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"Thomas shoved his sword into the face of what used to be Théobald de Barentin, and it shuddered and stopped moving. Thomas yanked the sword out of it but fell on his side. The lion-devil roared, standing over Thomas.
The crowd of finely dressed corpses moved closer. One of the monkey-things tugged the armor off his foot and bit it.
Thomas held his sword up.
The sun’s crown came over the edge of the land, just one brilliant orange diamond’s worth.
And it was all gone.
Everything.
Thomas was lying in a cow field, holding up his sword, dressed in his rusty armor. Neither his arm nor his rib nor his jaw were broken. A rusted plow stood where the lion-devil had been, one of its spars hanging at the angle of the axe it had just been holding. A dead sheep lay in exactly the position the corpse of Sir Théobald had assumed when he collapsed. A small Norman tower, long abandoned and crumbling, stood where the mighty castle had been when they first saw it at dusk. The priest, lying facedown in his robes, was breathing heavily in sleep.
“A whoring dream,�� he said."

In February, they robbed another farmhouse, and this time the men fought. Pepin was killed. As were the men. Godefroy ordered the house burned. A dark-haired little boy just in pants stood bewildered near the blaze, saying, as if there had been some mistake, “We live here. We live here.��
Not six months later the plague had come, killing most of the thieves.
And everybody else.
Nothing matters anymore.

Thomas shook away his ghosts and turned his eyes now to Paris. Her walls were the faintly yellowed white of bones, and her turrets stood proudly, each a lazy bowshot from its neighbor. He could see what must have been the Louvre, the king’s fortress, strong and white, cut from the same stone as the city walls. The spires of cathedrals poked at the sky, and the roofs of the shops and houses tumbled against one another. Even dead, if she was dead, Paris made a lovely corpse.

He froze when something moved in the water near the pilings of the collapsed bridge, something like an oily black arm, but the width of a draft horse’s chest. He wasn’t entirely sure he had seen it.
Then all of them said some variant of “My God�� when its head broke the water’s surface.
White-eyed and flat-headed, like some giant cross between eel, newt, and frog, it laid its head on the bank and felt the ground with long whiskers around its mouth and eyes until it found the woman’s leg. Its tongue darted out and latched onto the leg with a thatch of evil little hooks at its tip, pulling it under the water with it, bending a growth of sweetflag rushes. They sprang back up. The water foamed and then flowed gently again, as if none of it had happened.
Those white eyes, a grandfather’s blind eyes.
The small, beardy man dropped his boar spear and ran so fast his hat blew off him.

"He lashed out with the blade again and caught Théobald across the side of the head. Seawater, not blood, gushed from the wound. It stank. Théobald looked amused. He opened his mouth and a scream came out, but it was not his scream. It was the scream of the fat peasant who had died in the river. It was the scream the thing in the river had mimicked."