“Yes. That’s the point of the story. This captain saved her life. He was . . . What shall I say? Attracted to her. When he came to us, the girl was still living with him. We made him give her up. They did,” said the monk, jerking his head towards the far corner of the room. “They had him whipped. I had nothing to do with it. I hate that sort of thing. She had a birthmark.”

“I know.”

The monk looked at him distastefully. “Don’t tell me—you too?” he asked.

“Nothing like that.”

“I’m glad to hear it. It’s a filthy habit. Hard to break, too. He still visits her.”

“Nothing like that,” repeated Thanakar. “I knew her father.”

“That explains it. The captain is a very disgusting fellow, if you want to know.” Malabar Starbridge jumped up out of his chair. Hunching his shoulders to indicate secrecy, he pulled Thanakar to the window and pointed into the mass of men around the bonfire. “There he is,” he said, lowering his voice conspiratorially, though the man was thirty feet away.

“Which one?”

“That one.” A man stood away from the others. He wore the purple rosette of a child abuser on his uniform’s lapel. His eyebrows joined over his nose.

Since the day that he had killed the bishop’s liaison, on the plain below St. Serpentine’s, Doctor Thanakar had found it difficult to hate. He had felt no remorse. But it was as if the action of striking something foul had cracked the cavity in him where his hate was stored, and it had drained away. All his life he had hated so passionately, tenderly, articulately. All other feelings had been muffled and chaotic in comparison. Without hate, he had been left with an empty feeling, an anaesthesia for which he had been grateful in a way, for it had helped him to tolerate the death of friends. Now, watching the degenerate captain standing near the bonfire, warming his hands, he was resensitized. The man had a protruding lower lip. He would be easy to hate. And suddenly Thanakar was conscious of a new, pervasive, almost physical pain, like the pain of blood returning to a sleeping limb. Abu the Inebriate, he thought. He looked down at Charity Starbridge’s last letter. Goodbye, he thought.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” he said.

The monk looked away, twisting his face into a scowl. “Don’t mention it,” he muttered. “We’ve got to stick together, the old families. There’re not many of us left.”

“I wish I could repay you.”

“I need men,” said the monk, eyeing Thanakar’s leg. “Demiurge has fifteen hundred soldiers at the temple. He means to burn her. I wish him luck. She has powers he’s never seen. Even so, if it comes to fighting . . .”

Thanakar frowned. “Have you written to the colonel?”

“Aspe? What for? He’d be glad to see her burn.”

“No. She . . . means something to him. Just the way she looks. Some kind of symbol. Beauty in the heart of ugliness.” Outside the window, the pervert was picking his lip. It slid down over rotten teeth.