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and a theater, with screens and stages; inside, cool night air coils in deep purple velvets and muted blue satins of curtains and chairs, mingling with the clean smell of water tossed from a few small stone fountains, and sometimes spiced with a faint warm breath off of someone drifting in from the frying street to press his face against cool stone and sit on cool plush seats. Like a gem set in the middle of town, the first public building in San Veneficio, the Orpheum rests today as it always has at the midpoint of Calavera Street, surrounded by peppery-smelling trees, some with reddish-black leaves, others adorned only with blue flowers, petrified now like coral in the light. The Divinity Student looks at the Orpheum with difficulty, so much of it is lost in white smears of reflected light from the polished marble and the huge dome, carved from a single vast piece of green jade. Blinking in the searing light, he can see the statues hiding in alcoves, heavy basalt pillars supporting the facade: Orpheus soberly in the center—on his right, a smaller image where he enchants the animals and all of nature with his playing, and on his left, his head sings, drifting on river foam.
    The sun’s burden lifts from the Divinity Student as he passes into the shade of the pillars and the muted light within. He enters the main hall directly, huge and round with many doors set into its circumference both along the floor and above on the central gallery. High overhead, the dome glows green, translucent sheets of white marble set like windowpanes fill the room with warm diffused lambence. Water runs in thin sheets over the pillars supporting the upper concourse, collecting in a ring-shaped pool. On one wall, Circe is beguiling a crowd, already a handful at the edges are turning into pigs. On the other is Medusa, turning men to stone. A statue of Orpheus stands in the center of the room. The Divinity Student gets directions to the high priest’s office from a young docent in a black uniform.
    So, he pads up a wide, curving stairway, bypassing the public rooms to make straight for the gray, rounded service passages beyond. Soft red floors, light dapples the walls like water reflections, a museum smell of fresh paint, and over all a deep hush, save for an occasional courier rushing by on whispering feet. He follows the passage to its end, and there finds the high priest’s door set in a funnel-shaped wall. The nameplate reads: Magellan. The door is wine-colored wood with brass hinges. He raises his hand to knock, but the door is already opening; a hairless little man peers up at him with large eyes.
    “Yes?” Voiceless.
    “I’ve come from Woodwind’s . . . ” his quiet reply.
    “You’re the Seminarian?” The words seem to bypass the air and sound in the Divinity Student’s ears directly. He nods.
    The other nods and gestures for him to enter. The ceiling slopes down to meet with the top of the door jam; the room is shaped like a funnel—the far wall is an ellipse three stories high into which is set a circular window with a pane fragmented into hundreds of palm-sized pieces of varying thicknesses and shapes, a gigantic eye. Immediately before this window is Magellan’s huge desk and before that are seats for visitors, one of which is currently occupied by a nondescript client. A few others wait in chairs along the wall to the right.
    Magellan’s familiar waves the Divinity Student to an empty chair and scuttles off to the wings—where racks of jars stand in static dust: later the familiar will tell his wife, “Today I saw a bottle containing a witch.” A witches’ ladder, a rope with cockfeathers woven in between the strands, throws curses. An impaled slug on a thorn, in a jar, withered, colorless, still, in formaldehyde. Shelves of stuffed animals, motheaten, ragged, semicollapsed, dirty, glazed milky eyes. Flat glass slabs for the invertebrates—fish, eels, worms, phosphorescent. On every surface, tiny, neatly penned