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pain up her pinioned arms. 'I must exercise my arms and legs,' she said aloud, as much to keep the memory of her own voice alive as to remind herself not to surrender to hopelessness.
    Unable to keep track of time and deprived of contact with anyone apart from a small, frightened woman who cleaned
    the room - and of course, the beast that was Tanghin - Stella spent hours and hours exploring her own mind. She'd been thinking a lot about her family. A weak father, a shallow, superficial mother and her brother the wastrel drunkard. She began to realise she hated weakness in all its forms: the wanderings of old age, the helplessness of babies or of cripples like Hal, ineffectual people like her father - or like Leith before the journey changed him - and especially the weakness she found in herself. She hated her inability to resist the strength of others, her unreasoning fear of Druin and of being trapped in a life of helplessness, of being tormented by someone strong and merciless, unable to escape. She had fled from all of that, and here she was. Here she was, led by her fears.
    She remembered a time when she was very young. Her older brother would sit on his father's knee and listen to the stories he told. Once she crept out of her room and sat unregarded at the door to listen to a goblin story, where the hero had been trapped in a lightless cave, surrounded by evil creatures intent on catching and eating him. Paralysed by terror as the words washed over her, Stella missed the part where the hero had been rescued by his companions, and was caught up instead in a never-ending tunnel of clawed hands groping at her, wide open mouths leering, teeth clashing, hot breath covering her . ..
    She bit her lip until she drew blood. Thinking like this did her no good. Ignoring the needle-like pain in her arms and legs, and the greyness that closed around her like a tunnel without end, Stella began her exercises.
    The Ecclesia has grown like a mighty tree, the Hermit reflected. Well watered, its roots extended to touch the wealthy and
    influential as well as the poor and powerless. Branches had been set up in Deuverre and Straux as day workers returning home to villages north and south of the Great City exported the Fire. The Mercium meeting now rivalled the Basement as the largest branch of all, an especially pleasing development for the Hermit, who remembered with bitterness having been driven from that iniquitous town many years ago. In the few short months since he set foot in Instruere many hundreds of people, he didn't know how many exactly, declared themselves for the Ecclesia, contributing much to the welfare of the people of the Fire. Last week the contributions tallied over four and a half thousand pending; he had the exact figure written down in a notebook.
    More importantly, he told himself as he walked out on to the raised platform in the Basement, the Fire continued to fall. There they all were, waiting on his word or gesture. There! He pointed dramatically, and half-a-dozen fell to the floor cackling loudly. And there! A few more went down. Others lined the sides of the platform, their prophecies at the ready. Some of them were crackpots, going from one meeting to another trying to peddle their own vision, but he had trustworthy men tending the branches of his great tree, and they would not give place to the fakers or the deranged. He thought of Tanghin and his heart swelled with pride. Soon he would leave Instruere and the movement he had started to take charge of the Mercium branch, but only after installing Tanghin in the Basement. The man Tanghin had deep insight into the ways and plans of the Most High, and was a true disciple of the Ecclesia.
    Across the City, in a disused storehouse close by the Hall of Lore, Tanghin strode through the crowd, touching foreheads as he went. Inevitably the result was the same; down the people fell, to lie prone on the stone floor for hours at a time, enjoying some mystical cathartic