Silverneck moved aside for her. One of the younger women growled, but Shadow punched her in the side of the head, so hard she was knocked sideways. Shadow sat with the group, and clawed figs into her mouth. But nobody looked at her, nobody groomed her, and even the children avoided her.

That night, when the roosting calls went out. One-eye did not return.

Reid Malenfant:

Malenfant was kept chained up in a dark, filthy cell. It was just a brick-lined pit, its damp mud floor lined with packed-down filth. The only light came from a grilled window high in the ceiling. The door was heavy with a massive wooden bolt on the outside.

He reached out to touch the walls. The bricks were rotten. Maybe he could dig out handholds and climb up to that window.

And then what? What then, after you climb out into the middle of Praisegod’s courtyard?…

You are not dealing with rational people, Malenfant.

It was true Praisegod had built a place of relative order here. But this was an island of rigidity in a world of fluidity and madness, a world where mind itself was at a premium, a world where the very stars regularly swam around the sky, for all Praisegod’s zeal and discipline — just as, Malenfant suspected, Praisegod’s own inner core of horror constantly threatened to break through his surface of control.

There was nothing he could do, nothing to occupy his mind.

Sometimes the most courageous thing was doing nothing. Do-nothing heroics: was that a phrase from Conrad? If there was really, truly no way you could change your situation, the last thing you wanted to do was to pour so much energy into fighting your fear that you burned yourself up before the chance came for a break.

As he sat in the dark and the filth, utterly alone, Malenfant wondered how long his own do-nothing heroics would sustain him.

At last he was brought before Praisegod Michael.

At Praisegod’s chapel-residence Malenfant was kept waiting, standing before Praisegod’s empty desk bound hand and foot, for maybe an hour.

Finally Praisegod walked in, slowly, contemplative, his Ham boy at his side. Praisegod didn’t look at Malenfant. He sat at his desk, and a Ham girl brought in a tray of chopped fish set on slabs of hard, dark bread, with a bowl of what looked like mustard and a wooden goblet of wine. Praisegod ate a little of the fish, dipping it in the mustard, and then he passed the rest to the Ham boy, who sat on the floor and ate ravenously.

Praisegod’s manner seemed distracted to Malenfant, almost confused. He said rapidly, “I have been forced to punish Sir McCann. You see why — you witnessed his blasphemous disrespect. His soul is hard, set in a mould of iniquity. But you — you are different. You seek the woman you love; you are moved by a chivalrous zeal. In you I see a soul that could be turned to higher goals.”

“Don’t count on it,” Malenfant said.

Praisegod’s eyes narrowed. “You should not presume on God’s grace.”

“This place has nothing to do with God,” Malenfant said evenly, staring hard at Praisegod. “You play with human lives, but you don’t even see that much, do you? Praisegod, this place — this Moon — is an artefact. Not made by God. Humans. Men, Praisegod. Men as different from you or me as we are different from the Elves, maybe, but men nevertheless. They are moving this whole damn Moon from one reality strand to the next, from Earth to Earth. And everything you see here, the mixing up of uncounted possibilities, is because of that moving. Because of people. Do you get it? God has nothing to do with it.”

Praisegod closed his eyes. “This is a time of confusion. Of change… I think you may yet serve my purpose, and therefore God’s. But I must shape you, like clay on the wheel. But there is much bile in you that must be driven out.” He nodded to Sprigge. “A hundred stripes to start with.”

Malenfant was dragged out of the room. “You’re a savage, Praisegod. And you run a jerkwater dump. If this is some holy crusade, why do you allow your men to run a forced brothel?”

But Praisegod wasn’t listening. He had turned to his Ham boy, and stroked his misshapen head.

Malenfant was taken to a room further down the dismal corridor.

He found himself stretched out over an open wooden frame, set at forty-five degrees above the horizontal. His feet were bound to the base of the frame. Sprigge wrapped rope around his wrists and pulled Malenfant’s arms above his head until his joints ached.

Sprigge looked Malenfant in the eye. “I have to make it hard,” he said. “It’ll be the worse for me if I spare you.”

“Just do your job,” Malenfant said sourly.

“I know Praisegod well enough. That fat Englishman just riled him. He thinks you might be useful to him. But you must play a canny game. If you go badly with him, he’ll ill use you, Malenfant. I’ve seen that before too. He has a lot of devices more clever than my old whip, I’ll tell you. He has gadgets that crush your thumbs or fingers until they are as flat as a gutted fish. Or he will put a leg-clamp on you, a thing he’ll use on recalcitrant Runner folk, and every day we have to turn it a little tighter, until the bones are crushed and the very marrow is leaking into your boots.”

Malenfant tried to lift his head. “I don’t have any boots.”

“Boots will be provided.”

A joke? He could dimly make out Sprigge’s face, and it bore an expression of something like compassion — compassion, under a layer of dirt and weathered scars and tangled beard, the mask of a hard life. “Why do you follow him, Sprigge? He’s a madman.”

Sprigge tested the bonds and stepped back. “Sometimes the lads go off into the bush. They think life is easier there, that they can have their pick of the bush women, not like the bleeding whores they keep here. Well, the bush folk kill them, if the animals or the bugs don’t first. As simple as that. Without Praisegod we’d all be prey, see. He organizes us, Sir Malenfant. We’re housed and we’re fed and nobody harms us. And now that he’s taken up with the Daemons well, he has big ideas. You have to admire a man for that.”

Malenfant thought, What the hell is a Daemon? He felt his jacket being pulled off his back. The air was damp and cold.

“Now, a hundred stripes is a feeler. Sir Malenfant. I know how you’ll bear it. But you’ll live; remember that.” He stepped away, into the dark.

Malenfant heard running footsteps.

And then he heard the lash of the whip, an instant before the pain shot through his nervous system. It was like a burn, a sudden, savage burn. He felt blood trickling over his sides and falling to the floor, and he understood why the frame under him had to be open.

More of Sprigge’s “stripes” rained down, and the pain cascaded. There seemed to be no cut-off in Malenfant’s head, each stroke seemingly doubling the agony that went before, a strange calculus of suffering.

He didn’t try to keep from crying out.

Maybe he lost consciousness before the hundred were done.

At last he was hit by a rush of water — it felt ice-cold — and then more pain reached him, sinking into every gash on his back, like cold fire.

Sprigge appeared before him. “The salty back,” he said, cutting Malenfant’s wrists free. “It’ll help you heal.”

Malenfant fell to the floor, which stank of his own blood, like the iron scent of the crimson dust of this rusted Red Moon.

A heavy form moved around him in the dark. He cowered, expecting more punishment.

But there was a hand on his brow, water at his lips. He could smell the dense scent of a Ham — perhaps it was Julia. The Ham helped him lie flat on his belly, with his ripped jacket under his face. His back was bathed — the wounds stung with every drop — and then something soft and light was laid over his back, leaves that rustled.