The third speaker asked, ‘What happened to the man’s arm?’ ‘I ate it,’ Shift answered, and looked perplexed and alarmed, as if he hadn’t meant to respond truthfully, or at all. ‘He must have already been dead when you ate it, or you’d be in the Nearest Place,’ the second speaker intoned in a singsong chant. ‘You must have had a good reason to kill him, or you’d be in the Nearest Place. You must have had a good reason to eat him, or you’d be in the Nearest Place.’ Taryn gathered that the Nearest Place was Hell.
