sight of her husband as Ahcho had anticipated. She heaved a deep sigh, and her shoulders drooped with relief. Her entire being appeared to grow calm in his presence. Ahcho couldn't imagine such a reaction: for him, the sight of the Reverend brought forth an almost violent urge to do something.
The mistress inched closer, and Ahcho sensed that she wished to reach out to the Reverend, who remained sunk deep in his own thoughts. No doubt he was praying. Clearly, she wanted to rouse him and make him know that she had come for him. But she did not. She remained quiet and waited to be noticed by the man who was a shrunken version of his former self.
The Reverend's back sat curled and bent. His long legs were crossed like a scholar's, and his tattered trousers and worn boots trembled. Upon a closer look, Ahcho could see that all of the Reverend's thin limbs were shaking. The great man had been reduced to nerves and sinews with very little meat or muscle on him any longer. Ahcho could tell he was exhausted and needed food. He was wasting away.
Ahcho became aware of the raspy, irregular breathing that emanated from the proprietress under a coarse blanket on the bed. The smell of decay and human stench in this corner was so severe, it made Ahcho's eyes burn. He longed to remove both his master and mistress from this wretched place.
But Mistress Grace seemed undaunted by sight and smell. She moved closer and reached out a delicate, tentative hand toward her husband's shoulder. Her pale fingers hovered, unsure and yet brave, until she finally bestowed a firm grip upon him. The Reverend flinched at being touched, his gaze whipping upward and all about like the eyes of a cornered animal. He staggered off the stool and fumbled with the red sash across his chest until his hand took hold of the pouch that hung at his hip. Once he had it in a tight grip, he grew calm again and seemed to finally see his wife standing before him. To Ahcho's surprise, once the initial shock of being interrupted at his prayers subsided, the Reverend did not appear one bit surprised to see Mistress Grace.
"My dear," the Reverend said, his hand fiddling with the pouch and his eyes darting uneasily about the room.
Ahcho cringed to see the great man so weakened. What had happened to him here? This place had changed him in ways that Ahcho feared might be unalterable. At that very moment, poisonous opium, or something worse, must be coursing through the Reverend's veins, otherwise why would he behave so strangely? He needed to be carried home immediately, fed, and straightened out. A good bath would surely help.
For the first time since the mistress had suggested this nightmarish visit, Ahcho was able to imagine that something good might come of it. He and Mistress Grace would bring the Reverend back to his senses. Although night had descended outside by now, they would, metaphorically speaking, lead him out of the darkness of this vile hovel and into the pure light of the mission again. The Reverend needed merely to be carried forth, and soon they would all live together in the finest house in the compound. Ahcho waited for her to tell her husband this plan so that their journey home might begin.
"My darling," she replied in a voice as thin and weak as her husband's.
They didn't step closer, although clearly they had missed one another's company. They were proper people who did not show private emotions in public. Ahcho approved of this.
"You are attending to the sick?" Grace asked.
The Reverend's gaze drifted down to the proprietress's shriveled face, which poked out from beneath the covers. He nodded somberly, and Ahcho felt reassured that the Reverend was maintaining his good practices. Perhaps he really had been praying.
"Master offers last rites to the old, evil one?" Ahcho asked hopefully.
The Reverend squeezed the pouch on his hip with white knuckles and said, "No, I was merely wiping the liquid away. I can hardly keep up with it. She is seeping something terrible. I remember a goat that once ate nettles and managed to swallow a segment of barbed wire. Her insides oozed out of her for days. This illness is not unlike that."
"Oh, how awful," Mistress Grace said.
Ahcho hoped the Reverend might agree that the condition here was equally terrible, but he did not. Instead, he bent over the dying creature and