The separatists’ city charter forbids the construction of churches and bans all but a handful of religious writings, and even these cannot be bought and sold in the city. They may however be given away. Printing religious matter is banned, although copying books by hand is not. The life and death priests conduct their ritual observations in cemeteries, hospitals, offices, libraries, basements, attics. The lifers tend to change venue often, the death priests change far less often.

I was told, or read, that everyone visits Veciofeni’s cave sooner or later. He stood in there and wept himself to death, evidently, and this manner of dying, so gently incremental, brought about the perfect preservation of his body as a consequence of his mummy-like dehydration and the saturation of his person with his own lachrymal salt. His remains stand there still, unsupported, hands folded over his heart; the flesh of his face is pliable, his hands, his nose, even his ears are unshrivelled. The air in the cave is redolent of the odor of his tears, a salty air like sea breath, but without the underlying, living mustiness. Two deacons, with feathers in their hair, sit on the floor by his side. They live in the cave, keep watch over the saint, and further his medicine with their singing. Each takes his turn echoing the other, and the song is long deep sinus notes that hum in the stone, consonants as light as rustling leaves.

Visitors come daily, bearing offerings of flowers and votive body parts. Organs lie embedded in enormous bouquets of flowers, and the walls, which in places have been terraced, glow with vivid ruby hearts, piles of severed arms and hands, muscles like bundles of carmine wire, platinum braids of nerves, topaz pancreases, lungs pale rose as dusk’s first shadings, plaited rivers of hair, majestic livers of royal purple, slabs of snowy fat, fragrant pink brains smelling of soluble minerals, elaborately knotted ivory intestines ... by the entrance, air sluices through grates of stretched human vocal cords, the sound joining the deacons’ song. All these treasures are fresh and glowing with dismembered life. They glitter in the vaults of my imagination as Beardo describes them, and seeing them so vividly in there I feel as though a voyage to the cave itself would be redundant now.

Shade of trees with long-bladed leaves, a dusty corner courtyard with cool sunlight on the stone walls. Flat, leathery pods, like bumpy little belts, litter the pavement. He waves me into his small office, all leather this and rosewood that. I am shown ranks and ranks of uniform volumes with gold edgings; these are the encyclopedic writings of Alak specialists about the natives here—their history, language, religion. Of course, no Alak has ever actually visited Tref; or if any have, they didn’t draw attention to themselves, and that would have been out of character. The books were written in the capital, on the other side of the world, and brought here—unless they are copies made somewhere in between, in which case nothing of the capital adheres to them. Like most of the citizens of the Empire, I have never laid eyes on an Alak.