Argeh looked over his shoulder, his lips curled. “Your orders for the prisoner, My Lord?”

My Lord hesitated. It was not his role to hand down judgments. Argeh had never asked him before. But he knew he had no choice. The entire arena watched.

He made the sign for slaughter across his breast.

The crowd rumbled like an earthquake, though whether in approval or disapproval it was difficult to tell. Then the staffs began to pound in agreement, low, building.

“Kill the heretic!” came the cry.

My Lord quivered with relief, a tidal rush that told him he’d been more terrified than he’d known. He had escaped Argeh’s treachery—for now. Thank god one could always count on Fiorian bloodlust at least.

“No!” Aharon called out.

My Lord turned in surprise. Tevach was glaring at him from behind Aharon. The cagey rat had translated the entire thing! He motioned Tevach angrily to get away. For the first time, he felt rage at his servant—could have whipped him had he the weapon at hand.

“Yosef, no,” Aharon pleaded, his eyes wet.

My Lord motioned him to desist, looked back toward the crowd, seething. Argeh was watching the three of them with infinite calculation. Worse and worse.

“The sentence?” My Lord prompted the high priest.

Argeh licked his lips in a gesture of faux submission. He turned back to the crowd. “The heretic shall be executed on the last day of Festival!”

My Lord fell back into his chair as his knees gave out. His joints screamed; his heart thudded miserably in his chest. He studied the faces in the crowd. How well known was this heretic? Could he be the source of the sentiment against him, the seed of the vandalism? He must have Decher do a full investigation as soon as possible.

The heretic and his men were led away. One by one the remaining prisoners were charged, led to the hechkih, and mounted upon them. There were still interminable hours to go, and My Lord was already exhausted. But one mercy: all eyes in the crowd would be on the bloodletting from now on.

What had possessed him to have Tevach translate for Aharon… in public? What had he been thinking?

He knew: He had wanted Aharon to understand. He’d wanted the Jew’s approbation, and that had made him unwise then, furious with himself now. He was walking a razor’s edge on this planet, where the least breeze could be his ruin. He knew, right then, that Aharon would be that breeze. He’d brought with him too much of the past. And the past could not be reconciled with the king of Gehenna.

My Lord motioned Tevach to take the slumping Jew to the carriage.

Aharon fell into a feverish sleep the minute they put him in bed. He was depleted from the nightmarish festival, from the strain of trying to control his body. He had dreams involving bestial Fiore ripping him apart.

When he awoke someone was shaking him. It felt quite late, a sensation that had more to do with the reddened, puffy eyes of Tevach—whose paw was doing the shaking—than the black outside his window. Kobinski was waiting. He was dressed in a simple undyed gown that might have been his bed clothes.

Tevach helped Kobinski into a chair and left the two of them alone. The torch burned sputteringly in its holder on the table, that old familiar torch. It flickered against the old man’s lined face when he removed his mask. It was a face that was deeply pained by its very structure, but the expression itself was slack, void of emotion.

He opened his lips, almost spoke, didn’t. Aharon could sense that Kobinski was in a very different mood from any he’d shown before. He waited.

“I am as much a prisoner here as you, Aharon. You think I have power; I don’t.”

Aharon sighed inside. He felt instinctually that he should say nothing; it was that angel pressing its fingers to his lips, Shhhh. He didn’t say, for example, That’s what the capos said. He could see, even as Kobinski spoke those words, the guilt in his eyes.

“Argeh uses me to make the populace afraid, like an intimidating dog chained to his side.”

Aharon again said nothing, though Kobinski waited for him to speak.

The massive man put his legs out in front of him, trying to straighten his knees, grinding his teeth at the pain.

“Come sit on the bed,” Aharon said. “You can stretch your legs.”

“I’m fine.”

“Come!” Aharon used an irresistible tone that had been his mother’s specialty. It was a large bed, and though hard and scratchy from the dried-grass stuffing, it still offered welcome support in the heavy atmosphere. Aharon forced his aching muscles to rally and pushed himself to one side to make more room.

Kobinski shook his head, rubbed at his knees, but a moment later pulled himself upright. He managed to get onto the bed, his legs stretched out, his back propped against the wall. He shivered. Aharon tried to give him his blanket; Kobinski refused.

“The cold is not in the room.” Kobinski turned his head, and for a moment Aharon saw the demons that tortured his soul. Then Kobinski turned his gaze to look up at the ceiling, as if the contact had revealed too much.

“I did… try. At first. When I first came. I tried to make things better for the Fiore. But…” He sought for words. “This place gets inside you. It beats you down. How can you change an entire culture? A way of life, a history, a people, a world? And I had come from Auschwitz, where things were not much better. After a while, you just plod forward, surviving day to day. I was broken when I came here.”

He paused. Aharon, feeling that finger on his lips, said nothing. Kobinski was confessing. Aharon did not know why, but he knew enough not to interrupt.

“I could not openly defy their Scripture. If I had spoken against their religious views I would have been gone, like that.” He wiggled his fingers in lieu of the harder task of snapping them. “I did try to improve some things—agriculture, technology. My education was not so useful. What good is calculus in a world struggling with addition and subtraction? Or chemistry in a place where there are no labs, no manufacturing, no microscopes? But I did try.

“It’s this planet, Aharon. Every machine breaks—it’s as simple as that. Only the most basic and hardiest devices survive. The soil is rocky and barren, unresponsive to either irrigation or fertilization. The seas are largely uninhabited. Medicine is barbaric and deadlocked in religious superstition.” He paused again. “It beats you down. It just beats you down.”

He raised a hand, rubbed at his trembling lips.

When it didn’t seem like he would continue on his own, Aharon said gently, “Also, maybe, you’d given up before you ever came here, nu? You already were not the man you were when you wrote The Book of Torment.”

Kobinski didn’t reply.

“Maybe that’s why you came here. You had given up hope.”

Kobinski gave a bitter laugh. “I hated; that’s why I came here. I wanted to take us both to Hell, so that night, wrestling with Wallick, I let it fill me. Hate is a form of restriction, too.”

Aharon studied Kobinski’s face, eyes narrowed in thought. This afternoon, he had hated. He’d hated Kobinski for his participation in these atrocities, hated it that a Jew—one of the chosen and particularly one as “chosen” as Yosef Kobinski—could do such things. And how could he when he had written… when he was the author of this incredible work Aharon was reading? It seemed a double blasphemy.

But now Aharon felt… compassion. He had no idea where it had come from. It was such a large compassion, he couldn’t even take credit for it. It was as if someone were opening his heart and filling it up.

“What happened to the Nazi? This Wallick?”

Kobinski drew in a breath. His chest rose and fell; again his lips formed words that wanted to come out but were held back at the last moment. Finally he released them. “I told the Fiore he was from Charvah, the devil. He… he’s dead.”