“Or perhaps it is I you envy. Then tell me, is it my hand, my manhood, or my leg? Is it the mark of scourges on my back? Or perhaps you remember how on this very altar, on the feast of St. Delphinium, I dedicated my eye.” He showed them the dead side of his face. “That is what it means to be Starbridge,”

he said. “Don’t forget it.

“Now we are at the start of a great trial. One of my predecessors in this pulpit recorded in his diary that in the ninth through nineteenth phases of last spring, it rained for seven thousand days. Many will die, rich and poor. But our survival as a nation, and a culture, and a race, depends on us. Now I have heard some of you whispering that great changes come with spring, great miracles, great new freedoms. But I say, if we cannot keep God’s laws, the laws that kept our ancestors from harm during this long storm, then God will squeeze us like a sponge. Tonight from this pulpit I heard you singing, high and low together, and the beauty of it brought tears to my eyes. I tell you, I make that song a metaphor, because it is in the harmony in which we live together that we can hope to touch God’s pity. And in those harmonies, there must be high and low. Without it, all the sense is lost. Without it, there is no beauty, no achievement. I tell you, high and low together, together we will raise an anthem to our God!”

* * *

When the parson had finished, the people sank down on their knees for the compulsory prayers before the next part of the service. “Now,” whispered Spider Abject. “Go now. They’ll take him back soon.”

He stood up and pointed over the bowed heads of the congregation. “That one. There he is,” and Abu saw a hairless old man, asleep in the prisoners’ pews. “That one. Drunken fool! He’s asleep, the last night of his life,” said Abject, the tears starting to his eyes.

Abu led him to the side aisle, and they hurried down the narrow row of columns and arches toward the sanctuary, where the parson was already being helped into his litter. Behind him stood the entrance to the prison, an ornamented filigree of iron bars, and all around slouched soldiers of the purge. Two stepped forward to block the prince’s way. They scowled and snarled like dogs, but when they saw his hand their expressions congealed, and all their viciousness seemed to drain away from underneath, until the scowls meant nothing. Abu passed without a word, Spider Abject close behind him.

The parson had his back to them. He seemed a hill of red-robed fat, his bulk was so tremendous.