You have to be able to fly to get into Truce. There have been complaints about this over the years, but the response from management is always the same: piggyback.
Once inside, the dampers come on and you change out of your costume at the coat check: heroes at one door, “persons of enlightened self-interest” at the other. And you can get a decent drink, and there’s no one clamoring for a picture, calling you Lasergirl. You can be Jenna. Just Jenna.
And if he asks you to dance, well, mistakes you make at Truce maybe won’t get anyone killed.
Sometimes he’ll just amble the trade roads for weeks, watching peasants die. Pus bubbling on their necks and genitals, the backs of their hands, their heads: it’s marking their sins for convenience in later sorting.
He helps desperate men tear down and burn plague houses, and they value him, because he’ll walk into fire to make sure the walls collapse properly inward. Actually, all he wants is a last chance to see the bodies blister and burst to black.
Longinus lost the capacity for sickness so long ago; now he’s exultant. Finally, finally, the old bastard’s getting around to ending the world.