“You look tired, Captain. There’s hot water on the table, and clean towels. What’s the news?”

“The enemy has reached the thirty-seventh gate, sir.”

“And Aspe?”

“Is inside the city walls.”

“Thank you, Captain. Then you may tell your soldiers to stand down. I see no need for further violence.

Are my lords assembled?”

“Yes, sir,” answered the soldier.

Lord Chrism turned to his disciple, who was standing in the doorway. “Come forward, Corydon. Take my message to the Inner Ear. Tell them I think it would be wise to terminate our duties here. Tell them I will meet them all in Paradise. We will reassemble there.” He smiled. “Most of them won’t find the journey long or arduous. Most are halfway there already.” He reached out his hand. “God bless you, Corydon.”

His disciple knelt to kiss his ring, and Chrism ran his fingers through the young man’s hair, over his cheek.

“Don’t let them kill you,” he murmured.

“No, sir. I have my excuses planned.”

“Good boy. Say you were enchanted.”

“That would be the truth, sir.”

“Bewitched, then. Say bewitched.” The old man’s smile was full of sadness. “God bless you. Remember to strive always for purity in this life. Chemical purity. Remember that.”

He turned aside into his own apartments. He locked the door, and sealed it with a magic seal, and drew a magic circle on the floor. Then he stepped into his bedroom and stood for a while in front of the mirror.

His blind eyes could distinguish motion and color, but not form, and when with a weary sigh he undid the buttons of his crimson chasuble and drew it off, in the mirror it was as if he had disappeared. Underneath, his clothing was a muted gray, blending in with the rest of the colors in the room. He shook the garment, and with a soft thump a goblin dropped to the floor. And when he bent to pick it up, it moved away, easily evading his blind groping. And then, one at a time, other spirits started to climb out of his clothes: seraphim, and cherubim, and long-tongued demons. They clambered down his arms and hung for a while by his fingers before they let go, as if to say that as far as they were capable of love, they loved him.

Some licked his hands or gave his ankle a soft squeeze before they scuttled off. “Ah,” he said, in a voice full of regret, “Slip away from me, do you? Can’t you wait until the end?” And when the last one was gone and his skin was free from their pinching and their scratching for the first time since he was a young man, he felt more alone than he had ever felt in a lifetime of solitude and blindness. Yet he was not quite alone. The Princess Thanakar sat on his bed hugging her knees, her cooker and her hypodermic on the coverlet beside her, and when the priest turned towards her at last, she raised her head to look at him, and her eyes changed from pink to red.