The Tower of Foot. The Tower of Foot is the closest thing Ex has to a hospital. There are no wards or beds, but every inhabitant is a medical practitioner of some sort. A woman named Emilie Gorgon spends her days sitting in a small alcove by the front door, cooling herself with a square fan made of woven ivy leaves. (the lanes of Ex are often warm and dusty.) She has one eye and a twisted club foot, and she knows the exact profession of every person in the building. As a teenager she waged a long, cunning war against the doctors, claiming that one of their number, a foot specialist, had refused to treat her when she was a child. This was discovered to be true. Public opinion turned against the doctors and they became frightened. "People think we're monsters," they said to one another. "What are we going to do?" It was eventually decided that they should give Emilie the room by the front door to live in for the rest of her life. So that no patient would ever be neglected again, they handed her the job of directing them to the right person. "This way," some of the wilier doctors said to one another, "none of us can be blamed if this kind of thing repeats itself." Whenever a visitor arrives at the Tower, Emilie asks them the nature of their complaint and then gives them a piece of paper with the number of the appropriate chamber written on it. "Go up two floors. Door on your right," she says, or, "Climb the stairs for ten minutes and you've got a blue window. Bang on it." She stores the addresses at the back of her home in a huge mouldering box, but this is a precaution, or for show; she has never needed to consult them. Her memory is infallible. She never speaks to the doctors, but stares at the ceiling and whistles as they walk past. "Wordsa valuble" she says to her visitors. "They don't deserve 'm. They already got my foot. Let 'm be happy with that." See also, Illness, medicine, doctors.