And then when it was very late, they’d climb down thirty flights of stairs to street level, picking their way through abandoned sacks of clothes, or laminate takeaway boxes, the press of other people, smelling like the day-to-day sweat of working in a sultry office, or the day-to-day sweat of being outside in the heat, or the day-to-day sweat of fear. She would be taken to the little corner store with its great barricades of snacks and pills and pamphlets and thin cheap shirts, and sit on the should-be-white chairs and smell the deep fryer going, and then pick over crispy chunks of potato, or pan-blasted sweet fruit, or sausage meat in batter, with time enough after to lick her burnt and salty fingers. She and the person who looked after her had used to go to a different haunt, where the food was cheaper and the sausages more juicy—but there the man who fried the food had once said warningly, “It’s hot,” only to find that she had already stuffed her mouth full of lacy fried things anyway. The man had said, laughing, “Her lips should be burnt off, eh?” But her lips had not been burnt off. It had barely hurt. For some reason, because of that, they no longer patronized that sausage man.

Out there in the outskirts, soldiers walked the city, with their guns out and their riot shields slung over their shoulders, looking grimy and cross in the heat under their helmets and great reflective visors. Some nights they heard the pop—pop—pop—rattle of a gunfight, and on these nights they would shut the windows and lie with most of their clothes off on the floor of the bathroom.

On nights like this, in the dark, turning her face to press hot cheeks into the cool ceramic bump of the tiles below, she would look into the face of the person who looked after her. It was a comforting face to look into; it was a resolute, keen, utterly unmoved face, which did not flinch at the angry carillon of vehicle honks, nor at the sound of someone shouting from the rooms close by through the thin walls. It felt as though she had always been fond of the face, and of the dark, sharply bobbed hair; and she loved without reserve the eyes—those great lambent eyes, the iris so skilfully and gently blent that it seemed there was no tint or shade in that clear and beautiful grey.

And she would say, idly, more as prayer than demand: “Have you worked out who I am?”

“Not yet,” said Camilla.

The tomb will open in

ALECTO THE NINTH

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS