She looked once more over her shoulder at the players and the crowds filing out—numbed almost comatose by the perverse contrast of it, the harmony of the music and the horror of what lay before her, until she entered the expanding cloud of smoke and all was lost in a swirling gray void.
She could not even be certain that she had cleared the corridor of spikes when she glimpsed a tall, indistinct figure standing amidst the smoke and the fog, a figure which had pushed back its hooded cloak and whose lanky but muscular form could now be discerned, especially his long arms, which were savagely sculpted as if from years of manual labor—one of which unhooked a thick handle from his belt and seemed to squeeze, causing a great, curved blade to flash out with the ringing of steel.
She stopped dea
