There is a shrine at the mouth of the great market where a man may feed himself without another soul lifting a hand.
I watched a woman approach it alone. No merchant sat behind it. No boy weighed her grain. She passed each thing before a red eye that glowed and chirped like a caged bird, and the shrine spoke to her in a woman's voice, gentle and dead, telling her what she owed. Then she fed it coin through a slot, as one feeds an offering into the poor-box, and the box counted her coin faster than any priest ever counted mine.
I crossed myself twice.
There was no haggling. No one to look her in the eye and judge whether she was honest. The shrine simply trusts her, or watches her with that red eye, I could not tell which, and I do not know which is worse. A man could steal here easy as breathing. Yet she did not. She scolded the shrine when it barked at her, called it a foul name under her breath, and obeyed it anyway.
That is the part that sat cold in my gut. We are ruled by the lord and the priest, and both at least have faces. This one has no face. It does not eat, it does not sleep, it does not fear God, and still she bowed to it and paid it and thanked it not at all, as though a thing that does no labor deserves no thanks.
I have carried sacks of grain on my back until I wept. And here stands a box that never tires, never hungers, never dies, taking bread from the hands of the living.
The Devil does not need horns.
He need only spare us the trouble.