"What do you want?" the Archbishop demanded. Kesley saw that Santana was sheet-white beneath his outward duskiness.
"I want nothing. I merely came out here to laugh at the Archbishop of God who has come to Chicago on a mission of murder!"
Kesley stiffened in the saddle, but Santana caught his arm just as he was about to go for his gun. "What is this talk of murder?" Santana demanded.
Late afternoon clouds were dropping over the city now, and a cool wind came sweeping in from the lake. Kesley shivered as the mutant grinned, baring scraggly stumps of yellow teeth.
"Murder? Did I say murder? But there will be no murder, milord. Merely betrayal—and betrayal again."
That night, in the rooms they had taken near the city's central marketplace, the image of the mutant haunted Kesley, imposing itself before his eyes with demonic insistence.
Betrayal? No murder? The paradoxes and cloaked ambiguities the grotesque creature had uttered ground into Kesley's already sensitive consciousness, bringing with them the sharp image of the piebald spider of a man that was the mutant.
Kesley looked across the room to Santana. The plump Archbishop, having divested himself of his traveling costume, wore a loose cassock without surplice. He was thumbing the pages of his breviary, flicking rapidly over matter long since committed to memory.
"Padre?"