He had conferred with Yagharek about this, in whispers easily hidden under the old man’s terror. They had no drugs, and Isaac was no bio-thaumaturge, could not insinuate his fingers briefly through Andrej’s skull and turn his consciousness temporarily off.

Instead, they were forced to use Yagharek’s more savage skills.

The garuda thought back to the fleshpits, remembering the “milk fights”: those that ended with submission or unconsciousness rather than death. He remembered the techniques he had perfected, adjusting them to his human opponents.

“He’s an old man!” hissed Isaac. “And he’s dying, he’s frail . . . Be gentle . . .”

Yagharek sidled along the wall to where Andrej lay staring at him with tired, nauseous foreboding.

There was a quick feral movement, and Yagharek was leaning behind Andrej, on one knee, the old man’s head pinioned with his left arm. Andrej stared out at Isaac, his eyes bulging, unable to scream through his gag. Isaac—horrified, guilty and debased—could not help but meet his eye. He watched Andrej, knew that the old man thought he was about to die.

Yagharek’s right elbow swung down in a sharp arc and smacked with brutal precision into the back of the dying man’s head, where his skull gave way into the neck. Andrej gave a short, constricted bark of pain, that sounded very like vomiting. His eyes flickered out of focus, then closed. Yagharek did not let Andrej’s head fall away: he kept his arms tense, pulling his bony elbow hard into soft flesh, counting seconds.

Eventually he let Andrej slump.

“He will wake,” he said. “Perhaps in twenty minutes, perhaps in two hours. I must watch him. I can send him to sleep again. But we must be careful—too much and we will starve his brain of blood.”

They wrapped Andrej’s motionless body with random rags. They hauled him up between them, each with one arm over a shoulder. He was wasted, his insides devoured over years. He weighed shockingly little.

They moved together, supporting the enormous sack of equipment between them with their free arms, carrying it as carefully as if it were a religious relic, the body of some saint.

They were still swathed in their absurd, wearisome disguises, bent and shuffling like beggars. Under his hood, Isaac’s dark skin was still dappled with tiny scabs from his savage shaving. Yagharek wrapped his head, like his feet, in rotten cloth, leaving one tiny slit through which to see. He looked like a faceless leper hiding his decaying skin.

The three of them looked like some appalling caravan of vagrants, a travelling convocation of the dispossessed.