In the courtyard below him, pilgrims waited in the rain, wrapped in sopping blankets. A monk moved among them, sheltered by a scarlet umbrella. The colonel leaned over the balustrade and spat in their direction. There was no chance of hitting them at that distance. But even so the action soothed him, prepared him for the inevitable hours of talk before his will was accomplished. He tightened the focus of his mind and reentered the room.

Inside, the priests sat in ascending circles, or reclined on low benches around a fire sunk into the middle of the floor. The fire was magic, giving off neither smoke nor gas, nothing but a drugged perfume that made it hard to think. The colonel avoided the chair that had been set for him. He never sat when he could stand. Instead, he reached across the fire to take the golden cord into his hand. It looped down low, almost to the floor, between a skeleton wrapped in crimson silk and an obese, footless old man. The colonel stooped and took it between his fingers, and chafed it with the ball of his thumb. It was an unknown substance, between cloth and metal, and against his skin he felt the tingle of a mild electric current. He resisted the impulse to try and break it, because he knew it would not break. He let it go.

The bishop’s secretary threw his marijuana cigarette into the fire. During the first part of the colonel’s audience, while Aspe had recited the emperor’s letter amid a whining drizzle of protest, the old man had sat as if asleep. Now he spoke. “You’re a very violent man, Colonel,” he observed. “Very . . . violent.”

“I’m a soldier,” croaked the colonel in his harsh empty voice.

“A soldier, yes. I wish the emperor had sent us more like you. We had petitioned him for soldiers, not staff officers.”

“He has sent you thousands, and you’ve butchered them all with your criminal imcompetence. There are no other soldiers like me. How long has your war with Caladon been going on?”

“I believe you know the answer to that question, Colonel.”

“I know that every day the adventists grow stronger and more arrogant. As I was riding here, not fifty miles from the capital, I passed a village where a crowd had gathered to listen to an adventist preacher.

Not fifty miles.”

“These are difficult times, Colonel.”

“Worse than you think. You know King Argon has had a son?”

“So we had heard.”

“You are familiar with the apocalypse of St. Chrystym Polymorph?”

“There are so many different kinds of heresy,” sighed the bishop’s secretary.

“This is no heresy. This is one of your saints. And the vision is a true one. Listen: ‘When the rain comes, a Lion will come also, a King’s son out of the North. And he will catch the Serpent in his teeth. And with the first bite all false prophets will be bitten away. And with the second bite, all tyrants and oppressors, and all those who oppress the poor. And with the third bite, all false priests and tyrants. And his horoscope will be . . .’ ”