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Spine stoop to this?
    Rachel began to thread her way back through the crowd. But the show was not over yet, for worse was still to come. Mina Greene lifted her hands again and addressed the audience. “This horror, when left alone, tries to mimic its environment. You can see how it has copied the crate. It’s like a seed that doesn’t know which plant to become. Now watch closely.”
    “No!” The thing on the stage wailed in a voice made thick by saliva. “Please don’t do this.”
    Rachel glanced back to see Greene stooping over the thing and whispering something to it. What she saw next stopped her in her tracks.
    The creature’s shape began to change. Its limbs grew longer while its head sank like a bubble of pink mud back into its neck. As the crowd looked on in amazement, its torso swelled and split into two amorphous lumps. These then stretched and flattened, the skin darkening all the while. In moments, the creature began to resemble something else entirely.
    Cries of disgust and alarm went up from the audience, and then suddenly there was complete silence. Nobody in the crowd uttered a word.
    The thing on the stage had finished its transformation. The hideous knot of muscle and bone had disappeared. In its place stood an ordinary wooden chair. Greene scraped it forward and then sat down in it. “You all have these in your homes, right?” she said. “Chairs, I mean, not demons. Well, don’t try this with them.” She produced a knife hidden under the folds of her gaudy dress, then stabbed it into the wooden seat between her thighs.
    Blood dribbled from the damaged seat and spattered against the stage underneath it, accompanied by an eerie sound, like the distant echo of a scream. From the chair? The shape-shifter was still conscious?
    “This is how demons are formed,” Greene said. “It’s a type of Mesmerism, and there are things in the Maze who use such techniques to mould your souls into any form they like.” She paused for a moment, and Rachel saw her glance at a small prompt card pinned to the side of her wagon. “The Maze of Blood is aptly named,” she went on in an overly dramatic voice, “for its halls and corridors exist as incarnations of living souls. The dead don’t wander Hell; they are the bricks and mortar from which it is built.” She rose from her chair and made another flourish with her hands. “Thus Iril is both the Maze and the shattered god who lives within it. Similarly, when this pathetic creature died, it became forever a part of the Maze—a living, breathing,
thinking
piece of Hell.” She paused, observing the silent audience. “So, have you seen a show like
this
before?”
    Rachel pushed on through the crowd and hurried back to the tavern. With Spine agents about, she had risked much by attending such a public spectacle. The show-woman’s words echoed in her mind.
It is a type of Mesmerism…there are things in the Maze who use such techniques to mould your souls into any form they like
.
    Had the young angel been a victim of this unholy Mesmerism himself? And
what
had it done to him? She tried to shun gruesome possibilities, but the image of the weeping creature onstage gripped her imagination.
    A part of the Maze—a living, breathing,
thinking
piece of Hell.
    Walking briskly back through the darkening lanes, dodging streams of brown water thrown from the doors of the mud-brick houses on either side, Rachel wondered how Mina Greene’s demon had come to be in Deepgate at all. Wraiths and shades were known to haunt the darkest parts of the chained city, but those were ethereal: phantasms attracted by past violence and shed blood. Yet this shape-shifter had been corporeal. If it was truly what the show-woman had claimed it to be…
    Perhaps the recent death toll had caused a larger or more permanent rift to open between the chained city and the Maze of Blood? After all, tens of thousands had died when Alexander Devon had brought his monstrous machine to Deepgate’s