We move out at random into the town, looking together for more books flowed in together. I feel half-ghostly and not up to the task, but Jil Punkinflake is insistent, electrified by the search.

This is the route those moaning carts of dead bodies take on their way to the Ghuards’ camp, I suppose to be eaten or perhaps simply fondled and torn and toyed with. With which to be toyed. Or perhaps the dogs eat the ones who arrive dead? Jil Punkinflake’s dog sniffs the air here, but he is a contemplative and unruffled animal whose loyalties are by now it seems ineffacibly established. He cranks his head around and I can see the nondescript little brows above his different-colored eyes. Jil Punkinflake squats beside the dog and rubs his knees, and I am standing there a moment confusing myself with my own haste to find the right way to get lost, away from here or any other byway frequented by the Ghuards, when Thrushchurl, who is beside me, lunges a bit and then starts over to the other side of the road, where something sizeable flattens down a bed of weeds whose fringes screens it from view. Thrushchurl carefully takes the body, a woman wearing only a ragged shift and some dust, and sets it by the road, holding her out at arms’ length on the flats of his hands slowly without any visible tremor in his arms.

She must have fallen from one of the carts.

Thrushchurl arranges her, puts her arms on her breast, and smoothes her hair with the reverent attentiveness I knew from the Embalmer’s College. He throws a glance at Jil Punkinflake, whose attention is drawn at once, but who clings instead to his dog, his eyes widening, staring. A Ministerial Ghuard has silently loomed out from a street abutting this one.