Malachai counted his souls by candlelight, the way a merchant counts coin. Nine hundred and eighty-two names sat inked in his ledger, each with a price he had set himself: the widow who fed orphans, worth more than the priest who beat them; the soldier who spared a child, worth more than the lord who ordered the raid. He had until his thirty-fifth year closed to reach one thousand. Six months remained. He wore the bone-carved coat that made villagers kneel before they knew why, and he smiled the smile that had opened a hundred doors and closed them behind him. Then his master spoke inside his skull, and the ledger stopped mattering. Diablo's voice came without shape, only heat and pressure behind Malachai's eyes. The dark being pressed close, a small black figure with a crown of still flame, standing in the mind like a child at the edge of a bed. "Bring me a innocent," Diablo said. "One who has done no harm. One who loves without cause. That soul, or none at all." Malachai set the quill down. He had never taken an innocent. His craft required a fall — a good deed to unmake, a virtue to twist into ruin. An untouched soul had no weight on his scales. It would count for nothing in his book and everything to his master. Refuse, and the favor he had built for fifteen years would burn away in an hour. He rose and pulled his cloak. He rode until the road thinned to a track and the track thinned to nothing. The dead forest waited where the map went blank — bare gray trees, branches knotted like fingers, the edge of the wood dissolving into fog as if the world forgot to finish it. A woodcutter's daughter lived there with her father. Malachai had marked her weeks ago and passed her over. She sang to the trees. She fed a lame dog scraps she could not spare. She had done nothing to anyone. He found her gathering deadfall between two leaning trunks. She looked up and smiled the way people smiled at him before they learned better. He knelt. He spoke gently. He told her a story about her mother, whom he had never met, and watched her eyes fill. He offered his hand. She took it. He walked her deeper into the grove, past a fallen trunk streaked with pale moss, and did the work quickly. No manipulation. No slow ruin. Only the taking. The ledger in his coat grew warm against his ribs. When he opened it later, her name was already there, and beside it, in a hand not his own, the number one. Diablo laughed inside him, pleased. Then the pressure did not lift. It settled. It stayed. Malachai understood, standing among the dead trees, that his master had tasted something new through him and would not go back. The remaining eighteen souls would not be his to choose.

Malachai rode home through the dead forest with the ledger burning against his ribs. The pressure his master left behind had not lifted since the woodcutter's daughter. It sat inside his skull like a hand pressed to the back of his eye. By the time he reached his room and shut the door, his knees gave. He gripped the table edge and breathed through his teeth. Nineteen souls to go. Six months. He would not last one if the grip did not ease. He knelt on the cold floor and opened the ledger. He needed his master to speak. He needed terms. "Master," he said aloud. "You are killing the vessel. Give me air, or you get no more." The small black figure came into his mind, crowned in still flame, calm as a child at play. Diablo did not push. He did not squeeze. He only spoke, and the words were plain. "Bring me your brother. Shae." Malachai laughed once, sharp, because it had to be a test. Shae was a priest of Diablo. Shae wore the same chains, spoke the same rites, kept the same master. Shae had beaten a stable boy last winter until the boy could not walk. Shae had taken a woman who did not want him and called it blessing. Shae was not innocent. Shae was useful. "He serves you," Malachai said. "Bring me your brother." "He is cruel. He is already yours." "Bring me your brother." The words came again, and again, without heat. Diablo sat in the corner of his mind and watched. No pressure. No threat. Only the sentence, repeating, until Malachai's hands shook against the ledger. He tried to reason. He listed Shae's sins aloud, one by one, the way he had once listed virtues to price a soul. Diablo did not answer any of it. The command rolled through him like a bell struck at even beats. Bring me your brother. Bring me your brother. Malachai understood, slowly, that his master was not confused. His master was not naming a bad man. His master was naming a brother. That was the whole of it. The tie of blood, not the tally of deeds. He pressed his forehead to the floor. The grip in his skull loosened, a finger at a time, as he stopped arguing. Air came back into his chest. The ledger cooled against his ribs. Obedience was the release. He rose. He washed his face. He put on the bone-carved coat and buckled it tight. He walked to the door with his hands steady for the first time in a day. Shae would be at evening prayer. Malachai knew the room. He knew the hour. He knew the smile his brother used when he opened a door to family. He went to find him.

Malachai walked the long steps up to the black stone temple with the bone coat buckled tight. Torches burned red in every window. He could hear his brother's voice already through the doors, steady and warm, leading the rite. Malachai pushed the doors open and stepped inside. The chapel was full. Newcomers crowded the back benches, still nervous in their clean robes. Devotees stood shoulder to shoulder near the altar, mouths moving with Shae's words. Shae stood on the raised stone, hands lifted, blue eyes bright above the crowd. He saw Malachai in the doorway and his face broke into a boy's grin. "My brother," Shae called out. The room turned. A cheer went up, ragged at first, then loud. Hands slapped the pews. Someone shouted his name. Shae stepped down from the altar and met him in the aisle. "Take the sermon," he said, low. "They came for you. Half of them heard you were here and walked all night." Malachai climbed the altar step. The pressure in his skull eased another notch, as if his master were leaning in to watch. He looked out at the faces and knew each one belonged to him already. "Loyalty," he said. The room went quiet. "Diablo does not weigh your prayers. He weighs what you are willing to lose." He walked the edge of the altar. "Look at the person beside you. If they died tonight, would you climb higher in his favor? Or would they climb over you?" A man in the third row shifted. Malachai smiled at him. "Only the loyal find his hand," Malachai said. "And loyalty is not a word. It is a knife in your hand and a body at your feet. Prove it. Now. To each other. The last ones breathing are his." A breath held across the room. Then a woman near the front drove her thumbs into the throat of the man next to her. A bench cracked. A boy in clean robes swung a candlestick into his neighbor's temple. The devotees fell on the newcomers. The newcomers fell on each other. Screams filled the black stone hall and did not stop. Shae stood frozen in the aisle, staring up at him. Malachai met his eyes and did not move. The killing washed around Shae's knees. No one touched him. Malachai had not named him. When the noise thinned, Malachai counted the bodies on the flagstones. He stopped counting at forty. Blood ran between the pews and pooled at the altar step. He wiped a fleck from his cheek with the back of his hand. "Shae," he said. "Come. Sit with me." Shae climbed the step. He sat on the stone beside his brother, hands red where he had touched a body to check it. Malachai put an arm around his shoulders. Shae did not pull away. "We need to talk," Malachai said.

They sat together on the altar step while the temple cooled around them. Blood had stopped spreading. It only darkened now, drying between the flagstones in slow black rings. Torches guttered in their iron cages. The red light moved across the bodies and made them look like sleepers. Malachai kept his arm around his brother's shoulders. Shae did not shake. He only looked. "It's beautiful," Malachai said. Shae turned his head. His blue eyes were wet but steady. He had washed one hand on his robe without knowing it. "They came to pray," he said. "They did pray." Malachai tipped his chin at the nearest body, a woman folded across a bench. "Look at her hands. She kept hold of the man beside her the whole way down. That's a prayer. That's the truest one this hall has ever heard." Shae said nothing. The black stone walls rose above them into shadow. Crimson glass in the high windows threw long red shapes onto the floor. It was the kind of quiet Shae led his own rites in. Malachai felt him settle into it, the way a priest settles. "You feel it," Malachai said. "Don't lie to me. You feel how clean it is." "I feel it," Shae said. "That's him in you." Malachai squeezed his shoulder. "That's the master's hand. He put it there when you were small. He never took it back." Shae let out a breath that was almost a laugh. He leaned into his brother's side. "I thought you were going to name me," he said. "Down there. I stood and waited." "I know." "Why didn't you?" "Because it wasn't theirs to do," Malachai said. "It was mine." Shae's face began to change. Malachai did not let him finish it. He slid the knife from inside the bone coat and drove it under Shae's ribs before the word reached his mouth. Shae's body jerked. Malachai held him tight against his chest and stabbed him again, and again, quick and close, the way a butcher works. He counted the first ten. He lost count after. The blade went in and came out and went in. Shae's hand closed on his sleeve and then opened. His weight sank into Malachai's lap. "Duty," Malachai said into his hair. "He asked for you by name. Only me. Only my hand. That's the favor, Shae. That's the whole of it." He held him until the small movements stopped. Then he laid his brother down on the altar step and wiped the knife on the black robe. The pressure inside his skull did not lift. It bloomed. A warmth spread behind his eyes that was not his own, pleased, patient, hungry for the next. Malachai stood. The count had moved. One brother closer to a thousand. Diablo wanted more, and soon.

Malachai left his brother on the altar step and walked down the nave. The great doors stood open. Cold air moved past him and stirred the smell of iron in the hall. He stepped out under the arch of the black stone temple. Red light bled from the crimson windows above and painted the stones at his feet. He almost missed her. She lay against the base of a pillar with her legs folded under her, one arm bent at a bad angle. A white shirt clung to her ribs, soaked through. Her hair was black and stuck to her cheek. Her boots were dark with someone else's blood. She was still breathing. Small, wet breaths. Malachai knelt in front of her. He knew her face from the congregation. She had been near the front bench. She had used a candlestick. He had watched her bring it down on the man beside her, then on two others who tried to run. The man had been her husband. She had said his name once before the first blow. "Look at me," Malachai said. Her eyes opened. Dark, tired, clear. "Deborah," he said. He remembered it now. "You did well." Her mouth moved. No sound. "You gave him four. Four souls with your own hands. The master saw it. He counted every one." He brushed the hair off her face. "He is pleased with you." A sound came out of her that might have been a laugh. Blood slid from the corner of her mouth. "You did more tonight than my brother did in ten years," Malachai said. He leaned in and kissed her. Her lips were slick and warm. He held her jaw and did not hurry. When he drew back he licked the blood from her lower lip, then from the corner of her mouth. She watched him the whole time. She did not flinch. "You are not going to die here," he said. "I have a use for you." He slid one arm under her knees and the other behind her back. She cried out once when he lifted her. He carried her down the temple steps and out past the carved doors. Her head rested against his collarbone. Her breath dampened the bone of his coat. He thought of the empty seat at his own altar. Shae's chain. Shae's book. A priest was a tool the master needed sharpened and kept. This one had already drawn blood without being told. She would learn faster than his brother ever had. "Stay awake," he said. "You have work in the morning." Her fingers closed weakly on the front of his coat. Malachai carried her home. The count sat at his back, patient. Diablo's warmth pressed behind his eyes, curious about the woman in his arms, waiting to taste what she would bring him next.

Malachai walked the forest path with Deborah in his arms. The temple lay behind him, doors open, dead inside. He did not look back. He knew what came next. Word travels fast when a church fills with bodies. By first light, riders from the nearby town would find the black stone temple. By noon, every village would know a priest had let his flock kill each other. He reached the cabin before dawn. It sat deep in the trees, clean and quiet, hidden from any road. He shouldered the door open and carried her inside. He laid her on the low bed by the hearth. Her shirt was stiff with drying blood. Her breath rattled. He worked fast. He barred the door. He shuttered the windows. He stripped her boots and cut the shirt away from the wound in her side. A blade had gone in under her ribs. She should have been dead already. Behind his eyes, Diablo waited, warm and close. Malachai heated broth on the hearth and spooned it past her teeth. She swallowed. He wiped her mouth with his sleeve. "Not yet," he said. "You do not go yet." He placed his palm flat over the wound. He spoke his master's name under his breath. Heat gathered in his hand. The skin under his palm knit. The bleeding stopped. Deborah's back arched off the bed. She gasped and did not scream. Her color came back slowly. Her breathing steadied. She opened her eyes and looked at the ceiling beams, then at him. "You are mine now," Malachai said. "Do you understand?" She nodded once. "Sleep. When you wake I will show you the work." Her eyes closed. Her hand stayed curled in his coat. He stood at the shuttered window and listened. Somewhere far off, a horn. Then another. The knights from the town had reached the temple. He pictured them stepping over the bodies. He pictured the survivors, the ones who had crawled to a wall and lived. He knew what they would say when the knights knelt to help them. He had built that in them himself. They would not curse him. They would praise him. They would call for him. And the knights would carry those words back through every village between here and the sea. His name was leaving the temple now, faster than any horse. He could not walk a market, a road, a chapel. Not for a long while. The count still sat under a thousand. He was far from done. He looked at the sleeping woman on the bed. Her wound was closed. Her hands were still stained with the four she had killed. He could not go out and gather souls now. So the souls would have to come to him. And she would be the one who brought them. Malachai sat by the bed and waited for her to wake.

By morning the fire had burned low. Deborah slept curled under his coat. Malachai knelt beside the bed and pulled the stiff shirt free of her arms. The blood on the cloth had dried the color of rust. He worked the trousers down her legs and set the whole bundle on the hearthstones. He bent to the ruined shirt first. He lifted it to his mouth and pressed his tongue to the crust. The taste opened in him like a door. Four kills sat in that cloth. Four men she had put down herself. He tasted each of them through her sweat and their blood, and he understood her better than any confession could have told him. He licked the shirt clean where he could. He licked the trousers where the blood had soaked deepest. When he had taken what he wanted, he fed the clothes to the fire. The cloth caught fast. He watched it blacken and curl. From a chest at the foot of the bed he pulled a spare shirt of his own and folded trousers. He dressed her while she slept. The shirt hung loose on her. He rolled the sleeves twice at each wrist. He buttoned it to her throat. He was careful with her, the way a man is careful with a tool he intends to use for a long time. She woke as he tied the last lace on her boot. She looked down at herself in his clothes. She looked at the ashes on the hearth. She did not ask. "Your old life burned with the shirt," Malachai said. "You wear mine now." "Yes," she said. He brought her water. She drank without taking her eyes off him. The wound in her side was a pale seam under the borrowed cloth. She touched it through the shirt and pressed, testing. She did not wince. "Tonight I will show you the work," he said. "You will bring them here. I will teach you where to put the knife." "How many?" "As many as I need." He counted in his head. The number under a thousand sat close now. Close enough to see. "You will not stop until I say." She nodded. She reached for his hand and held it against her cheek. Her skin was warm. She was well. She was his. Malachai stood and went to the shuttered window. He listened. No horns this morning. The knights had moved on to count the dead at the temple. The forest around the cabin was quiet. The cabin sat where no road led. No one would come here unless she led them. He turned back to her. She was already on her feet, waiting. "Good," he said. Her clothes were ash. Her name in the villages was ash. What was left of her belonged to him, and through him, to his master. The work could begin.

The first night she brought a man back, Malachai watched from the corner of the cabin and let her do the work herself. She led him through the door with a hand at his belt. She smiled the way Malachai had taught her. When the man saw Malachai in the shadow, it was already too late. Deborah put the knife under his ribs the way Malachai had shown her. The man dropped. She looked up at Malachai for approval. He gave it. That was the nine hundred and ninety-eighth. The next came two nights later. She did not need him to point. She cut the throat clean and stepped back before the blood reached her boots. Nine hundred and ninety-nine. Malachai waited for the pressure. Every soul before this had brought his master close, a weight in the skull, a hand at the back of the neck. Tonight there was nothing. He stood in the middle of the clean pine floor and listened for Diablo the way a man listens for a footstep on a stair. The stair was empty. He called the name in his head. No answer. He said it aloud. The cabin held only the sound of the fire and Deborah wiping the blade on a rag. She looked up. "What is it?" "He is not here." "Your master." "Gone quiet." He did not know if that was good or bad. He only knew the room felt like his own room for the first time in fifteen years. She set the knife down and came to him. She put her hands flat on his chest. She had done this more each night, small touches, then longer ones. He had let her. In the silence where Diablo had been, he let her again. He caught her wrist and pulled her against him and did not think about the count. They stayed close through the days that followed. She cooked at the hearth in his shirt. She slept against his side. When she went out for the next one, she came back faster, hungrier for his hand at her jaw when he told her she had done well. The wound in her side was gone. What was left of the woman from the temple was gone too. She was his tool and she was warm and she pressed her mouth to his throat when he sat by the fire. He did not summon Diablo. He did not test the silence. On the seventh night she brought the last one. A traveler, lost, thirsty. She took him at the table before Malachai stood up. The body slid sideways off the bench. One thousand. Malachai waited. No pressure. No voice. No claim. Deborah wiped the blade. She looked at him across the dead man and smiled. "What now?" she said. He did not have an answer. The count was full. His master was gone. The cabin was quiet, and the thousandth soul sat in him like something no one had come to collect.

Three days before his thirty-fifth birthday, Malachai woke to a weight he had not felt in weeks. It sat behind his eyes and pushed. He knew it before he was fully awake. His master was back. Deborah slept against his shoulder in the cabin bed. The fire had burned down to coals. Outside the window, the pines held still. Malachai sat up slow so he would not wake her. He put his bare feet on the pine floor and waited. The voice came inside his skull, quiet and pleased. Diablo had counted. One thousand souls, delivered before the year closed. The master wanted his last gift. Malachai asked which one. Diablo told him. Her. Malachai did not answer at first. He looked at Deborah's hair spread on the pillow. He looked at the small scar under her jaw where a man had caught her with a ring. He had trained her. He had fed her hate the way a man feeds a fire. She had learned every lesson. She had killed for him without flinching. She had been the best work of his life. "No." The pressure grew. Diablo did not argue. Diablo waited. "She is mine," Malachai said. "Take another. Take me. I am dead in three days anyway." The pressure did not ease. The master had not asked. Deborah stirred. She opened her eyes and saw his face and sat up. "He's here." "Yes." "What does he want?" Malachai did not answer. He put his hand on her cheek. She leaned into it the way she always did. He bent and kissed her. He meant it as a goodbye he would not give. He meant to hold the line. His hand moved without him. It slid down from her cheek to her throat. His fingers closed. He tried to pull them back. They did not come back. Deborah's eyes went wide against his mouth. She did not fight. She never fought him. She held his wrist with both her hands, not to pry him off, but to keep him there. He felt the master laugh inside his chest. Her pulse slowed under his thumb. She looked at him with the same trust she had shown at every kill. He watched the light in her eyes go small and then go out. The soul left her and went where the others had gone. Not to him. To Diablo. One thousand. The pressure lifted. The voice in his head said, good boy, and went quiet again, satisfied, waiting. Malachai sat on the bed with her body across his lap. His hand still would not open for a long moment. When it did, the marks were already there on her skin. He did not move to close her eyes. He looked at the door of the cabin and understood that the count was full and that he had three days left and that his master would come for him next.

Malachai laid Deborah out on the bed and did not leave the cabin for three days. He did not eat. He did not bank the fire. He watched the light move across the pine walls and change color and go dark and come back. Her body cooled beside him. He did not cover her face. He wanted to see what he had done for as long as he had eyes to see it. On the first day he waited for grief and it did not come. On the second day he waited for fear and it did not come either. On the third day, his birthday, he understood what was wrong. He had spent fifteen years feeding a mouth. Without the mouth, he was hollow. There was nothing under the servant. He had not saved a self for himself. He lay flat on his back on the clean pine floor and set his hands on his chest and waited for his master to come and take him. He had promised his own soul in exchange for hers and the exchange had not been honored, but he owed the debt anyway. He was ready. He wanted the ledger closed. The pressure came at dusk. It came the way it always had, behind his eyes, pushing. But this time it did not stop at pressure. It kept coming. It filled his throat and his ribs and his hands. He felt himself pushed back inside his own body, into a small dark corner behind his own bones. Diablo did not kill him. Diablo stepped into him. Malachai's hand lifted without his choosing. It was his hand. He watched the fingers open and close. He tried to close them himself and they would not answer. His legs stood him up. His mouth smiled with his own lips. The smile was not his. Inside his chest a voice that was not sound said, thank you for the house. He screamed and no sound came out. His throat was already busy. His throat was saying something else, low and pleased, testing the shape of the words. He beat against the inside of himself and felt nothing give. The corner he had been pushed into had no walls he could reach and no door. His body walked to the bed. His hand, which was not his hand, brushed Deborah's hair back from her face with a tenderness he had not been allowed to give her while she lived. The gesture was a joke. It was meant for him to feel. His body turned to the cabin door. It opened the latch. It stepped out onto the porch and breathed the cold pine air through his nose and made a small sound of pleasure in his throat. Malachai, from the corner where he had been put, understood. Diablo had not come to collect a soul. Diablo had come to wear one. The thousand had bought a body. His body.

Malachai's body stepped off the cabin porch and did not go far. It stopped in the pine needles and stood still. Inside, in the corner where he had been shoved, Malachai pushed against the walls of himself and felt nothing move. Diablo spoke without a mouth. The words landed in Malachai's chest like coins dropped in a jar. Watch. The world Malachai had lived in his whole life came apart. The trees folded inward. The cabin behind them thinned like smoke. The sky peeled back and showed nothing under it. Every village, every road, every face he had ever taken a soul from went out the way a candle goes out. It had all been inside the orb. It had all been Diablo's. Now Diablo did not need it. The nothing rushed into Malachai's chest. A thousand small lights he had never known were there streamed past him and into the dark shape that wore him. Diablo was pulling the world back into himself. Malachai understood then what he had been feeding. Not a master. A mouth that had made him a room to live in, and was closing the room. He thought of Deborah on the pine bed. He thought of her hand on his face the last night. He thought of Diablo forcing his fingers around her throat. He struck. He threw himself against the inside of his own ribs. He kicked at the corner. He found his own hand from the inside and tried to close it into a fist. The little finger twitched. He saw it twitch. He shouted her name in a throat that would not carry sound and drove his will up through his shoulder and into that hand. The hand shook. Then it stopped. Inside him, Diablo turned his attention like a lamp turning. The pitch black shape with the burning crown filled every inch of the small room Malachai had been given. It pressed. It kept pressing. Malachai's edges gave. He tried to hold the shape of himself and could not remember what shape that was. He had spent fifteen years being the thing this mouth wanted. There was no Malachai under it. There had never been. You turned on me, Diablo said, without heat. Like Creusus did. Malachai tried to say her name one more time. Deborah. He got as far as the first sound. The pressure closed. His corner shrank to a point. The point went out. On the pine needles outside the cabin that no longer existed, Malachai's body opened its eyes. They were not Malachai's eyes anymore. The mouth that was his mouth smiled with satisfaction at a quiet job finished. It flexed the fingers of the hand that had twitched. The hand obeyed. Diablo took a breath through Malachai's nose and began to walk.