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His chair made an ugly cracking sound under his weight.

Erskine Morris was a big man; not fat, not muscular, just big, in some vague and indefinable way that the world’s furniture-makers were obviously unprepared for. When he sat, his legs would spill awkwardly across the floor, and his elbows would topple any table that was unlucky enough to be in the vicinity.

Furniture ‘disagreed’ with him.

‘As we say in my own country, gentlemen; liberté, égalité, fraternité.’ Tourette spread his arms wide, as if he’d just said something terribly profound and was waiting for a round of applause. His audience – three unfortunate members of the Society who’d been unable to escape the idiot Frenchman’s attentions – nodded dumbly, not knowing where to look.

By all the sodomized choirboys of Pope Pius VI, thought Erskine, things are going from bad to worse around here. Back when he’d joined the New York Renewal Society, there’d been an unshakeable code of conduct. The Society had been a group of Deists, atheists and rationalists, with three principle aims: to advance the cause of reason; to annoy the hell out of the damned Papists; and to experiment with every alcoholic concoction known to science. But now?

Erskine let his eyes wander around the old King George, getting used to the gaslight that lit the hollow shell of the building. There were men standing around in their Sunday bests, looking like blubbery children in stiff shirts, discussing a hundred and one half-cocked philosophies that were probably all the rage in Paris or Rome or London. Erskine’s gaze settled on one man in particular, surrounded by a small audience that seemed a good deal more interested than Tourette’s had been. The man was hard to miss. His shapeless, powder-pale face was hardly a face at all, just a collection of features looking for somewhere to happen, while his thin grey hair looked as though it had been painted onto the top of his head.

Matheson Catcher. The worst of the lot.

‘Many primitive races worshipped nature’s tyranny,’

Catcher was saying, his voice a constant throb-throb-throb that made Erskine think of someone turning the handle of a music box. ‘The so-called goddesses of the druids, the sickly cults of Hecate and Astarte. But the architects of Peru understood the true horror of the natural world. Consider their greatest constructions, gentlemen, built in defiance of the jungle’s chaos. An example to the world. We are not primitives, we are men of Reason. We have a duty, a responsibility, to hold back the chaos of our own age in the same manner.’

‘By building pyramids,’ Erskine grunted under his breath.

‘Bloody stargazer.’

Catcher paused for a moment, giving Erskine the irrational feeling that he’d heard. ‘There is a nobility in architecture, gentlemen. Architecture is purity itself, the triumph of the rational mind over the terrible Cacophony of nature. Only through this purity can we know the Wa...’

Catcher tailed off, like a man who’d just caught himself giving away a secret.

‘...can we know God,’ he finally concluded.

Erskine winced at the G-word, and cast a critical eye over the man’s audience. Certain members of the Society (weak-willed, pox-brained members, naturally) were incapable of staying away from Catcher. Erskine had become convinced that ‘unofficial’ Society meetings were going on somewhere, just Catcher and his ‘inner circle’ of hangers-on. If this goes on, thought Erskine, we’ll be no better than the damned Freemasons. There were even half-serious rumours that Catcher and his gullible friends had summoned up Baalzebub, rumours which the man had no doubt started himself in order to appear more interesting. Erskine had made several loud jokes about Catcher sprouting horns and drinking blood, but no one had thought they were funny, and even Isaac Penley –

a humpty-dumpty little man who usually laughed at everyone’s jokes, and only seemed to have joined the Renewalists because he didn’t have anything better to believe in – had just turned away, embarrassed.