Thirty-Nine: Of the Gemini, and of the Unmasking

At the papal feast, a second, white-robed pope arrives with veteran guards, confronting the seated, orange-robed pontiff as a fraud. Thomas, disguised as a friar, launches his attack. The lion-faced knight-devil reacts first; Thomas pierces its head, and it begins to transform monstrously.

Amid panic, guard Jacquot mistakenly shoots Thomas with a crossbow. An old cardinal reveals himself as a devil and kills Jacquot. Thomas, though wounded, sprints along the cardinals’ table and cleaves the seated pope’s miter and head.

The “pope” reveals a regenerating, golden fly-headed form—Baal’Zebuth. Thomas grabs a spear but is struck and disoriented. When Thomas lunges again, the lion-devil seizes his arm and tears it off, taunting him with his helplessness.

Delphine, holding the true Clement’s hand, watches Thomas fall. Seraphic monsters—twelve-eyed, fly-headed, and lion-shaped—grow immense and devastate guards. One reanimates a corpse to hurl a spear at Clement; Delphine throws herself in front of it and is impaled.

The devils handle Delphine carefully to avoid her blood, recognize what she is when she smiles, then drive the spear into her again, bite off her legs, and cast her aside. As men rush Clement toward the palace, Delphine dies in the courtyard while the devils rampage.