Judge Numerous counted faces the way other demons counted coins. He kept each one in a ledger behind his eyes: the shift of a liar's mouth, the flick of a guilty eye. One face he could not count. The exorcist who shattered his original face and stole his true name had left no mark in that ledger. He remembered the pain. He remembered the words that broke him apart. He did not remember the face. That was the problem. A hunter needs a trail. Judge Numerous had none. He went to the cathedral because the old places hold what people leave behind. Rain streaked its weathered stone. Inside, dim light fell through the ruined stained glass and painted the broken pews in colors. He walked the aisle and spoke to the empty air. "Someone saw it happen. Someone remembers the hands that did it." Two green eyes opened in the dark beneath the broken rose window. "I know you," Judge Numerous said. "The one who finds what people hide." He had heard of this collector of secrets. They had never met. He had hoped never to need him. Thoth stepped from the shadow. The hood swallowed his face. Only the eyes burned. "You lost a face," Thoth said. "Not someone else's. Your own." Judge Numerous went still. He had told no one that. "The exorcist took it," Thoth said. "And a name. You want both back." "I want the face of the one who did it," Judge Numerous said. "I cannot remember it." "You never saw it." Thoth circled a fallen pillar. "They came from behind. You felt the hands, not the man." This was true. Judge Numerous had turned it over a thousand times and found only the back of a hood. "Then there is no trail," he said. "There is one." Thoth stopped. "The name they took is not gone. It is buried. A name leaves a shape where it used to sit. Follow the shape and you find the thief." "How do I follow it?" Thoth held out one hand. In his palm sat a small shard of colored glass, warm with dim light. "This held a prayer once. Hold it and speak the first sound of your true name. The sound you cannot finish. The glass will point where the rest of it went." Judge Numerous took the shard. He opened his mouth. One sound came, then caught, like a word with its throat cut. The glass turned warm, then hot. It pulled toward the great doors and the rain beyond. "East," Thoth said. "Something out there answers to the shape of your name." Judge Numerous closed his fist around the shard. He had a direction now. He also had a cold truth: his name was still being used by someone, somewhere, and it was answering them. "One more thing," Thoth said at the door. "I was wrong once about a hidden thing. It cost me everything. If I am wrong now, it costs you."