Thanakar turned back. “The chaplain offered you a dispensation to murder me?” he asked.

“Not murder. An accident. It was a choice between that or a court-martial.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

Captain Locke smiled. “I’m a religious man, sir. And I have my pride. Believe it or not, I respect what you are trying to do. I don’t respect the method. I mean the intent.”

“Thank you, Captain.”

“Thank you too, sir, in a way. I won’t be sorry to leave this place. It’s not like I’ve got a family. My son died here, in Ward Thirty-One. He was crippled, sir. Like you.”

They walked together up the ramp. “Where are the people from Rang-river?” asked Thanakar. “The last crusade. Are there any left?”

“I think there are a couple.”

They walked past cages of increasing size. Some had several dozen inmates.

“Here,” said the captain. “Try these.” He unlocked the door of one and stood aside. Thanakar forced himself to step in without looking, and when he was inside he turned around gratefully and smiled in spite of himself. It could have been worse. The captain reached in and turned on an overhead bulb. It illuminated six women against the far wall, lying or sitting in heaps of straw. They paid no attention to him.

The captain wrinkled his nose at the stench. “No rats here, sir,” he remarked. “They eat them.”

Thanakar looked around, relieved and encouraged by this small attempt to disgust him. The place was no worse than the worst nightmares: the smell, the sweaty walls, the women lying in rags, the oppressive silence emphasized rather than disturbed by the whine of the fluorescent light.

“These were from Rang-river?”

“Yes, sir. The males were all killed, by and large. The females were brought down, I forget the reason. It was before my time. There used to be a lot more.”

They had been young girls then. Now they were fully grown, and some even looked old, or at least their bodies did, withered and wasted on their giant skeletons. But their faces still looked young, because, again, no experience had marked them—the eternal present of their childhoods, the eternal present of their cell. Because it’s not pain that changes you, thought Thanakar; it’s the memory of pain, the memory of happiness. No one else could have survived so long here. In a way, their childhoods had been perfect training for a life in prison. Here in their cell, freedom and bondage had resolved.

“They used to sing all the time in here,” remarked the captain. “All day and all night, when I first came.

You used to hear them all the way down. They’ve stopped, now.”

Thanakar remembered the storyteller from Rang-river, singing to him and Abu the whole night while Abu drank. “Even in the purest there are deep biting instincts,” he had said. Thanakar remembered the phrase now, because one of the women was looking at him with eyes full of calculation. It made her look foreign in that place: a large woman, with yellow hair and straight hard features. She seemed healthier than the others, more flesh on her bones, more supple and muscular under her ripped clothes.