The text was vague, the translation unsure; as always, the controversy had been bloody. But the nineteenth bishop had resolved its literal meaning. He had discovered ancient plans and diagrams, blueprints, and memoranda dictated by Angkhdt himself, but ten lifetimes later the work was still unfinished, though there was no lack of inmates. The Temple of the Holy Song had had to be constructed on a steel scaffolding arching from the mountaintop, while far beneath it, stonemasons slaved to fill the gap. The temple was invisible, uninhabitable, swayed in every breath of wind. Four thousand feet below, the Starbridge palaces ringed the prison’s base—temporary housing already crumbling with age. When the building was completed, the Starbridges would live on top.

In the motorcar, the doctor thought: without hope, fear can never be maintained. Without the temple, people would never tolerate the prison. They would rise up. For this reason, the base of each strand of the temple’s web is guarded from sabotage by a troop of soldiers.

* * *

The most powerful priest in Charn was not the bishop, but the bishop’s secretary, Chrism Demiurge, and he was waiting for the doctor when he got home. Thanakar’s housekeeper met him in the hall to warn him. “He’s in your parents’ bedroom, sir. Please God be careful what you say.” Thanakar smiled. She loved him. She had been his nurse. It touched his heart to see the terror in her fat, kind face—she was afraid for his sake, she didn’t know why. He knew. For more than a hundred days he had experimented on his parents’ sleeping corpses, trying to rouse them, to break the mystery of the sleeping drug before they started to decay. Not because he missed them, or wanted them back, but in the interests of pure science, perhaps. Prince and Princess Thanakar Starbridge—perhaps if they had loved him more, he might have shown them more respect. He hoped his injections had left no trace.

“Did you give him something to eat?”

“They don’t need more to eat, that lot,” said Mrs. Cassimer. “They’d eat you out of house and home.

Please God be careful, sir.”

“I’ll be careful.”

At the doorway to the bedroom, he paused. The room was dark, the curtains thick. He had been an adolescent when the priests had put his parents to sleep; it had been almost five thousand days. Yet still they were in the first stage of their journey back to Paradise—they were getting younger. The drug had smoothed their faces and their skin, blackened their hair, so that they lay like a new bride and bridegroom in their wedding bed. Their bodies smelled of incense. In time, the smell would sweeten.

Already, a week before, he had noticed an unhealthy flush of yellow on his father’s fingertips; it was the first sign, and the second would be the incense sweetening as their spirits drew back along their drying limbs. The process, once started, would be swift, the soul’s flight to Paradise, but their bodies would be carrion, and as if to emphasize that part, the bishop’s secretary stood hunched over the bedstead, plucking at them with his long fingers like a scavenger bird. The doctor’s father groaned and pulled away.