The iron hatchway beneath Elena Vale’s statue had barely opened two inches. Just then, the heat in the western round hall shifted.
It wasn’t the blistering heat of the coal-gas fire they had ignited in Sub-Basement Twelve, nor the brittle sub-zero chill of the freezing liquid purge. It was a cold, dry, choking deadness. A sudden empty pocket of sense presence that made the air feel thin, colorless, and stale, as if the room were an uninked page waiting for a razor.
Through the narrow hall behind them walked Arch-Inquisitor Moros.
He was a tall, skeletal man clad in robes of bleached pigskin that had been scraped until they were semi-clear. He showed the faint shadow of iron-plated chain mail beneath the skin. Over his face he wore a silver mask shaped like a blank sheet of thick parchment, entirely smooth save for two narrow slits for his pale, colorless eyes. His gloves were made of white sharkskin, dusted with fine foam-stone powder used to erase wet signed names.
In his right hand, swinging from three links of cold-forged iron chain, Moros carried the Censer of Redaction.
The censer was a six-sided vessel of dull gold-silver metal, its punched holes in sides carved in the shape of cut quills. From the vents drifted a slow, heavy smoke of dull, ash-grey flame. Not fire that burned with heat, but fire that burned with ontological erasure.
