The prisoner went on. “When this light struck by outside my window today, I knew I was still alive for this reason. To tell you—specifically you, Lord John Sousa—what I saw in my vision. I truly believe I’m alive right now to bear witness to my prediction coming true.” He opened and closed his fists thoughtfully.
These words congealed around John and he quivered fruitishly inside them. Talking, talking! But outside, still, that comet, entirely there, entirely not going away. And here before him, a man who might (yes, terror—might!) be able or at least who might believe himself able to explain this marvel. It was that belief, which seemed itself marvelous and humble in spite of everything, that moved John so awfully. So that his heart skipped again, this time down into his feet where it remained, and he had to gasp for a new breath. O, his body, so frail a thing when pitted against the tireless lashings of his mind! He clutched the bedpost and leaned forward as if to vomit.
“Yes, yes,” John replied. “Perhaps it does mean something. Nameless sir, we who love the truth are bound to be undone by it, as it seems always to be melting just as we grab for it. You are telling me you think you can see more and better things than I can in my own scrying mirror? Is that what I hear you saying?”
“It was just one time. I was in a trance. But … yes, I do.”
“Where did you get your mirror?”
The prisoner glanced over his shoulder. “A simple—very legal—shaving mirror.”
John waved his hand. “I know you’re lying about predicting the comet. You’re lying to save yourself from the executioner, but I don’t care about that because I think you’re not lying about being able to predict the comet.” He spread his hands. “I would like nothing more than to give you unending moments of my time, but as it is I have so much work to do, and your views are so against my own philosophy that I cannot see what more there is to be gained from this … suggested partnership. That is what you’re suggesting, correct? That we work together?”
The prisoner coughed. “Will you give me a chance to prove myself?”
This was what John had been casting for, some desperate act to match his own desperation. He felt himself begin to smile but instead he hacked phlegm into a ball of wadded-up bedsheet. “Go ahead, then.”
The man glanced up and out the window at the coral sky and for a long time he seemed on the verge of weeping. Unfair, the weight of expectation, John thought, but then each one of us is given his own special dreadfulness to endure. Better perhaps to have been born as he himself had been, the seventh son of third-generation Chief Orbital Doctors, and better perhaps to have been raised inside the faith, rather than however this man had been raised—surely only inopportune circumstances could have led him to such a pitiful line of work.
But John felt no special sympathy for the downtrodden. He accepted things as they came to him, and sometimes they were good and other times they were unsatisfying. He supposed he had some persistent wish that others should do the same. After all, he’d worked all his life at something he could neither see nor touch, and there was dignity in that—he knew it existed somewhere—but he could not expect a man like this prisoner, who’d spent his life elbow-deep in human guts, to understand that.
After a long silence, the prisoner closed his eyes and began to twitch like worm cut in half, one side of him shrinking from the other as if in awful pain. John watched. The show revealed as much as the prophecy. The prisoner was a good performer at least. But presently he collapsed in a heap on the desk chair and said, “I can’t, I can’t, sir, I can’t see anything right now.”
“Ah well. Would that we could call down precognition when it suited us. Mizar—” he began. “Take this fellow back to the jail—”
“But what if I were to tell you something I already saw? It’s real, I have it written in my notes that they confiscated, I can prove to you I wrote it a long time ago.”
John leaned back on his elbows and into the fluffy boat of the mattress and didn’t speak.
The prisoner’s eyes widened, and a peculiar blush went over his face. He looked to his shackled feet. “I don’t know if I should say it.”
“Then don’t say it, man. I haven’t got time for dithering, I’ve wasted hours already in a damnable swoon.”
The prisoner nodded. “What I saw, or part of what I saw, when I was in the trance months ago, was a feminine wildfire ripping through this very spot, in tandem with the comet, or rather in relation to the comet, and I know that if you were to check with the, ah, ladies of this court you would find that they are all, to a woman, ah, bleeding at present.”
John raised an eyebrow, his habit since childhood, which he had learned from imitating Mizar. He detested this gesture now but could not stop doing it. “O yes?”
The prisoner winced. “It’s true. Check. I have full confidence.”
John frowned. But then shook his head. “You believe these angels—you called them angels, correct?—revealed that to you? That the ladies are bleeding? And you’re certain you’re not insane? Who cares about the menses of the palace women?”
The prisoner said, “I am only a mouthpiece. Which is why you must see this as proof of my visionary skill. Even when I didn’t know what I was seeing, I was seeing something. Now it all makes sense. The angels told me.”
“That we shall certainly see.” John said with a dry snort. But the prisoner’s claim was
