* * *

Miles away, Colonel Aspe stood on a balcony in the Temple of Kindness and Repair, a vast sprawl of cloisters and shrines on a hill outside the city. He had been talking in the amphitheater of the Inner Ear when the storm broke, and he had stopped midword to walk out from among the shrill old men, to watch the lightning from the balcony and suck deep draughts of air while the clouds thundered and spewed.

They sickened him, the priests of Charn. He turned to watch them through the window, the rain on the outside of the glass streaking their faces and their clothes. They didn’t even know that he had left, most of them, and he could hear them begging with him and pleading as if he were still there to hear. The bishop’s secretary, a bony-faced old man, was in the bishop’s chair, a cigarette hanging from between his bloodless lips, while all around him, in various attitudes of agitation and repose, reclined the members of his council. Some were clearly dead, others less clearly so, sleeping the last drugged sleep of the Starbridges. There were dozens of them lining the tiers of the amphitheater. All were dressed in red and golden robes, and since some were deaf, and most were blind, and some were dead, they communicated by means of art. A golden cord wound between them, up and down the steps. They held it in a variety of fingers, some fat and fleshy, some mummified and dry.

In the rain, the colonel snorted with contempt, and the rain ran down his uniform and down his back. He was a tall man, even for an antinomial, and old too, with long white hair. He was seamed and scarred with lines like silver in his pale skin, running like silver over his eyelids and his cheeks, his shoulders and his chest. His eyes gleamed black and empty, and his nose was beaked like the beak of a bird. He hated priests. He felt like strangling them or whipping them insensible. Partly it was the natural abhorrence of his race, and partly it was the sight of them, fat, dead, dying, arguing over foregone conclusions. He knocked his steel fist against the windowpane. Nobody noticed.

In this backward and neglected province of the empire, where the seasons came so hard, priests held sovereign power all through the spring. They were a cult of sorcerers, and they mutilated themselves and studied magic long forgotten elsewhere. Their leader was a bishop-whore, a living goddess of pornography, and Colonel Aspe itched to see her, to grasp her by the throat. He distrusted women. But already he had come to understand that she was nothing in these councils, a figurehead and not even that.

All power twined like a nervous golden serpent through the fingers of the priests.

They realized he was gone and fell silent, communicating through the cord. Young priests gelded themselves at the time of their first vows; from then on, periodically, they would burn out one of their senses or cut off one of their limbs in a gruesome public ritual. The compensation, they believed, was in a stronger spirit, increased capacities for conjuring, telepathic power. They could summon demons, and angels from Paradise, and bring the dead to life. That was well known. It was best to take them seriously, thought Aspe.