed the grey curtains of his consciousness swept back for a moment and he glimpsed a dark place lit with traceries of fire like shooting stars. But when he opened his eyes again the Brother still stood before him, and that dreadful pinpoint below his ear had not moved
The Brother's eyes had rolled back in his head. He was softly intoning some kind of rite, or invocation, in a language Ward didn't recognise. The Brother shivered with exultation as he spoke the final words, and the trance seemed to lift from him, like a fog rising from the sea.
There fell a silence so profound that Ward could hear the hiss of the lanthorn in the Vault behind him. Oddly, it seemed to be rising in volume. Perhaps, like him, it was breathing out its last.
The Brother's hand tensed. Ward closed his eyes and waited to die.
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