In some version of 16th century Europe, a band of brutal mercenaries is transporting a misshapen and inhuman Oracle (always capitalized) to a monastery at the base of Das Kagel, the vast terraced mountain that once, perhaps, was the Tower of Babel. To sustain the Oracle and prepare it for its eventual immurement in the monastery's Cyst, the mercenaries, all old in evil, must whisper their darkest secrets to a box of bones. Once Steeped in confessed wickedness, the marrow from the bones may be fed to the Oracle. At the monastery, young Friar Dominic has his voice mysteriously stolen, while the abbot conducts mysterious research on demons and spends days in the Glandula Misericordia, which is the vale, protected by the abbey's walls, that encompasses "three square miles of confined isolation in which rages a perpetual war between the living and the dead," a horrifying sight that "is not a manifestation of evil but the workings of the mind of God." Finally, a prematurely old woman, Meg, sometimes called Dull Gret, finds herself leading a crew of impish familiars against a corrupt constabulary.
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