"Hello," said the ghost to a pretty girl as it passed her on the street.
The girl screamed, and ran away.
An old woman looked at him with horror in her eyes, then looked the other way. An IRS trooper stopped and stared.
Nathaniel Drake went on.
Behind him in the Silk City spaceport, a trio of reluctant techs from Pastelsilks, Inc. were conducting various tests upon his cargo in order to determine whether or not it could be salvaged. As their findings would have to be processed through the executive echelons of the company and would not be made known to him till later in the day, he had a few hours to kill.
He did not intend to kill them in lush lairs, however. He had a wound to take care of.
It was the wound that had appeared in the side of his conscience. It had festered on the trip in from Dior, and now it was so painful that he could barely endure it. Madame Gin had only made it worse.
Conscience-wounds are different from physical wounds. In treating physical wounds, you attack the effect. In treating conscience-wounds, you attack the cause. Once the cause is eliminated, the wound automatically closes. This is rarely possible, but quite often the cause can be weakened, in which case the wound, while it will never completely close, will at least be less painful. In Nathaniel Drake's case, the cause was Saint Annabelle Leigh. If he could prove to himself that his suspicions were correct and that she had been something less than her sainthood would seem to indicate, a quantity of his pain might go away, and if he could discredit her sainthood altogether, his wound might close completely.
He proceeded directly to the local headquarters of the Army of the Church of the Emancipation. There, he inquired whether a Saint Annabelle Leigh were assigned to any of the local chapels. A white-faced clerk replied in the affirmative, and referred him to the Saint Julia Ward Howe chapel on Redemption Street.