"Oh."

And then: "--If I don't go back to the hotel my friends will come looking," she whispers, still distracted, somehow still hung up on this one tiny legible part. "I don't -- I don't want my first act in your service to be causing you trouble -- I don't know what to--"

"Do not worry. We will take care of your friends."

She nods. Her eyes are wide. "What is-- what do you want-- me to do?"

He pats Lacie's hand. "For now, you will serve in the cellar. It is an important part of your education. We will study each day, and of course you will take the Nectar of the God." He unlocks her handcuffs.

She smiles at him, filled with relief and delight and overwhelm. "Thank you, Father. Thank you so much."

"It is important that you know what will happen if you fail me, my queen."

"Yes, Father."

"Come with me."

She stands and follows.

He takes her to a room that once was a cellar.

A slow stream of yellowish Nectar oozes, channeled away through channels carved into the stone floor, stained darkish-red, and collected through apparatuses of glass. Tables store an array of items you do not recognize, but their purpose is obvious from their sharp sinister glint and the occasional dark-red stain that they didn't quite manage to clean off. And on the wall...

It's a mouth. It would be a human mouth, were it not ten times the size. There is a tongue, and teeth, and all the things that one typically associates with a mouth. The mouth is part of the wall, stone blending to flesh so smoothly that Lacie can't see where it changes.

The Nectar oozes from a corner of its lips.

It says something in the tongue she heard back in Savannah.

She cannot understand it, but she knows it is welcoming her to its service.

"Nyarlathotep is the God with a Thousand Faces," Samson says. "Each of those Faces has a Mouth. And the Mouths... are hungry."

"Yes, sir," she says with feeling, her mouth moving almost by instinct. The words in that black tongue are reverberating in her mind. She cannot stop staring at it. There are tears streaming down her face.