He turned slowly, and Isaac caught his breath as the scars he had glimpsed were brought into view.

Two long trenches of flesh on Yagharek’s shoulderblades were twisted and red with tissue that looked as if it were boiling. Slice marks spread like small veins from the main eructations of ugly healing. The strips of ruined flesh on either side of his back were a foot and a half long, and perhaps four inches at their widest point. Isaac’s face wrinkled in empathy: the torn holes were criss-crossed with rough, curving slice marks, and Isaac realized that the wings had been sawed from Yagharek’s back. No single, sudden cut but a long, drawn-out torturous disfigurement. Isaac winced.

Thinly hidden knobs of bone shifted and flexed; muscles stretched, grotesquely visible.

“Who did this?” breathed Isaac. The stories were right, he thought. The Cymek is a savage, savage land.

There was a long silence before Yagharek responded.

“I…I did this.”

At first Isaac thought he had misunderstood.

“What do you mean? How the fuck could you…?”

“I brought this onto me.” Yagharek was shouting. “This is justice. It is I who did this.”

“This is a fucking punishment? Godshit, fuck, what could…what did you do?”

“Do you judge garuda justice, Grimnebulin? I cannot hear that without thinking of the Remade…”

“Don’t try to turn it round! You’re absolutely right, I’ve no stomach for the law in this city…I’m just trying to understand what happened to you…”

Yagharek sighed, with a shockingly human slump of the shoulders. When he spoke, it was quiet and pained, a duty that he resented.

“I was too abstract. I was not worthy of respect. There…was a madness…I was mad. I committed a heinous act, a heinous act…” His words broke down into avian moans.

“What did you do?” Isaac steeled himself to hear of some atrocity.

“This language cannot express my crime. In my tongue…” Yagharek stopped for a moment. “I will try to translate. In my tongue they said…they were right…I was guilty of choice-theft…choice-theft in the second degree…with utter disrespect.”

Yagharek was gazing back at the window. He held his head high, but he would not meet Isaac’s eyes.

“That is why they deemed me Too Too Abstract. That is why I am not worthy of respect. That is who I am now. I am no longer Concrete Individual and Respected Yagharek. He is gone. I told you my name, and my name-title. I am Too Too Abstract Yagharek Not To Be Respected. That is who I will always be, and I will be true enough to tell you.”

Isaac shook his head as Yagharek sat slowly on the edge of Isaac’s bed. He cut a forlorn figure. Isaac stared at him for a long time before speaking.

“I have to tell you…” said Isaac. “I don’t really…uh…Plenty of my clients are…not entirely on the right side of the law, shall we say? Now, I’m not going to pretend that I even slightly understand what you did, but as far as I’m concerned it’s not my business. Like you said, there’s no words for your crime in this city: I don’t think I could ever understand what it was you’d done wrong.” Isaac spoke slowly and seriously, but his mind was already racing away. He began to speak with more animation.