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disappointed.
    â€˜No.’
    Unable to resist moralizing, IdrisPukke continued complacently. ‘It’s pointless to blame someone for being themselves and looking to their own interests. Whose interests would they look to? Yours? Kleist knows what’s waiting for him if he’s caught again. Why should he risk such a hideous death for someone he doesn’t even like?’
    â€˜What about me?’
    â€˜Why should he risk such a hideous death for someone he does like? You must think awfully well of yourself.’
    This time Vague Henri laughed without the disappointment. ‘So why have you come then? The Redeemers won’t be any kinder to you than to me.’
    â€˜Simple,’ said IdrisPukke. ‘I have allowed affection to get the better of my good judgement.’ He could not resist the opportunity to expand on another one of his pet notions. ‘That’s why it’s much better not to have friends if you have the strength of character to do without them. In the endfriends always turn into a nuisance of one kind or another. But if you must have them let them alone and accept that you must allow everyone the right to exist in accordance with the character he has, whatever it turns out to be.’
    They struck camp in silence and had carried on the same way for a good while when Vague Henri asked his companion a surprising question.
    â€˜IdrisPukke, do you believe in God?’
    There was no pause to consider his answer. ‘There’s little enough goodness or love in me, or the world in general, to go about wasting it on imaginary beings.’

4
    It is well enough known that the heart is encased in a tube and that sufficient distress causes it to fall down the tube, generally called the bunghole, or spiracle, which ends in the pit of the stomach. At the bottom of the bunghole, or spiracle, is a trap-door – made of gristle – called the springum. In the past, when bitter disappointment struck a man or woman and was too much to bear the springum would burst open and the heart would fall through it and give those who had suffered too much pain a merciful and quick release by stopping the heart instantly. Now there is so much pain in the world that hardly anyone could bear it and live. And so ever-protecting nature has caused the springum to fuse to the spiracle so that it can no longer open and now suffering, however terrible, must simply be endured. This was just as well for Cale as the first sight of the Sanctuary rose out of the early-morning mist as grim as a punishment. All the way along the
last part of the journey a childish hope had emerged from somewhere in his soul that when he saw the Sanctuary first it might have been utterly destroyed by fire or brimstone. It was not. It sat squat on the horizon, unalterable in its concrete watchfulness, and waiting for his return, as solid in its presence as if it had grown into the flat-topped mountain on which it was built that itself looked like an enormous back tooth implanted in the desert. It was not made to delight, to intimidate, to glorify, or boast. It looked like its function: constructed to keep some peopleout no matter what and to keep others in no matter what. And yet you could not easily describe it: it was blank walls, it was prisons, it was places of grim worship, it was brownness. It was a particular idea of what it meant to be human made out of concrete.
    All the way up the narrow road that corkscrewed up the side of the vast tabletop hill Cale’s heart battered against the gristly door of his springum as it clutched at oblivion – but oblivion would not come. The great gates opened and then the great gates shut. And that was that. All the daring, the courage, the intelligence, the luck, the death, the love, the beauty and the joy, the slaughter and treachery had brought him back to the exact point where he had started not even a year before. It was the canonical hour of None and so everyone was