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"I am Cley," I said.

He brought his hands together and clapped twice. I was unsure if he was mocking me or letting me know that he understood.

I realized I didn't care. Taking up my drink, I sat back in the chair and sipped. He seemed to approve of my decision to stay.

"Thank you," I said.

With this, he hopped off his chair and went through a doorway at the end of the bar. A few minutes later, he returned holding a serving tray. He climbed back up on his chair and then laid the tray before me. It was a complete dinner of pig shank covered with pineapple slices. There was bread and butter and a separate dish of potatoes and garlic.

I did not realize until that moment how insane my hunger was. While I ate like an animal, Silencio got down from his chair, went around the side of the bar, crossed the porch, and sat down at his piano. It was the combination of the pineapple and the music that made me think of paradise. I gulped the Rose Ear Sweet and jammed potatoes down my throat as I saw the golden gates sweep open to let me in.

I was still at the bar when Corporal Matters of the day watch came for me. He beat me roundly but I was too drunk to feel it. Out in the sand, in the circle, the dice showed two sixes. I heard the corporal's laughter all day, spiraling down through the mine as I stood before my hole, swinging the pick. Even after I had passed out and was deep in a cool dream of salvation, it was there, like a cricket in an egg, threatening to hatch.

On Doralice, the days were near infinite and filled to the brim with physical suffering. The nights were a candle going out, a few brief moments of shadow-laden solitude, underscored by the persistent whisper of the ocean and the baying of the wild dogs. The moonlit pain was mental anguish, bubbling up from dreams in which my guilt was revealed both literally and symbolically. Sometimes, when the corporal of the day watch woke me with his stick across my back, I almost thanked him for retrieving me from some memory of myself in Anamasobia.

The only thing that seemed to change on Doralice was me. Over the course of a few weeks, I had become physically stronger from my efforts in the mine. Silencio was a wizard at curing my wounds when I returned beaten up or scorched or delirious from the fumes. He had large green leaves he sometimes dipped in water and then wrapped me in to ease the fire in my flesh. There was a certain herbal tea he prepared that increased my strength and cleared my head. With his hairy-backed hands he gently applied a blue salve to the places where the corporal's stick had landed and broken the skin. But even with all of his efforts, and the fact that my muscles were becoming as hard as the rock I worked, I could feel I was dying inside. Day and night, I thought longingly ahead to the time when I would exchange my haunted remembering for a complete forgetting.

I learned my lesson about going down to the bar at night after that first painful experience. From then on, after staggering back to the inn, I went to my room and stayed there. Silencio brought up a tray of food for me. Whatever type of monkey he was, he was most unusually brilliant—handsome too, with his various shades of brown and that long black beard that came to the middle of his white chest. He used his tail like an extra hand, and was quite strong in his wiry muscles. I could swear, when I spoke to him, that he understood every nuance of my conversation.

Sometimes, when I had finished eating, he sat on the dresser, picking ticks from his fur and cracking them between his teeth. I lay on the bed and revealed to him the depths of the vanity that had brought me to the island. Occasionally, he shook his head or gave a little screech as I related yet another embarrassing detail, but he never seemed judgmental. When I told him the story of Aria, and what I had done to her, he brought his fist to his eyes to wipe away tears.

One day when the corporal had rolled only a pair of ones, and I had plenty of time to myself down in the mine, I went exploring through the tunnels of my predecessors. Some of the names were familiar to me, either from having read about them in the city Gazette or having had a hand in prosecuting their cases. It dawned on me that most were political prisoners. Those who committed robbery or rape or murder were usually dealt with immediately by way of electrocution, firing squad, or explosion of the head. It seemed the ones who made it to Doralice were all individuals who had, in some way, questioned the authority or philosophies of the Master. In words or writing, they had professed a disdain for the rigid societal control of the Weil-Built City, doubted the efficacy of the Physiognomy, or called the mental state of Drachton Below into question.

Above the entrances of the various openings, I found Rasuka, Barlow, Therian. They had all in their own cracked ways seen beyond the limits of the city to a place where brutality and fear were not necessary for the regulation of society. I remembered the Master laughing at Therian's plan to feed the poor of La-trobia and the other communities that had sprung up around the walls of the metropolis. "He's a whiner, Cley," Below had told me. "The stupid ass doesn't see that starvation is a way of thinning out these undesirables." And what did I do? I read poor Therian's head and found him dangerous to the realm. I can't recall if it was his chin or the bridge of his nose, but it didn't matter. Those two features, along with the rest of him, sat before me, a sizable pile of salt, barely visible in the dim, yellow glow of his otherwise barren tunnel.

Barlow's hole was filled with writing. He had used some implement to etch poetry into the sulphur walls. It was a sad thing to see that through all his suffering, he had never become any better a writer—here rhyming ghost with host, there, trope with hope, too many beats, too few images, all love and lovely. In the heat and stench of the pit, I wondered if that was important, or if there was not something I was missing about the passion that had literally consumed his life. What danger he was to the Master, I could not see.

Although I used quite a bit of energy I could have otherwise conserved in moving from tunnel to tunnel inspecting the remains of the dead, there was something fascinating about my search. The upward draft in the pit was doubly hot that day for some reason, but I continued on, wiping the burning sweat out of my eyes and peering through the mist. It was almost as if I was visiting these people, almost as if I was one of them. Here were my compatriots. This thought actually offered a modicum of solace until I moved down along the path, past my own tunnel, and found the name Flock, carved above one of the openings.

Out of all the eternal homes I had visited that day, the most impressive one was my old professor's. Had I been able to put out of my mind that it was all hewn from sulphur, and been able to ignore the stench, I would say that Flock's little grotto was quite beautiful. The old man had a touch of the artist in him, for he had made his hole into a garden, having sculpted onto the walls reliefs of plants and shrubbery and trees. Tendrils and vines, leaves and blossoms were delicately rendered, showing detail and proper dimension. At the back of the tunnel, which was quite deep, was a small garden bench, carved entirely from what must have been an enormous boulder of sulphur. It faced the back wall.

I took a seat there, in Flock's garden, and stared at a row of life-size faces that he had shaped out of the yellow stone. The first was of the Master—an uncanny likeness. He was snickering, his eyes slightly rolled back as if he had just injected himself with sheer beauty. Next to him was Corporal Matters of the day watch, scowling jowls and deep pockets beneath the hateful eyes. Last in the strange gallery of the professor's tormentors was a visage I could not place, though I knew it to be familiar. It was certainly as filled with spite and menace as the other two. One might say it had some of the Master's own madness in it.

While I tried to remember where I had seen it, I noticed that beneath all of these rude heads had been carved the word forgive. Eventually, I lifted my pick and swung violently, smashing that last head from the wall. I beat it where it lay on the ground until it had been reduced to yellow crumbs. Then I shoveled it into my sack. 'Two pounds," I whispered to the corporal's leering face.