January closed his eyes. He knew he should get up and go over to them-his Italian was good enough to make himself understood-but exhaustion held him like a chain. Maybe they were in hell.

It was hot enough, God knew. In the long upstairs ward, the clotted black heat was imbued with the stenches of human waste and fever-vomit and the peculiar, horrible stink that reeks from the sweat of those in mortal fear. The long windows that gave onto the gallery were shut tight and heavily curtained in the hopes of excluding the pestilence that rode the air of night, and January's face ran with sweat as if he'd put his head in a rain barrel. Like hell's, the dark was smudged with fire. The lamps were too few and burned the cheapest oil obtainable; smoke hung beneath the high ceiling and the smell of it permeated clothing, hair, flesh. Like hell, even in this dead hour of the night, the room murmured with a Babel of voices: German, Swedish, English...

Like hell, it was a place without hope.

"He thinks you're a priest." January got to his feet, slowly, like an old man. "He has no use for priests."

"An Italian?" Emil Barnard straightened indignantly. He spoke the singsong French of the Midi, with its trilled vowels and rolled r's. "Absurd. They're all priest ridden, Romish heathens. You are mistaken." Yet Barnard did look a little like a priest, in his long, old-fashioned black tailed coat and his shirt of biscuit-colored calico that looked white in the lamp glare and smoke.

"He thinks that's the viaticum-the Host-you have... sir." In his days in Paris, January had called no man "sir" unless he thought they deserved it: the physicians at the Hotel Dieu, the wealthy men who had hired him to play, the Director of the Opera. It was hard to return to his childhood, to call even a street-sweeper "sir" if that street-sweeper happened to have been born white, to look down or aside so as not to meet their eyes. "What is it?"