The sisters approached. Their robes were ice-white, and their horned cowls trembled as they walked. There were more of them than before. Ten, fifteen…

‘Come, Gregor,’ said Baptrice. ‘Let me take you back. Let the fever run its course. There is hope yet.’

‘There was no patient with the Torment housed in this place,’ said Eisenhorn. ‘No outbreak occurred here at the hospice. It was an asylum. There was only a survivor. One man, an inmate who had survived the pandemic. I have read the reports. This is a lie. You are a lie.’

‘Help me with him,’ Baptrice smiled. The sisters closed around, their white bicorn wimples like tusks in the sunlight. More of them now, forty, fifty…

‘I want to leave,’ said Eisenhorn.

‘Restrain him gently,’ Baptrice said. ‘He knows not what he says.’

The sisters surrounded him. There were more of them now than there were chirring insects in the jungle outside. Eisenhorn staggered through them, brushing aside their phantom hands and their snow-white robes. He started to walk, pushing them aside. Somewhere, a cloister bell began to ring. He reached the iron gate in the old garden wall. Beyond, the green darkness of the jungle swarmed with the fricative words of insects.

The flames swirled around him. He opened the gate and stumbled through.

‘I suppose you get a lot of cases like mine,’ sniffed the small man waiting for him on the other side of the desk.

‘Cases?’ asked Eisenhorn. The room was cool and grey, as if it were raining outside, or the place were always starved of light. There was a large, ornamental fireplace that clearly had not seen a fire in centuries, a rug on the wooden floor and two plain chairs on either side of the desk. The old man sat in one. A gilt clock stood on the mantle, ticking like an insect in a jungle thicket, steady and slow.

‘You may take a seat,’ the small man offered. ‘Of your own volition. You might as well be comfortable. We’re here to talk.’

Eisenhorn sat. The old man was shrivelled and bent, lost in the folds of his hand-me-down robes.

‘You get a lot of cases like mine,’ he sniffed.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Eisenhorn.

‘Oh, you understand. You understand, sir. You just don’t care. And because you don’t care, you don’t remember.’

‘What am I supposed to remember?’ asked Eisenhorn.

‘The people you have ruined,’ said the man. ‘How many is it? Lost count? I’m sure you remember the truly great ones. Pontius Glaw, you’d remember him. Stopping him was the making of you. Or was it the breaking? What about the others? The nondescript ones? The minor cases? The insignificant ones? The innocent? Do you remember them? Or are they just faces that passed you by? Do you remember me?’

‘I remember this room,’ said Eisenhorn. ‘I remember that clock, ticking like–’