“You,” she said. Her voice was low and musical, even in a single word, because music seemed to surround it, like the setting around a jewel. She might be beautiful, thought Thanakar. Or perhaps she once had been, before her face was branded with the cross and circle, and marred by self-awareness.

She sat cross-legged, stroking the hair of another woman, who lay with her face hidden in her lap. “You,”

she repeated.

“Yes? Please talk to me. Don’t be afraid. I’m a doctor.”

“Yes, Doctor. My sister is dying.” She dropped her eyes and stroked the woman’s hair. Thanakar stepped to look and squatted down. The woman lay on her side, breathing softly. Her right forearm was swollen, and the skin was green and mottled purple. He could smell the rot.

“It is best to kill her. She is in pain,” said the yellow-haired woman in her luminous voice.

“She thinks I’m a parson,” muttered Thanakar. He took the sick woman’s wrist in his hand, but she whimpered and pulled away.

“Look at her,” said the yellow-haired woman. “She is in pain. She is free to live or die, but pain is something else.”

Thanakar sat back on his heels in the straw. “She can’t stay here,” he told the captain.

Spanion Locke stared at him evenly, and then shifted his eyes to look out through the bars of the cell, out into the dark.

“We’ve got to take her down,” said the doctor presently.

When the captain turned back, his face had changed, as if softened in the heat of the room. It was still ugly, or rather still more so, as if his deformed features were struggling with feelings even more deformed.

“You can’t, sir,” he said at last. “You just can’t. You know you can’t. Why do you . . .” and he broke off, his mouth still working, his eyes filled with tears.

A minute passed, and then the doctor shrugged and started to unpack his bag. He leaned over the sick woman and took her arm into his lap. She tried to pull away, and turned to face him, and opened a pair of glass-green eyes. The doctor tried to lose his misgivings in activity, arranging bottles on the floor, choosing syringes, but whenever he touched her she cried out. He took out slicing hooks, and clamps, and body shears, and incense, and a gold statuette of Angkhdt the Preserver, and he arranged them on a piece of cloth. He took out a chart of the planets and, glancing at his wristwatch, made calculations in red chalk on the stone floor, and drew circles with stars inside, and diagrams of the zodiac, and abbreviated prayers in a special doctor’s script. Yet every time he touched her, the woman kicked and moaned.

“Don’t torture her, Doctor,” said her sister with the yellow hair. “It’s pointless, now that she is almost free.” Thanakar lit a candle and said nothing, only frowned at the hypodermic point as he prepared an anaesthetic. Then he put it down. He looked at Captain Locke. “What do you think?” he asked.