“What’s your problem?” said Kleist as he swaggered up to Cale. “You’re still alive, aren’t you?”

“Something’s wrong.”

“You forgot to say thank you.”

Cale stared at him. “Go and see if there are any survivors.”

Kleist was about to ask him what his last slave died of, but there was something odder than usual about Cale and he thought better of it.

Vague Henri had already started checking the bodies, counting the bolts and hoping to God that his victims were dead. He noticed that Kleist was doing the same, although the Materazzi had quickly finished off anyone who was still moving.

“Cale! Come and see,” shouted Kleist as he turned over a body with one of his arrows in its back. Vague Henri watched as Cale approached but hung back, uneasy. “Look,” said Kleist. “It’s Westaby.” Cale stared at the dead face of an eighteen-year-old he had seen every day at the Sanctuary for as long as he could remember. “Here’s one of the Gaddis twins,” said Vague Henri. There was a short silence as he pulled a body next to it onto its front. “And his brother.” From the far end of the courtyard, near the manhole cover, there was a burst of shouting and four Materazzi started kicking and punching a Redeemer who’d been lying low. The three boys rushed over and started pulling them off, but the Materazzi kept trying to shove them aside until Cale pulled his sword and threatened them with vile dismemberments if they didn’t back off. Kleist and Vague Henri dragged the Redeemer away as the Materazzi looked on in a bad temper. The evil mood was broken by another Materazzi guard who walked up to the four holding a sword bent into an L-shape. “Would you look at this?” he kept saying. “Would you look at this?” Slowly Cale backed away and went over to Kleist and Henri, still keeping his eye on the four Materazzi.

Cale, Kleist and Vague Henri stood over the Redeemer lying unconscious with his back against the palazzo wall, his face swollen, lips fat, teeth missing.

“He looks familiar,” said Vague Henri.

“Yes,” said Cale. “It’s Tillmans, Navratil’s acolyte.”

“Redeemer Bumfeel?” said Kleist, looking down at the unconscious young man more closely. “Yeah, you’re right. It is Tillmans.” Kleist snapped his fingers in Tillmans’s face twice.

“Tillmans! Wake up!” He shook him by the shoulders and then Tillmans groaned. Slowly his eyes opened, but they were unfocused.

“They burned him.”

“They burned who?”

“Redeemer Navratil. They roasted him over a griddle for touching boys.”

“Sorry about that. He was decent enough, all said and done,” said Cale.

“As long as you kept your back to the wall,” said Kleist. “He gave me a pork chop once,” he added, a memorial as close to a eulogy as Kleist was ever likely to give a Redeemer.

“I couldn’t bear the screaming,” said Tillmans. “It took nearly an hour to finish him. Then they told me they’d do the same to me if I didn’t volunteer to come here.”

“Who was watching you on the way?”

“Redeemer Stape Roy and his cohort. They told us when we got to this place, there’d be God’s spies to fight with us, and if we did well, we’d get a fresh start. Don’t kill me, Boss!”

“We’re not going to hurt you. Just tell us what you know.”

“Nothing. I don’t know anything.”

“Who were the others?”

“I don’t know-just like me, not soldiers. I want…”

Tillmans’s eyes started to move oddly, one losing focus, the other looking over Cale’s shoulder as if he could see something in the distance. Again Kleist snapped his fingers, but this time there was no response, except that Tillmans’s gaze became more unfocused and his breathing more erratic. Then for a moment he seemed to come to-“What’s that?” Then his head fell to one side.

“He’s not going to last the night,” said Vague Henri. “Poor old Tillmans.”

“Yeah,” said Kleist. “And poor old Redeemer Bumfeel. What a way to go.”

He had been told to report at three to the chancellor’s office and keep his mouth shut. When he was finally shown in, Vipond barely looked at him.

“I have to admit that I had my doubts when you predicted the Redeemers would try an attack on Arbell in Memphis. I wondered if perhaps you weren’t making it up in order to give yourself and your friends something to do. My apologies.”

Cale was not used to anyone in authority admitting they were wrong-especially when they were right-and so he just looked shifty. Vipond handed Cale a printed leaflet-on it was a coarsely drawn picture of a woman with her breasts exposed and above this the headline: THE WHORE OF MEMPHIS. The leaflet went on to describe Arbell as a notorious defiler and shaved-headed whore who prostituted herself and all innocents in mass orgies of devil worship and sacrifice. She is a sin, declared the leaflet finally, crying out to heaven for vengeance!

There were hammers working in Cale’s brain trying to figure all this out.

“The attackers outside the walls left these pamphlets all along their trail of attack,” said Vipond. “There’ll be no keeping a lid on it this time. Arbell Materazzi is widely considered to be whiter than snow.”

While this was clearly no longer entirely true, the grotesque lies of the pamphlet were as deeply puzzling to Cale as to Vipond.

“Any idea what this is about?” asked Vipond.

“No.”

“I heard you interrogated a prisoner.”

“What there was left of him.”

“Did he have anything to say?”

“Only to tell us what was already pretty clear. This was never a serious attack. They weren’t even real soldiers. We knew about ten of them-field cooks, clerks, a few soldier types who slacked off once too often. That’s why it was so easy.”

“You’re not to repeat that anywhere else. The form all around is that the Materazzi have delivered a great victory against a cowardly attack by the pick of Redeemer assassins.”

“The pick of Redeemer pig-boys.”

“There is outrage at what has happened and great regard for our soldiers’ skill and heroism in repelling them. Nothing must be said to contradict that claim. You understand?”

“Bosco wants to provoke you into an attack on him.”

“Well, he’s succeeded.”

“Giving Bosco what he wants is a stupid idea. I’m not lying about this.”

“That makes a change. But I believe you.”

“Then you have to tell them that if they think taking on a real Redeemer army will be anything like this, then they’ve got another think coming.”

For the first time Vipond looked straight at the boy in front of him.

“My God, Cale, if you only knew with what little sense the world is run. There has been no disaster visited on mankind that was not warned of by someone-never, not in all the history of the world. And no one who ever gave such warnings and was proved right ever got any good out of it. The Materazzi will not be told by anyone in this matter, and certainly not by Thomas Cale. That’s how the world is, and there is nothing an insignificant nobody like you, or even a significant somebody like me, can do about it.”

“You’re not going to say anything to stop them?”

“No, I am not, and neither will you. Memphis is the heart of the greatest power on earth. Some very simple forces, Cale, hold that empire together: trade, greed and the general belief that the Materazzi are too powerful for it all to be worth the risk of defying us. Waiting behind the walls of Memphis while the Redeemers lay siege to us is not an option. Bosco can’t win, but we can lose. All it requires is for us to be seen to be hiding from him. We could wait out a siege in Memphis for a hundred years, but it wouldn’t be six months before revolts would have sprung up from here to the Republic of Pisspot-on-Sea. It’s war-so we’d just better get on with it.”

“I know how the Redeemers will fight.”

Vipond looked at him, exasperated. “So what do you expect? To be consulted? The generals who are planning the campaign have not only conquered half the known world, they either fought with or were trained by Solomon Solomon, even if most of them didn’t care for him much. But you-a boy… a nothing who fights like a starving dog. You can forget it.” He waved Cale away impatiently, adding so as to send him away with a flea in his ear, “You should have let Solomon Solomon live.”