Near the city of Alundil there was a rich grove of blue-barked trees, having purple foliage like feathers. It was famous for its beauty and the shrinelike peace of its shade.

In that wood did this teacher abide with his followers, and when they walked forth into the town at midday their begging bowls never went unfilled.

Alundil was not an overly large city. It had its share of thatched huts, as well as wooden bungalows; its main roadway was unpaved and rutted; it had two large bazaars and many small ones; there were wide fields of grain, owned by the Vaisyas, tended by the Sudras, which flowed and rippled, blue-green, about the city; it had many hostels (though none so fine as the legendary hostel of Hawkana, in far Mahartha), because of the constant passage of travelers; it had its holy men and its storytellers; and it had its Temple.

There was a boat, a metal-hulled antique some forty feet long. Shadrapar was its birthplace, as it is mine, but it took us east down the river into the unmappable and hungry jungles. The thump of its engine was a constant companion to all of us aboard her. We dreamed in time to its artificial heartbeat.

Peter Drachmar, seen there on deck, is quite a different sight. His hair is the colour of wet sand and there are laughter lines on his face even when he is not laughing. He has broader shoulders than I and wears clothes from a far better tailor. Luckily for his future employment, black is his preferred hue for a shirt. His trousers are of mustard colour and he has a short half-cloak of burgundy red that was the height of fashion the year before last. It is edged with gold trim that has faded slightly. If my description of him is more accurate, remember that, from this point on, I seldom crossed paths with a mirror.

“Stefan Advani,” for such am I. I’d have you picture a man of aristocratic feature, as of a good family: a long face, dark straight hair and brown-olive skin. A high forehead – a sign of intellect and not just, as Helman always claimed, receding hairline. The nose is finely shaped but, even in the owner’s opinion, a trifle long. Eternally clean-shaven, a gift from my genes, my loose, ill-fitting clothing is dirty grey and does not flatter. This is your narrator contemplating the fate that was so nearly his, something I have made a career of.

They dragged us all out into the morning to look at it, because it was a vital part of breaking our spirits. Here was our new home, and our mass grave.

The jungle was more of a swamp now, and the water spread on all sides, a glistening wetland choked with reeds and knotted trees. The air was rank with flies. The boat moved slowly through what must have been the only channel deep enough to take its draft, and ahead of us the water broadened out into a lake. It was half mud, and strange plants thrust out from its shallows at intervals like the hands of drowning men. At the heart of this lake was the Island. Everyone’s first glance at the Island was the same: one took it for its namesake. In the middle of this lake, you assumed, there is a hill, and the hill has been covered by the structure. The Island was roughly square, with the top two floors of decreasing size and the lower three all of the same dimensions. It was made of wood and cane, as though the entire building was a barred cell. The higher levels had a few spaces of solid wall, so that the staff could steal a little privacy. The lower levels were all of reinforced slats, cane bars and a vast webwork of rope that held it all together. It was possible to see clean through the Island, if one picked the correct opening. The eye’s path took you through a dozen intervening slatted walls and out to the foul waterscape on the other side, past a hundred sullen inmates. As the boat approached we could see a few of those inmates, shadowed figures behind the bars.

Get your worthless hides off the boat!

There were three, including the steersman. They were all in black: jackets with grotesquely high collars rising almost to the level of their ears at the back; trousers belted with a club and a knife; boots and gloves of shiny rubber or plastic. Their hair was shaved close to the skull. The man at the prow also wore a headband that marked him out as a leader of men. Beneath it, he was almost bald, without even the stubble of the others. He had narrow eyes and a face that defied expression. In all the time I knew the Marshal – for it was he – I never saw any real flicker of thought betray itself on his face.

“There was a crack, although perhaps it was just a light so bright and sudden that it seemed like a sound. The man on Shon’s other side was thrown backwards into the men behind, and when they got out of his way he was just a limp corpse on the floor. His face and chest were charred black. In the aftermath of that strike the air between us and the Marshal boiled and sizzled. That was the second time that random chance passed me by when there was a death to be doled out.

“I do not know who he was, nor do I care,” the Marshal said. Nothing in his hard voice had changed with the man’s death. “That was an example. You are less than nothing to me and my staff, and we will kill any one of you without a second thought. If you wish to remain alive you will do everything in your power to avoid angering us, and even that may not be sufficient. You have no rights. You are nothing more than vermin and the boat brings more of you every month."

“I am the Marshal,” he said. “I command here. I am the Governor’s right hand. This is the Island. You will spend the rest of your lives here,”

Once a decade, a titanium-nosed shuttle plows through the rings of the planet Tartarus with a new batch of prisoners destined for the Orpheus Factory. The debris that makes up the rings is so thick that it thunders like a hailstorm, deafening the passengers. As the orbiting debris bounces and scrapes against the hull, the prisoners squeeze their eyes closed and beg the pilot to be more careful. “Are you trying to hit all of them?” a prisoner snaps, covering his ears against the roaring onslaught.The pilot laughs through her nose. Ironic. Dismissive. “We always do. As many as we can.”She steers into the path of the debris, and the thundering increases.

Planetside, they hold a farce of a trial in the Sibylline Court, a decaying mansion of rotten marble. All traitors to the Sibyllines go to Tartarus to receive the only punishment for rebellion: eternal life.The prisoners stand at attention as the comms read out their names. A whirring ten-limbed auto-judge pronounces their sentences in turn, omitting no words from the traditional declaration of guilt, because the Sibylline Empire believes in ceremony.

One by one the prisoners file into a dark, square mouth cut from the earth: the Orpheus Factory. Machines shred their clothes and lather them in amber disinfectant that burns the skin and smells like tar and makes all their hair fall out. Tiny silver needles snake into their veins. Nanobots pump into their blood, flooding their organs, cleaning off plaques, lengthening telomeres, repairing neurons. The last injection severs their voluntary motor pathways so nothing moves but their eyes. Before the final step, the prisoners feel young again, for a moment.

The last gift of the planet Tartarus to its newborn residents is a brand-new spacesuit, bright white, top of the line, with solar-powered life support that can recycle respirated air and bodily wastes for up to two hundred years, should nothing breach the suit’s barrier. z their terrified eyes flickering behind their faceplates, their lips drawn back by spasticity into a tight, cramped grin.When the job is done, the pilot who flew the inbound shuttle loads them back into the cargo bay, stacking the bodies high and deep, like firewood.

On its way through the planetary belt, the shuttle dumps the new Orpheuses into the ring that loops round and round Tartarus like a dirge that will never end. That is when the prisoners will see all the frozen white spacesuits, billions in orbit, their eyes aware and flickering behind well-made helmets, their blood pumped full of machines that won’t let them die, their bodies spinning around the planet forever and ever. They will float eternally, unable to sleep. They will pray for a rogue asteroid to careen into their path and breach their suits. Ten years later, when they see the silver-tipped shuttle approach the weary planet, they will pray for the vessel to smash into their bodies as it enters orbit and descends to the surface. The pilots do always try to hit as many as they can.