“Go away,” said Aspe without looking up.

“You sent for me.”

“I don’t recognize you,” he said, still glaring at his work.

“You sent for me.”

“Go away.”

Thanakar shrugged, irritated, and turned to go, but the harsh voice spoke again and held him back.

“Wait,” it commanded, and the doctor stood and waited until Aspe had finished his drawing. It was a complicated polygon, with a paragraph of spurious handwriting underneath. Frowning, Aspe studied it for a moment, and then he drew two lines crossing through it from corner to corner of the page and put it aside on a stack of sketches, all similarly crossed out. Then he sighed and released his pencil; it rolled a little way and stopped. He raised his steel hand from where it lay outstretched on the surface of the table.

He loosened the key at his steel wrist, and bent the steel fingers forward into his customary fist before he turned the key again, locking them in place. Then he sat back. “Captain Starbridge,” he said.

“Yes.”

Aspe looked at him for a long time without speaking, as if trying to recall why he had sent for him. If he suddenly remembered, he didn’t show it by any change of expression, but instead, after a few minutes of silence, he reached into the pile of papers by his side and took out a memorandum addressed to Thanakar from his adjutant, dated the previous week. It had been passed out at a staff meeting.

Thanakar was embarrassed to remember, when the colonel turned it over, that he had fought boredom during the discussion by drawing caricatures of various officers, including a savage one of the colonel himself. He had drawn it from memory, for Aspe had not attended any meetings since the battle. Still, it was quite recognizable, the heavy jaw, the hatchet face, the tangled hair.

The colonel studied it and then looked up. “I am an ugly man,” he said. “But you have made me uglier than I am.”

“It’s a skill that I have.”

“I want this skill. What does beauty mean, Captain?”

“I don’t know,” said Thanakar, yawning.

“You must know. I have seen the bishop of Charn. She is beautiful.”

“I suppose she is.”

“Suppose?” cried the colonel harshly. “God damn your suppositions. Listen to me—your religion is a web of lies, but at the heart of it there is some truth. She is beautiful. Beauty in the heart of ugliness. What does it mean?”

“I don’t know,” answered Thanakar, too tired to be anything but irritated by this kind of conversation.

“Beauty isn’t so important,” he said. “It doesn’t mean so much. A woman can be beautiful and still be bad.”

“Can she? I wish I could believe that. I’m an old man. Listen.” Aspe leaned forward and spat the next words like a curse: “This woman’s face is at the center of my thoughts. My thoughts! Look there.” He pulled out some papers, and Thanakar could see that he had tried his hand at portraiture. They were like a child’s drawings.