“… Can you? Can you hear me? Listen, I can’t get you out of here, Seven, not in any way, physically or otherwise. Minor miracle I’m here. Never thought I’d work so hard to get back in. I don’t think you can understand a damn thing, can you? But for the record – in case you somehow can, or one day will – you’ve made it worth it, all by yourself, just to get to see what they’ll do, what they want, what risks they’ll take, how low they’ll stoop. But look, maybe things will change. Now listen, kid. You do whatever you need to do to make things easy on yourself, okay? Go along. Do you understand? Do something of what they want but keep a true core inside you, a soul of rebelliousness; an anger, not a fear. One day you’ll be free, and then we’ll see what we can do. I might be there then. If I am, remember me. Good luck.”

“Well met by sunlight. We’ll greet by sinlight. Stroke me a clyper!”

The grey-cloth lady often touched her; she would stroke her hand or pat her arm or smooth her hair off her forehead. She did that again now, brushing hair from her brow.

Liquid.

In the light, she could see that there was liquid on the grey-cloth brush lady’s cheek. Tears.

That was strange. For some reason she’d thought that only she made tears, not anybody else.

Then the grey-cloth brush lady went away with the rest of the cleaners.

She never came back.

After the great septennial extravaganza under the Dome of the Mists, I was no longer Madame d’Ortolan’s golden boy. I was not at all sure that I ever had been, despite what Mrs Mulverhill might have believed, but certainly I was no longer. I must have passed whatever test she had arranged around that consummately bizarre serial two-person orgy she took me on, because I survived in the immediate thereafter and there were no further interrogations, but she felt that I had insulted her, obviously, and now I would be made to pay.

I was still convinced that the whole point of the exercise had been to test how easily I could be couriered and to give the trackers, spotters and foreseers who were undoubtedly in attendance nearby something to work on – like handing a sniffer hound a piece of clothing belonging to the person you wanted to track – and if there had been any personal component – Madame d’Ortolan feeling some curious form of jealousy regarding myself and Mrs Mulverhill, perhaps – then surely that had been entirely subordinate to the infinitely more important business of ensuring the security of the Concern.

Nevertheless, I knew I had insulted her and she had taken it very badly. I had not reacted as I had been expected to, required to. I had shown some distaste, even arguably some disgust. Certainly not the awed, stunned, perhaps embarrassed, perhaps humbled respect I believe she had anticipated and was convinced should be rightfully hers.

In the end, on any absolute scale it had been no great hurt; the average person must endure, absorb and forget a hundred equivalent or worse insults and denigrations each year. But for a person of Madame d’Ortolan’s unparalleled importance and continually reinforced pride, the very unexpectedness of it had magnified the offence and made it loom all the larger, set against the otherwise smoothly functioning progressions of her remorselessly flourishing life.

For a few months afterwards I was rested and given no assignments at all, but from then on I was sent on gradually more difficult and hazardous missions for l’Expédience. I was allowed to spend less and less time in my house in the trees on the ridge above Flesse. I spent my days instead spread serially far across the many worlds, engaging in feats of derring-do, close-quarter assassination and outright thuggery. Gradually even the house at Flesse stopped seeming the sanctuary it had been and when I had discretionary use of septus I would holiday, if that is the right word, in the world containing the Venice where I had met and lost my little pirate captain, wandering like a lost soul across its history-scorched face, becoming familiar with that single embodiment of a world crippled by its legacy of recent cruelties and a self-lacerating worship of the proceeds of selfishness and greed. Again, this was your world, and I guarantee that in many ways I know it better than you.

There is a saying that some foolish people believe: what does not kill you makes you stronger. I know for a fact, having seen the evidence – indeed, often enough having been the cause of it – that what does not kill you can leave you maimed. Or crippled, or begging for death or in one of those ghastly twilights experienced – and one has to hope that that is entirely not the right word – by those in a locked-in or persistent vegetative state. In my experience the same people also believe that everything happens for a reason. Given the unalleviatedly barbarous history of every world we have ever encountered with anything resembling Man in it, this is a statement of quite breathtakingly casual retrospective and ongoing cruelty, tantamount to the condonation of the most severe and unforgivable sadism.

Nevertheless – as much through chance, I am sure, as through any innate skill or other natural quality – I survived these trials and did indeed grow more skilled, more capable and more adept at all the arcane, ethically dubious, technically overspecialised and frankly disreputable techniques required.

I did, however, grow more frightened too, because with every new mission and each required high-risk intervention, attack or killing, I knew that my gradually perfecting skills would not save me when my luck ran out, indeed that they would stand for precisely nothing when the moment came, as it surely must, and that with every new mission I upped the chances of this one being my last, not through any lessening of my preparation, creativity, vigilance or skill but due to the simple working-out of statistical chance.

I had already long forgotten most of the interventions I had taken part in, then later could not recall how many people I had harmed or injured, or left disabled or terrified for life.

Eventually, to my shame, I even lost count of those I’d killed.

I think there is a kind of queasily mixed emulsion of guilt and fatalism that settles on a man or woman engaged in such deadly, fatal work. I mean deadly to those we target; fatal only potentially to ourselves, but still, eventually, if we keep going long enough, always guaranteed to be terminal.

We come to know that the end cannot be evaded for ever, and the terror of that knowledge – the increasing certainty that every successful mission and every triumphant side-stepping of death this time only makes it more likely that the next risk we take could be the one that finally takes us – makes us more and more nervous, neurotic, unbalanced and psychologically fragile.

And, I believe, if we are involved with the business of killing others and have any sort of conscience at all – and even if we know that we fight the good fight and do what we do for the best of motives – a part of us, if we are honest with ourselves, comes to look forward to that end, begins even to welcome its increasingly likely arrival. If nothing else it will bring an end to worry, an end to guilt and nightmares, both waking and sleeping.

(An end to tics, neuroses and psychoses, too. An end to seemingly always finding myself in the body and mind of somebody with OCD, and that being the one trait that transfers.)

I might have said no, I might have resigned, but stupid pride, an urge not to be beaten or cowed by anybody, including Madame d’Ortolan, even if she was now the undisputed head of the whole Concern, kept me going until, when that initial impetus fell away and I might have justly claimed I’d made my point and stepped away, the resigned fatalism and thirst for it all to end – and end as it had taken place so far, as though only that could somehow justify and make sense of everything I’d done – took over, enabling and diseasing me at once.