* * *

That night, as the prince and Spider Abject left the house, the wind blew accumulated sugar around them in a powdery mist which whitened their faces and made it difficult to talk. It was a dangerous time, for when the weather was like this—sugar in the air with no rain to keep it wet—the mist could easily ignite.

Inside their houses, people blew out their candles and sat shivering in the dark. They spoke softly to one another, for superstitious folk thought curses and obscenity gave off a kind of spark.

The prison was a small one, but it was bright with floodlights. From the four corners of the building stone towers rose up into the mist, and from their battlements huge search lamps swung in circles. At night they shone for half a mile, strands of blue light which beat down rhythmically upon the cringing streets, like the scourging of some whip. And in the fog the prison seemed to glow, and rise to many times its height, the light caught in a swirling prison of its own.

This was the center of the township, one of seven in the city of Charn. It included a chapel and shrine, municipal offices, a bank, and, built into the prison’s base, the bishop’s market and dispensaries, where laborers could spend their salary receipts. The magistrate’s court was a small one, for it dealt with civil offenses only. Crimes against God were handled elsewhere. But still, the gallows took up much of the square; they walked through them towards the chapel door, as if through a copse of trees. There were public executions almost every day.

As Prince Abu and the boy approached, the bells were ringing for the evening service. Worshipers crunched up to the portals through the hardened mud, their coats dusted with sugar. Abject followed them up the steps, past the great dog-headed statues guarding the gate, under the carved pediment illustrating the choices of St. Terrapin the Just. At that time of night the chapel was the only entrance to the prison.

“Look there,” he whispered, standing in the narthex. He pointed down the aisle, directly underneath the pulpit, where rows of handcuffed men and women sat, interspersed with turnkeys in gray uniforms. The service had already begun, and the pews along the aisle were full, but Abject found seats for them underneath a grinning angel. On the altar, the statue of Angkhdt was surrounded by a ring of acolytes, polishing and stroking him, and oiling his phallus. They chanted lists of names. The ceremony of the lamps had been concluded—abridged, most likely, because of the dangers of the weather. The candelabra were all empty, and instead a line of glass globes hung from the vault. They burned red gas, which cast uncertain shadows and made the white mosaics of the floor glow red.

The chanting repeatedly rose and died away, and at times the congregation joined in, reciting the eighteen kinds of self-deception, the seven laws of harmony, the eleven types of civil disobedience, the sixteen phases of a woman’s love. It was a beautiful performance. At certain times the sounds flowed regularly, and then they broke apart as different sections of the congregation broke away into different chants in different octaves, and all the sense was lost, only the order and the beauty remaining. They finished in a kind of round, each section coming down to silence at a different time, until only the impossibly high voices of the choir remained, and the bell-like booming of the parson in the pulpit, asking the benediction.