Despite the press of people, however, the square feels different today. During the execution, there had been but one crowd, focussed on a single spectacle. Today there are many centres of attention. A group of farmers have set up stalls and are selling produce to a jostling throng, their boys armed with cudgels to discourage thieves. Behind these stalls, a ring has formed around two fighting dogs; a crone with a chalkboard is accepting bets. Right next to her a man has mounted a crate and is screaming at the score of people who form his congregation. Beyond, a small tent has been set up, and a gaudily dressed youth is selling tickets to a show that, judging by the sign dangling from his neck, appears to involve a woman undressing to reveal her scorpion’s tail. Each of these groups is knit together by a mist of Smoke, light and volatile in the air, if thickening in places into dark swirls. At the borders these mists mingle or rain down in flakes of Soot soon absorbed by the ground’s black grit.

“It’s not like it was down the mine,” Livia says, disappointed. “I had started to hope that Smoke was benign.”

“And now you are shocked.”

“Well, look at it,” Livia answers. “It’s a disgrace.”

“I was just thinking the opposite. That it’s not really that bad.”

Just as Thomas says it, two women at the far end of the square start fighting, the shorter, stockier woman wrestling the other to the ground then pelting her with insults.

ф

They choose a perch atop a set of shallow stairs that lead up to a church. Church does not capture the building’s scale; it is very nearly a cathedral. A row of marble columns rise behind them, holding aloft a portico high above their heads. Beyond it a single tower spikes two hundred feet into the heavens, where the Smoke thins and a cloudy sky spews snowflakes that reach the earth as dirty drizzle. For all its grandeur, the building is dilapidated, its great doors leaning burnt within their frames, held aloft by a crude patchwork of timber. The windows, too, have long lost their glass and are similarly boarded shut. High up, the brickwork that peels itself out of the city’s sooty varnish shines with the pallor of limestone. The long, angular lines of the 1720s: built a hundred years into the time of Smoke. Thomas stares at the church and imagines a time when, despite it all, a decision was taken to build it here, at the heart of vice.