“They’ve nothing to do with it,” he grunts.

“You’re acting alone?” I sneer. “Then you’re dumber than I thought. With the support of the priests, you could have held on for six months, maybe a year. Alone, you wouldn’t last a month.”

“We’ll see,” Gico snarls, then nods sharply at Cathal. Ducking low, Cathal propels himself into the small of my back, knocking me over the ledge. Gico grabs my feet as I spin over the rails and shoves hard, to hasten my descent. The faces of both men are contorted with gleeful terror.

It’s a fifteen-floor drop. Plenty of time to admire the scenery. I sail to earth relaxed, knowing it can’t hold me. I smile against the rush of air. “They’ll have to do better than this,” I chuckle, then hit the ground and die in a shattering explosion of bones and shredded flesh.

On a train, approaching a gray, sprawling, menacing city. For a few minutes I don’t know who or where I am. Then my memories return. I’m Capac Raimi, The Cardinal, recently deceased, freshly resurrected, on my way home. Coming back from the dead threw me for a loop the first few times, but like most things in life, a man can get used to it.

A conductor passes up the aisle, asking for tickets. I fish mine out and hand it to him with a polite smile. I’ve never worked out how I re-form and wind up on this train, fully dressed, with a ticket from Sonas to the city in my pocket. It bothered me to begin with, but I’ve given up worrying about it. One of those mysteries of the universe I’ve learned to accept without query.

It’s been close to four years since my last execution. I’d aged slightly, gained a few pounds, developed a spray of gray hairs, picked up wrinkles around the eyes. But now I’m the way I was when I came to this city eleven years ago, bright, fresh, youthful. “Hi, handsome,” I mutter to my reflection in the window as we enter a tunnel.