This town wants to kill me, William realises, and it will have me. He is alone, trapped in a world that grows more unknowable to him with every passing moment. He feels death near; it is a reaching thing that will overcome him if he is not careful, and he is no longer a careful man. He knows that he may not be able to navigate around the orifice of death that wishes to engulf him, because the sane disinterest he has always fostered has come undone. Still, even through the depths of my fear, he thinks, I have my little lust. This lust is a beckoning thing, calling him, preparatory to death.

‘Fool child,’ William whispers to Saint John. ‘We have come upon a weird place and you scuttle about the dirt like a wounded bitch, your senses knocked out of you. We must flee and be done with these insane ventures and Nobber’s maddened peoples. They keep dead men indoors here, like playthings, ornaments to decorate the rooms they habitate. Their midgets glow, and they are too comely by half. Harold was right; the town is cursed. I can take it no more. It is infecting me with its madness.’

Saint John looks up at him, and William can see he is not recognised by the youth. Not even the boy knows his face any more.

‘Why is there no one else in this devilish town but ourselves?’ William cries, so loudly that the two horses turn their heads towards him. ‘Are my only companions this brief assortment of degenerated freaks who do not value their own lives?’

Fear scuttles through him. A stranger is in my head, he thinks; a foreigner in my body.

‘I am gone,’ William declares, waving his hands. ‘I will hide in clean monasteries if I am accepted, and if I am not I will become a hermit who lurks in the hardwood forests of the midlands, living off the sky-dizzied birds I poach, my only bedding the chainmail I will strap across my throat so it is no invitation to bandits. I have translated so much of other people’s words, but now I must translate myself to myself. I must have solitude; I have forgotten who I am; been rubbed and worn into a strange, unthinking shape by the self-serving company I have kept. Too much socialising and drinking in taverns has undone this land and spread the sickness throughout it. I am a confused blur.’

‘A fox who loves me,’ Saint John replies, his voice thick and slow, ‘awaits outside this town, looking to snack upon us, and I am become an old man.’

There are heavy rings under the boy’s eyes. The bunched-up shadow he projects below him is like the concentrated essence of his blank unreceptivity. Saint John is no company to him.