SUGARR AIN
Copyright © 1989 by Paul Park. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1-930815-45-X

Published by ElectricStory.com, Inc.

ElectricStory.com and the ES design are trademarks of ElectricStory.com, Inc.

This novel is a work of fiction. All characters, events, organizations, and locales are either the product of
the author’s imagination or used fictitiously to convey a sense of realism.

Cover art by and copyright © 2000 Cory and Catska Ench.

eBook conversion by Ron Drummond.

eBook edition ofSugar Rain copyright © 2000 by ElectricStory.com.

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                         Sugar Rain
              The Starbridge Chronicles: Book II
                                             By Paul Park



                                           ElectricStory.com, Inc.




                                   For Mary and Nathaniel Lawrence

Part One:
Charity Starbridge

T here is a fresco in the prince’s library where it is all set out: the Sun painted on the black background
of deep space, while around it spins the wheel of Earth’s majestic orbit. And the rim of the wheel is made
of numbers, tiny calculations of painted gold, for in those days the length of the year was a matter of
dogma. Knowing it to be a lie, the bishop’s astronomers had put the figure down as eighty thousand days
precisely. They were in love with a vision of celestial harmony: four seasons of twenty thousand days,
twenty phases of a thousand days each, ten months of a hundred days, ten weeks of ten, twenty hours of
a hundred minutes each. The artist has painted a portrait of the bishop, enthroned within the circle of the
Earth. In her hand she holds a silver sword. It is composed of numbers, the magical equation 1 X 10 X
10 X 10 X 20 X 4 = 1. Under her feet writhe demons and heretics, arbitrary and conflicting figures
issuing from their mouths.
Closer in around the Sun and farther out in space, the nine planets of hell pursue their separate
ways—tight, fiery circles and long, cold ellipses. Each is decorated with scenes of souls in torment. Men
freeze in icy prisons or burn like torches; they burst apart or weigh a thousand pounds, depending on the
differing effects of temperature and atmosphere. And beneath each planet the artist has depicted the
kinds of criminals who inhabit it. Under Baqui Minor, for example, he has painted a seascape, a storm
raging on a sea of liquid helium. Almost overwhelmed by the waves, a raft breaks through a cloud of
spray. Clutched to the deck, miserable men and women huddle together for warmth, a murderer, a tailor,
a paralytic, a smuggler, a homosexual, a man with yellow hair. Each carries, cut into his forehead or the
muscle of his upper arm, the symbol of his vice.

In temporary orbit around Mega Prime moves Paradise, the source of life, a captive planet among the
terrors of the solar system. Its towers and lakes and shining palaces are painted with a kind of wistful
brilliance, and its complicated path among the planets is traced with ribbons of gold. Smallest of all the
planets, it is also the greatest, painted as if lit from within, surrounded by halos of luminescence which
spread out into darkest space. Angels and demons cavort in its upper atmosphere, and on the topmost
tower of the brightest palace sits Angkhdt, dog-headed prophet of God, enthroned on a dais, surrounded
by companies of the blessed, his mouth contorted in a dog-like scowl. He has opened his hand and
released a bird into the air, a falcon bearing a lantern in its claws, setting its wings over the wide abyss
towards Earth.

The falcon flies over a recumbent figure, a sleeping giant painted on an empty section of the wall. The
bones of his forehead have been stripped away, and within the caverns of his brain sit convocations of
God’s priests, holding the synapses of his system in their ancient, spotted hands.

The giant is symbolic of the body of the state. Along his shoulders sit regiments of Starbridges—judges,
princes, generals, financiers, all in gorgeous uniforms. Lower down, craftsmen and artisans crouch among
the giant’s hands, the pennants of their guilds sprouting from his fingers. Along the passages of his entrails
slog tradesmen and merchants in shit-colored robes, dragging enormous packages on sledges. Soldiers
camp upon his thighs. And on his legs and feet squat crowds of men and women dressed in yellow rags,
working people, slaves.

Yet even these are not the lowest. For the giant has relieved himself before going to sleep. A pile of
excrement smokes near his feet, and in it squirm heretics and atheists painted in the shape of
maggots—antinomials, adventists, cannibals, carnivores, and a dozen others, the marks of their heresies
branded on their backs.
                                                      ***

In the days when the fresco was first painted, men believed in miracles. When Paradise was in rotation
close to Earth, people could see with the naked eye what looked like sparks and streamers falling out
from its bright surface into space. They believed there was a spark of divinity burning in the hearts of
men. They believed that from his companies of angels God had exiled some for punishment on Earth.
And when a child was born in those days, a priest would come to cast its horoscope and pattern its
tattoos. He would listen to its crying. For then, in the language of the newborn, the fallen angel in the heart
of every child would describe the sins that had pulled it down, given it flesh and blood, molded its young
bones. And some babies were arrested right away and beaten or condemned to prison. Others, less
perverse, were permitted to learn trades. But most were condemned in their cradles to lifetimes of labor.
For God marked the most sinful with certain signs. They were born into poor families, or their limbs were
crooked, or their eyes were green.
The fresco’s border is decorated with scenes from the life of the Beloved Angkhdt, painted in exquisite
detail. In those days every citizen of Charn could recite the story of how the prophet left his wife and
family to set out on his journey through the stars. He divided his goods among his friends: to Cosro
Starbridge, his gun. To Nestrim Starbridge, his money and his books. To Bartek Starbridge, his livestock
and his plow. In this way he divided all the earth. And at the time the fresco was first painted, in the early
phases of spring, 00016, in the city of Charn, the descendants of these men held sovereign power. They
were the priests and the administrators. They owned every bird and every stone, for their power was in
trust from God. They were the wardens of the prison world.
                                                     ***

Parts of the fresco are so complicated, they require a magnifying glass to decipher. Standing in her
brother’s library, the princess peered at it doubtfully. There was a crack in the wall under the image of
the Sun, a tiny imperfection in the plaster. She reached out to rub it with her thumb, and then she turned
away.
                                                     ***

Outside her tower window the city stretched away into the rain and the dark night. She stood staring
towards the east. There, still far away, her brother’s fire turned the intervening houses into jagged
silhouettes, lit from behind by green and silver flares, and the deep red burning. Closer in, the river had
risen through the lowest slums and spread into a lake five miles around, drowning the miserable streets,
making islands out of the highest buildings, the prisons and the temples. Neon steeples and gilded domes
rose up above the water’s inky surface. From time to time, fat boats full of lamplight would glide between
them, carrying priests and soldiers on unknown errands.
She stood at the window of her brother’s library on the thirty-seventh floor. Beneath her, throngs of
people seethed around the first gates of the Mountain of Redemption, the monstrous prison at the city’s
heart. Horse soldiers with whips had kept the major streets clear, but there weren’t enough of them to do
more than that. Looking down from her tower window, Charity Starbridge could see where an entire
shanty-town had sprung up around the gate, cardboard boxes and plywood shelters, and people sitting
around bonfires dressed in urine-colored rags. Displaced by fire and flood, paupers had come from all
over the city to gather at the mountain’s base, to chant the names of rage, to recite in unison the fourteen
reasons for despair. Some squatted in the mud or huddled under umbrellas, cowed to silence by the
constant rain, but others swarmed against the barricades, shaking their skinny fists and shouting. Here
and there in the crowd, men had erected symbols of revolt: a huge chamber pot made out of
papier-mâché, dog-headed effigies of the prince of Caladon, inflated phalluses as tall as men. Someone
had made wings and a tail and a huge beak for himself out of red cardboard, and he danced on a box
above the crowd, a red bird of adventism. Elsewhere, rebel preachers gesticulated and prayed,
surrounded by devotees. Charlatans juggled torches, and mountebanks ate fire. And sometimes a dark
soldier of the purge would push his horse past the barricades around the gate, wading his horse
contemptuously through the mob, clearing a circle around himself with his pistol and his whip. From her
high window, Charity saw one of them raise his hand; she heard the shot and saw the man in the bird suit
pitch backwards into the crowd, flapping his red wings.

After a few minutes the soldier retreated back into the shelter of the gate, and the crowd closed up where
he had been. Charity stared down at him, admiring his black uniform without understanding what he was.
Drugs and innocence and social custom had made a prison out of her mind, and she stared down out of
her window as if through the bars. Somewhere among the edgeless days of marriage she had lost the
ability to think. Or rather, not completely—a week before, she had stopped taking the personality
relaxers prescribed to her on her wedding day, and already it was as if a giant bird which had nested in
her skull had spread its wings and flown away. Already the precepts of the Starbridge marriage code
seemed less consuming. It had been thousands of days since she had last stood before a window looking
out. That kind of activity was frowned on in a married woman. But still, it was hard for her to make sense
of what she saw. The scene below her was so various and complex, the significance of it so bewildering,
that in a little while she gave up trying and took consolation instead in the patterns of color and the shapes
of the buildings. Ten major avenues radiated from the mountain’s base straight to the city walls. One, the
Street of Seven Sins, emerged from the gate below her, and she took consolation in following the long
line of orange streetlights out to the far horizon, where the fire her brother had started filled the sky.

Behind her came a scrabbling and a scratching at the door. She turned and backed away from it, holding
her hands behind her as if hiding something. She backed into a dark corner of the room, where the lamps
were arranged to make her disappear into a cleft of shadow. Each room in the apartment contained a
similar place of refuge, for it was against the law for anyone except her husband or her closest relatives to
see her face. But in the course of her marriage she had broken the law many times. And not so long
before, she had pulverized it so completely that now she obeyed its strictures not out of modesty but out
of fear. She was afraid. In the doorway stood a blind man and his seeing eye.

They hesitated there, a young priest in purple robes with the tattoos of an advocate at law. In his right
hand he grasped the silken collar of his servant, a professional moron, scarcely human anymore, the
marks of surgical incisions standing out all over his pale forehead.

“Are you there?” called out the advocate in his supple, castrate voice. “Woman, are you there?” His
servant was an older man. He crouched down on his haunches, sniffing and peering like a dog, his
master’s hand still tight around his collar.

“Are you there?” called out the advocate. He was recently blinded, his sockets still raw where his eyes
had been torn away. From time to time, reddish tears ran down his face. “Are you there?” he called out.

The servant sniffed and peered, his head oscillating back and forth on the end of a long neck. For a while
his mouth had hung open; now it closed as he settled his attention on the dark corner where the princess
stood. His whole body stiffened, and his face took on an eager, sad expression. “Woman,” he said softly.

Charity Starbridge stepped backwards, and the floorboards squeaked under her feet. The advocate
turned his ruined face towards the sound. “There you are,” he said. “Don’t hide from me. You have no
reason to hide.” He smiled, displaying perfect teeth.

“Please don’t hurt me,” whispered Charity.

There was a pause. The seeing eye moved his head. “Window,” he said. “Books.”

The advocate frowned. “Where are we?” he asked. “What room is this?”

“This is my brother’s library,” answered Charity.

“It is not suitable for you to be here. Where are your servants? There was nobody to let us in.”

“I am alone here,” said the princess. “My brother’s been arrested, and my husband is dead. The servants
have all run away.”

“It is not suitable,” repeated the advocate. “But I am not here to scold you. Not yet. I am here to console
you. I bring a message from the bishop’s council.”

The seeing eye was holding a plastic attaché case in the crook of his forearm. The advocate bent down
to take it, and then he straightened up and took a few unsteady steps into the room. “I’ve brought the
clothes your husband was wearing when he died. Together with a selection of the personal belongings
from his tent. There is also a letter of commendation and a promotion. He will enter Paradise with the
rank of brigadier.”

Charity made no movement, and the advocate stood holding some papers out and frowning. Reddish
tears ran down his face. “There is also a letter,” he continued, “describing the way in which your husband
met his death. I was not there. But I am told that he died bravely on the battlefield and that he
successfully fulfilled the obligations of his name and his tattoos.”

Still in the doorway, the seeing eye peered this way and that. Freed of his master’s hand, he had sunk
down into a strange, dog-like crouch. With his forearms stretched out flat along the floor, he drummed
his fingers on the polished wood.

“I don’t understand,” said Princess Charity. “That’s not what my cousin says. My cousin Thanakar. He
said my husband died miles from the fighting. He said my husband was murdered by one of our own
priests. I don’t understand. My cousin says he was stabbed to death before the battle even started. By a
priest of God, one of the order of St. Lucan the Unmarred. Is that your order? My cousin says you carry
knives hidden in your socks.”

Her voice, puzzled, anxious, hesitant, trailed away. The advocate waited for a moment before answering,
and he turned his head to listen to his servant’s fingers drumming on the floor. “You have seen Thanakar
Starbridge?” he asked.

“No. He wrote to me. Please, I don’t mean to contradict you. It’s just that I’d like to know the truth. My
husband was always kind to me. I’d like to know.”

“Miserable female!” interrupted the advocate, his voice rising high and shrill. “How can you use his
name? How can you even say it? Thanakar Starbridge! We will hang him when we catch him. We will
hang him.” He made an angry, dismissive gesture with his arms, and it was enough to throw him off
balance, so that he staggered and might have fallen. But his servant was watching and rose to help him.
The advocate’s flailing fingers caught the old man by the hair; he yanked back on the old man’s hair and
kept himself upright that way. “Let me tell you,” he continued softly, after a pause. “Thanakar Starbridge
is under indictment for murder and for treason. Adultery is the least of the crimes he is charged with.”

“I don’t understand. He’s done nothing wrong.”

“Hasn’t he? Then be prepared.” The advocate smiled and raised his hand to wipe the red tear from his
eye. “Your cousin is a sick young man. He has picked up some moral virus somewhere, perhaps some
physical corruption. Be prepared. He might claim he contracted it from you. We’ll see. The purge went
out tonight to bring him in.”

Charity leaned back against the bookcase. She remembered a story her brother had told her when she
was just a girl, about a magician escaping from the purge, who turned himself into a sentence and
escaped between the pages of a book, safe in some bookish landscape where the soldiers never found
him. She leaned back and closed her eyes. She felt like crying, but the lawyer’s bloody parody of tears
had robbed her of the impulse, and left her with a knot in her throat and no way of getting rid of it. Inside
her, feelings fought and struggled without the armament of words. Thoughts struggled to be born.

“Say something,” demanded the advocate. “Let me tell you, the judge is disposed to be lenient. Moral
contamination is hard to prove, and frankly, we believe that Thanakar Starbridge was a criminal long
before he met you. The judge is disposed to think that if there was contamination, more likely it went the
other way. He is willing to be lenient. But you must cooperate.”

Charity said nothing. Thoughts of Thanakar had brought him back so vividly, it was as if he were standing
near her, somewhere in the library, out of sight behind her shoulder or behind a turning of the wall. A
pale, dark man with such beautiful hands, the hands of a healer. How could she have resisted, when he
touched her with those hands?
“So,” continued the advocate. “You have nothing to say.” He wiped his cheek. “You think it will be his
word against yours. Not quite.” He smiled. “We have other evidence. Learn from this. A criminal pollutes
everything he touches. He left a mark, a stain on your bedsheets. The woman who does your laundry
alerted the police.”

“She had no right.”

“True. She had no right. And she has already been condemned for her impertinence, if it is any
consolation to you. For slandering her superiors. Injected with the fever, if it is any consolation. The
sentence is already carried out. But the evidence remains.”

Charity stepped out from her dark corner. She turned to the window, her mind empty. She stared out to
the horizon, where the fire burned bright. She watched a sugarstorm gathering above the river, the
raindrops burning as they fell. Outside, far below, the crowd struggled and shouted. Wisps of chanting,
fragments of revolutionary songs rose up to the tower window. “Where is my brother?” she asked
suddenly.

“Prince Abu Starbridge is being held at Wanhope Prison. In the psychiatric ward. He too is in deep
trouble, deeper than yours. For him there is no way out. But you—let me finish. I told you, the judge is
inclined to be lenient. Thanakar Starbridge is a known criminal, and there are extenuating circumstances.
You are a widow, after all. But we need your cooperation. We need your testimony to condemn him.”
He fumbled with the papers in his case. “I’ve prepared a statement for you to sign. It is a confession of
adultery. Sign it and we will let you live. The bishop’s council has found a refuge for you in the home of
Barton Starbridge, your mother’s second cousin. Seven hundred miles south of here. You would be free
to collect your husband’s pension.”

From the window Charity could see down into the courtyard of a small shrine, where an execution was in
progress. A thicket of gallows rose from the center of an open space, protected from the crowd by a
circle of the spiritual police, the black-coated soldiers of the purge. As the princess watched, a priest
performed the last rites for a condemned prisoner, cutting the mark of absolution into his face, checking
his passports.

“Woman, say something!” cried the advocate behind her. He held out the unsigned confession, not
realizing that she had turned away from him. Squatting nearby, the seeing eye drew back his lips to reveal
long teeth filed into points. “Window,” he said softly.

“God damn it, woman, pay attention,” shouted the advocate. “Don’t waste my time. You have no choice.
If you refuse to sign, the council will vote to terminate your duties here. They’ll send you home, and I tell
you, the journey will be hard and long. Paradise is in orbit near the seventh planet. More than seven
hundred million miles from here.”

“I’d like to see my brother,” said Charity after a pause.

Down below, the priest had strung up several prisoners. They hung suspended from the highest gibbets,
their bodies revolving slowly in the rain. On the scaffold below, the priest danced a quiet version of the
dance of death, lit by a spotlight from the temple tower. He was a good dancer, graceful and sure, but
even so, the crowd was angry. They shouted and threw bottles. A bottle hit the priest on the shoulder as
he danced; he stopped and stood upright, but Charity was too far away to see the expression on his face.
He was in no danger. The purge stood around the scaffold in a circle, with automatic rifles and bright
bayonets. In a little while he started to dance again.

“I’d like to see my brother,” repeated the princess.
“That’s not possible. God damn you, why do you even ask? Here. Here he is, if you really want to see.”
The advocate stretched out his hand, palm up, and Charity turned back to watch him. In a little while the
air above his palm started to glow, and then a tiny figure materialized out of the air, a man sitting on a
bed, reading, too small even to recognize. The advocate closed his hand, and the image disappeared as if
crushed between his fingers.

“Now,” he said. “Would you like to see him die?” He opened his hand again, and Charity could see a
tiny pyre of logs. Here the scale was even smaller; Charity could see a throng of tiny figures, red-robed
priests and black soldiers. Through the middle of the crowd, a pickup truck moved slowly forward
towards the pyre, a single figure standing upright in the back.

The seeing eye sat up on his haunches and stared at the bright image, licking his lips with his long tongue.
Charity, too, stood mesmerized until the advocate closed his hands again. “There,” he said. “Are you
satisfied?”

She was not satisfied. She began to cry. At the sound, the advocate tilted his head, listening intently with
a puzzled expression on his face, though he must have been used to hearing people cry. He listened, and
then he reached his hand up to touch his cheek, where his own red tears had left a scum.

He held out the paper for her to sign, but she had turned away again. In a little while he opened his
fingers and let the paper settle to the floor. “I’ll leave it,” he said quietly. “Don’t be a fool. I’ll send my
clerk tomorrow morning, and if you still refuse, at ten o’clock I will come back to send you home. I will
pump the blood from your body, and I won’t be gentle, either. That I promise. Women like you are a
disgrace to us. You don’t deserve your own tattoos. If I could send you to hell, I would.”
                                                       ***

All that day the churches had been packed with worshipers, and when the priests had rung the bells for
evensong, the crowds had taken to the streets, jamming the roads, moving in slow streams towards the
center of the city, down towards the Mountain of Redemption, where they had spread out around its
lower slopes. The gigantic prison blocked out the sky. Even in those days it was the biggest building in
the known universe, a huge, squat, unfinished tower, circle after circle of black battlements. It held a
population of one million souls. And all around its lowest tier, sticking up like the spikes of a crown
around a great, misshapen head, rose smaller towers, the Starbridge palaces, white and graceful, glinting
with lamplight. Below, the streets were full of people chanting and singing. They looked up towards the
windows while the rain fell steadily in dark, viscous drops, tasting of sugar and smelling of gasoline,
coating men’s clothes and crusting their skins. Here and there, preachers in the crowd spoke of the
apocalypse, and some preached slowly and softly, and some ranted like maniacs. Numerologists had
made a magic number out of the date: October 44th, in the eighth phase of spring. The forty-fourth day
of the eighth month—some had daubed this number, 4408800016, on cardboard placards, which they
waved above their heads. According to some long-extinct rule of prosody, this number duplicated the
meter of the so-called apocalyptic verses of the Song of Angkhdt, the verses that begin, “Sweet love,
you can do nothing further to arouse me. It’s late—don’t touch me anymore . . .”
An old man recited the lamentations of St. Chrystym Polymorph in a loud voice; naked to the waist, he
whipped himself listlessly with a knotted scourge, not even raising a bruise. The sugar rain coated his
shoulders. It was dismal weather, a dismal season. The food reserves, which previous generations of
priests had stored up through summer and fall, were almost gone, and the daily ration of rice soup and
edible plastic was scarcely enough to keep a child alive. Hunger had made men crazy. Strange sights and
visions had been reported. An old woman had seen huge figures stalking her street in the hour before
dawn—the angels of the apocalypse, she cried: war, famine, and civil war, she cried, and she had taken a
photograph. People stood around her and passed it from hand to hand, studying the dark, unfocused
image. The old woman was an adventist. “Sweet friends,” she cried, “the hour is here. All my life I’ve
prayed that I would live to see it. The powers of Earth are overthrown. The bishop herself has been
imprisoned. The soldiers fight among themselves. And the Starbridges . . .” She paused to spit, and
shake her fist at the pale towers above her head. “Every morning they are fewer. Every morning I have
seen them at the southern gates, their motorcars loaded up with food.” It was true. In their lifetimes
people could remember when the windows of the Starbridge palaces lit the streets for miles around, but
now more than half the windows were dark, and some whole towers stood empty, abandoned. The
Starbridges had retired south to their estates, waiting for better weather. In summertime their
grandchildren would return to rule the city.

The old woman had long gray hair, a long nose, and thin cheeks branded with the mark of heresy.
“Sweet friends,” she cried. “Old Earth is finished. But lift yourselves up, lift up your hearts, because a
flower will grow out of this wreckage, and a garden that will cover all the earth. Birds and fish will speak.
And there will be no more bloodshed, no, and no more hunger, and all these things will be like memories
of nightmares. And God will wash the world between his fingers, and he will wash away all the priests
and tyrants, the judges and the torturers. Look!” she screamed. “It has already been accomplished!” She
grabbed back her photograph and held it up above her head.
                                                     ***

A young woman stood away from the crowd, under the shadow of the gate. She shook her hair back
from her face. She tried to comb some of the tangles out between her fingers, but the sugar rain had
turned her hair into a sticky mass of knots. Yet she pulled at it restlessly, and her other hand moved
restlessly over her body, touching her skin wherever it was exposed, her neck, her temples, her wrist.
She was on fire. Already her temperature was way above a hundred, and the parson had told her that it
would keep on rising at a steady rate until her heart burst into flame. One degree an hour, he had said.
Then he had given her a glass of water and released her from the hospital, for there was no sense in
keeping her. So she had wandered down into the streets, and all evening she had wandered with the
crowds, and followed the crowds down into the center of the city, more desperate and distracted every
minute. Now she stood at the barricade around the gate and raised her hand to gain the attention of the
guard.
“Please, sir,” she whispered, her voice burning in her throat.

“Please sir,” she whispered, holding out her hand. But when the guard came to peer at her palm, she was
suddenly afraid he wouldn’t let her pass. Her tattoos were forgeries, a little vinegar would wash them
clean, and she was suddenly afraid that she might have smudged them in some places and that tonight of
all nights, the last night of her life, the guard wouldn’t let her pass. She closed her hand into a fist. The
soldier frowned. “What do you want in there?” he asked.

“I have some work to do.”

The soldier looked up at the gate. “Go home, sister,” he said. “Come back tomorrow. The laundry’s
closed.”

“Please, sir. I have something that can’t wait.”

She pulled her hair back from her face, and the guard noticed for the first time how beautiful she was,
how sweet her skin, how proud her eyes. He smiled. “What is your name?”

“Rosamundi,” she answered. “Like the flower.”

The soldier smiled. “Rosamundi. This is what I’ll do. The gate’s closed for the night. But give me a kiss,
and then we’ll see.”

They stood on opposite sides of the barricade, a line of wooden sawhorses painted red. She ducked
underneath and tried to run past him, but he grabbed her wrist in his heavy glove and twisted her against
him, forcing her wrist up between her shoulder blades. He was a handsome man with long black hair,
handsome in his black uniform with the silver dog’s-head insignia; he twisted her against him, forcing her
hand higher when she tried to pull away. He bent down to kiss her and she turned her face away, but
even so he was close enough to brush his lips against her cheek. It was enough. He released her suddenly
and pushed her, so that she stumbled and fell down. “My God,” he cried. “My God.” He touched his
glove to his lip, where her cheek had burned him. Then he spat, and mumbled part of a prayer of
purification. “Unclean,” he said, and then he made the sign of the unclean, touching the heel of his palm to
his nose and ducking his head down once to either side. In the guardpost underneath the gate, other
soldiers of the purge stopped what they were doing and looked out.

Farther on along the barricade, an officer turned his horse and came towards them, flicking his whip
against his leg. “What’s this?” he asked when he got close.

“A witch, sir.” The guard was rubbing his lips and pointing.

The captain looked down from his horse. “What makes you think so?” he asked. He was an older man,
and he wore his gray hair fastened in a steel clasp behind his neck, in the style of a previous generation.

“Her skin, sir. She’s not human.”

The captain frowned. “Superstitious jerk,” he muttered, and then he swung himself heavily out of the
saddle. He squatted down on the cobblestones near where the girl had fallen, and with the butt of his
whip he pushed the hair back from her face. “Why, she’s just a child,” he said. He put his whip down on
the stones, and then he stripped away one of his black gauntlets so that he could touch her face with his
bare hand. “Poor child,” he said. “Injected with the fever. What crime?”

“I don’t know.” The words burned in her throat. “I don’t know,” she cried. She reached out to hold his
hand against her cheek. “Please, sir. Please let me in.”

“The gate’s closed,” he said gently.

“Please, sir. My mother runs the elevator above Cosro’s Barbican. I want to see her. This is my last
night.”

Soldiers had gathered from the guardpost and stood around them in a circle. The captain glared at them,
and the circle widened as the men drifted away and stood whispering in little groups. The captain touched
Rosa’s forehead with his fingers.

The gate loomed above them, one of ten set into the mountainside, a square brick edifice two hundred
feet high. “Of course, child, of course,” he murmured. He stood and helped her to her feet, and together
they passed up the steps and under the brick archway into a high, vaulted chamber stinking of urine.
Wasps had made their nests among the pillars, and bats hung from the vault. At the far side, ninety-foot
wooden doors led into the first tier of the Mountain of Redemption. But they were locked and barred.
Rosa stood in front of them with restless hands, touching her neck, picking at the soft hair below her jaw
while the captain hammered on the postern with his fist.

Nothing happened. Rosa turned to look back through the arch, behind her up the Street of Seven Sins,
barricaded from the crowd on either side, patrolled by soldiers of the purge. “Don’t worry,” the captain
reassured her. “Someone will come.” He looked at his wristwatch. “How much time do you have?”

“I don’t know.”

“Poor child.” He fumbled with a pouch at his belt and found a steel pillbox. “Let me give you something
for the pain. If the pain gets too bad.” He held out a small white pill.

“No. My pain is my own. Every minute of it.” She scratched at the skin below her collarbone. “No,” she
repeated. “Besides, I need the practice.” She laughed, and pulled down the bodice of her dress to show
where the parson had marked her. He had filled her veins with fever, and then he had marked her
shoulder with the sign of Chandra Sere, the fourth planet, close in around the Sun. “I need the practice,”
she repeated, pulling at the strings of her bodice. “It’s hot where I’m going. Stone melts, they say.”

“Hush, child, don’t bother about that. Those are just legends. Parsons’ dreams. Don’t worry about that.
What’s dead is dead.”

“Legends!” she cried. “It is my faith. My God is sending me to hell. It is my God,” she cried, wiping the
sweat from around her mouth. “Don’t try to console me. I will not be consoled. But one day I will wake
in Paradise.”

“Sooner than you think, child. Sooner than you think.”

“Don’t lie to me!” Daughter of a prostitute, she gripped religion tighter for having come to it so late.
Paradise, she thought. For a few nights she had seen it, the last time it had passed close to Earth. Before
the sugar rain had started—she had stretched her hands out to it as it rose above the hills.

“My father was a Starbridge,” she continued. “That’s what my mother said. That counts for something,
doesn’t it? I told that to the priest this afternoon, but he just laughed. Half-Starbridge, he said, that would
take me halfway to Paradise. Tonight Chandra Sere is just halfway. The fire planet—how could he be so
cruel?”

The captain said nothing, but he hammered on the postern with his fist. It was a small metal door to the
right of the main gate, once painted red, but now streaked and dented, and in some places it had almost
rusted through. But a panel on the door’s upper part had recently been repainted with a portrait of St.
Simeon Millefeuille, the last of the great teachers. The saint’s face was pensive, but his eyes were vacant
and flat white. As Rosa watched, they shuttered inward and disappeared. Behind them, through the
saint’s left eyesocket, she could see another eye blinking out at them, and then a bulbous human finger
protruded through the hole, curling down over the saint’s cheek. “Hold on,” came a voice from inside.
“Who’s there?”

A beam of silver light shot out from the saint’s right eye and played upon their faces and their clothes.
There was silence for a moment, and then the voice spoke again. “Gate’s closed, friends. Try the next
one over. Deacon’s Portal. Half a mile along the wall, and they don’t lock up till one o’clock. Come
back in the morning, better yet.”

The captain stepped forward and held his palm up so that the light shone on his tattoos. “Ah, Captain,”
said the voice. “I didn’t recognize you.” There came the sound of bolts being drawn back, and then the
door swung inward, revealing a fat man standing in the gap. “Evening, Captain, miss,” he said. He took
off his cap and stood rubbing his nose.

“Hello, Dim. Can you let this girl inside?”

“Don’t know why I should.”

“On my responsibility. I’ll answer for it.”

“That’s all very well,” said the little man. “You know the rules.”

“It’s only a few hours, Dim. She’s got the fever. She says her mother runs the elevator up by Cosro’s
Barbican. Can you let her in?”

“Don’t want to, Captain. Doesn’t seem likely, anyway. Not unless her mother’s a man.”

The Captain squinted. “What do you mean?”

“Styrene Denson’s run that barbican as long as I can remember. I reckon he’s alive and well.”

Puzzled, the captain turned around, but Rosa was too quick. The fever gave her strength; she jumped
into the doorway and pushed the little man in his fat stomach so that he sprawled back against the wall.
The captain swore and reached out his hand, but she was already gone, running barefoot down the
corridor inside. The captain drew his pistol, but it was already too late. She was gone around a bend in
the passageway, and he could hear her bare feet slapping up the first of thirty-seven flights of stairs. “It
doesn’t matter,” he said. “She can’t go far.”

“I don’t see why not,” replied the little man, touching his stomach where the girl had pushed him. “We’re
not chasing her.”

“Well, maybe you should ring the alarm.”

The little man looked up at the wall above his head, to where a red handle was connected to a frayed
blue wire all covered with spiderwebs and dirt. “Hasn’t worked in my lifetime,” he said. “Not unless they
fixed it recently.”
                                                     ***

Princess Charity lay sleepless on her bed. She raised herself up on one elbow and looked around,
half-dazed and suffocating in her airless, windowless room. In a little while she sat up against the wall and
drew her knees up to her chest. At some parts of her life she had been able to sleep all day in that bed,
and all night too. For weeks at a time she had been awake only for a few hours in the evening, when her
maids had brought her food. Dreams had become more real than life. And this night, too, she had been
drowsy. It was her last night on Earth, and she had meant to sleep it through. Already yawning, she had
made dinner for herself with her own hands, sitting at the kitchen table peeling strawberries and golden
oranges, eating the last of the hashish ice cream straight out of the can. But now, in bed, sleep receded
from her grasp, and all the tricks that she had ever learned to coax it closer failed. She leaned her head
back against the wall. She hadn’t signed the lawyer’s paper. She hadn’t even read it. She had forgotten
all about it.
A silver lamp stood on the table beside her bed, a clump of silver wildgrass, with tiny lights hidden in
among its stems. She reached out to turn it on, fumbling with the switch, and then she swung her legs over
the side of the bed and stood up unsteadily. The room was in a whirl around her. She caught a glimpse of
her naked shoulder in the mirror hung above her washstand, a glimpse of her hand holding on to one of
the carved bedposts. Though it had been months since she could smell it, she could taste the odor of her
scented wallpaper in the back of her throat. It sickened her. All around her, queasy combinations of pink
and gray fought queasy warfare on the walls—colors high up on the bishop’s scale of visual eroticism,
mixed into horrifying patterns by a blind priest. He had lit incense and spattered her mattress with drops
of holy oil. He had consecrated her bedroom as a shrine of love. A grotesquely phallic statue of Beloved
Angkhdt crouched in one corner over an oil lantern. Her shelves were lined with devotional literature, and
the night table was still crowded with unguents and powders, and aphrodisiacs, and strange mechanical
devices. She had inherited them from her predecessor in that room, the old man’s second wife. They
were neatly arranged and carefully dusted, never opened, never used.

She looked across at herself in the mirror above her washstand, the outlines of her famished body, her
dark hair. Mesmerized by her reflection, she walked towards it from across the room, wondering, as her
face came into focus, at what point, at what moment she had departed from beauty, for she had been a
beautiful child. When she was a child, she had been able to make a silence just by walking into a room.
Now, sitting down to stare at herself in the spotted surface of the glass, she wondered at what moment
that had changed. There must have been a single instant, she thought, when misery and disappointment
had broken through the surface of her features, changing not their shape but their significance. It couldn’t
have been long ago. She had been born in spring, and spring was not half gone. She remembered her
wedding party when she was just a girl, the day she had married the old man. Then she had been
beautiful, in her white dress. And she remembered her friends and schoolmates crowding around to say
goodbye, young girls, and boys in their first uniforms. “We will meet again in Paradise,” they had said,
loudly coached by the deaf parson who had performed the ceremony. Except for one—she remembered
her cousin Thanakar, with his long hair and his long face, limping through the crowd. “It’s a goddamned
shame,” he had said, scowling, and when the priest had reached out to restrain him, Thanakar had
pushed the deaf man’s hand away, his face twisted up with loathing. He was the only one whom she had
seen again.

On a table next to the washstand stood vats and jars of makeup—eyeliner and mascara, vermilion, and
aromatic powders wrapped in leaves. Idly, she mixed some colors on her palette, wondering if she could
draw some beauty back into her face. She had always been skillful with her hands. She raised her brush
up to her eyelid and then hesitated, staring at her face in the mirror. What had gone wrong? Nose, ear,
lips, cheek, skin—everything was perfect. Nothing had changed. And yet, something had been added
that had ruined it all. In her eye, perhaps. In the center, in the bottom of her eye, there lurked some
poisonous new thing.

She put down her brush and unscrewed one of the jars. Long before, her mother had gone home to
Paradise. And the night before she left, she had put some makeup on her face, in a style that had
occurred to her in a dream. She had not wanted to arrive in Paradise dressed out of fashion, to be
laughed at by all her friends that had gone before. She was a vain woman. And the night before she died,
she had put silver makeup on her cheeks, emphasizing the ridges of the bone. When Charity and Abu,
her young daughter and her son, had come to say goodbye, they had run to her and put their arms
around her neck, and she had pulled away, ever so slightly. Smiling, she had pulled away. She had not
wanted them to spoil her makeup, but Charity had reached out to kiss her on the cheek, and had come
away with silver pigment on her lips.

Now Charity opened a jar of the same color and mixed it experimentally on her palm. And then she
stopped and turned her head, because the door behind her had opened partway, and it was as if a gust
of hot wind had come in from the darkened antechamber, and she could feel the temperature of the air
around her rise a little bit. At the same time she was conscious of a noise, a sound of roaring, labored
breathing. Rubbing the ball of pigment into a puddle in the center of her palm, Charity touched almost
unconsciously the tiny lion’s head tattooed below her index finger, the symbol of immunity from fear. She
turned her head.

A young woman stood in the doorway, Charity’s own age, or perhaps a little younger. Her black hair
was matted and tangled, and she wore a long ragged dress of yellow nylon. She had loosened the bodice
from around her neck to give herself air. Her skin was flushed and dark.

They stared at each other for a moment, and then the girl dropped her eyes. She bowed her head and
made the obligatory gestures of respect, pressing the knuckles of her right hand up against her forehead.

Princess Charity crossed her arms over her chest. She was wearing a robe of purple spidersilk, and she
pulled it up around her shoulders. Some silver pigment had come off on the collar; irritated, she turned to
clean her hands with cotton wool and cold cream, and then she pulled her collar down to clean the spot,
rubbing gently at the spidery material. “Who are you?” she asked, not looking up. “How did you get in?”
“Please, ma’am, the door was open.” The girl’s voice was harsh and full of breath. “They’ve all run
away. They nailed a notice to your door. Pink. Moral contamination.”

“And you’re not afraid?” asked Charity, smiling gently, rubbing at the spot. She looked up. The girl was
pretty, she decided. Again she wiped her hands and smoothed the collar back from her shoulder,
arranging a fold of material over the damp patch.

“No, ma’am. I’m not afraid. I’d come to see what they had done to you.”

Charity looked up at her. “Who are you?” she asked.

Rosa paused to wipe her lips with a corner of her shawl. Her other hand moved restlessly around her
body, touching, scratching. “I do the laundry for this floor,” she said. “Used to. These four apartments.”

Charity Starbridge stood up. Again she crossed her arms over her breasts. “Yes,” the girl continued. “I
turned you in. I did my duty as a citizen, and I hope they hang you for it. Look what they have done to
me.”

“It serves you right,” said the princess softly. “It was no business of yours.”

Rosa wiped her face with her shawl. Sweat ran down from underneath her hair and along the insides of
her arms. She stripped the shawl from around her shoulders, wadded it up into a ball and rubbed her
neck with it, and then she threw it into a corner of the room. “Oh, God,” she moaned. “I’m burning.” She
reached out to catch hold of one of the bedposts, and then she leaned against it.

Princess Charity stood looking at her for a moment. Then she bent to rummage in a small refrigerator
beside her washstand, pouring bottled water into a glass. “Here,” she said, standing up and taking a few
steps across the room. The girl reached out and took the glass and drank the water down. She held the
glass against her head. “Oh, God,” she moaned. “I ran up all the way. I thought my heart would burst.”

Princess Charity gave her the bottle and took back the glass. Rosa drank. From the bedpost hung a linen
towel; she pulled it down and poured water over it with shaking fingers, and then she held it up against
her face. “Oh, God, I’m sorry,” she cried. “I never would have told them if I had known.”

“What’s done is done,” murmured the princess. Confronted with weakness, she felt strong. “Never
mind,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. Only tell me, why did you do it? Was I so cruel a mistress?”

“Oh, ma’am, how could you be cruel? I worked here for a thousand days, and I never even saw you.
But your husband, he was kind to me. He once gave me a dollar and a half.”

“Ah. So it was for his sake.”

“No. It was for my sake. Oh, ma’am, I hope they hang you. Don’t you understand? I washed your
sheets a thousand times. It was my fate, and I was true to it. Was it too much to ask the same of you?”

The princess put the glass down on her washstand. She rubbed her hands together, her fingers stroking
the marks of all her obligations: courage, kindness, modesty. She stroked the golden ball and chain
tattooed on the lap of skin under her thumb, the mark of marital fidelity.

Rosa had collapsed against the bedpost, gasping, out of breath. The princess went to her and took the
bottle and the towel, and with her own hands she wiped the sweat from the girl’s face. Rosa submitted
and suffered Charity to lead her to the bed, where she sat down. “I feel so tired,” she said. “I ran up all
those stairs.”
“Hush,” murmured the princess. “It’s the fever. You may lie here for a little while. But first tell me, what
was the stain you found? On my bedsheet. A bloodstain, was it not?”

“Part of it. I know what it was. I’m not a child.”

“No, but a bloodstain. Didn’t that mean anything to you? I was married more than twenty months—two
thousand four hundred and one days. My husband never touched me. Look at my hands. I have other
obligations, too. Fertility—look—and love. I thought you might have understood. You might have pitied
me.”

She had been fussing with the girl while she was speaking, stroking her down onto the bed, stroking her
hair. But now Rosa started up. “Pity you?” she cried. “God in heaven, pity you? You must be insane.
Even now, when they have filled my blood with poison and charted my soul’s flight to Chandra Sere. Pity
you, is that why I came all this way? No, I wanted to see what they would do to you. I hoped they’d
hang you. They’ve been hanging Starbridges, I hear. I’ve seen posters for your lover in the streets. But
not you. No luck. I know already. They’re sending you back.”

“Yes,” said the princess. “They come tomorrow morning.” She spoke gently, softly, but the girl pulled
away and buried her face in the pillow. “It’s not fair,” she sobbed.

Charity reached out to touch her hair. “Never mind,” she said. “Not many of us believe in Paradise
anymore, or in hell either.”

The girl turned towards her, her lips pulled back. “You don’t even believe it! You work us like
slaves—who gave you the right if God does not exist? Hypocrite! Don’t touch me.” Delirious, she made
the sign of the unclean, pressing the heel of her hand against her nose. But she didn’t have the strength to
pull away; she collapsed against the pillow. The silk turned yellow where her cheek touched it, seared by
the heat of her skin.

Charity waited, and in a little while she reached over and wiped Rosa’s face again. “I think you think my
life must be more pleasant than it is,” she said, touching the girl’s hair. She couldn’t keep her hands away.
She was fascinated by the girl’s beauty. The two of them were similar in every part, only the girl was
beautiful. I lost my beauty with my freedom, thought Charity. It is freedom that illuminates a face.

She was sitting next to Rosa on the bed, her back to the door. Someone staggered in; she jumped up
and pulled her robe around her, and turned her face away. A man crouched in the doorway, leaning up
against the frame. He held up his hand. “Don’t worry, ma’am. Don’t worry. I won’t bother you. I won’t
even look.” He pointed to the bed. “It’s her, ma’am. It’s her I want.”

He was a renegade parson, his voice full of alcohol, his red robes torn, his face dry and spotted, his nose
broken and red. His scalp showed in strips through his lank hair. “Don’t let me disturb you,” he said. “It’s
her I’ve come for.”

At the sound of his voice, the girl sat up. She stared at him in horror for a moment and then sank back
onto the pillows. “Don’t come near me,” she warned. “God damn you, can’t you let me go?”

The parson cringed against the doorframe, smiling nervously, picking at his lips. “I’ve come to fetch her,”
he said. “I’ve come to take her home.”

The girl pointed at him from the bed. “Don’t come any closer,” she commanded. “Drunken pig! Eunuch!
Can’t you let me alone?”

“Oh, Rosa, how can you say such things?” whined the parson. “After everything I’ve done for you. I
followed you halfway across the city tonight, just to bring you home.”

“Don’t you understand?” cried the girl. “I’m dying. You’ve gotten all you’re going to get from me.”

“Rosa, how can you talk like that? After I’ve cared for you all these months. Fed you and kept you.
Don’t you trust me yet? Look, I have medicine for you.” He stepped towards her into the room, holding
out a little package of aluminum foil.

“Please, ma’am,” cried Rosa. “Don’t let him touch me. Don’t let him come any closer.”

Princess Charity stepped forward into the light. The parson turned to face her, bowing humbly. “Excuse
me—I’m sorry. I don’t mean to disturb you. Raksha Starbridge is my name, formerly in holy orders.
Eleven months ago I found this girl abandoned in the street and took her in. She’s been like a daughter to
me.”

“Daughter?” cried Rosa. “Lecherous pig!”

“Don’t listen to her, ma’am. It’s the fever talking. The fever’s in her brain. If it weren’t for me, she would
have starved to death.” He had opened up the foil package, and he rubbed some of the red powder it
contained into his gums. And as he twisted the foil back up, he paused to wink heavily. “And would you
believe it? When I met her, her palms were naked as a baby’s.”

He had the face of someone who drinks more than he eats, his eyes bloodshot, his cheeks covered with
scars and broken blood vessels. On the bed behind him, Rosa had started to cry.

“Yes, ma’am,” continued the parson. “I can see she fooled you with all her spiritual talk. She’s got no
right to talk like that. Her mother was an atheist. An antinomial whore. She didn’t even have a name until
I gave her one. Rosamundi, like the flower. When I met her, she could hardly talk. Just a few words and
bits of songs. She was singing in the streets for pennies. Now look at her—everything she is, I taught her.
I taught her how to work. Every morning I drew those tattoos on fresh. Oil pencil. She used to beg me to
make them permanent. But I’m not such a fool.”

He was a mendicant preacher, a Starbridge who had lost his destiny. Expelled from his congregation, he
lived by his wits among the common people, saying mass for a dollar or a bottle of wine, healing the sick,
telling fortunes. And among the common people he had found something to love. Now he turned and sat
down on the bed. “Oh, Rosa,” he said. “Isn’t it better to tell the truth, now that it can’t hurt you
anymore? There—don’t cry. You don’t really think I’d let them send my little girl to hell?”

She looked up at him, tears running down her face. But her cheeks were so hot, they evaporated before
they were halfway down. She pulled her bodice down to show where the priest had marked her, the
horned circle on her shoulder, the sign of Chandra Sere. “You’re too late,” she said. “I’m on my way.
One or two hours, not more. I saw him cast the spell.”

Her voice was a dry creaking in her throat. She had stopped sweating, and her skin was assuming a dry,
papery look; in some places it was even turning dark, like paper held over a flame. The parson, too, had
started to cry. But in everything he did there was a mixture of sentiment and slyness, so that even as the
tears rolled down his nose, he turned to the princess and winked. “I know,” he said. “Poor girl.” He
reached out for Rosa’s hands, and this time she did not resist him; he took her hands and chafed them
between his own. “I know,” he said. “But stranger things have happened. I’ve heard that there is
someone bound for Paradise tonight. More than one, though truthfully, the conjunction of the planets is
not ideal.” He turned and gave the princess a sharp look. “Maybe we could get someone to give up her
place.”
“Gladly,” said the princess.

“I thought so,” muttered the parson. “God knows I’m in no hurry to go back.”

Rosa lay back slowly on the pillows. “Only Starbridges . . .” she croaked.

“And don’t I have the power to make you a Starbridge?” cried the parson, tears in his eyes. “Aren’t I
still a priest of God? Look, I have brought my tools.” He turned her hands palm up on the bedsheet, and
then he started fumbling underneath his robe, and from hidden pockets he drew out scalpels, needles,
lotions, inks, books of numbers, astrological charts. He laid them all out on the surface of the bed. He
took the towel the girl had used to cool her face, and squeezed out some liquid from a tube, and cleaned
her hands with it until her palms were clean and white. “Come here,” he said over his shoulder. “I need
you for a model.”

Charity moved close, knelt down, and put her own hands on the coverlet. All trace of palsy had vanished
from the parson’s fingers; with his tongue in the corner of his mouth, he drew quickly and expertly.
Flowers grew and spread along the hills and valleys of the young girl’s palms—castles, faces, lists of
privileges. And when the time came for him to make the cuts, his work was easy, for the blood had
receded from her hands, and the incisions were as dry as scratches on a piece of paper. All the while
Rosa looked on, the breath rattling in her throat, her eyes wide with wonder, her expression changing
gradually until there was something like happiness in it, something like contentment. The parson muttered
incantations and made quick, deft gestures in the air. And when he moved the needle through the cuts,
the colors seemed to spread out by themselves, mixing and making patterns, secondary colors, a whole
world. It was perfect. And then he spread a sealer over it, and then, finally, he reached up to her
shoulder. Under his needle, miraculously, the mark of Chandra Sere became less distinct, and out of it
spread crowns and halos and the head of a dog, silver and golden, the mark of Paradise.

The parson leaned back. His face was covered with sweat. Rosa had closed her eyes. With one hand he
reached out to touch her forehead, while with the other he took her pulse. “What time is it?” he asked.

“Twenty past two,” answered the princess.

“Then it is time.” He consulted an astrological chart, a map of the solar system, and then something that
looked like a railway timetable. “Dear child,” he said. “It’s time to go.” Again he touched her forehead.
She opened her eyes and smiled, and brought her palms up to look at them. “Already?” she whispered.
She looked down to her shoulder, and then she turned to rub her face against the parson’s hand. The
pillowcase was singed where she had lain.

“You leave at two-thirty,” he said softly. “Look. This is the way.” He opened his hand to reveal a pill
held between his fingers, a clear capsule with some liquid in it.

For an instant she looked doubtful. Then she turned to the princess, who smiled a little bit and nodded.
Rosa smiled back and then, hesitantly, like a little girl, she opened her mouth and put out her tongue. The
parson blessed her with his fingers and then laid the pill upon her tongue. She closed her mouth and
settled back and closed her eyes. That was the end. At two-thirty precisely, her breathing stopped.

“I wasn’t to go before morning,” said the princess after a while. “Ten o’clock.”

“Shh,” whispered the parson. He looked up at the ceiling. Tears trembled on his chin. He sat still for a
few minutes, and then he reached into his pocket and drew out a pint of wine.
                                                    ***

By three-fifteen, Charity began to understand that she was free. She went to lie down on a sofa in
another room, and when she returned, the parson had passed out on the floor. The girl was lying back in
bed, her body cool, her face peaceful. Charity stood in the doorway watching her, fascinated by her
beauty. After a few minutes she went to stand above her, and with the priest’s scalpel she reached down
to cut the buttons off of Rosa’s bodice, and cut away the hooks that held it closed, and then she slit the
yellow nylon down to the girl’s waist and peeled it back, exposing skin so beautiful and breasts so strong
and perfect, it made her want to cry. If only she could be like that, lie there like that. She cut away the
ragged skirt. Shifting the body to one side, she pulled the whole dress away, crushed it into a ball, threw
it to the floor, and then she stood up to look at the girl as she lay naked, her skin clear and brown, the
light from the bedside table catching at the soft hair that grew along her stomach, along the outside of her
thigh.
Then, scarcely knowing why, Charity went to her washstand and gathered together a hairbrush and some
pots of eyeshadow and rouge. She sat down on the bed, and with an expert hand she brushed the girl’s
hair quiet and put a little paint onto her face—only a little, where death was already robbing the color
from her cheek. She darkened the girl’s eyebrows and stroked some indigo into the corners of her eyes.
She paused, her brush suspended above Rosa’s face, and then sat back and smiled. She was making the
girl into a Starbridge, for the lower classes were not allowed to paint their faces or wear jewelry. But
more than that—she unclasped from around her neck the silver necklace with the bloodstone pendant
that her brother had given her on her wedding day. She paused, and then she drew the necklace around
Rosa’s neck and arranged it so that the pendant fell between her breasts. In some ways the girl was very
like her.

The princess laughed. She pulled the silver combs out of her own hair and shook it wildly about her head,
and rubbed it into a mass of tangles. Then she stood up, and with the barest glance at the parson to see if
he still slept, she shook her robe from her shoulders so that it fell around her feet. She stooped to pick up
Rosa’s dress. It stank of sweat and fever and was slit so that it no longer closed in front, but it fit the
princess as if it had been made for her in the palace dress shops. She took it off and sat down at her
table to repair it.

With a silver needle and a silken thread, she sat mending the yellow dress, sewing up where it was torn,
patching it with pieces cut from a golden scarf. After about half an hour she paused to roll a marijuana
cigarette and smoke it thoughtfully. The parson had fallen away from her onto his side; she turned around
and studied him, and studied the dead girl, trying to understand her feelings. “Rejoice at every death,”
advised the Starbridge Catechism. Nevertheless, there was something eerie and disagreeable about
death, Charity decided, even when it was swift and merciful. She sucked the smoke deep into her lungs,
trying to relax. Her fingers were shaking. In spite of everything that had happened that night, it was hard
not to feel optimistic. She was free. The girl lay on her bed, wearing her jewels, marked with her tattoos,
looking so much like her. Not that it even mattered, thought the princess, for not more than a dozen
people had seen her face since she was married, and of those most were dead or gone away.

She stubbed the roach of her cigarette out in a crystal ashtray, rubbing it reflectively over the image of
Angkhdt the God of Matrimony incised into the bottom. The forces that had shaped her life so far had
been so inexorable, the routine of it so deadening, that now, suddenly free, she felt giddy and off balance,
as if she had suddenly stepped outside into the sunlight after months in a dark cell. Already she imagined
she felt changes in herself. She got unsteadily to her feet.

And when she was ready to go, barefoot, dressed in yellow rags, her shawl clutched tight around her
shoulders, she knelt by the parson to wake him up. She had left a suicide note by her night table, a last
farewell in complicated calligraphy. Farewell to whom? And yet it seemed appropriate. She was a
different person; she had coated her palms with greasepaint and powder to obscure the marks of
privilege. That was the last stage of her transformation; when it was complete she laughed aloud, and
laughed to see the parson, shaken out of sleep, stare at her slack-mouthed. She could feel him cringe
under her touch, could hear the whimper in his throat. He pulled away and lay back against the wall,
swallowing heavily, breathing through his mouth. His wits were diluted with liquor. But in a moment he
began to understand; he looked over her shoulder and saw the dead girl on the bed, dressed in a silken
nightgown, her lips painted, her hair brushed and arranged. For a moment the fear in his eyes gave way
to sadness, and then his face cracked open and he smiled, showing rotten stumps of teeth. “You won’t
last a day out there,” he said when he could speak.

“We’ll see.”

“Your voice, your movements, everything is wrong.”

“I’ll learn. Listen: Eunuch. Drunken Eunuch. Pig. Drunken pig.” Experimentally, she sharpened her voice
into the accent of the starving class. “When I want your advice, I’ll ask for it, drunk pig. Now get your
things and let’s go.”

Part Two:
Executions

W hen Prince Abu was a boy, he enjoyed playing with dolls long after the age when most children tire
of them. His father had died when he was young, one of the last casualties of the winter war. Shortly
after, his mother had drifted into orbit near a planet of her own, a silent world of penance and religious
ceremonial. He and his sister were raised by servants, by married aunts, by loud, bearded uncles home
on leave. These would bring him legions of toy soldiers, Starbridge officers on horseback, beautifully
painted, their banners streaming in the wind. But their faces were so fierce. Arranging them together, the
young prince found it hard to imagine conversations of any subtlety taking place among them. On
horseback with the wind so strong, the men would have to shout just to make themselves heard above
the jingle of their bridles and the beating of the flags. It was hard to imagine anything but harsh cries of
defiance. To be sure, the banners on their backs made some kind of dialogue, announcing in Starbridge
pictographs each man’s name and obligations. “I am brave,” said one. “I am not so brave as you, but
braver than he,” confided another. “I am scarcely brave at all, but I am fearfully intelligent,” confessed a
third. “Nevertheless, I will die next Tuesday from a wound in the throat.”
For Prince Abu it was not enough. Instead he preferred the more fluid conversations that took place in
the hallway of his sister’s dollhouse. There an elderly gentleman pointed towards the sideboard. “Do you
see that envelope next to the bottle of pills? It contains six photographs and a letter for my friend. You
must bring it to him quickly, for I will not leave this house again. Wait there for an answer. As for these
pills, take them once an hour. These fits of weeping will pass.”

“Yes, sir,” answers the servant girl. But her white china face is so ambiguous. Surely she realizes that by
the time she delivers the letter, it will have lost its meaning.
                                                     ***

On the last night of his life the prince found that he could remember many of these conversations clearly.
He stood in the middle of his cell in Wanhope Prison Hospital, whispering them to himself. These ones
from his childhood had a strange, disjointed quality. What photographs? What pills?
Once, driving through the city in his motorcar, Prince Abu had told his cousin a whole story he had spun
up out of nothing while they were waiting for the traffic. Their chauffeur had stopped the car behind a
convoy of episcopal trucks. Up ahead, a man had been crushed beneath a cart, and the traffic had been
halted all along the street while the police pried the man’s body from the mud. In an instant their car had
been surrounded by a swarm of beggars. Thanakar had put his window up, but Abu had rummaged in his
pockets and pulled out a big handful of change.

His cousin had sat back, smiling cynically, his eyes half-closed. And even Abu was not paying close
attention; he was listening to the sound of his own voice against a background of murmured prayers, and
beggars chanting the nine benefits of generosity. But in a moment the cadence was interrupted by a
scream of rage and the sound of fists drumming on the roof. Prince Abu hastily rolled up his window. His
handful of stone currency had contained a silver dollar; concentrating on his story, he had handed it out
with the rest. A beggar’s fingers had closed on it and disappeared, but as soon as the man had realized
what it was, he dropped it in the mud, shaking his fingers as if they had been burned. Gold and silver
were the Starbridge metals, forbidden to the poor, and in an instant all the men were shouting, outraged,
pressing their faces up against the glass.

“How can you be so careless?” Dr. Thanakar had cried, after the police had come and gone and sent
them on their way. “How can you make fun of them? Next time they’ll roll the car. We’re that close to a
revolution, and you have to play the fool.”

“I don’t think they would have hurt us,” Abu had replied. “I thought you’d welcome a revolution.”

“You can’t expect everyone to be like you. Not everyone can share your zest for self-destruction. This
system is absurd, but at least we’re at the top. At least we’re better off than that.” Thanakar had
motioned out the windscreen of the car to where a crew stood working on the road, leaning on their
shovels, listening to the instructions of a young priest in scarlet robes.

Alone in his prison cell, Prince Abu remembered his friend’s words. A passion for self-destruction, he
thought. He examined the binding of the book of poetry in his hand and cast it wearily onto the bed. On
the table stood the remnants of his dinner: curried plums and ginger, and walnuts in a silver dish. Not
trusting him with a knife and fork, the curates had given him a spoon. There was no glass or porcelain
that he could break and use against himself. He had felt like a child with his spoon and metal cup.

Above him a window was set into the quilted wall. He pulled a chair out from the table and climbed onto
it so that his face was level with the bars. But he hesitated for a minute before he looked out, leaning his
head against the wall, rubbing his cheek against the yellow silk, examining the pattern up close. It was
against Starbridge custom to wear corrective lenses. Abu, who was myopic, took pleasure in looking
closely at things, for at a distance of a few inches his eyes could magnify small objects into images of
great clarity. What from far away looked like specks upon the surface of the silken wall, up close he
could see that they were insects, tiny black insects, clambering with difficulty over the uneven surface as if
over the hairs of a man’s arm. The lamp from the table threw a soft, oblique light. Abu could see the
shadows of the insects on the wall.

He reached across to the window and chafed his thumb along one of the silver bars. The guildmark of the
silversmith was sunk deep into the metal, a centaur carrying a machine gun, and Abu chafed the ball of his
thumb against the tiny figure. The silver had thickened slightly around the base of the bars, and the metal
was soft there, soft enough to take his thumbprint. The bars were wearing thin up at the top as the metal
softened and ran down. Abu wondered whether the prison guards had to reverse them in their frame
from time to time, to keep them from draining away.

He gripped the bars and pulled himself up to the windowsill and looked out. His cell was on the third
floor of the psychiatric ward, overlooking the courtyard. For an instant he saw everything clearly, and
then the blurred mist of his myopia settled down over the courtyard. But even so, he knew the space was
packed with people standing patiently in the rain, staring up at his window with a focused concentration
that felt like heat on his bare cheeks. An arc light switched on down below and reached its blue beam up
through the bars of his window to seize hold of his face; he stood balanced on his chair, blinded and
blinking, while from the courtyard below him a sudden noise rose up, a roaring from a thousand throats.
He couldn’t understand what they were saying.

He stood at the window, blinded, his mouth open, and then he turned away. A guard had entered the
room behind him, a hospital orderly in a white robe. He was making the gestures of respect. When he
was finished, he stood erect, a young man with a dark, heavy face. “Congratulations,” he said. “They’re
cheering for you.”

“I can’t understand what they’re saying.”

“They’re saying, ‘Save us! Save us!’ ”

Embarrassed, Abu smiled, and rubbed his lips with the back of his hand.

He had not washed in the week since he was taken, nor had he changed his clothes. He stood balanced
on his chair, the back of his head against the window. To the orderly, only the outline of his big, soft body
was visible, only the outline of his balding head. He stood leaning back against the bars, lit from behind
by the arc light, a cloud of blue radiance shining around his head.

“I took one of your undershirts to rip up and sell as souvenirs,” said the orderly. “To pay for the postage
and all that. I thought you wouldn’t mind.”

Prince Abu smiled. “No, I don’t care,” he said. “Did you get what I wanted?”

“Yes, sir.” The orderly slipped a quart of whiskey out of a paper bag. “I mailed the letter to your sister,”
he said. “Charity Starbridge. The courier had run away, so I took it directly to the post office.” He
sighed. “The mails are undependable these days.”

“Thank you.”

“My privilege, sir. You’re our most famous client now. There must be fifteen hundred people in the
courtyard, and I hear they are already lining up along the streets you’ll pass tomorrow. The police are
expecting twenty thousand just around the bonfire.”

“How gratifying.”

“I know what you mean, sir. But if you’re not doing it for the effect, why are you doing it? You could just
stop it anytime you want. You could just walk out of here, just by raising up your hand. Not that it
wouldn’t be a sort of anticlimax.”

Prince Abu smiled. “Well, that’s it, isn’t it? I’ve let things go so far.” He brought the palm of his right
hand up in front of his nose, so that he could see in minute detail the mark of the golden sun, the most
powerful tattoo in Charn. He examined it mournfully. It had been the curse and burden of his life, a long,
sad practical joke, for what use was power without strength or will or faith? “No,” he said. “It’s too late
now. Where would I go?”
                                                     ***

In that phase of spring, many people still believed that diseases could be spread by music, that sickness
could be wakened in the blood by certain combinations of notes. Priests and bankers used this fear to
guard their holy places. They decorated bank vaults and granaries with musical notations set into the tile.
And when a Starbridge woman married in those days, the priest would mark the threshold of her
husband’s house. He would paint a line of notes along the inside of the sill, using a mixture of attar and
albumen, invisible, yet potent too. In those days it was against custom for a woman to step outside her
husband’s house until she was past childbearing age.
Raksha Starbridge squatted over the doorjamb of the princess’s apartment, trying to make it out. He had
rubbed the faceless marble with a mixture of lemon juice and wine, and now he moved a lighted match
along the stone. Gradually a line of notes came clear, blackened by the flame.

“There,” he said. He sat back on his ankles, the match trembling in his hand.

“What does it say?” asked Charity. The parson had already crossed over and sat in the hallway, but she
still lingered in the door.

“Oh, God, I don’t know,” complained the parson. “It’s been so long. It’s coded to your name.” He
rubbed the matchstick along the line of notes. “I thought you didn’t believe in this shit.”

“Just tell me what it says.”

The parson smiled and showed his rotten teeth. He gave her a sly wink and then started to hum a little
tune. Charity put her fingers in her ears. “Stop it!” she commanded. “Just tell me.”

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s about remorse. Self-hatred. An outbreak of self-hatred. It says you’ll be dead in
two months if you cross over. Suicide.”

The princess laughed. Relieved, she stepped over the threshold. “Then they’re too late,” she said. And
then she looked back through the open doorway, suddenly afraid. The atrium stretched into the shadows,
lined with cabinets and family portraits. Here and there she could see glimpses of frescos, tapestries, and
carpets through the open doorways bordering the hall; she had lit all of the lamps before she went and
run quickly through each room, passing her hands over the marble busts, touching the spines of her
favorite books, inhaling, suddenly resensitized, the fragrances of her lifetime in those rooms: dust, hashish,
cedar, and old stone. Suddenly resensitized, she had seen as if for the first time the beauty of a ewer of
cut glass. She had batted it to the floor, and it had broken into a thousand parts. “What’s that?” Raksha
Starbridge had cried. He had been looting the kitchen cabinets for food, looking for money in the
pockets of her husband’s suits.

But as she hesitated on the threshold, it was as if she were searching for reasons to be afraid. As soon as
she stepped into the outside corridor, then she was no longer superstitious. In that one moment she shed
the whole impossible burden of her marriage, laying it down inside the door where she had picked it up
the only other time that she had crossed that sill, the day she had warned the old man. She felt like a child
again. And though the old man had always been gentle, and though she had cried until her eyes were sore
the day she heard that he was dead, and though he and her brother had been the only two companions
she had had to help her carry the burden of that house, still she left the old man’s memory there too. She
ran down the outside corridor towards the elevator banks, suddenly remembering what it had been like,
her wedding procession along that same hall, up from her mother’s apartment on the thirty-fourth floor.
As she ran, the empty months fell away, as if even the memory of them could not exist outside the
perfumed atmosphere of her husband’s house. She remembered how it had been before; more than that,
she felt it in her body. At Starbridge Dayschools she had been eighth in her class, winning prizes in
physics, mathematics, archery, and law. She had written a thesis in silver ink, using a whole arcane
vocabulary of knowledge. So long ago—now, running down the corridor towards the elevator, the only
word she could remember wassyzygy .

Raksha Starbridge hurried after her. Sick of him, disgusted by his ugliness, she ran fast, trying to lose him
in the empty passageways. At the elevator banks she kept her finger on the button, hearing the bell ring
somewhere far below. But no one came. Once she heard one of the express cars at the end of the row
rattle past her, ascending rapidly, but it didn’t stop. Out of breath, she leaned against the metal doors.
The corridor was dark here, the carpet dusty, the walls faded and stained. A statuette of Angkhdt the
God of Light crouched in a niche above the button for the elevator, his tongue a small electric bulb.
Loose in its socket, it flickered miserably.

Raksha Starbridge appeared at the turning of the passage. “These are all broken,” he announced. “We’ll
have to take the service car from the floor below.” But at that moment the door she was leaning against
opened, revealing a gnomelike operator, perhaps the same one who had taken her upstairs on her
wedding day. Then he had bowed almost to the floor and made an elaborate dance out of the gestures of
respect, for she had been dressed in purest white, with a necklace of flowers from the bishop’s own
garden. But now he peered at her with eyes full of hostility. Astonished, she stared back at him, expecting
him at any moment to drop his eyes and bring his knuckles to his forehead. Then she remembered her
new clothes.

“What do you want?” asked the gnome.

“Please, sir, can you take me down?”

He didn’t answer, and Charity was afraid she had gotten the accent wrong. He shook his head and
stared at her, and then he said, “That guard tell me that girl run loose up here. That girl break in. That girl
you?”

“No sir.” She took a step backwards, suddenly glad that Raksha Starbridge had come up beside her.
And when he put his hand on her shoulder, she didn’t pull away. “She’s with me,” said the parson. He
winked.

Deeply suspicious, the gnome peered out at the parson’s ragged cassock, the neck of his wine bottle
sticking from his pocket, his filthy hair, his broken fingernails. Then, slowly, as if unwillingly, he put his fist
to his forehead and bowed low. He was powerless to do otherwise, no matter what he thought. He
stepped back into the car and gave them space to enter.

All the way down, Charity could feel the pressure of his stare itching between her shoulderblades. The
elevator was a small one, paneled with exotic carvings, upholstered in green velvet. The lights had burned
out, but the gnome had hung a lantern of his own devising from a hook in the ceiling; it was touching,
thought Charity, how closely he still clung to his duty, even though the city was on fire and most of his
masters had already run away. These positions were hereditary. No doubt the gnome had spent his
whole life in that car. Perhaps he had even been born on the overstuffed banquette. He carried some
priest’s crude rendition of an elevator’s button panel etched into the skin below his little finger.

Charity had covered her own palms with paint; they felt sticky and unclean as she tightened and relaxed
her fists. She thought she could understand something of the gnome’s deep disapproval, his fear of
pollution, his feeling of possessiveness about his little car. She too felt polluted by the parson’s hand on
her bare shoulder. When the doors opened on the ground floor, she jumped out quickly. “Please,” she
said, turning back towards the gnome to apologize, but then she stopped. Without thinking, she had used
the honorific appropriate to their stations, a princess and a palace servant. She stopped when she saw
the look of horror on his face, but the parson was behind her and grabbed her by the arm. “Filthy slut,”
he muttered. “Don’t give yourself airs.”

Then he pulled her away through the enormous gallery at the bottom of the building. Their footsteps
echoed over the empty tiles, stirring up eddies of tiny green birds. Clouds of birds migrated through the
distant vaults, following constellations set into the stone, mosaic figures of the zodiac. Charity looked up
with an open mouth. Wineshops, bookshops, dress shops, and delicatessens stretched around her in a
circle. Many were boarded up and dark, but the lights were on in a few restaurants, and in a few of the
offices priests and seminarians kept late hours, dozing over the ledgers and accounts.
Charity stared up, entranced. “Is that the sky?” she whispered, but the parson didn’t answer. Instead, he
dragged her away, onward through passageways and colonnades, through waiting rooms and mirrored
halls. And finally they passed through the first gates, into a vast deserted courtyard under the open sky. It
was almost morning.

Underneath the statue of Cosro Starbridge and his nine sons, they rested in a thicket of stone legs.
Charity was eager to go on. The parson lagged behind, leaning against the ankle of the youngest son.

He hung back, out of breath, and with trembling fingers he unscrewed the top of his pint of wine. He
threw his skinny head back to taste the last of it, and then he pointed forward, the bottle still in his hand.
Across the yard stood an ancient gate, flanked on both sides by seated statues of Beloved Angkhdt. A
quote from holy scripture was carved into the pediment between them: “Set me on fire, fill me with your
seed.”

Giddy in the open air, Charity danced over the pavement and stood beneath it, and there was something
in the stone muzzles of the god that made her pause, puzzling out the uncouth words, obscure in any
language. “What does it mean?” she asked as the parson staggered up.

Scowling, he turned his head away. Among the refuse of his mind he groped for the continuation of the
text, learned in seminary long before, when he was young. And in a little while he found it: “ ‘. . . For I am
yours, my beloved, now especially, while the morning is still sweet, and the morning stars are hidden in a
gauze of mist . . .’ ”

“What does it mean?” repeated Charity.

The parson scowled. “It means the world belongs to us,” he said. “To Starbridges. To you and me.” He
flicked his empty bottle away over the stones, and it shattered in a corner of the wall. And as if that were
some kind of signal, the doors trembled and grated open with a hollow booming noise, splitting away
from Charity as she stood on the threshold, showing her the world for the first time. From where she
stood, a small stair led down into the garden of the same temple she had seen from far above, where the
gallows stood like a clump of trees, poisoning the air with bitter fruit. Soldiers patrolled the steps, paying
no attention to her in her yellow dress, though they saluted the parson as he hobbled down beside her.

The air was warmer here and it was full of smells. That was the first thing she noticed, the air so rich that
it seemed hard to breathe, so thick with odors: cinnamon and cloves, urine and gasoline, onions and wet
mud. A woman sprawled out on the steps next to the captain of the guard, dressed in the peach-colored
uniform of the guild of prostitutes, smoking hashish from a metal pipe, and as Charity passed, she threw
her head back and laughed aloud. Farther below, a boy gnawed furtively on a radish. And below him the
garden was full of people, clustered around the bases of the gibbets, talking with strange urgency,
gesticulating and pointing. Charity stepped down into the mud. Immediately she was surrounded by a
mass of people jostling against her, jabbering in languages she didn’t know. Happy and excited, she
reached out her hands. The warm air, the sweat on her bare skin, the mud between her toes, all filled her
with an ecstasy that was close to nausea, a feeling of pollution more vital than anything she had
experienced before. She was ready to begin.
                                                      ***

In those days it was the fashion for the priests of Charn to mutilate themselves. The bishop’s secretary
had approved a new translation of the Song of Angkhdt, and one new verse was widely quoted: “Break
me in pieces, oh my beloved. Have I not hands, mouth, eyes, feet, heart . . . ?” And so all spring the
streets were full of flagellants, and priests would mutilate themselves on their own altars, in bloody public
rituals. Individually, it gave them some authority. It was an impressive sight to watch an old man get up at
the altar rail to preach, his eyes burned out of his head.
But nothing was more pathetic than to see a crowd of priests together, and that morning in the council
chamber of the Inner Ear, on October 45th, in the eighth phase of spring, there must have been two
hundred slouching in their chairs, rows and rows of blind, footless, fat old men. Many were already dead,
mere skeletons wrapped in gorgeous robes, their miters slipping from their polished skulls. Many more
were almost dead, carried up from their apartments on the backs of servants. For no one had wanted to
miss that meeting, dead or not.

The council chamber was built in the shape of a shallow amphitheater, high in the central tower of the
Temple of Kindness and Repair, on a hill overlooking the city. In front of the chamber was a raised dais,
and behind it stretched a great flat pane of solid glass, forty feet from edge to edge, mined unbroken in a
single piece during the reign of the eighteenth bishop. From the dais you could see the city spreading out
to the horizon, held in its cup of hills, and in the distance, miles away, the Mountain of Redemption
loomed through the mist and smoke. Between the temple and the mountain, the valley floor was covered
with a congeries of streets and walls and spires and gilded domes. You could see the river snaking
through down to the port, or where the port had been before the war with Caladon had throttled it.

On the dais stood the bishop’s throne, but it was empty. Beside it in a smaller chair of carved obsidian
sat Chrism Demiurge, the bishop’s secretary. He was an old, emaciated man, with the face and gestures
of an old scavenger bird. With long, bloodless fingers he plucked restlessly at his robe. He looked
around at the assembled company.

Presently he lifted his pocket watch up to his face, and with his left hand he pulled back his eyelids so that
his right eye bulged out of its socket. In that way he could tell what time it was, for he was afflicted with a
peculiar kind of blindness. He could perceive color and movement, but not form. Holding his watch an
inch away from his right eye, he could see the motion of the hands.

And when the watch hands had aligned themselves into an angle that he thought he recognized, he
produced a bell from among the folds of his robe and rang it. It had no effect. There was no lessening in
the noise around him after the clear, sweet tone had died away. The buzz and twitter of the voices of the
council continued as before, until the secretary stooped to touch a golden cord that ran over his feet.
Long, sinuous, metallic, it ran away from him on either side in a great circle around the auditorium,
looping through the banks of seats. It ran through the fingers of the assembled priests, a golden serpent
with a golden voice, a cord of telepathic sorcery that linked the members of the council. As the secretary
chafed it with his thumbnail, the priests fell silent one by one.

“Gentlemen,” said Chrism Demiurge. Quiet and insistent, his voice filled the chamber. He said, “We don’t
have much time left. There is no time for us to argue. Instead I want to show you what I saw. It gives me
pain to do so, but a minister of God has certain duties to the truth. The truth,” he repeated gently, and
then he held out his hands. He had replaced his bell and watch back in the pockets of his robe, but in one
hand he still grasped the telepathic cord. With the other he made a soft, caressing gesture. A brazier was
set into the stone floor in front of him, and on it burned a small red smokeless fire. It flared up suddenly
under his fingers and then subsided as the light in the chamber faded down to darkness. Mist gathered
outside the window behind the secretary’s back, and the rain beat down. Soon the shadows lay thick in
all the corners of the room, and there was no sound except the old man’s soft, gentle voice. “I saw her,”
he said. “God help me.”

An image formed out of the shadow, floating above the little fire. At first it was just a cloud of radiance,
amber-colored, soothing to the eye. Yet it didn’t seem to lighten any of the dark around it; it just hung
there over the fire, and gradually it acquired mass and bulk and shape and became the figure of a woman
sitting cross-legged in the air. She was naked, surrounded by a nimbus of amber light, and her hair was
black and fell in heavy curls around her shoulders. In a little while she raised her head, and all around the
room the golden cord glowed dimly as the priests recognized her, even the blind ones.

The thirty-second bishop of Charn had the pale skin peculiar to the children of that season. It had a
richness to it, like something edible, some sweet kind of dessert. She had been born in the third phase of
spring; now five thousand days later she was still almost a girl. Her body had a kind of awkwardness
about it, because it was still changing. There was some clumsiness in the way she pushed her hair back,
the way she shifted her position and stretched out her legs. Naked, she had not yet learned
self-consciousness. But her face was a woman’s face, with a gravity beyond her age. Last child of an
ancient family, she had been raised by priests in the fastness of the temple, and the endless round of
rituals had left their mark upon her face, had given her an appreciation of futility unusual in one so young.
But there was arrogance, too, burning in her clear black eyes, for she had lived her whole life in the
courts of power and learned much.

She stretched out onto her back, arching her spine so that her breasts flattened down. She raised her
arms above her head, in a gesture so languorous and inviting that it would have changed the breathing of
most normal men. But in that chamber full of eunuch priests and half-dead corpses, the golden serpent
glowed dully. There was no interest of that kind. Perhaps a few of the observers, keener and more
perceptive than the rest, might have realized that the image made by Chrism Demiurge possessed a
physical perfection beyond even that of the original. The bishop’s skin wasn’t that sweet, nor her hair that
heavy, nor that black. He had made her perfect for reasons of his own, out of a sentiment that was
perhaps the last spark of feeling left in his old breast. Or perhaps it was out of a sense of contrast, to
make the change more poignant when the cat materialized between her legs, a huge, rough yellow tomcat
with a missing ear. And when it leaped between her legs onto her stomach and lay down, its paws made
dirty prints on her white skin.

The apparition of the cat made chaos in the chamber. One priest shouted aloud, and others muttered
prayers. The golden cord glowed hot white for an instant. But in a little while, above the noise of the
outrage came the ringing of the secretary’s bell and his soft voice saying, “It is true. I saw her with the
demon, not ten feet from the altar of our God. I saw her. With my own . . . eyes.”

As he spoke, the cat became a demon indeed, under the influence of his caressing hand. It grew huge,
bigger than the bishop, with a distorted, masklike face, all lips and gaping eyes. It licked her breasts with
its great lolling tongue, and scratched her shoulders until the blood came. And when it pushed her legs
apart to penetrate her, even in that circle of eunuchs there were some who cried out, astonished that her
small body could accommodate so furious an attack.
                                                      ***

On the morning of October 45th, in the eighth phase of spring, the council passed a vote of censure, and
in a rider to another bill, the bishop was condemned to death, for witchcraft and for heresy. The vote was
close, the roll call taken in complete silence. Everybody understood the importance of what was
happening. And when Chrism Demiurge cast his vote, a sigh rose up around the chamber, an exhalation
of relief. Everybody knew that they had taken an irrevocable step. Later historians, describing the events
that led up to the October Revolution, wrote that the council at this time was overtaken by a kind of
frenzy, like a pack of starving dogs that, for want of further prey, finally turn upon themselves. They point
to tyrants and oligarchs of other years, who by combinations of good judgment and good luck managed
to keep their governments intact almost to summer. They conclude that the council of the Inner Ear, that
spring, must have been in the grip of some collective madness, to persist so long in policies that led up to
their own destruction. This is not true.
In fact that day, which was to end with the mutiny of the bishop’s private guard and two regiments of her
soldiers, started in an atmosphere of calm. All night the crowds had rioted around the Mountain of
Redemption, but by dawn they had dispersed back to their own parishes, where food was still being
distributed at the end of morning prayer. And at nine o’clock the weather broke, and the sun came out
for half an hour. Charity and Raksha Starbridge had stopped in a vacant lot where some buildings had
been torn down. The princess climbed up on a hunk of masonry to look back at the palace where she
had lived her whole life, while the parson squatted below her, wrapped in his filthy robe. “Come down,”
he cried. “Don’t waste your time.”

Waste? thought Charity. The Starbridge towers rose above the house, delicate spires of glass and stone,
glinting in the sun. Behind them the mountain filled the sky, tier after tier of battlements, and Charity could
see soldiers pacing back and forth along the nearest parapets. The mist had parted on the mountain’s
crest, and even at that distance Charity could see the work up there, the cranes and winches, the great
soaring arches of unfinished stone, all covered with black scaffolding.

A wind blew down out of the mountain carrying noises from the work site, a muted throbbing and the
grind of gears. Steel cables hundreds of feet long dragged a load of bricks and sand up towards the
summit. Charity followed it with her outstretched finger. “What’s that?” she asked. Living on its lower
slopes, she had never guessed the prison’s bulk. But the parson looked up grimly. “The time is coming,”
he muttered, “when all men will be free. Women, too,” he muttered, smiling suddenly. That morning he
had eaten three or four white pills, and his hands were shaking. When he got to his feet, he staggered and
almost fell. “Come on,” he cried, lurching back across the lot to where a small alleyway led down
towards the river.

Charity looked at his greasy head, his spotted neck. She too felt giddy, drunk from sensation, and she
was staring wide-eyed at every new thing. She was standing on a broken block of carving two yards
high, a piece from the shoulder of a fallen statue. She sat down and swung her legs over the side, kicking
at the ridge of an enormous ear. She spread her hand over the surface of the stone. The rain had painted
it with sugar scum; it was rough and pitted to her touch, and pools of sugar had collected in the joints
between the stones. She brought her fingers up to her face, smiling at the sweet, nauseating odor, the
taste of honey mixed with gasoline. So much smiling was making her cheeks tired.

Strange sounds came down the alleyway and drifted out into the lot near where the parson picked his
way among the rubble. Charity could hear drumbeats and the sound of bells rising above a muddled,
whining chant. The parson stopped and rocked back on his heels. He looked anxious and afraid, but the
princess was happy because there, framed in the entrance to the alleyway, painted on a large square
standard, was the portrait of a face she knew.

Caught by the breeze, it bellied towards her out of the opening, supported from behind by men carrying
long poles. They strutted out into the yard, and behind them marched a procession of perhaps forty men
and women. They blew whistles and rang handbells, and they had looted drums out of some temple, long
black hollow logs covered with carvings. Each drum took two men to carry it; they took careful steps
over the uneven ground, while others beat a ragged rhythm using sticks wrapped in red flannel.

Sitting on the fallen statue, Princess Charity clapped her hands and laughed, because the banner above
them was unrolling on the wind, and the face that it carried was the face of her brother, Abu Starbridge.
In a little while the marchers had found an open space, where the ground was clear for a circle of thirty
feet. They put the banner up on poles stuck in the dirt.

They were a troupe of traveling dancers, and beneath the banner six or seven men and women went
through a pantomime of recognition and welcome, embracing each other and slapping each other’s
palms. The rest spread out in a circle around them, and Charity jumped down from her perch and came
close, standing next to Raksha Starbridge in the crowd. The lot was filling up with people. Men straggled
in from neighboring streets, and groups of children rolled their hoops and pointed and chattered to each
other in high voices.
“What is it?” asked Charity.

“Passion players,” answered the parson. “It’s a play about your brother’s trial. Look, there he is.” He
pointed to a dancer who was putting on his costume and his mask.

“Why? What happened?”

The parson looked at her. “I can’t believe you haven’t heard,” he said. “You must be the only person in
Charn who doesn’t know. Today is his execution day.”

Suddenly there were tears in her eyes. “Don’t say it,” she cried. “They will not dare.”

The parson shrugged and turned his attention to the play. Around them the crowd was quieting down.
One of the dancers had put on a quilted jacket and a mask: a bald head and a high white forehead. He
drank liquor out of an empty bottle and made a mime of drunkenness, stumbling and staggering around
the circle until the crowd roared. Then he held his hand up for silence. His palm was painted with the
symbol of the sun.

“How dare they?” whispered Charity, tears in her eyes. “How can they make fun of him? He is a prince
of Charn.”

“Hush,” warned the parson, and put his fingers on her arm. “They mean no disrespect,” he muttered. “On
the contrary. You’ll see.”

The play started. It was in pantomime and hard to understand for someone who knew nothing of the
story. In most cases people seemed to know, and those who didn’t know were quickly told by others in
the crowd. All around there was a hum of talk. Charity plucked the sleeve of her companion after every
scene, whispering, “What is happening? What is happening now?”

“How can you be so ignorant?” grumbled Raksha Starbridge. “The whole city knows this story. Look,
there’s the church. You know, where the fire started.”

Four dancers sat cross-legged on the ground, joined at wrists and ankles with gray scarves, indicating
manacles. Above them stood another dancer, dressed in the red robes of priesthood. His mask was
grotesque and distorted, painted half face, half skull, and he held a pillow out in front of him to indicate
his fat.

“Parish chaplain,” muttered the parson as Charity tugged his arm. “Can’t you see? He’s delivering a
sermon to the prisoners.”

The parish chaplain stalked around the circle, gesticulating and shaking his fists, while below him the
prisoners groveled and hung their heads. But then Prince Abu stumbled in. Standing in the middle of the
circle, he raised his right hand to show the tattoo of the golden sun. For an instant no one moved. And
then the prince and the chaplain were struggling in elaborate mock battle, full of kicks and pratfalls, until
the chaplain tripped and fell, and it was over. The prince stood above his fallen adversary. He took a
drink out of his empty bottle, and then he squatted down among the prisoners, pulling the scarves away
from their ankles and their hands, helping them to their feet.

But then more dancers were leaping into the circle from the crowd. Dressed in black, with black, empty
masks, they joined hands around Prince Abu and the knot of prisoners. Again, the prince raised his hand,
and for an instant everyone was still.

Then one of the prisoners jumped forward, swinging his gray scarf, and one of the black soldiers of the
purge fell, holding his head. He had hidden some red paint in the palm of his hand, and as he fell, he
streaked his hair with it, leaving a long red smear.

It was a signal for pandemonium, as prisoners and soldiers struggled together. They formed a spinning
circle around the prince; he stood untouched. Then suddenly all was quiet. The dancers threw themselves
to the ground, frozen in various attitudes of prostration, while a young girl stepped over them into the
middle of the circle, and twirled a graceful pirouette. She was dressed in a ragged shirt of orange and
red, and her mask was red, and her naked arms were decorated with a motif of flames as she raised
them to the sky. Then she began to dance, graceful and slow, moving among the other dancers, and
when she touched them, they collapsed and lay still.

“She’s the fire,” whispered Raksha Starbridge, as the princess tugged his arm. “Oh, you know. Your
brother broke into the chapel while the chaplain was preaching to the condemned prisoners. Your
brother freed them on his own authority, but then there was a fight. The building caught fire, that’s all.”

The girl danced around the circle, making exquisite gestures with her hands, while musicians in the crowd
beat a rhythm on the drums. The drumming worked up to a frenzy and then stopped suddenly with a
single hollow beat. The dancers got up and dusted themselves off and mixed in with the crowd, but the
play wasn’t over. But it had changed direction, and for the princess the second part was easier than the
first to understand. It was as if the first part were describing events that everyone already knew, and
therefore did not have to be explained. But the second part was news. It was the story of Prince Abu’s
trial and condemnation; a boy stood up to tell it in a high, sweet voice. He was dressed in white. As he
spoke, one or more of the dancers behind him acted out the words. When the time came for dialogue,
they supplied it, their voices faint and muffled through their masks.

“I know these things are true,” the young boy was saying, holding his hands up for silence. “I know these
things are true because I saw them. I am witness to the truth. I was there, and when the roof of the
chapel fell, I saw him shield my mother’s body with his own. I saw him on the floor, crushed under a
fallen beam, his face covered with soot. And when they took him up and carried him to prison, they
didn’t recognize him. They put him with the rest of us. This was in the Mountain of Redemption, in the
second tier. I know it because I went with him. I was by his side when he woke up. There were three
hundred of us there in the long hall, men and women and young children, and he lived there with us, and
he shared our water and our food. We knew what he was, a prince sent down from Paradise to help us.
At any time he could have raised his hand and made them set him free. He carried the tattoo of the
golden sun. But he had covered it with soot and dirt, so that he would not be recognized. And the guards
who came to bring us food never guessed who he was, but we knew. His flesh was sacred, and he had
the healer’s gift. He touched us with his own hands. His pockets were full of candy, and he shared it with
us. He showed us games like hop scotch and the jumping rope. And we were happy, until the day we
came before the judge.”

A dancer near Charity was putting on his makeup and his mask. And when he stepped into the circle of
the stage, there were shouts of anger from the audience, and people spat and shook their fists. She
touched the parson’s arm. “Who’s that?” she asked.

“Lascar Starbridge. He’s the judge. They’ve really done him up. Look at his arms.”

Lascar Starbridge was taking his seat on the back of one of the other dancers, who knelt down on her
hands and knees. He was a little man with trembling hands, and his skin was painted white, and streaks
of black ran up his arms, to emphasize his veins. On the mask his eyes were painted red and black, and
he had black teeth, red gums, and a black tongue.

“He’s an addict,” explained Raksha Starbridge. “Look how they hate him! Bastard! He knows he won’t
live long. It makes him careless with the lives of others.”
Again people in the crowd were shouting and hissing, and some even threw stones. “I saw him once,”
continued the parson. “In his court it’s a heresy to speak in your own defense. He says that in the time it
takes to argue, other criminals might go free. He sits for six hours at a time, handing out sentences as the
prisoners file past. He projects their tattoos onto a screen. He’s always mixing up the slides. He’s too
high to see straight.”

Lascar Starbridge’s voice was slurred and feeble. As the dancers moved past him, he asked their names,
and they would pantomine putting their hands into the projection machine. Another dancer held a spiral
pad of drawing paper up behind the judge’s head, and as each dancer passed, he flipped another page
over from the back, to show the different tattoos. Each page had a hand drawn on it, and on each palm
was drawn one of the recurrent symbols of the criminally poor: a spiderweb, a checkerboard, a pick and
shovel, a hangman’s noose.

In the audience, men and women rubbed their own hands together and they groaned. For Charity there
was something poignant in the sound, so that for the first time the drama came alive for her, and she could
see a picture of the strange scene in her mind as it must have been, the line of broken prisoners, and
among them her own brother, Abu, not the dancer with his greasepaint and his mask but her own sweet
brother, standing fat and tall.

“What is your name?” asked the beadle.

“Abu Starbridge. Prince . . . Abu Starbridge.” He was sweating heavily, and the light shone on his bald
forehead. His face was dirty and his clothes were in rags, but at the sound of his voice, there was sudden
silence in the courtroom. A dozen clerks stopped writing and looked up. The magistrate sat back in his
chair, grimacing and showing his teeth. He looked terrified. Lifting his gavel, he half-turned so that he
could see the slide of the prince’s hand, projected on the screen behind him. The tattoo of the golden sun
seemed to spray the room with light.

“What’s the charge?” mumbled Lascar Starbridge, grimacing and shuffling his papers.

“Disturbing the peace,” said the beadle. “Inciting to riot. There must be some mistake. . . .”

“Enough,” interrupted the magistrate. “That’s enough. The prisoner is remanded to the psychiatric ward
of Wanhope Hospital for observation. Next case.” His cheek was twitching and he raised one hand to
smooth it. The pupils of his eyes were shrunken down to pinpricks, and his skin had an unhealthy pallor.

Prince Abu smiled. “There is no mistake,” he said. “Cousin, please. Might I remind you that the last nine
men and women up before you on this charge were all sentenced to death?”

The magistrate glared at him and leaned forward over his desk. “Are you mad?” he hissed. “You must be
mad. Take him away. No, stop,” he shouted, as the guards moved forward. “Don’t touch him. He’s a
Starbridge. Are you insane?” he asked, stroking the twitch in his cheek.
                                                     ***

He was not insane, not yet. But he was tired. All night he had sat drinking and listening to voices in the
crowd outside his cell. Unable to sleep, he had pulled a chair up under the window and sat back with his
head against the wall. And from time to time the wall would resonate to the sound of some speechmaker
shouting through a megaphone. Once or twice he had stood up on the chair to look out through the bars,
and then the noise of the people had risen like a wave. A thousand people stood outside his window, in
the courtyard of the hospital, in the rain.
He had sat with a pen and notebook in his lap, thinking to write a poem before he died, something
magnanimous and fine, but nothing came. And towards morning he must have slept, for he was jolted
awake by the sound of gunfire and breaking glass. Spring sunlight was prodding gently through his
window, making a white mark on the floorboards at his feet. The lamps had all gone out. His pen and his
paper had fallen to the floor. And one of the hospital orderlies stood before him, holding breakfast on a
silver tray.

Jolted from sleep, the prince woke with a cry. He heard bangs and smashes coming from the courtyard,
and the sound of bells. “What . . . ?” he stammered. “What . . . ?” His eyelids fluttered with the effort of
speech.

“A great change has come,” said the orderly. Sepulchral and grave, he stood like a statue, dressed in a
white smock. His face had taken on that look of respectful reproach so familiar to the prince, and Abu
closed his eyes to block it out. His mouth was foul with drinking, and his neck was sore.

“There’s been a change,” repeated the orderly. He was a middle-aged man. In those days superannuated
and wounded soldiers were put to work in hospitals and prisons. This man’s cheek and neck were rough
with scars, and his left hand was made of wood. His head was shaved in a style forbidden by law except
to certain grades of soldiers.

Prince Abu rubbed his forehead with his hand. “Are they trying to set me free?”

“No, sir,” replied the orderly. “Where do you want this?” Without waiting for a response, he turned back
towards the table and put down his tray.

The prince rose to his feet. He stepped up onto his chair to look out his window into the courtyard. It
was a weak, milky morning, and the rain had stopped. The crowd was still there, in diminished numbers.
But it had lost its singleness; no one looked up towards Abu’s window now. People stood arguing in
groups or sat glumly on the ground. The torches and the bonfires had all burned out, and columns of pale
smoke rose up from the cinders.

“What happened?” Abu asked.

Behind him the orderly stood still, his wooden fingers clamped around the saucer of an empty coffee cup.
“Forgive me, sir,” he said. “I want to ask you something. I’ve never met a prince before. I’ve never seen
one, not up close. What I want to know is, are you a different kind of man? Physically, I mean.
Genetically.”

The prince leaned forward until his bald head rested against the silver bars. He had such a headache.
Behind him the orderly was still talking: “Forgive me, sir. I feel that I can speak freely, because soon you
will be dead. It’s just that you don’t seem to be behaving rationally. Not just you. When I was with the
army, the priests and the officers behaved like crazy men. I saw a priest set fire to a powder wagon. He
blew himself to pieces and twelve of his own soldiers. Coffee, sir?”

“Thank you. Milk, no sugar.”

In the courtyard, in the crowd, a group of soldiers stood arguing. One of them was making furious
gestures with his fists; he broke away from the others and ran a few steps forward, and then he stripped
his black cap from off his head and stripped off his black tunic, and threw them down into the mud. Abu
watched him.

“It’s not rational,” said the orderly behind him. “And you’re just as bad, sir. I mean no disrespect. But I
can tell, you’re going to let them kill you. And there’s no reason for it. You could just walk out of here.
They’d do anything you said. They’d have to.”

Prince Abu raised his fingers to his head. “I refuse to claim my privileges under a system I despise,” he
said. In the courtyard a scuffle had broken out. The man who had taken off his coat was being kicked
and beaten by two of his companions.

“Tell me what happened,” said the prince.

The orderly raised Abu’s coffee cup to smell it and then lowered it again. “The council’s voted to
condemn the bishop,” he said. “The announcement just went up. Tomorrow night she burns.”

Abu’s cell was large and spacious. Its walls were lined with silk. The door was set into an alcove, behind
some curtains, and as the prince turned around he saw that someone was standing there. Someone had
entered without knocking, an old priest in purple robes.

As Abu looked at him over the orderly’s shoulder, the priest smiled and put his finger to his lips.
Unaware of him, the orderly was still talking: “I’m not a religious man. But even so, it’s lunacy. You make
someone into a living goddess and then you burn her at the stake. I tell you, they must be insane. Whole
regiments have taken oaths of personal allegiance to the bishop. Half the city worships her. If the council
tries to burn her, there’ll be civil war. There’ll be a revolution.”

“How interesting,” said the priest behind him. “How very . . . interesting.” He was an old man, with white
hair and a predatory face. On his collar he was wearing the ensign of the Inner Ear, an anvil, a stirrup,
and an eardrum, fashioned exquisitely in gold. Unlike most priests, he wore no other jewelry. His robe,
too, was plain and unembroidered.

Abu had not seen his uncle since he was a little boy, yet he was sure this man was he, Lord Chrism
Demiurge, secretary of the council. It was not that Abu recognized his face. But his voice seemed to
speak out of the quietest recesses of the prince’s childhood. Gentle, barely audible, it seemed to linger in
the air and fill it with softness and dry menace. The silence that surrounded it was absolute. In perfect
silence, the orderly turned his head. In silence he replaced the prince’s coffee cup on the tray. In silence
he began to make the gestures of respect.

“Don’t,” said the priest, still smiling, holding out his hand. “In the past minute you have already committed
two crimes. You have slandered the bishop’s council and you have spoken the wordrevolution . Both
are forbidden under emergency Statute Two-twenty-one-J, among others. The Prophet Angkhdt tells
us . . . but no matter. No, don’t go,” he continued, as the orderly changed his gestures to imply an urgent
duty elsewhere. “I am interested in what you have to say. Only be careful, I warn you.”

Prince Abu stepped down off his chair. “Please, Uncle,” he began, but the priest held up his forefinger.
He had a circle of silver lips tattooed around his fingertip, and his fingernail protruded like a tongue. The
mark entitled him to talk without being interrupted. “Go on,” he said. “Speak, my son. Go on with your
analysis. Only be careful.”

Slowly, stiffly, the orderly went down on his knees. His face was slack with fear, and he stammered
when he spoke. “My Lord,” he said. “Oh God, please . . .”

The priest smiled, as if the name of God contained a private joke. “Ah,” he said gently. “Perhaps it is not
true, then, that you are not a religious man. But to call on God now, in this context, couldn’t that be called
hypocrisy?”

“Uncle, stop,” said Abu. “Don’t bully him.” But again the old man lifted up his forefinger. There was
silence for a full minute, and then the orderly began to speak. Kneeling on the floor, his head bowed and
turned away, amid much swallowing and hesitation, he said, “I knew it. It’s true. You’re not human, are
you? You have no hearts. My mother used to say that. Starbridges. From another star. And now I know
it’s true.”
Lord Chrism chuckled, a dry rustling in his throat. “Your mother sounds unorthodox. Is she still alive? It
would surprise me if she were still alive.”

Ignoring the old man’s uplifted forefinger, the orderly leaped forward, and grabbed up at his throat. The
priest stepped back and made a little gesture in the air. And whether it was magic, or perhaps some
subtler power, the orderly never touched him. He stopped as if he had run into a wall of glass. His arms
grew slack, and his wooden hand caught fire suddenly and flared up.

And that was all. In perfect silence he knelt down again and bowed his head as his hand burned down to
a cinder and burned out.

The old man’s voice was soft as spiderweb. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said. “You were a soldier
once.”

The orderly said nothing, but he bowed down to the floor. And in a little while the priest continued: “Yes,
I see. You are a brave man. A commendable quality in a soldier. Very . . . commendable. You may go
now.”

“Sir?”

“Go in peace. I am not as interested in you as you might think. I thought perhaps that I could goad my
nephew into some display of strength. Yet I find he could not raise his hand to save an innocent man. Is it
because he lacks the courage of a common soldier?”

But before he had even reached the end of speaking, the orderly had scuttled out the door, while the
curtains whispered after him. Lord Chrism took no notice. He was smiling, and his blind eyes glistened
and shone. “Well, Nephew,” he said softly. “Say something. I know you’re there.”

Abu reached down to pick up the whiskey bottle from beside his chair. There was a glass beside it with
some whiskey in the bottom; he picked it up and rinsed his mouth out with the dregs, sucking it around
his teeth before he swallowed it. Then he poured himself some more.

The old priest cocked his head to listen to the sound. “Ah,” he said. “They treat you well.”

“I don’t complain.”

“No? But that’s good. And what is this—breakfast?” He stepped to the table and passed his hand over a
basket of croissants, picking at the crust.

The prince’s bed stood along the far wall, across from the window. Unused the night before, it was still
neat, piled high with blankets and silk pillows. Abu walked over and sat down. He felt ashamed,
mocked, soiled, suddenly filthy in the clothes he had been wearing for a week. His teeth felt furry and ill
used.

When he was a child, his uncle’s presence had been enough to frighten him into fits. He looked down at
the tattoo on his palm. “Is that why you came?” he asked. “To laugh at me?”

“No. Or rather, not entirely. It was too long a trip just for that. I came from Kindness and Repair. Six
miles, underground. The streets this morning are unsafe.”

“It will get worse.”

“Indeed. Burning you will not be popular, I fear. Burning my bishop, that will be a national catastrophe.
But what choice do I have? She was guilty of an imperfection, poor child. A chemical impurity. It is . . .
unfortunate.”

“So you don’t care if there’s a civil war or not.”

The secretary smiled. “I am an old man,” he said. “And there are always wars. It is God’s way. Perhaps
when I see Him I will ask Him why, if I remember. It doesn’t matter. On Friday I return to Paradise.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I have seen it in my dreams. The streets are paved with silver. The women all have flowers in their
hair. I will have a palace of my own, built of lapis lazuli. And God will take me in His arms, and He will
make me young again.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“But I do. I have seen it. And something else: My palace has a dungeon, below the level of the street. It
is not like this one, no. It is much . . . harsher. It is all prepared. There is one cell for your sister and one
for you.”

“My sister . . .”

“Yes. It is what I came to tell you, partly. She is on her way. Last night she took poison. My agents
found her body, but her soul had fled. Like you she had no courage. No courage and no brains.”

Prince Abu sat back on his bed and drank deeply. The whiskey in his glass was almost clear, a grade
reserved for princes and for priests. It came from far away, distilled from the flowers of some distant
southern desert, harvested by hand among the sand dunes. Popular among lovers, it was called
Heartsbalm.

The prince lifted the bottle into the light. There was more than a third left. The old man was still talking,
but Abu couldn’t listen anymore. He felt the first effects of drunkenness—it seemed impossible to do
more than one thing at a time, and right then he was thinking about his sister. The Heartsbalm had a mildly
hallucinogenic effect, and when he closed his eyes, he could see her clearly. Her black braids were tied
up around her head, and she was turning from the bathroom window, a pencil in her hand. He took
another swallow of drink and watched the image fade. In his mind’s eye he saw her change—Charity
Starbridge, older now, soon after she had married the old commissar, bending down over a bouquet of
herbs, her small body constricted in the tight, soft robes of matrimony, her face already tired. And then
again—later still, her cheeks pale and her hair unkempt, smoking marijuana from a silver chillum, in bed in
the middle of the afternoon.

He opened his eyes and looked down at the whiskey in his glass. He swirled it in a circle around the
bottom. “Where is Thanakar?” he asked suddenly. “My cousin Thanakar?”

“With the army. Not for long. My agents have gone out to bring him in. I tell you, burning you will be my
melancholy duty. Hanging him will be a pleasure. Ever since he was a child, he has thwarted me. Broken
my law. Debauched my niece. He has . . . thwarted me.”

Abu closed his eyes. In his mind he saw his sister. Once she had stopped eating, and he had persuaded
his brother-in-law to consult a doctor. The old man had chosen Thanakar. And within a week she had
been better. He remembered her standing in the hall, looking at the clock, waiting, counting the time until
her consultation, and when he had laughed at her, she had turned towards him, blushing, angry. How
pretty she had looked.

“She poisoned herself,” he said.
“Yes. A peculiar kind of poison. It seemed to burn her from within. One wonders how she purchased
such a thing.”

“I would like to see her.”

“Ah. In fact, there is nothing left to see. So I am informed. My agents were attacked outside the gate. As
they were bringing her to me. The crowd broke into her bier. They were looking for jewelry. Her body
broke apart under their hands. Inside, there was nothing left but ash.”

“Rejoice at every death,” counseled the Starbridge Catechism. Nevertheless Abu felt tears on his cheek.
The old priest stared at him, peering intently, but in the manner of the blind, he missed Abu’s eyes. He
could see movement and color, but not form, and Abu had not moved in a long time.

The old man peered into a corner. As always, it was as if he were surrounded by a mist of light, as if he
stood swaddled in color, the pink walls and the red carpets and the changing morning, the silver tray, the
golden tablecloth all smearing into one another all around him. Looking down at his own body, he saw a
smear of purple and scarlet, mixing together as he raised his arm.

“Are you . . . crying?” he asked softly, lifting his arm. “Be comforted. You will see her soon, in Paradise.”

“In a prison cell.”

“Be comforted. A prison cell in Paradise is better than the richest palace here. It will be summer there.”

“I’m surprised you want to go,” remarked the prince. “I’m surprised you think that God will be so glad to
see you, after you have wrecked this city and brought it to the brink of revolution.” He poured some
whiskey for himself.

The old man shook his head. “You still don’t understand, do you? You still don’t understand what I have
done. You must think that I’m a madman. No, but listen: Do you think I don’t know what is happening
outside? There are demagogues on every street corner preaching revolution and predicting the
apocalypse. I had to creep here through the catacombs, six miles underground. I was afraid, I, who have
ruled this city since before your birth. Don’t be a fool; if I were so in love with power, wouldn’t I have
contrived some way to keep it? If I had believed in power? No.”

The old man made a gesture, and all around him the glowing mist started to dim; to Abu it was as if the
sun outside had gone behind a cloud. The room settled down to darkness and deep shadow, and the old
man’s voice grew louder, more intense.

“There is a myth,” he said, “about a world where the seasons change so fast, two hundred, three hundred
times in a man’s lifetime, and the harvests just a few short months apart. If such a world exists, they must
have no such thing as war. Fathers, sons, and grandsons all must understand each other. But here, when I
was born, it was already winter, and winter is a season that requires strength of will. Therefore I have
ruled this city with a desperate jealousy. And I am not ashamed; now, only now have we run out of food.
In my great-grandfather’s time half the diocese was dead by this phase of spring, and even Starbridges
were eating straw. I am not ashamed.

“But it is spring now. Already times are not as hard. Soon there will be food to eat, birds on the trees. I
have designed a system where men worship their oppressors. In winter that was necessary, but times
have changed. Can I now go before my ministers and tell them Paradise is just an empty rock, that the
God who granted them the right to rule does not exist? Can I go before the people and explain that all
their misery has been for nothing? No—let them find out in their own way. The best I can do is make the
change as quick and sudden as I can. Therefore I will burn my bishop, and there will be a revolution. The
council will ascend to Paradise, and for twenty thousand days the name of Angkhdt will be forgotten.
New politics will come. But don’t misunderstand—I have planted a seed. Now, even now, all over the
city, actors and musicians are spreading word of you. They are in my pay.”

Prince Abu stared at him. He suddenly felt very drunk; lifting his glass to his lips, he slopped whiskey on
his shirt.

“I have planted a seed,” repeated the old man. “I have been dreaming of this moment ever since your
mother came to me when you were just a baby. Have you ever wondered why I gave you your tattoos?
Why I put such power into your hands—you, a weakling and a fool? It is because I needed a seed for a
new faith, not now, but fifty thousand days from now. Here, now, perhaps you think you symbolize
something new, a spirit of resistance, perhaps, of godlessness and revolution. But I have seen a vision of
a new church. Fifty thousand days from now, no one will remember then your foolish scruples. No, they
will remember the myth that now, right now, I am devising: of how a Starbridge prince suffered for them
and led them to salvation. And fifty thousand days from now, when winter comes, they will be eager to
surrender all their freedom into the hands of your ministers and your family. Just as they were eager to let
me rule them, when I was a young man. All the temples and the shrines will be rebuilt, and your face will
be on every altar. That is my dream.”

Prince Abu sat forward. He had heard enough. Summoning strength, he rose to his feet. “I forbid it,” he
said. “I won’t be part of it; I’ve changed my mind. Set me free.” He raised his hand. But in the darkness
and the shadow, the great golden tattoo was invisible. It had no power to illuminate. And Lord Chrism
laughed, a dry, feathery sound. “Too late,” he whispered softly. “Too late.” He made a gesture with his
little finger, and two soldiers stepped out of the curtains behind him. Each held in his hands a length of
purple rope. Like Lord Chrism, they were blind.
                                                     ***

Charity broke away from the circle of dancers and pushed away out of the crowd. She felt stifled by her
own breath. “They won’t kill him,” she said aloud. “They can’t.” She pushed out through a mass of
people, holding her hands spread out in front of her, and when they saw her blank, tattooless palms,
people stood aside to let her pass, afraid of the pollution. Her palms had begun to itch under the
greasepaint; her whole body had begun to itch.
She broke away into an open space and ran up a small slope of rubble, towards where an alleyway came
out onto the yard. Once there, she rested in the shadow of the gatepost, looking back towards the
dancers and the actor who was playing her brother. And then she turned away. In those days her
attention span was short. The world was various and new. And in a little while it was as if she had
forgotten; she bowed her head until her breathing slowed, and then she squatted down to look into a tiny
shrine set into the wall of an old house. Remembering part of an old prayer, she looked under the brass
arch and past a double row of oil lamps. The back ones had burned out, and the image itself was
covered up in shadow. But its eyes were made of mirror, and Charity could see them shining in the
darkness. This god was very old. The level of the street had risen up around her knees. It was Angkhdt
the God of Children.

Charity leaned forward to sniff the smoke that rose up from the lamps. Drunk from sensation, she was
fearless the way drunkards are, so that she didn’t even turn around when she felt somebody grab her
from behind. He had to pull her out, and then he hit her hard across the cheek, but she took no notice.
She put her hands up to her face.

“Don’t run away like that,” said Raksha Starbridge. “Don’t make me chase you.”

He grabbed her by the back of the neck and twisted her head around to make her look at him, and then
he thrust her past the gatepost into a narrow, stinking alley, out of sight from the yard. He was stronger
than he looked. Or perhaps the drugs had made him strong—he was sweating, and his whole body
shook. And there was something different in his eye, too, as if violence had awakened something there.
From her neck he ran his hand down the muscles of her shoulder, and pushed his trembling fingers into
the soft flesh above her collarbone. She could smell his breath, a mixture of alcohol and rot. It was too
rich a smell; she gagged and turned away, and then she pushed him in the chest so that he stumbled
backwards and fell down. He hit his head on the brick wall behind him. A protruding brick cut a gash in
his head, and he sat down in the mud and covered it with his hands. Charity watched him, fascinated by
the black blood welling up between his fingers. And she was fascinated by the sound he was making, a
low gurgle in his throat. Then he put his head back, and she could see tears on his cheeks, real tears.
“Don’t be afraid of me,” he sobbed. “Please don’t be afraid. I can’t hurt you. I was in holy orders. They
took my manhood when I made my vows. Only I need to touch someone sometimes. Is that so bad?”

Fascinated, she bent down to look at him. “I need you,” he confessed. “You’re like my little Rosa. And
don’t you understand, you need me too. You won’t survive out here, with no money and no food.”

She reached out and pulled his hands away from the cut on his head. But suddenly he grabbed hold of
her thumb and twisted it back and then jumped up, twisting her arm back behind her. Tears were
trembling in his eyes, but then he winked. “I need you,” he said. “Don’t you understand?”

He held her by the wrist, in a special hammerlock known only to parsons. And then he pulled her away
and led her down narrow and deserted streets, along high, windowless brick walls. Underfoot the mud
was covered with a sugar crust, and in the corners sugar had already begun to accumulate. In some
places the drifts were six inches high and still damp, for it had rained all night and looked to start again
any minute. In the middle of the roadway the crust had split apart over a gutter full of water and raw
sewage, and as they went on, the water spread across the street. Soon it lapped the bricks on either side
and then grew deep, so that they were wading through water past their ankles. And always they were
going downhill, and at a choice of ways they always took the one that led downhill, until they stood at the
top of a broad set of stairs with the water cascading down. It led down into what had once been a
market, but now it was all drowned. Remnants of tents and canvas awnings still stuck up above the
water.

From where they stood, they looked out over a small lake. A wind had sprung up out of nowhere and
chased itself in circles out over the water and raised whirlwinds of dust and newspaper into the air. Yet
the surface of the lake was undisturbed. A layer of rain had built up on the surface like a layer of oil, and
there were no waves or ripples on the lake, but only oily swells, rushing towards them up the steps and
then sucking away.

The parson put his fingers to his mouth and whistled shrilly. Across the lake a boat broke away from a
group of others and came towards them. It was brightly painted and cut swiftly through the water.
Charity admired the strong strokes of the oarsman. He was dressed in yellow trousers and a green shirt,
and when he got close she could see how big he was. He had long arms and a big, burly frame. But his
hair and beard were streaked with yellow.

“I’m surprised he owns a boat,” said Charity.

“All things belong to God,” replied the parson. “He rents it from the church.” And then he grinned.
“Don’t give yourself airs. You’re lower down than him. He may not let you in the boat.”

When the boatman saw who had hailed him, he laughed and waved. “Monsignor!” he shouted. He pulled
up to a mooring pole, one of several near the steps. A makeshift jetty ran out to it, put together out of
ladders and loose boards. The parson pushed Charity along it while the boatman shouted
encouragement. He had a wide, freckled face and a smile full of teeth. When the parson tripped and
almost pitched into the water, he stood up in his boat and clapped his hands. And then he made the
gestures of respect. While they staggered towards him over the jetty, he bowed and capered in the boat,
closing his eyes and pressing his knuckles to his forehead.

He was using forms that were old-fashioned even then, unnecessarily servile and complex. But his
laughter put irony into everything he did. At the very end he bent down to touch his toes. He was laughing
when he straightened up, but the parson’s face was dark with anger. The boatman didn’t care. He
reached his hand out for Charity to grab, but when she stepped down towards him, he pulled his hand
away, and the laughter faded from his mouth. He had seen her palm.

“Not your usual, is she, sir?” he asked. He sat down by the oars and stared at her, while she stood
uncertainly on the jetty. But then the parson pushed her from behind, so that she collapsed into the
bottom of the boat. He stepped down after her and sat down in the stern.

The boatman hawked a wad of spit up from his throat and blew it over the side. “Where are you going?”
he asked.

“Spider Ghat. Not far.”

“Any money?”

The parson shook his head.

“Any food?”

“No.”

The boatman frowned. “Got to be something, my master.”

Charity wore a talisman she had gotten that morning, pinned to the front of her dress. One of the dancers
had distributed them to the crowd, a tin button painted with her brother’s face. The boatman pointed to
it. “I thought they were atheists,” he said.

Charity opened her mouth to answer, but the parson shook his head. “Her mother was an antinomial. I’ll
purify the boat once we get back.”

“Thank you, my master. That’s not good enough.”

“It will have to do. The harm has already been done.”

The man stared at them a long moment, and then he bent down for his oars. He had a boat tattooed
along the outside of each finger, and perhaps he had had something in his horoscope, or perhaps the
priests had seen some promise in him when he was a boy, but the work was finer than was usual for
people of his caste, less monochromatic, better drawn. Each boat was different: a steamboat, a sailboat,
a barge, a tug.

He pulled out swiftly into the lake. Drops from the blades of his oars made rows of circles in the water.
“Antinomial, is she?” he asked. “Can she sing? I’ve never heard one sing.”

Again Charity opened her mouth to speak, and again the parson shook his head. “I’ll give you twenty
cents,” he said.

“All right. But I have a sick friend.”

“No drugs. I’m sorry.”
The boatman rowed for a while in silence, and then he smiled. “You’re not good for much, are you,
monsignor? You might offer me a drink, at least. This is thirsty work.”

The parson squinted up at the sky. A rip had opened in the clouds above them, and the sun was shining
through. The light made swirling patterns on the water. Charity looked at her reflection over the side. She
trailed her fingers in the lake, joining hands with her reflection. The lake gave off an acrid, sweaty smell.
Smiling, she turned around and watched the sweat gather on the boatman’s forehead and drip slowly
down into his eyes.

“I’ll say this for her,” the man said. “She’s easily amused.”

They were coming in among some buildings and the tops of flooded tenements. Charity looked through
the windows into the apartments. Some were still furnished and intact, and some had rowboats parked
outside, tied to the fire escapes.

She saw no other people. But soon the water was much shallower. Ahead she saw a group of wooden
houses built on stilts. It was a style that had been popular in winter, when the snow was very deep.

“There is one thing,” said the parson. “I could write you a charm. In lieu of payment. What kind of man is
he? Your sick friend.”

“Like me. He has a fever.” The man put his oars up and let the boat glide from its own momentum into
Spider Ghat.

“Understand, I don’t guarantee results. It’s a question of faith.”

“I understand.”

“Just so you know.” The parson fished a ballpoint pen out of a pocket in his robe. From some other
place he produced a book of rolling papers, and he took one out and ripped it in half. He spread it out
on the gunwale and bent over it, hiding it from Charity as he wrote. Then he handed it to the boatman.
“Have him roll it up and take it like a pill.”

“What does it say?”

“It is a verse from holy scripture. A very potent verse.”

One of the houses had a wooden porch built along three sides, and steps ran down from it onto a
wooden landing. The landing floated on the shallow water, lashed to oil drums at either end. “There,” said
Raksha Starbridge. “Take us there.”

A scum of Styrofoam and driftwood covered the water near the landing, wreckage from the submerged
apartments, pieces of furniture, and broken chunks of roof. Charity pushed aside some saturated sofa
cushions and stared down into the water. She could see the concrete curbstone two feet down and,
superimposed, the reflection of the house as they drifted to the landing. It was one-storied and
dilapidated, with cracks in the sheathing. The windows were broken and boarded over, the walls
covered with graffiti. The porch and the landing were crowded with objects salvaged from the
flood—crates and chains and spools of wire, a child’s tricycle, a broken rocking chair.

Charity raised her eyes. The boatman was still sitting in his seat, puzzling over the fragment of paper. He
spindled the paper in his hand, curling it around his finger while the parson stepped out onto the landing.
And then he made a tiny gesture with his head, a gesture of dismissal. Charity got to her feet, and the
parson grabbed her around the wrist and pulled her from the boat. He let go of the painter. But the man
just sat there in the boat with the paper curled around his finger, until the parson pushed the gunwale with
his foot, and the boat drifted away. Charity stood looking after it, while the parson held onto her wrist,
forcing his fingernail into the vein beneath her palm. The man in the boat backed water slowly, but it
wasn’t until he was out of sight behind the wreckage of a wall that Raksha Starbridge permitted himself
to laugh. “He’d better pray there is no God,” he said.
                                                     ***

Five miles away, Lord Chrism stood on Bishop’s Keys, beneath the belly of the temple. From Wanhope
Prison he had traveled underground, along a web of waterways that stretched for miles under the city.
Returning to the temple he had traveled underground, in his somber, hearselike barge of state, all gilded
wood and purple hangings, poled by silent members of his guard.
He stood at the edge of the stone pier, looking back into the darkness the way they had come. He could
remember when that whole enormous cavern had been ablaze with light. When he was a young man,
each member of the council had kept a boat here at the docks beneath the temple. The catacombs had
been full of noise and messengers in livery and soldiers transporting grain. In winter they had used ponies
to pull sleds over the ice, smart brown beasts with sharpened hooves and ribbons in their manes.

Then, standing on Bishop’s Keys, he had been surrounded by a storm of light and brilliant colors and the
high, strident voices of the priests. Now everything was dark, save for the torches in his guardsmen’s
hands. He could hear the water slapping against the wooden bottom of his barge as the men stowed it
along the slip and covered it with tarpaulin.

He shivered, and with cramped, arthritic fingers, he plucked at the sleeves of his robe. Then he turned
and walked quickly over the stone promenade. His men fell into place a step behind him. Their torches
spit and flared, grabbing at the cavern’s roof unsuccessfully until they passed under a lower vault. There
the echoes of their footsteps seemed flatter and less resonant. Rough carvings protruded down into the
light, though Lord Chrism’s blindness robbed them of detail. Even in his memory they had no detail.

This part of the temple had been built during the reign of the ninth bishop, in winter many years before.
The principle of the elevator had been forgotten then. From Bishop’s Keys the architects had built
stairways that reached toward every section of the temple, hollow fingers of stone that stretched up half a
mile, some of them, a lot of steps for an old man.

Here the cavern had assumed a disklike shape, the walls still out of sight, the ceiling not more than
nineteen feet above their heads. In front of them, the first of fifty stairways rose up from the floor, a
narrow spiral cased in stone. It stood alone, like a tree with the ceiling in its branches. Farther on, the
stairways grew closer together and more numerous, until the three men were walking as if through a stone
forest, among groves of trees irregularly spaced and sized. These were the servants’ stairs, leading up to
kitchens and guardhouses. At the base of each there was a door, black now, mostly, though some still
showed a feeble glow. That was how the chamber had been illuminated in the old days—the staircases
were sheathed in alabaster, and inside, the spirals had been lined with lights, red, green, violet, the colors
coded to their destinations and the caste of people who could use them. Then each stair had formed a
column of light nineteen feet from floor to ceiling, the colors bleeding through the thin, transparent stone.

Then this entire chamber had been alive; now it was dead. Lord Chrism hurried on. Ahead of them, a
wall stretched to both sides. Lord Chrism turned to the left and walked along it, past a gaping doorway.
A single bulb hung from the keystone of the arch. Once guards had been stationed there around the
clock. It was the entrance of an old granary, one of one hundred and seventeen cavernous storage bins
cut into the rock beneath the temple. The electric light gave contour to a mass of carving all around the
arch, a beautiful woman in a variety of different poses. Each granary was dedicated to one of the one
hundred and seventeen lovers of Immortal Angkhdt; this one, named after the so-called White-Faced
Woman, had served the Church of Morquar the Unkempt, and all the shrines between the river and the
Morquar Gate. All winter and well into spring, for more than a lifetime, it had fed the people of that
district. Now it was empty. They were all empty, and people everywhere were forgetting God.

In the summertime and autumn, generations of men and women had slaved to fill these granaries, working
with increasing desperation as the weather grew colder and the power of the priests increased. When
Lord Chrism’s father was a boy, the episcopal wheatfields had stretched for ninety miles around the city,
land that was all barren now. Winter had scraped it clean, down to the red rock. And when the snow
had come, and the countryside was empty, and the country people had all come in through the gates,
then these caverns had been full of light, and soldiers pulling carts and sledges loaded with fat red
grainbags, each one stamped with the black dog’s head of Angkhdt. Their labor had been a kind of
worship, and they had chanted songs of worship while they worked. They had pulled the sledges over
the ice and through the catacombs down underneath the city. They had pulled them through the crypts
beneath the churches, where the grain was off-loaded and turned over to the parish priests for
distribution to the multitude, between the sermon and the invocation, in small plastic bags.

Farther on along the wall, Lord Chrism stopped for breath next to another doorway. The carvings here
had been among his favorites when he was a boy, and even though he could no longer see, he put his
hand out to stroke the smooth neck of the brass statue. He slid his finger down her spine. In scripture,
this woman had no name. The God’s encounter with her had been brief and furtive, and the granary itself
was insignificant. But the statue was delightful. As the old priest stopped to catch his breath, he let his
hand stroke the curve of her buttocks.

This granary was empty, too, and the light in the archway had burned out. But nearby there was another,
prouder entrance cut into the stone and a wide rampway sloping up and to the right. It led up to Lord
Chrism’s private quarters in the Courtyard of the Rights of Man, a long and weary way. Fingering the
statue, Lord Chrism prayed to God for strength and muttered charms to slow his breath and smooth his
heart. He turned back to his men, standing behind him in a pool of light. “Don’t wait for me,” he said.
“Don’t . . . wait.”

He made a gesture with his finger, and they bowed their heads. They could not speak. Their lips were
sewn shut with a metal thread. But they touched their knuckles to their foreheads, and then they walked
past him up the ramp without looking back. At intervals along the walls extinguished torches hung in metal
brackets. As the two men walked up the ramp, they lit them from the torches that they carried, so that a
line of guttering blue lights followed them along each wall. Lord Chrism smiled. In the darkness, his eyes
made out a curving double line of blue. He fingered the head of the prophet’s metal penis and fingered
the ring of mystic symbols carved around the woman’s lips.

He waited a few minutes and then went up another way. Leaving the torches and the ramp behind him,
he turned aside into an ancient doorway and up an ancient, dusty stair. Even though it could not help him
in the way it helped a seeing man, he took a torch down from its bracket. For comfort’s sake, he lit it
with an effort of his mind, a small effort, but he was tired. And soon, as he climbed the stairs, the light
settled into the rhythm of his breathing. When his lungs were full, it burned up bright. When he exhaled, it
glimmered out. Breathing hard, he was wrapped in alternating cocoons of light and dark.

At the seventh landing of the seventh stair he stopped to rest again. Soon he would rest for all eternity. If
God existed, then on Friday he would be in Paradise, and God would cleanse his heart, and he would
feel no fear or sadness anymore. If God did not exist, that, too, would be a kind of rest, mute blackness
to the end of time. Either way it made no difference. He still had work to do.

But even so he stood a while longer, letting alternating images of doubt and faith possess his mind, until
his breathing settled down and the torch cast a more even light. He murmured a prayer to smooth his
ragged heartbeat and then pressed on, past storehouses and armories and warrens of useless, empty
rooms. Ten thousand monks had lived in Kindness and Repair when Chrism Demiurge first came to stay
there, a young priest, newly gelded. Then he had come up this same way. Raised in splendor in his
father’s house, he had been shocked and frightened by this humble stair, for even then his footsteps had
been muffled in the dust, and it was cold, so cold, with the winter thick outside. And even though he had
been born to glory, and his tattoos specified that he was to be a great commander of the faithful, still
there had been no ceremony to greet his coming. He had been given a cell in a section of the temple that,
even then, was ancient and disused. On the way his father had terrified him with stories of the catacombs,
and told him stories of vast conclaves of heretics who worshiped alien gods down in the darkest crypts,
among the stone sarcophagi. When he became a man, his first act had been to send soldiers down
through every corner of the catacomb, but they found nothing. It had been winter then.

In spring, of course, new heresies sprouted from a thousand seeds. Somewhere in this labyrinth there
lurked a race of refugees and criminals, men and women who had run away from all the duties of their
caste, who scavenged from the city and worshiped a strange god, an incarnation of the White-Faced
Woman. On six successive nights Lord Chrism had seen her in a dream, a woman standing in a field of
whitened bones. She had worn an onyx necklace, and her face was as white as wax. Each night he had
woken up sweating, and once he had cried out. The dream had held the force of premonition.

At the fifteenth turning of the fourteenth stair, Lord Chrism stopped and peered back down into the
darkness. A narrow door led from behind the landing; Lord Chrism fumbled through and pushed it shut
behind him. He bolted it. It was the border of the realm of light. In a high, empty hall he threw his torch
away, for light was coming in through the high windows, a cool, soft light, mixing with the smell of dust
and dreams, and books and rotting tapestries. Lord Chrism wrinkled up his nose. There was something
else here too, a smell of gasoline and perfume, and a sound like gravel thrown against the window. The
rain had started up again. High above him, one of the casements had split open and the sugar rain was
pouring through, soaking the tapestries and biting at the cloth, so that underneath the windowsill the fabric
hung in strips. The sugar phosphorescence had penetrated the room, so that to the priest’s blind eyes one
whole wall was lit with silver fire.

Muttering, he turned away. That vision of Paradise was not for him; he turned away and fumbled for a
secret doorknob carved into the wall. A panel of the wall was carved into the likeness of the thirteenth
bishop, a bibulous old man, and when Lord Chrism found his swollen wooden nose, the panel levered
back to show another secret stair, which twisted up into a secret tower. Here were cells reserved for
Chrism’s private enemies. His predecessor was still alive in one, an ancient paralytic, deaf and blind, still
fed three times a day.

Wide, straight flights of steps rose up around a square central well. There was a landing at each corner,
and Lord Chrism stopped at the first one. He turned the key in the lock of a small door and pushed it
open without entering. He stood back against the wall. “Come out,” he said. “Come out now.” But
nothing happened. There was no sound, and for a moment Chrism was afraid the boy had died. Like all
antinomials, the boy worshiped freedom as if it were a god, and for an instant Chrism was afraid that
even a few days’ captivity had been too much, and no bad treatment either. But then he heard a deep,
guttural breathing, even and untroubled, like an animal’s.

The boy was sitting on his bed with his back against the wall. His huge hand moved delicately through the
fur of the cat on his lap. It was the only movement he made, until he raised his head to stare out through
the open door. He had been sitting in darkness, the shutters pulled closed over the window. The light
from the open doorway cut diagonally across his face.

Like Prince Abu’s, his cell was large and luxurious, reserved for prisoners of the highest rank. That had
not made any difference to the boy. He had defecated next to his bed and urinated in several places
along the wall, ignoring the chemical toilet built into the windowseat. His blankets had been pulled apart
and rearranged into a kind of nest. The room itself had taken on a hot, sweaty odor. The boy’s enormous
body was glistening with sweat. He was naked to the waist.

“Come out,” repeated Chrism Demiurge. He peered inside, but his sight was too dim to distinguish the
soft caress of the boy’s hand, the slow ripple in the darkness as he raised his head. The old priest was
listening for some change in the boy’s breathing, to see if he was sleeping or awake. But then suddenly he
caught a flash of blue, as the light from the doorway was thrown back at him, reflected in the boy’s alien,
criminal blue eyes.

Lord Chrism shuddered. He had not seen the boy since he had come upon him in the bishop’s chamber,
and he had forgotten his blue eyes. Criminals in Paradise, atheists and cannibals on Earth—these
antinomials, God had marked them so that they could never hide. He had marked them with their hairless
skins, their gigantic bodies, their repulsive eyes. Reflexively, Lord Chrism made the sign of the unclean,
dropping his chin into each armpit, muttering a little spiteful prayer.

The boy had no way of understanding the language of the prayer. But he understood its rhythm and its
tone. Like all his kind, he was sensitive to music, and he heard the venom in the old man’s voice. He
turned his head so that he could savor it more carefully. And because he was sensitive to dancing, he
watched each motion of the old priest’s hands, though he cared nothing for barbarian ritual, as a rule. Yet
this one seemed to concern him closely, so with music the boy put a note of interrogation into the air, a
few notes of the melody called “talk some more.”

But when he heard it, the old priest staggered backwards and stuck his skinny fingers in his ears. And
when he spoke, his voice contained nothing of its usual gentleness. “Silence!” he shouted. “No
blasphemy! Do as I command.”

These words meant nothing to the boy. He understood their pitch, their tone, even their definitions, but
not their sense. It was a barbarian way of talking, a way of using language as a kind of power. That was
all he knew. He had no way of appreciating the complexity of form, when a Starbridge and a prince of
the church stooped to address a piece of human filth. And in fact he was not interested, because there
was something else, too, some other music in the air. He turned his head to listen.

The tower rose eleven stories around a central stairwell. On every floor the stair was lined with cells. And
when the old priest made his exclamation, the sound drifted up through the stairwell, finding resonances in
the ancient tower, awakening prisoners in their beds, disturbing them at their desks or at their meals. In a
little while the whole building shook to the sound of their weak shouting, and their weak fists drumming
on the doors. They recognized his voice. And some were banging on the pipes, so that the sound made
up a kind of music.

The boy sat listening, trying to analyze its parts, to break it down into its voices, as if he were walking up
the stair with his hand on the bannister, pausing at every door. There could be something vital to him, if he
could separate it out. If he could disregard the muffled curses and the cries, and break apart the rhythm
of the pounding, and travel up each step of that long stair, then perhaps he would hear something. He
would hear it separate from the rest, a song that he had taught her with great difficulty, for she was
ignorant of music.

The cat jumped to the floor. It stretched, and arched its back. He stood up too, swiftly and unhurriedly.
In the doorway the priest muttered a charm to calm the boy and sap his strength. But the antinomial knew
nothing about magic. He pushed the old man aside, so that he fell back against the wall. The boy was
free; he leaped across the threshold and leaped up the stairs.

As he ran, he pulled his thumb along the rods of the bannister. It made a quick, even patter on the wood,
mixing with his heartbeat and the slapping of his footsteps. He was humming part of a melody, a tune
called “think of me.” And all the time he strained to hear another music blending with his own, badly sung
and out of tune perhaps, but recognizable. He passed by doorway after doorway. He heard all the
melodies of desperation in the frenzied banging and the strange, half-human cries; the music he was
searching for was different from that.

He stopped on an upper landing. There were six doors in a row, but one was different from the rest,
grander and more solid. It was built of oak and studded with nails. The whole surface of it was covered
with symbols drawn in chalk, charms to reinforce the hinges, for the bishop was a powerful sorceress.
She could have broken any ordinary door. But this one was sealed with magic. It was set into a recess in
the wall, and on each side the frame was carved into a likeness of the God of Chastity, her lips clamped
shut, her wooden fingers locked over her sex. In one of her five hands she held a spindle, and with each
of the other four she passed a strand of thread back to her sister on the other side.

Between them, the doorway was sealed with a web of magic. But the boy cared nothing for barbarian
superstition. He swept the edge of his palm down across it, and the web broke apart. The threads pulled
back under his hand and writhed and tangled in the air, fringing the door as if with seething snakes. But
the boy was ignorant of danger. He bent down to listen at the keyhole, and then he struck the door with
all his strength.

Coming up behind him, Lord Chrism heard the hollow booming. “Stupid, so stupid,” he muttered,
laboring up the stair, leaning on the rail. But at the landing he stopped, and from the chain around his neck
he produced a silver key.

Already the boy’s hands were bloody, his knuckles mashed. His lips were pulled back along his gums,
displaying long, carnivorous teeth. With a cry of rage, he smashed his naked shoulder against the studded
door. But when he saw the priest, he turned around. The old man held the key out towards him at the
end of its chain.

Then for a moment everything fell silent. For a moment the protests of the other prisoners fell silent, and
in the interval the old man heard another sound, hesitant, unclear, a woman’s voice, and even his
barbarian ears could hear the music in it, though he couldn’t understand it. In front of the door the
antinomial was grimacing in pain. He reached his hand out for the key. “Give it to me,” he said.

In one moment all the boy’s violence had drained away. Lord Chrism disliked violence. Yet even more,
he disliked sudden change. These antinomials were great, empty casks of flesh, yet they were dangerous
and unpredictable. Lord Chrism muttered prayers against pollution. But then he shuffled forward,
dangling the key, while with his other hand he made stiff, arthritic gestures in the air.

He never thought the boy would understand the working of the lock. But the antinomial had grown up in
Charn. Though he loved freedom, he had never known it, even in his mind. Locks and keys he knew; he
had been in prison more than once. So he grabbed the key and held it up. Grimacing, he rubbed it
between his fingers and fitted it carefully into the lock.

The door swung open. At one time, the cell beyond had been the richest in the tower. In his strange, sad
way, the priest had loved his bishop. Now, that love mixed with his blindness, and it took a moment for
the old man to realize what had changed. For a moment, as he looked in through the door, he saw his
memory of the way the room had been, imprinted on his ruined retinas. He saw the cushioned wallpaper,
the chandelier, the carpets, and the giant bed where Angkhdt himself had once made love. But then the
vision faded as his nostrils caught the smell of smoke. With a jolt of bitterness and pain, he realized she
had wrecked the room.
The wallpaper had been white, and decorated with a floral pattern. Lord Chrism had chosen it himself, a
mixture of forget-me-nots and lilies of the valley. Now it was gray and scorched and soggy. She had lit
the room on fire and then extinguished it with water. The furniture was battered into pieces, the bed
turned on its side, the mattress ripped apart and oozing soggy cotton. The chandelier had fallen to the
floor. And in the middle of the wreckage stood the bishop, straight as a candle flame, dressed in her
immaculate white shirt.

To the old man’s eyes she appeared as a luminous white glow on a background of dark gray. But then a
stain spread across the image as the antinomial leaped forward and took her in his arms. Lord Chrism
turned his head aside and spat. The boy was his peace offering, his gift, but already he regretted bringing
him. It nauseated him to see the sacred couple willingly with the unclean, nauseated him and broke his
heart. Almost he regretted having come.

Before his eyes the candle flame burned free again. She had twisted from the boy’s embrace and turned
towards him. “Well?” she asked. “What have you to say to me?”

For the last time in his life the old man made the gestures of respect. He looked down at the floor. “It is
my painful duty to inform you,” he mumbled, “of the results of this morning’s roll call. The vote was one
hundred and seven to ninety-five with twenty-one abstentions—”

The bishop interrupted him. “Don’t you think I guessed?” she cried. “My window overlooks the
courtyard.”

She pointed, but the old man did not raise his head. He could not have seen, even if he had wanted to,
what she was pointing at, out the bars of her window, over the retaining wall, in the Courtyard of the Sun
and Stars. “It is my scaffold,” said the bishop. “They have been building it all morning. When is it to be?”

“Tomorrow night.”

“I am surprised you won the vote. You must have lied to them.”

“No, ma’am. Not entirely. Forgive me. But if I had told the truth, they would not have voted to convict.
It was a question of . . . political expediency. And better for you, too, in the long run. When your
great-great uncle was bishop of this city, he was tortured to death by the revolutionary tribunal, almost
exactly one year ago.”

The bishop stood in the center of the room. The antinomial had moved over to the window. Lord Chrism
leaned against the doorpost, looking down. Otherwise, he would have missed the smear of golden
orange on the dark wood as the huge cat slunk across the threshold. It picked its way over the ruined
carpet to rub up against the boy’s legs.

The bishop also looked down at the cat, so that her black hair obscured her face. A week’s
imprisonment had not changed her, even in memory, her black eyes and heavy eyebrows, her petulant
expression, her skin like edible sweet cream. Sadly, Lord Chrism recognized the reason he had come.
He had wanted to see her one last time.

“I had to lie,” he said. “If I had told the truth, it would not have been enough. Though it was enough for
me. They did not see what I saw. If they had found you naked in your chamber with this . . . this . . .
this . . . carnivore.”

“And wasn’t that my right?” she cried, looking up with angry eyes. “I am bishop of Charn.”

“It was your right, but it was not well done. In part, I blame myself. These atheists, I should have burned
them all. And I ask myself, how did you find him? Through what crack did he crawl?”

“He climbed up to my tower window. He was starving and wet through. Do you blame me? I was
brought up in this temple among men like you. Old men, blind. I thought he was the God Himself.”

Standing at the window, the antinomial scowled and frowned. He tugged on one of the bars of the
window as he looked back into the room. Outside, the weather had closed in, and it was raining.

“I do not blame you,” said the priest. “I chose your education. I might have known the effects that so
much holy scripture would have had on a young girl. Only I wish you had chosen something worthier.
Some worthier object for your . . . love. It is unfortunate.”

The cat was pacing back and forth under the window. The old man paused, and then continued. “It was
his cat which gave me the idea,” he said. “I told the council I had found you coupled with a demon. The
demon from the ninety-second psalm—you know, Palagon Bahu, in the shape of a cat. I showed them in
a living image, and they trusted me. Now I am sorry, but to tell the truth, what else could I do? Believe
me, child—dear child—you will hardly feel it. I’ll give you a drug, and you will hardly feel the fire. Or just
a little bit—you will fall asleep, and you will wake in Paradise. Believe me, I have prayed for you. Every
night of this past week, I have prepared a room for you. In the house of our beloved Lord.”

“I think you are a monster,” she said.

“Don’t call me that. I am being generous. This afternoon my nephew burns, my own sister’s son, and I
have cursed him. Or rather, I’m not sure. I still have plans.” Lord Chrism smiled at his own cleverness,
and yet it was a guilty smile. He felt a compulsion to shame himself by telling everything. Yet he was
gleeful, too, and proud, because the bishop, after all, was just a little girl. She could not be expected to
understand.

“I came here to ask you for absolution,” he said. “But now I see it is a wasted trip. Nevertheless, please
try to understand. I have prepared a miracle. I have made my nephew’s double. Surgically. Or rather, I
have caused him to be made. I have made a man who looks just like him, from a distance. Understand: I
want to make a miracle, to burn one and then use the other, as if God had saved him from the fire. Only I
haven’t yet decided which to burn.”

“I think you are a monster,” she repeated.

“Yes. Well, perhaps.” Lord Chrism swallowed, and then he looked away. His voice had risen defiantly,
but now it resumed its soft, insinuating tone. “But in a sense, it doesn’t matter what you think. You are
deposed. You lack . . . authority.”

“I am Bishop of Charn.”

“Yes. Perhaps. For a little while longer, I suppose.”
                                                      ***

That day, all day, there was chaos in the streets of Charn. At nine o’clock, in Soldan Square, the
spokesman for the Inner Ear had nailed up a pronouncement, confirming rumors of the bishop’s
condemnation. A crowd of seven thousand people waited for the news under a light rain, and when it
came, they raised a howl that could be heard for half a mile. They pelted the council’s spokesman with
excrement and mud; he was an old, fat, blind man, and they almost killed him.
By noon the news had spread throughout the city. The churches and chapels were all packed for morning
prayer; after the distribution of the grain, the parish priests stood up to give the news, and later many of
them took refuge in the crypts, cowering among the tombs while the crowds rampaged above their
heads. One at least, the chaplain at St. Soldan’s Gate, stripped off his miter and went down to join his
angry congregation. With his own crosier he beat in the stained-glass portrait of Lord Chrism Demiurge
above the altar, and with his own hands he rang St. Soldan’s Bell and called the folk to arms.

“Which one of you has not received some comfort from her hand?” he asked rhetorically. “Which one of
you has never felt the comfort of her grace?” His name was Ripon Starbridge, and within a month he
would be dead, broken on the gallows of the revolution. For the sake of his name and his tattoos, he
would be broken and condemned, but on that day he was a hero of the revolution, the first to raise his
hand against oppression. Later chroniclers would call that time the Starbridge Uprising; from the 45th of
October to the fall of the temple five days later, much of the violence against the government was led by
rebel officers and priests, seeking first to free the bishop, later to avenge her death.

Too late these men would realize their own danger: They were rousing passions that would overwhelm
them. That day, when Ripon Starbridge rang the bell above St. Soldan’s Church, he rang the tocsin for
his race. All over the district men and women stopped what they were doing and looked up.

When Raksha Starbridge heard the sound, he was squatting over the workbench in his house on Spider
Ghat, a beaker of what looked like urine in his hand. He turned his head and squinted up into the air.
“What’s that?” he asked, but he already knew. And there was no one else to tell him; to Princess Charity
the bell was just a noise, another cadence fighting with the squall of rain upon the tiles, the slap of water
on the pilings underneath the house. Or more than that: After a while the sound of the bell seemed to
drown out other rhythms. Charity shivered, and wrapped her skinny body in her arms.

She stood near the doorway of the parson’s house, leaning back against the bare studs of the wall. The
house was larger than it looked from the outside, a single room, packed to the rafters with huge piles of
junk. Near Charity, a mass of broken bicycles, scrap metal, and electrical supplies loomed up above her
head. In front of her, occasional rodents wandered among bales of paper, chimney stacks of books.

Charity shivered, and listened to the tolling of the bell. After her morning in the streets, she was relieved
to be inside. The outside world had proved so varied and intense, it was a relief to get away;
concentrating on a single sound, she felt her strength return. In time she was secure enough to feel bored;
that morning Raksha Starbridge had dragged her to his house. But once inside, he had abandoned her
and disappeared. After an hour, she pushed away from the wall and walked down a pathway between
boxes, following a line of revolutionary slogans painted on the floor. There, in an open space in the center
of the house, Raksha Starbridge kept his bed and kitchen. There he kept his laboratory, a strange,
eclectic cluster of burners and pipettes and dusty bulbs of colored liquids. And there he crouched over
his workbench, stirring a beaker, while with his other hand he added pinches of some dark and dirty
powder.

He was talking softly to himself. Standing above him, Charity noticed a new purpose in the way he
moved, a new anxiety. “It’s Soldan’s Bell,” he said aloud, anticipating what was on her lips to ask. “God
help us all,” he said.

Baffled, she shook her head, and he turned back to stare at her. “My God, you’re ignorant,” he said.
“Even Rosa would have understood—listen,” he said, rising to face her, cradling the beaker in his hands.
“Listen, why do you think I brought you down here? It’s because I needed you for my experiment. But I
didn’t guess I needed you so urgently.”

Baffled, she shook her head. He tried again. “I have a friend in Kindness and Repair. He told me this:
Last Wednesday Chrism Demiurge, returning late from midnight mass, surprised the bishop of this city
coupled with a stranger, before the altar of her private shrine. Lord Chrism had them both arrested, and
the bishop was indicted for witchcraft and impurity. That was on Sunday. This morning the council was to
meet, to vote on the indictment, and I was sure she’d be released. That bell tells me I was wrong.”
The parson’s face was full of movement, even when he paused. Drugs and alcohol had penetrated every
part of him; his eyes were dilated, and his eyelids twitched. Clouds of angry rashes and discolored skin
seemed to move over his cheeks; his mouth was never still and never dry. Charity stared down at his
trembling hands, watching the uneven surface of the liquid in his beaker.

He wasn’t finished: “I was wrong. The chaplain of Saint Soldan’s church is calling for armed
demonstrations and a general strike. He is Lord Chrism’s cousin, but he is the bishop’s man. What can
that mean, except she was condemned? What can that mean, except the moment I have feared and
hoped for all my life is here at last, and I am unprepared?”

Raksha Starbridge held the beaker in one hand. The other he spread open, and Charity could see his
strange tattoo: a dark thicket of leaves and underneath, almost invisible, a single seam of gold, a tiny
lizard hiding in the grass. “Once their power splits,” he said, “then it will fall. I used to think, yes in my
lifetime, yes in one thousand or two thousand days, the people would rise up. But that bell means that in a
week—no more—the people will be hunting Starbridges through all the streets, and they will murder all
they find.” He stared down at his palm, and with the forefinger of the hand that held the beaker, he
touched the seam of gold. “And I mean to survive.”

Then suddenly he took her hand and led her over to another bench, under the shadow of a wall of
books. “Stand here,” he said. He put the beaker down upon the bench. “I needed you,” he said. “For my
experiment. Just for a moment—you will hardly feel it. The experiment has been complete, only I need
the test. My own blood was never pure, and I have ruined it. Besides,” he said, glancing down at his
mottled forearm. “I find it hard to raise a vein.”

With trembling fingers he lit a spirit lamp and then chose four test tubes from a dusty box. He rubbed
them with a piece of cloth, then poised them upright in a row, balanced in a wooden rack. Then he
crouched down. Under the bench there was a small electric cooler; he opened it and took the only thing
that it contained—a china beaker covered with tin foil. Standing again, he poured two of the test tubes
full of a thick liquid. It was dark blue and almost black.

“This is human blood,” he said. “Ordinary. Starving class. But this”—he broke the seal on a sterile bag,
and drew out a thick needle, which he connected to a plastic tube—“this,” he said, and then he grabbed
the princess by the arm and jammed the needle into the big vein inside her elbow. She grunted with
surprise and pulled away, but he was stronger than he looked. He held her by the arm and then let go; it
only took a moment for him to fill two test tubes with her blood. He yanked the needle out almost before
she had a chance to say a word, and clamped a piece of gauze over the wound. Then he let go and
turned back to the test tubes.

With a chuckle of delight, he held one up against the flame. “Perfect,” he said. Her blood gleamed
amber-colored in the lamplight; he shook it, watching the residue settle, and then replaced it in his rack.
“Perfect,” he said again. Charity said nothing, only she held the gauze clamped tightly over her arm.

Then he took the other beaker, the one that he had first prepared, and with a pipette he dripped seven
drops of liquid into each tube.

In the two tubes of ordinary blood there was no change. But instantly the Starbridge blood turned color,
and let forth an evil smell. When it was gone, the four tubes were interchangeable.

“What does it prove?” asked Charity.

Raksha Starbridge laughed. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all. But you and I are not religious. If we
were, we’d find this demonstration most significant.”
“What do you mean?”

Raksha Starbridge held the tubes up to the light, one after the other. “There are millions in this city who
believe the myth we taught them, that there are differences between the rich and the poor. There are
millions who will find it hard, even now, to rise up against their masters. They will think, ‘What is the use?
Our masters are like gods. To kill them is to send them straight to Paradise.’ Now, to such a one, I
would think this demonstration might be most significant. If they could be convinced there was a drug that
could eliminate that difference, they might feel a revolution might succeed. A pill, perhaps, or an
injection—something that would neutralize the sacred essence of the Starbridge blood . . . well, then
they’d feel their hands were free to strike at their oppressors. And more than that, might they not be
grateful to the man who gave that drug to them, who freed them from the burden of that myth? Might they
not give him a high place in their counsels, and if he is a Starbridge, might they not forgive his blood,
forgive his past?”

“My God,” said Charity. “You’d sell us to the mob . . .”

“Ah yes, my family,” interrupted Raksha Starbridge, and again he raised his hand, so that she could see
the gleam of gold along his palm. “Ah yes,” he said, looking around the filthy room. “My family, who
have treated me so well. No, it is their own stupidity that has betrayed them. I have not brought them to
this place. But I plan to survive—what are your plans?”

Charity took the gauze from her arm and looked down at the patch of amber blood. “I miss my cousin
Thanakar,” she said, tears in her eyes. “My cousin and my brother. He’d know what to do. The bishop’s
been arrested—he could free her. Just by raising up his hand.”

“Yes. Perhaps. He has the power, but he lacks the strength. And Chrism Demiurge is burning him this
afternoon. Had you forgotten?”

She had not forgotten. Tears were in her eyes. He went on: “No. These stories are all coming to an end.
Your brother and the bishop. The Starbridge power in this city is coming to an end. The storm is coming,
and I mean to ride it. I mean to survive.”

“I, too,” said Charity. “But not like that.” She seized the beaker from the table and tried to pull away, but
the parson had grabbed her by the arm. She tried to pull away, and then she turned and dashed the
contents of the beaker back into his face, so that it ran down his clothes.

Raksha Starbridge laughed and licked his lips. “It doesn’t matter. Rat piss and dopamine, that’s all it is. I
know the formula.”

The bell had stopped. Charity pulled away, and he released her suddenly, so that she staggered and fell
back. “Go,” he said. “If you’re not with me, you’re against me. Don’t come begging, later on.”

He turned back to his test tubes. And Charity felt a sudden rush of terror, because, disgusting as he was,
in all the vicious city he was everyone she knew. Almost, already, she felt like begging his forgiveness; the
house on Spider Ghat seemed like a refuge, dark and peaceful, from the crowds outside. But then she
gathered strength. She turned and walked up through the piles of junk, into the open air.
                                                     ***

“What are you doing?” asked the boy.
In Kindness and Repair, part of the bishop’s cell was still intact. When the old man had gone and sealed
the door behind him, the boy sat on the windowsill, his cat upon his lap. He watched with a strange, silent
absorption as she lit the candles of her private altar. From her own chamber in the bishop’s tower, she
had brought an old four-handed statue of Angkhdt the Charioteer. It was about ten inches high, carved of
blackened bronze. The God was dancing, His arms making a circle around His head, and in each hand
He held a symbol of the four great mysteries—love, war, poetry, and faith. His face was human, and
there was nothing vulgar or deformed about His sex. The statue had been for children in the ancient time.

The bishop mixed some kaya gum into a bluish paste. At the same time, she was reciting vespers in her
clear, low voice. She poured water into a row of small brass bowls, so that it trembled on the lip of
overflowing. “Oh my Father,” she intoned, “teach me how to love, for my love is the joy, the passion,
and the flame.”

At two o’clock, the bells started to ring again in churches all over the city. The bishop sat back on her
heels to listen. She brushed a strand of hair back from her face. The boy watched her from the window,
and with the thumb and index finger of his right hand he stroked the fur under the cat’s right ear. Once
again, the clouds outside had broken apart, and the afternoon sun was coming through the bars into the
room, touching his golden hair, his golden skin. “There is part of you that I don’t like,” he said.

“I am sorry,” replied the bishop. She didn’t turn around.

“This is slavery,” he said. “In your mind. Leave it and come with me. Can you break the door?”

The bishop made the mark of Paradise above her forehead and her heart, tracing it in water. “I cannot,”
she said. “He has sealed it with an incantation, which will not be released until my death.”

The boy hummed a few notes of a song called “come with me.” Outside the window, the sun was shining
with a clear, straight, golden light. It shone on the backs of the soldiers laboring in the courtyard around
the scaffold, and it made their shadows long and black. They had built a pyramid of logs. Soaked with
rainwater, scented with perfume, now it was smoking in the sunlight and the unaccustomed heat. The
great pile of wood with the heavy stake on top pointed dolefully up towards the sky. The shadow of it
stretched across the yard and touched another, smaller gallows by the wall. “Tomorrow night,” said the
bishop. “Tomorrow night we shall be free.”

“In Paradise,” said the boy, his voice a music of contempt.

The bishop frowned. Again she pushed the hair back from her face. “Not quite that far,” she said.
“Watch this.”

In a dark space near the altar an image gathered shape. It spun and twisted on the floor, a coil of snakes,
a white stag, and a cloud of butterflies. A mixture of illusions in a space six inches high, and then another
image: a tree growing from a pyre of burning logs, spreading its limbs, its leaves and branches catching
fire. A silver apple on its topmost bough spun in the light, detached itself, and floated up into the air. It
was the Earth, a tiny simulacrum of the Earth, spinning, changing color, changing season.

The bishop frowned. “I can make a dream as real as flesh,” she said.
                                                     ***

Six miles away across the city, Prince Abu watched the sun for the last time. He stood on the steps of
Wanhope Prison, squinting myopically into the glare. “How warm it is,” he said. “This is real spring
weather, after all.” These were his last words, and later people argued constantly about their meaning.
And in fact it was the hottest day in Charn so far that season. That, and the unsettled weather, were
things that people would remember later, when they sang songs about his death.
The priests had ungagged him and untied his hands, so that they could shrive him. Lord Chrism had
asked them to perform this ceremony in public. So they had put up sawhorses and barricades in the open
square before the prison steps, and the purge was holding back the crowd. There were fifteen hundred
people in the square. “Abu, Abu, Abu,” they shouted. The prince smiled and waved. He felt like a fool.
He had been drinking steadily all day, and now he could scarcely stand. He wasn’t thinking at all clearly,
but he liked the feeling of the sun on his bare cheeks.

For a while he had thought to make a gesture. When the priest approached him with the cup, he had
thought to knock it from his hands so that it clattered down the steps. In his mind he had rehearsed how
he would strike it down and then raise up his hand, so that the people could all see the symbol of the
shining sun. But when the moment came, he saw that for his benefit the sacrificial balsam in the cup had
been replaced by rum, a good, solid shot of rum, a last present from his uncle, and no doubt liberally
drugged. So instead, he grabbed the cup and raised it to his lips, and all around him the cheering was
redoubled. It was something they would all remember, how Prince Abu grabbed the cup and drained it,
instead of kneeling to accept a sip.

He wiped the sweat from his bald forehead. He was happy, even in that circle of repulsive priests. Only,
when they brought him the mask and gauntlets, for a moment he turned away. “Wait,” he said. He turned
back towards the sun and closed his eyes. So that he wasn’t even paying attention when they tied him
and locked the silver gauntlets to his wrists. They strapped the silver mask over his head.

And when he opened his eyes again, he found that he could scarcely see. The mask was padded so as
not to hurt him, and the eye slits were several inches from his eyes. He didn’t care. The world of his
sensation was closing down. But he could still feel the sunlight, and his body chafing in his clothes. And he
could still hear the chanting of the crowd, cheering for him, though doubtless for the wrong reasons. It
didn’t matter; reasons didn’t matter. But the cheering seemed to fill his heart.

They put his hands in gauntlets and led him down the steps. There a procession was waiting for him, a
double row of seminarians, young serious boys in pink and silver robes. Their hair was combed back
straight, or parted in the middle. They were carrying handbells. And interspersed among them were a
number of old flagellants that the council had raked up from some asylum. Since the procession had not
yet started, most were still squatting in their places, scratching for fleas, smelling their fingers, muttering to
themselves. Their hair and beards were long and wild, their backs ridged with scars.

At the end of the procession stood an ancient pickup truck, freshly painted black and decorated with the
symbol of the Inner Ear. It was a mark of the council’s favor that they had made such a vehicle available,
for there were very few in Charn, all relics from the previous year. This one ran on a mixture of methane
and solar power; the driver touched off the old-fashioned gunpowder ignition plate, and the engine
shuddered to life, spewing clouds of evil smoke. And as if that were the signal, the seminarians opened
their missals, and some had tambourines and tiny cymbals. The flagellants got to their feet, combing out
their scourges, and it was they who provided the first rhythm of the march, tentative at first and then
stronger as they got used to their own stroke, and the anesthetic paste that they were chewing took its
grip.

Then the boys started to sing, and even Abu was not too drunk to smile at the irony of that choir, the
eldest of whom had already been emasculated, singing such a triumphant celebration of the phallus of
Beloved Angkhdt. “It is hard as iron,” they chanted, a cheerful, hopeful song, and it filled Prince Abu’s
heart with laughter as they led him to the tailgate of the truck. There in the bed of the pickup stood a large
wicker cage, and they prodded him inside and strapped it closed.

The symbolism of this was lost on him, but the crowd understood it. Ever since they were children they
had heard the story of how Angkhdt had been carried in a cage through those same streets. Prince Abu’s
silver mask had been carved into the scowling muzzle of a dog, and he peered through eyes of yellow
agate. The prince was not aware of how he looked. But he knew the crowd was cheering, and he waved
and clapped his hands as the truck started across the open square. It turned into the first of the long
streets that led out to the municipal gallows and the burning ground.
All through the city where he was to pass, the streets were lined with people. Near the Morquar Gate,
Princess Charity was standing in another section of the crowd, among some factory workers. They were
big, rough, drunken men.

Their leader was Professor Sabian. Later he was to found the first of the labor caucuses that were to rule
the city, but at that time he was still a public obstetrician, having given up a good position in the house of
a Starbridge financier. He was very small, almost a dwarf, and by nature he was stooped and mild, with
careful manners and clean clothes. But when he spoke in public in those days, he was transformed. His
frailty and indecision vanished, and his voice, normally quiet and precise, rose to a shriek.

That afternoon he was standing at the curbside, on a platform of barrel heads. Five hundred people had
gathered to hear him, and when the funeral procession appeared at the bottom of the street, the professor
shook his fists in the air. “Citizens!” he shouted. “Don’t let this distract you. Don’t be taken in. Now is
the time to stand up strong and show that you will not be satisfied with the deaths of one or two or ten of
these, for I tell you, the time is coming soon when we will wash our streets clean with their blood.
Starbridge parasites! I tell you, not one will escape. Not one!”

Charity stood listening in an open section of the crowd. She leaned her back against a concrete wall
abutting the wide sidewalk. Her eyes kept closing by themselves. She had come on foot from Spider
Ghat, following the crowds, and now she waited with the rest, hoping to catch a glimpse of Abu’s funeral
cortege. She could not think further than that.

The day before, she’d been in bed, asleep in her palace on the thirty-seventh floor. Out of that womblike
stasis she had been expelled onto the street, and now she stood, weary in her deepest heart, her bare
feet torn and bruised, her dress covered with mud. Around her the world that she had known was sinking
fast, subsiding as the sun went down, yet still she stood, waiting to sever one last link.

“Citizens!” cried the professor. “This is just a piece of theater. Do not let yourselves be fooled. But look
around you now and feel the power of your numbers, and ask yourselves who else can stand against you
when these princes, lords, and bishops turn upon themselves!”

His voice was drowned out in the crowd. A chant came rolling up the line, people shouting in unison.
“Starbridge!” they shouted. “Starbridge! Starbridge! Starbridge! Starbridge! Starbridge!” And at that
moment, Abu Starbridge’s procession turned into the bottom of the street, and Charity could hear the
music of the tambourines. Over the heads of the assembled multitude she saw soldiers on horseback
trotting by, and then she stood erect and pushed into the crowd, pushing herself forward until she stood
in the front rank.

But by the time the prince’s truck arrived, the crowd was so excited that it had broken past the barricade
into the street. Men squatted down to pull the cobblestones out of the roadbed, and soon the air was full
of rocks and flying debris, raining on the shoulders of the flagellants, banging dents in the old truck. Prince
Abu was awakened by the sound. Tired out from adulation, he had fallen into a drunken doze, but now
he woke to the sound of stones pattering around him and the rhythmic, hostile shouting of the mob.
“Starbridge! Starbridge! Starbridge!” they shouted. Abu peered out through the slits in his mask.

But they did not get a chance to harm him. Within minutes a mounted company of soldiers had ridden
back from the head of the column, clearing the street with their nightsticks and their whips. The rebels
staggered back, but not before several of the boldest had penetrated to the truck itself. One, taller and
stronger than the rest, a glass miner from Caladon, raised his pick above his head. Tottering, off balance,
he swung it in a circle; he lifted it up high above the prince’s cage. But Charity had followed him into the
street; before he could bring it down, she reached up to grab the spike of it as it hung down behind his
back. The miner shook his weapon free, but even so the stroke went wide. It smashed down on the
tailgate of the truck, puncturing the ancient metal, and then it was torn from his hands. But for a split
instant, the truck’s forward progress was slowed, and it gave the princess time enough to leap up into the
bed. This also became part of the legend: how Prince Abu, even at the very last, still had the strength to
raise himself and offer comfort to a woman of the starving class, a laundress, an atheist who had not
discovered God until that moment. She was dressed in yellow rags, covered with mud, and her feet were
bare and bruised. But in the moment before the soldiers in the truck had pitched her out, Prince Abu
scrambled to his feet to stand beside her, gripping the bars of his cage between his silver gauntlets. And
some people reported later that he had reached out to bless her, that he had touched her on the hand,
that they had pressed their heads together, and even had exchanged some words.

It was over in a moment. The soldiers pitched her out. She fell to her knees in the rough street.

Part Three:
Thanakar

T he city of Charn stands at the base of a broad promontory, thirty miles from the sea. It rises out of a
circle of small hills, broken to the east and west by flat, rocky gorges, and the river running through. From
the Harbor Bridge the river unwinds nineteen miles to the port—in those days a long reach of abandoned
buildings and collapsing docks, where rusted cranes stood fingering the sky. Warfare with Caladon had
closed the port: The estuary and the lagoon were blocked with the wrecks of sunken ships. The water
there was shallow, too, because in that season the ocean had receded back ten miles beyond the littoral,
leaving the lagoon covered with a brackish sheet of water, out of which rose the hulks of the abandoned
warships, their gundecks canted over in the sand.
By the middle of October in the eighth phase of spring, the war had reached a cautious stage. Argon
Starbridge, King of Caladon, had pulled his army back across the border. A strong commander would
have marched on Charn, to take advantage of the change in government. But Argon Starbridge had
recently been beaten in a bloody fight, his army broken by the bishop’s on the Serpentine Ridge. And he
was by nature a cautious ruler. Ancient and immensely fat, he sat immobile on his throne in Caladon, a
hundred miles from the border, two hundred miles from the gates of Charn. He had been king for longer
than old men could recollect, for his father and his grandfather had been the same as he—the same name,
the same habits, the same bulk.

That season the seat of power in Caladon was the cathedral, a maze of windowless low buildings on
Kodasch Promenade. There King Argon sat upon his throne, accessible to any of his subjects with the
strength to penetrate that labyrinth of shrines. Even the most urgent couriers had to allow a full day, from
the time they passed under the cathedral’s low, unguarded portal, to the time they stood at last in the
round chamber of the sanctuary. There the rituals of statecraft moved unaltered, whatever the message,
whatever the hour, whatever the day—the gold mosaic of the walls glinting in the candlelight, the acolytes
dancing to the music of the flute and tambourine. And in the middle Argon Starbridge sat on his pierced
and padded throne, surrounded by a circle of soldiers and ministers. In perfect rhythm to the music, they
would pass him documents to sign or bend to whisper in his ears. Every hour they would help him change
his clothes; it was the only way of judging time in that place, to see what he was wearing. As the day
wore on, golden robes would give way gradually to scarlet ones. At nighttime he was clothed in regal
black, changing to gray and pink as morning came.

And every hour or so his courtiers would help him to his feet, and he would walk down the steps of the
dais to the altar. There he would make the round of sacred objects. He would raise each one according
to the ancient custom, and his hands would describe patterns in the air. His hands were long and
eloquent. They were not the hands of a fat man.

At other times he sat immobile on his throne. Or rather, he gave the impression of immobility. But the
impression was a false one: From time to time he would take a book from one of his courtiers and study
it for minutes on end. He would rearrange the rings upon his fingers. And although rumor claimed he
never slept and never ate, a careful watcher, waiting for an audience among the banks of pews, would
soon perceive the truth: The king was mortal. Occasionally his masked head would fall forward on his
breast for minutes at a time, and he would be heard to snore. At other times, his seneschal would pass
him little golden plates of candies and thimble cups of vegetable stimulants.
                                                       ***

In summer, Caladon City had risen out of endless fields of flowers, two days’ journey from the nearest
imperfection in the plain. Tulips, hyacinth, and sun trumpets had grown in hundred-acre paddocks,
separated from each other by narrow, straight canals. The trunk road had passed over dozens of small
bridges; travelers coming down out of the hills had found their sinuses assaulted by a mist of fragrances,
so that houses and villages had seemed to rise out of a fog.
In summer, Caladon had been a wealthy place, famous for its merchants and its women. The city
ramparts had been covered up with earth; there had been gardens and fountains and low bungalows. But
by the eighth phase of spring, 00016, endless weathering had stripped away the soil, down to its
foundations of soda ash and lime. That spring a flat, white, caustic plain stretched to the horizon in all
directions, and the city was surrounded by walls forty feet high, built of limestone blocks, discovered
course by course all season by the searching wind. The citizens were glad of the protection. In the streets
they wrapped scarves around their faces; women and children shivered in their houses and rarely
ventured out.

By midspring the rains had come, and turned the soda plains to mud. In some places the roads were
washed away. Farther up into the country they were pitted and ridged, with gullies that could break a
wheel. And in the high hills near the border there were mudslides, and the roads were full of carts and
beasts of burden and soldiers shouting and cursing at the rain.

In October of the eighth phase of spring, there was new activity on these roads. Argon Starbridge had
garrisoned a series of hill forts along a ridge of mountains to the sea. In the village beneath each one there
was a customs post—a stone building surrounded by hotels. The border wound over the hills between
these posts. In those days it was marked by a fence of luminous barbed wire, twice as tall as a man.
Even in daylight it seemed to glow, but at nighttime travelers from far away could see it burning over the
hills, in places red, in places livid green. Closer to hand, they saw the fire resolve into its separate strands,
and then it seemed a barrier of nervous handwriting, a scrawl of giant, illegible letters across the
landscape, lighting up the sky, marching to the sea.

Thanakar Starbridge saw it from far away, sitting in the boat he had taken from the wreck of Charn. It
came down from the hills and made a barrier along the beach, and then it came out towards them on
poles progressively longer, though the water there was shallow, close to land. Farther out, it was
supported by pontoons, continuing on past them, out of sight across the glass-flat sea.

Thanakar turned the boat and came to shore, following the lights. There was a place where the wire had
come unstuck from its pole and sagged down almost to the water. He could have crossed it there, and in
the weeks that followed, he would look back to that moment in frustration, wondering if everyone along
this border was given just one single chance to cross, and that was his, and he had missed it. But that first
night, as he rested on the oars, he was not anticipating trouble. That first night he was happy and relieved
that he had led them all to safety, down the river from the burning city.
He had been with the army when the news of his indictment came. He had been indicted for adultery, and
Chrism Demiurge had sent the purge to take him in. But he had managed to evade them and return to
Charn, arriving on October 46th. There he had found news of Charity’s death, the bishop’s
condemnation, and the streets had been full of revolution. So he had left the city the next day, taking his
family’s boat down through the catacombs and down the river.

And he had taken flotsam from the city’s wreck: Mrs. Cassimer, his family’s housekeeper; and Jenny
Pentecost, an orphan who had been his patient. Refugees, they had slept along the riverbank under the
constant rain and skulked for food around the outskirts of the towns. In the estuary Thanakar had fished
for hours in the dark with a small, pale flashlight tied to a piece of twine, trying to tempt an old sea
cucumber from its hole. At night they had camped on the lagoon among the broken battleships, and they
could smell the sea and hear the cry of the birds.

But in time they had passed under the reach of the lido, and out onto the cold, flat sea. For a week they
had motored up the coast until the engine gave out, and there was no more fuel. Then Thanakar had
rowed until his delicate white hands were split and blistered, while Mrs. Cassimer boiled seaweed on the
primus, and Jenny Pentecost stared straight ahead over the bow.

That had been the first sign of her illness. An ordinary child, bred in the slums of Charn as she had been,
would have looked around herself with eyes full of wonder. And maybe she would have been frightened,
and maybe she would have cried about the weather and complained about the food—still, anything was
better than just staring up ahead. Thanakar felt like shaking her, turning her by her frail shoulders, forcing
her to notice when a small sea dragon flopped over the bow, forcing her to notice when the border came
in sight, gleaming through the darkness like a wall of fire.

He himself was too excited to speak. That first night he saw it, the wall of burning letters spelled out
safety to him, and freedom, and success against all odds. Mrs. Cassimer was sleeping in the bilge; he
pulled the boat in towards land and beached it on the shore, and made camp. In the morning he washed
his face in the last of the fresh water, and limped up through the sand dunes to the village.

It was a poor, muddy place, thatched one-story houses built out of driftwood and flat stones. But there
was one imposing structure, a new stone customs house rising from the central square, and near its steps
a new stone statue of King Argon Starbridge, holding in his arms his infant son.

Behind the king, facing the other way, stood one of his ministers, and between his marble hands he
hoisted up a strand of glowing wire, part of the wire fence that straggled in across the square and cut the
town in two. This was the border midway between Caladon and Charn, decreed by Angkhdt Himself,
drawn by Angkhdt Himself across the map of the world. Throughout the chaos of the endless war it had
never shifted, though in fact it had no practical significance. In the last phase of the fighting, Argon
Starbridge’s armies had driven past it almost to the walls of Charn, and though they had been defeated
there and been pushed back, still the intervening countryside had not been recaptured. The town on both
sides of the border was the same. The people spoke the same language, lived the same lives, and passed
freely through the gate at one end of the square.

The gate was a hole in the wire fence, perhaps twelve feet wide, and no guard seemed to be on duty
there. Thanakar limped towards it across the square, along the façade of the customs house. He limped
through a group of children playing marbles, dirty kids with runny noses and ripped undershirts. And he
had gotten past them, and past some women carrying pots, and past a child playing with his hoop, and
almost to the gate itself, when he was stopped. A little boy ran after him, tugging at his sleeve. At first
Thanakar thought he was a beggar, and he fumbled with the change in his pocket and tried to pull his
hand away. But the boy held on tight and dragged him towards the steps of the stone building. “Coming,
sir,” he cried. “Please, coming, sir,” he cried, his voice a high singsong, and he was pulling with all his
strength on Thanakar’s cuff. And there was something in his face, too, some poignancy, some reserve of
childish power, that sapped Thanakar’s will. He allowed himself to be pulled up the stone steps, under
the lintel and the rough plaster frieze along the pediment: vultures feasting on St. Morquar’s brain.

That should have warned him, that and a dozen other things. Inside the building, clerks scurried down the
narrow passageways, and patient janitors pushed carts of wastepaper. But still Thanakar didn’t pay
attention; he allowed himself to be led into the deep recesses of the building. And it wasn’t until he stood
inside the door of the main waiting room with the child still hanging onto his arm, watching the first of the
emaciated, veiled figures stalk towards him over the tiles, that he cried out and tried to turn away. By
then it was too late. The door had closed behind him.

With a curse, Thanakar flung the boy aside and started back, but the door was locked. On each side a
Caladonian soldier stood unblinking, and though their backs were rigid and their faces stiff, still it seemed
to Thanakar that they were mocking him. Flight and resistance seemed suddenly undignified, so with a
gesture of disgust he turned around and allowed the veiled figure to lead him into the room, past rows of
chairs, mostly vacant, though old men watched him anxiously from some of them. He allowed himself to
be led down an aisle between the seats, into an inner chamber made of movable partitions.

There, behind an old desk piled with papers, sat another of the veiled creatures. It was swaddled in
black gauze, and the thin angularity of its body made it look inhuman, more like an insect than a man. Its
face was covered with black cloth, and through it Thanakar could see its eyes and the hint of a long face.

Thanakar put his fingers to his cheek and made the gestures of contempt. He had heard about these
creatures. In Charn they had been exterminated one full year before, in Thanakar’s great-grandfather’s
time. Somewhere among the endless revolutions of that spring an angry crowd had set fire to the prison
where they lay—there had not been many of them, even in those golden days of paperwork. But
obviously some had survived in Caladon, and Argon Starbridge had found work for them. Unravelers,
they had been called, part of an ancient and hereditary cult of civil servants, descendants of Lord Laban
Coromex, who had been (or so he claimed) the Prophet’s catamite.

In Charn they had been arrested and imprisoned with other ritual practitioners of homosexuality, for the
revolutionary council had been strict that spring. It was unclear how they reproduced. Popular songs of
the period described them hatching like insects from the mold of books—it was ridiculous, thought
Thanakar. Doubtless somewhere there existed a race of women as angular and secretive as they. The
one in front of him could easily have been a woman. Thanakar experimented with the thought and then
decided it was so, just as the creature opened her mouth. Later he was to have trouble telling them apart.
Later he would look back on this one with a kind of wistfulness, for her voice, at least, was sweet and
sympathetic.

She sat back in her chair and looked at him, while with one finger she hit the space bar of an old
typewriter on her desk. It had no paper in it.

“Please sit,” she said, and then she turned her head and looked past him towards a corner of the wall. In
her wheeled armchair, her whole attitude was one of listless melancholy, her drooping neck and shoulder,
the line of her arm. “Please sit,” she said again.

“I don’t expect it’s necessary,” Thanakar replied. “I don’t expect to be here long.”

The absurdity of this statement didn’t seem to strike her. She heaved a long, melancholy sigh and rapped
idly on the space bar of her typewriter. “No,” she said. “Not long.”

She stared past him at the wall. And then, after a good minute had gone by, she looked briefly at his face.
She picked up a piece of paper from the litter on her desk and then cast it aside. “How old are you?” she
asked.

The question took Thanakar by surprise. But it seemed as good a place as any to begin. “I was born on
the twenty-second of December, in the eighteenth phase of winter,” he said.

“So. Ten thousand days.” She reached her hand out towards her desktop calculator and then let it drop.
“Almost . . . ten thousand,” she repeated. “Where were you born?”

“Wanhope Hospital. In Charn.”

“In Charn,” she said, as if she heard the city’s name for the first time. “And . . . who are you?” she asked.

Thanakar rubbed his nose. “I am called Thanakar Starbridge,” he answered, feeling that strange mix of
arrogance and shame that afflicted him whenever he had to name himself. It was arrogance for what he
was, shame for what his family had made out of the world.

“Starbridge,” said the woman softly, and Thanakar could see her frown under the veil, as if the word
brought up images and associations she was striving to recall. “King,” she said. “Argon Starbridge is our
king. Are you a relative of his?”

“Not a close one.”

“Then . . . who are you?”

“I am a surgeon,” replied Thanakar uneasily. “I was a surgeon in the army of the late bishop of Charn.”

“The late bishop—is she dead?”

“She is dead.”

The woman sighed. “So many dead. Six thousand . . . almost seven thousand of our soldiers. Almost
exactly seven thousand, in our last battle with the bishop’s army, on the Serpentine Ridge. Were you
there?”

“I was there,” he said. “I was a doctor.”

“And now you wish to enter Caladon. Do you have some proof of your identity?”

Thanakar put out his hand. He had washed that morning, so that the lines were bright and clear, the silver
dog’s head and the yellow briar, the emblems of his father’s family. He turned his palm a little, to show
the golden key tattooed under his thumb, the key that opened all doors.

With her little finger the unraveler hit the space bar of her typewriter. “Starbridge,” she said softly. “Are
you carrying a passport?”

Thanakar opened up his shirt, and from a secret pocket sewn into the seam he took out his passport and
his letter of safe conduct, and laid them on the desk.

The letter of safe conduct was an impressive document, issued to Thanakar’s great-grandfather and
hereditary in his family, signed by the emperor himself. The unraveler perused it wearily. On her desk
stood an array of stamps and inkpads; she reached her finger out to touch one, and then looked up at
him again. “Are you traveling alone?”

“No. My housekeeper and adopted daughter are accompanying me.”
“And . . . where are their passports?”

“They don’t need passports. The letter states that clearly: ‘Thanakar Starbridge, his family, and whatever
property he wishes . . .’ ”

The unraveler stared at him a moment and then turned away. “The document refers to relatives by blood,
not by adoption. And your housekeeper, is she also a member of your family?”

“Of course not. She belongs to me. She was my mother’s servant.”

“Nevertheless. Perhaps in Charn a human being is considered property. Not here.”

There was a long silence. Thanakar broke it by pulling a chair from the wall behind him and sitting down,
for his leg was hurting him.

The unraveler leaned towards him. “So,” she said. “You understand what I am saying. You, I am
powerless to prevent. These others, well. Perhaps I am not powerless.”

“What do you suggest?” asked Thanakar.

“You must return to Charn. I will provide you with a list of documents you need. Then we will see.”

“I can’t go back. How can I go back? I escaped from the city with my life and nothing else.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice was soft and sympathetic.

Thanakar possessed a sapphire ring. He twisted it uneasily on his finger, but the unraveler guessed his
thoughts. “Please don’t try to bribe me,” she said. “I cannot be bribed.”

He let his hands drop to his lap. The unraveler leaned back in her chair. “Come back tomorrow
morning,” she suggested. “Please don’t give up hope—there’s always hope.”
                                                    ***

Thanakar went back the next morning and again each day that week. He moved Jenny and Mrs.
Cassimer into a hotel near the square. But on the morning of October 78th he went for a walk outside of
town, to a small half-ruined chapel out of sight of the sea, bombed months before by the Brothers of
Unrest. He had heard there was a priest there, like himself a refugee from Charn, and one morning he
came out of the rain and stood in the shadow at the back of the church, leaning on an old umbrella,
waiting for the priest to finish morning mass.
A dozen men and women clustered near the altar rail, where the roof was solid. They were dressed in the
colors of the Caladonian working class, muted grays and browns. But it was not their poverty that made
Thanakar feel self-conscious. He was used to that. No, it was their devotion, the way they bowed their
heads and pressed their knuckles to their foreheads, the tears in their eyes as they repeated the words of
the general confession, the humility with which they touched the sacred image of Immortal Angkhdt. It
made Thanakar unhappy. The rite was unfamiliar, but he recognized parts of it, enough to smell the
sickness that had spread from Charn all over that northern country. Here, too, men worshiped their
oppressors. He had hoped it would be different.

He looked up at the crack in the roof above his head, the white sky showing and the sugar dripping
through. Then he turned back towards the priest. He would have felt better, he decided, if he could have
found it in his heart to hate the man. But as always, circumstances had combined to frustrate him. There
was nothing contemptible in that gentle face. There was nothing contemptible in the way the old man
moved among his people, bending down to touch them and to whisper words of consolation in their ears.
He moved down the line of kneeling figures, holding the sacred image out for them to kiss, the lingam of
Beloved Angkhdt, giver of life. Then he opened his cassock, and into each pair of outstretched hands he
thrust a small package of rice flour, though he himself looked as though he could have used a meal,
thought Thanakar.

The priest made the sign of absolution, and the parishioners started to disperse. Thanakar waited until he
was alone, standing by the altar, wiping out the vessels with a greasy rag. But he turned his head when he
heard the patter of the doctor’s limp and the click of the steel spike of his umbrella coming towards him
over the stone floor. For a moment he looked frightened. But then Thanakar took his hat off and stepped
out from the shadow of the arch into a circle of candlelight. He saw relief wash into the old man’s face,
together with that humble look that never failed to irritate him, the more so when it seemed sincere. He
raised his hand.

“My lord,” said the priest. He bowed and made the gestures of respect.

Thanakar stared at him sourly. All his life he had hated priests, hated their arrogance and power. This one
seemed different, his ragged clothes, his tired face. His humility seemed genuine. The first of a new breed,
thought Thanakar.

“You are from Charn,” he said. “I had heard you were from Charn.”

Again the old priest bowed. “God was kind to me,” he said. “I was smuggled out in an empty wine cask.
Of my convocation, I alone am not a martyr.”

“You sound sorry.”

“I am not sorry. Life is sweet. Come,” he said. “We will be safer in the open air. I am followed
everywhere I go.”

He led the way down the aisle and out onto the porch, walking quickly and then waiting for the doctor to
catch up. The front end of the chapel had collapsed, but the porch was still intact. The priest waited
there.

Outside it was raining, a slow, scummy drizzle. The chapel stood in a countryside of fields, divided from
each other by stone walls, and Thanakar was encouraged to see some greenness there, and some signs
of agriculture. It was greener country than around Charn. The soil was not so pitiful, and even the rock
gorges were not barren, as they were back towards the city. A green fungus grew over the rock, and
Thanakar knew that it was edible, for he had seen children in the evening scraping it from the stones, and
women boiling it in huge kettles.

This close to the sea the land was kinder. The people here ate seaweed and set traps for sea vegetables,
the first of the season. Nevertheless, wherever Thanakar went, he was surrounded by a swarm of
beggars. Several had followed him up from the town, and they stood in the shelter of a gray stone wall as
Thanakar and the priest looked out from the porch.

“Do you have anything to give them?” asked the priest.

“I had brought something for you.”

“Let us eat it here, and we will share it.”

Thanakar had brought a kind of pie, cheese baked in a thick pastry and wrapped in silver foil. He undid
the upper buttons of his overcoat and fished it out from an inside pocket. It made a messy meal, and he
and the priest sat on the steps to eat it. With his pocketknife the old man cut aside a small portion for
themselves, and he sliced the remainder into strips and placed it on the lowest step. They settled down to
wait, and in a little while the beggars came close, timidly at first, making exaggerated signs of
self-abasement. One of them, finally, a gap-toothed, red-haired man, squatted down below them and
stretched out his hand, once, twice, until the priest nodded his head. And then the beggar grabbed the
food and hurried off with it and carried it to the shelter of a pile of rocks not far away, where the rest
clustered around him.

“They distrust you,” remarked Thanakar.

“They have been shamefully abused,” replied the priest. “Their own parish chaplain has run away.
Between here and the city, most have fled. They have heard terrible rumors, most of which are true. I
cannot blame them.”

“And you?”

The old priest shrugged. “I do what I can,” he said. “Tomorrow I move on.”

“Where to?”

“Caladon City, eventually. I am carrying the daily execution lists from Charn, until one week ago, when I
escaped. My late master thought that they might interest the king.”

“Can I see them?”

The priest turned away and stared out over the green fields. “I have no wish to cause you pain,” he said.
“They contain the names of many relatives of yours.”

The doctor put his fingers to his head. “They are in Paradise,” he said.

The old man’s eyes were tired and old and rimmed with yellow. “That’s just it,” he said. “We can’t be
sure of that. Not anymore.” He swallowed, and then went on: “The new tribunal contains a defrocked
priest. I am ashamed to say it. January First, he calls himself—he has developed a vaccine. It reacts with
what is sacred in the blood. When my late master was condemned, this man visited him in his cell. He
injected him with this vaccine—my late master was condemned to hell, and so were all the members of
the bishop’s council, those they found alive. Down to the ninth planet, do you know what that’s like? I
have seen photographs. The surface pressure is enough to flatten steel.”

“January First?”

“Raksha Starbridge, his name was. He changed his name to January First. There is a motion before the
new assembly to reform the calendar. The new majority speaker changed his name.” The old man shook
his head. “Tell me, is it possible? The desanctification vaccine—God help me, the thought of it has hurt
my faith. You asked me if I were eager to die, to accept martyrdom like so many others. I tell you, I am
afraid.”

Thanakar shifted on the stone step and stretched out his crippled leg. “I don’t believe it’s possible,” he
said. “Tell me,” he continued. “Tell me what has happened. Who is the leader of this revolution?”

“Raksha Starbridge!” muttered the old priest, making the sign of the unclean. “Traitor! No, he is not the
only one.” He turned towards Thanakar, a doubtful expression on his face. “I can’t believe that this is
news to you.”

The doctor shrugged. “I left the city thirty days ago, after the bishop’s execution. I have heard many
rumors, but no news.”
“You are here alone?”

“With my adopted daughter. She is sick.”

The chapel stood on the outskirts of the town. From where Thanakar sat, he could see the slate roofs of
the houses and the end of the main street, where it stumbled out into the fields. A procession of a dozen
men was coming along the muddy track, partly hidden by the stone walls and the hedgerows. They were
pushing wheelbarrows and carrying baskets full of seaweed up to the drying shed at the end of town. It
was a wooden building set on stilts above the soaking ground, wall-less, open to the air, the roof
supported by posts at the four corners. Some women were already there, raking out the morning catch
with long wooden rakes. And the village shaman was there also, in a white, featureless paper mask and a
loose white shirt with flapping sleeves. He was moving in a circle around the perimeter of the floor,
ringing a wooden bell.

This was a ritual practiced in the seacoast towns. The shaman was frightening away ghosts, scaring away
the ghosts of anyone who had ever died of hunger in that town. The people feared their starving
ancestors, afraid that their spirits might gather like birds to feed upon the crop, and pluck away the ghost
of nourishment hidden in the heart of their poor food, and leave only the worthless husk.

Thanakar settled back to watch. At his side, the priest settled back against the stone pillar of the porch
and cleaned the blade of his pocketknife against the skirt of his habit. “After the bishop died,” he said,
“the city fell apart. It was as if the center of our life was gone. The simplest tricks no longer worked.
There was no power anywhere. The army and the purge split into factions. Chrism Demiurge and his
council were besieged in the temple. When the rebels finally broke in, they found that most of them were
gone, fled to Paradise. Some were arrested with the hypodermics still in their hands—that was in the
middle of the month, October 50th, old style. Chrism Demiurge had disappeared. It was thought he
knew some secret bolt hole below ground. He was never found.”

In the drying shed the shaman danced and rang his bell. Thanakar sat watching him, and with the nail of
his little finger he picked some cheese out from between his teeth.

“Now there is no magic left in Charn,” the priest went on. “All those who practiced it are dead. On the
fifty-second of October, Raksha Starbridge had the bodies of the council dragged to Durbar Square. He
built a huge bonfire out of pews and statues from the temple. That was the beginning of the cult of
Desecration. He damned them all to hell. Tell me—is that possible?”

Thanakar shrugged. “It is not possible,” he said. “It’s just more fakery. New lies to replace the old.”

“He had the great bronze statue of Immortal Angkhdt carried down from the temple. The workmen
dragged it on wagons through the streets and then smashed it into pieces with their sledgehammers. That
was the start of it. By the time I left, there was not one shrine still intact in all of Charn. The sanctuary of
Saint Morquar had been turned into a barracks for the Desecration League. The Rebel Angels. They
were copulating on the altar. They brought wagonloads of excrement into the shrine and smeared the
faces of the statues.”

In spite of himself Thanakar smiled. “And whose idea was that?” he asked.

The old priest shuddered. “I don’t know. Raksha Starbridge is a monster, but he is not the worst. There
are others—they had been waiting for their moment, and with the bishop gone and the council dead and
the army broken into pieces, well, it seems there was a whole rebel network that had flourished
underground. It all happened so fast—a man named Earnest Darkheart, a black man, a foreigner. He
held rallies every night in Durbar Square. He divided the city into wards, and now each street is electing
officers into a new assembly. They meet daily in the old bathhouse behind Wanhope Prison. They are
drafting a new constitution. But until it is finished, they have appointed an executive tribunal, a committee
of four men. Raksha Starbridge, he’s one. And the commander of the army, Colonel Aspe. And that
black man, Earnest Darkheart.”

“And the fourth?”

“That’s Professor Sabian. A dwarf.”

In the drying shed the shaman had taken colored ribbons and pulled them tight around the wooden posts
at the corners of the building, making a multicolored barrier. Inside, men and women threshed the piles of
seaweed with long flails, threshing out the eggs of various sea creatures. Though broken by the flails,
these would be returned to the sea. The villagers were the strictest of the seven kinds of vegetarians.

The old priest was still talking. He chafed the edge of his pocketknife along his palm. “Listen,” he said.
“Listen to me. Who could have believed this a month ago? In those first days after the temple’s fall
Professor Sabian had all the Starbridges arrested, all the ones that he could find. He put a hundred of
them to work along the levee filling sandbags. But Fairfax Starbridge wouldn’t do it. He let himself be
whipped to death, and after that the rest refused. They threw their shovels down into the water. It was
the excuse that Raksha Starbridge needed. Since then, every day he has gained power. January First, he
calls himself, and that’s the day he means. October sixty-sixth, old style. Twelve days ago—the day he
pushed his so-called bill of attainder through the assembly. Now the Desecration League is hunting
Starbridges throughout the city. They are given public trials, but not one has been acquitted. The men are
crucified in Durbar Square, the women buried alive. Raksha Starbridge is the judge.”

Above their heads the sky had shown signs of clearing, but now it started to rain again, a sudden
downpour, the drops exploding like firecrackers where they hit the stones. Sugar dripped down from the
eaves.

Thanakar put his fingers to his head. Charn seemed far away. And his feelings, too, seemed far away
from him—old bitterness, old anger, old regret. Yet he felt sick at heart: “It’s strange,” he said. “This man
Raksha Starbridge. It’s strange that a man could be so bitter against his own family. Who was his
father?”

The priest shrugged. “He panders to the passions of the mob. His ferocity is all a sham, I feel sure.”

Thanakar turned his head away to listen to the rain. “It’s a terrible thing,” he said. “Still, you are wrong.
Any sane man could have seen it coming months ago. It’s the price we are paying for our arrogance.”

The priest stared straight ahead. “It was our right,” he said. “It was the way God made us. We could not
have acted otherwise.”

“Come now,” said Thanakar. “Surely now we can let go of this charade, after what has happened.
Paradise above us and all that. You’re an honest man; be honest with yourself. Tell me it was more than
just a pack of lies, of magic tricks and sleight of hand, to keep ourselves in power. Tell me Chrism
Demiurge was a religious man.”

The old priest stared straight in front of him into the rain. When he spoke again, it was in a softer, sadder
voice. “My lord,” he said, “I understand what you are saying. Human beings pollute everything they
touch. Religion is no different. My lord, it is not difficult to make us look like hypocrites. And I know
what you are saying—in the past, so much of what we did was empty ceremony. Illusion mixed with
politics—I know. But it is different now. In this past month I have been given a great gift. I have been
given certain knowledge of the truth. You must know what I mean.”
Thanakar smiled. “I suppose you are referring to the martyrdom of my cousin, Abu Starbridge.”

The old priest stared at him. “My lord,” he stammered. “I had no idea.” Again, reflexively, he made the
gestures of respect, but then he broke off in the middle. “Then you must know what I mean.”

“I think I do,” Thanakar began, but the old man interrupted him. He leaned forward, speaking low and
urgently, and his hand hovered above the doctor’s knee. “The fire burned for two and a half hours. But in
the evening, when they cut him down, there was not a mark on him. Listen to this—” The priest lowered
his voice still further and tapped the doctor’s leg. “He was seen drinking in a tavern that same evening,
the evening that he died.”

“Did you see him?”

“No. But hundreds did. There were a hundred witnesses.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Thanakar. “You didn’t know him as I did. He was an atheist.”

“But don’t you see, that is always the way. He was innocent until his death, ignorant even of his own
holiness. No, do not cheat yourself. You must believe it. Listen—that’s not all.”

The priest clasped his hands in front of him in an attitude of prayer. He bowed his head, and his voice
was barely louder than a whisper. Yet even so, Thanakar could understand him perfectly, because his
articulation was so precise and clear, as if he were reciting from memory. And as he spoke, his wrinkled
face took on a new softness, a new color. His yellow-rimmed old eyes shone brightly. “This I saw,” he
said. “This I saw with my own eyes. I was in the temple when they burned Cosima Starbridge, Cosro
Starbridge’s daughter, thirty-second bishop of Charn. There must have been three hundred of us around
the scaffold, though most by now have followed her to Paradise. Still, there are some who can bear
witness, as I do. Listen—when the fire was laid on, there was silence for the space of half a minute. Then
we looked up through the smoke and saw a great tree growing up through the logs of the scaffold,
breaking them apart. There where we had seen her, dressed in white, tied to the stake, the smoke just
starting to coil around her, there was the trunk of an enormous tree. And as we watched, it spread its
limbs over the courtyard and covered the sky with a canopy of leaves, as if it were midsummer. And all
around I heard a singing noise, deafening my ears—it split my skull. I bowed my head and put my hands
over my ears, but still I could hear it, and when I raised my eyes, I saw a red bird fly up from the top
branches and fly up straight into the night. Most had hid their faces, deafened by that noise, but I saw it
with my own eyes, my bishop’s soul ascend to Paradise, and it was as if a voice had cried out in my
heart. Because it was true, after all, you see. After all the lies and violence, it was still true. All night I
watched that tree burning, and in the morning it was like a skeleton against the sky.”

The rain had ended as suddenly as it had begun, leaving behind it the same soft drizzle out of the low sky.
The sugar hung in strings from the stone eaves of the porch, unwinding in the gentle air.

Thanakar shifted his seat. “And if it were just more magic?” he asked quietly.

Furious, the old man turned on him. “It was no magic,” he hissed. “I have spent my whole life behind the
altar. Do you think I still can’t tell the truth from a lie?” He looked away, silent for a minute, and then he
let some softness come back into his voice. “You think that since so much of it was rotten, then
everything was rotten. But you are cheating yourself.”

Below them the beggars had come back. During the rainstorm they had kept within the shelter of the
wall. But now they crept in close, three women and a man. Having finished their food and licked their
fingers clean, they wanted more. They squatted in the mud below the lowest step, raising their open
palms above their heads. The old priest looked at them. “Besides,” he said. “It would be cowardice,
now, to give it up. When I was in Charn, God kept me fed when all around me men were starving. Now
they break His image into pieces in the streets, and it is a crime to speak His name. Yet even so I will
continue, spreading the news that I have seen. It would be cowardly, now, to turn my back on Him.”
                                                    ***

“Tell me,” said the doctor after a pause. “I heard a rumor, and I don’t know whether to believe it. Prince
Abu Starbridge had a sister.” He stopped, unable to continue.
“She took poison,” said the priest. “The night before her brother’s execution. She meant to cheat the
jailer, is that what you had heard? She was convicted of adultery, posthumously, the next day. It was
probably the council’s last official act.”

“That’s what I had heard,” said Thanakar.

“It was a terrible thing,” continued the old man. “Her husband was a hero. He was a soldier, dead upon
the Serpentine Ridge. All the while, that woman had been—”

“And the lover?” interrupted Thanakar.

“He was not named in the conviction. But the rumor was, he was a member of her family. Also an army
officer. He was not named—he must have escaped in the confusion. Is that what you had heard?”

“That’s what I had heard.”

This was the part of the conversation that Thanakar took with him when he left. He carried it down the
hill under his umbrella, like a box in his hand. And the jewel in the box, the memory he uncovered when
he broke apart the words in his mind, was an image of the princess, Charity Starbridge. It was a memory
he had kept a long time, in divers secret places, an image of her asleep, curled up away from him, with
her naked foot making a small kicking motion at the end of the bed. In his mind she turned over onto her
back.

Once, that single memory had been enough to keep him happy, when he was apart from her. Then there
had been a hope of future images that he could piece together with the first. But now his memory of her
had acquired a different beauty; it was too beautiful to bear. It was too heavy for his strength. Limping
back down the hill into the town, he hid it back inside himself. I will not take it out again, he thought.

Yet he was sick at heart. Abu had been his only friend, and he was dead. Charity had been less than that,
and more. This is not the season for romantic friendships, thought Thanakar. This is not the weather for a
sentimental friendship. He had barely known her.

Nevertheless, once it had been enough to make him happy, just to think that some day he might know
her well.

At the bottom of the hill the road divided. He took the way back into town, along a row of houses. He
had the impression that people were watching him from the upstairs windows, and he bowed his head.
And at a turning in the road, he passed a covered carriage parked before the gate of some new
guesthouse.

He recognized the escutcheon painted on the carriage door. Day by day the town was filling up with
refugees, priests and Starbridges from Charn, running from the revolution. Late enemies of Argon
Starbridge, now they were imposing on his mercy, hoping to cross the border into safety.

Thanakar lowered his umbrella to hide his face. He had no wish to meet the owner of the carriage. Some
members of his family had even registered in his hotel, but he had no wish to see them. Always a misfit
for the sake of his politics and his crippled leg, now he was isolated for new reasons. These refugees
were seeking safety from the revolution and the new laws of attainder. Though Thanakar, if he had stayed
in Charn until the end, would have been persecuted as harshly as any for his name and his tattoos, still he
had not stayed. He had fled, not from the revolution but from Chrism Demiurge.

Thanakar thought that this difference was enough to place him, in the minds of other Starbridges, with the
forces of rebellion. And even though he might not give a damn what they might think, still he had no wish
to draw attention to himself. The old priest had been too senile to guess the name of Princess Charity’s
lover, but Thanakar assumed that others would have no trouble guessing. He had no wish to hear himself
blamed for her death; so, at the entrance to his hotel near the square, he pulled his hat down over his
ears.

He need not have bothered. The instant he crossed the threshold into the common room, he heard his
name shouted from the corner by a relative of his, a second cousin on his mother’s side, a boy named
Oxus Starbridge. Thanakar had known him in the army.

“Cousin!” he shouted. “Cousin Thanakar!” He was very young, with a thin, nervous face and bad skin.
“Thanakar!” he shouted. He came hurrying from across the room to shake the doctor’s hand. He looked
pale and exhausted, as if he hadn’t slept in far too long. A sad new beard was trying feebly to hide his
features, and he picked at it nervously and smelled his fingers as he talked. He was wearing the remnants
of his army uniform; his shirt was ragged and his pants were torn.

A row of greasy couches ran along one wall. The boy collapsed onto one and drew the doctor down
beside him. Elsewhere around the room, people stopped what they were doing to stare at them. They
included a group of Starbridge officers playing cards at a round table, two married women with veiled
faces, and an old bearded gentleman wiping his hands on a black-and-white-striped handkerchief.

“Thank God you’ve come,” said the boy. “I don’t know anyone here. Yours is the first familiar face I’ve
seen.”

Thanakar put his hand out to touch the boy’s shoulder. “I’m glad to see you,” he said gently. “I’m glad to
see that you’ve escaped.”

The boy made a gesture with his arm, as if dismissing recollections too painful to mention. “I swam the
river,” he said. “My God, I’ve lived for weeks on garbage and stale bread. And now, I can’t believe it. I
have an uncle in Caladon City, only they won’t let me across. They won’t let me go. I can’t believe it. I
told them who I was.” He held out his hand so that Thanakar could see the silver bluebird tattooed on his
palm. Then he stared at it himself. “They didn’t seem to care.”

Thanakar smiled. “Ignorant swine,” he said.

“It’s an outrage,” continued the boy. “When I get across, I’ll have them all locked up. Filthy bureaucrats!
My uncle knows the king.”

“The king is paying them to keep us here. They take the place of soldiers.”

“I don’t care. Who are they, to go against my will? My father was Baroda Starbridge. By God, I’ll have
them flogged.”

Suppressing a gesture of impatience, Thanakar made as if to stand, but the boy was clinging to his coat
sleeve. And there was something in his face that made the doctor pause, some underlying seriousness.
His voice was high-pitched and precarious, as if he understood his own futility but was searching for a
way of hiding it from others. Surely that was forgivable in one so young, thought Thanakar. And there
was something else: The boy was close to tears. “They broke into my house,” he said. “The Desecration
League. I got a message from my sister to come back, and I left my regiment and rode all night. On the
morning of the fifty-eighth, I reached the gates of Charn just after dawn, and it took me until one o’clock
to go the last few miles, there were so many people in the streets. They had torched that whole block of
houses, from Cosro’s Barbican almost to the river. My own house was gutted—all the furniture was
thrown out into the street. And they had written their obscenities on every wall, and everywhere the mark
of the red hand—my mother lived there. And my little sister. They were gone.”

With great delicacy and care, the boy pushed a strand of hair back from his face and curled it behind his
ear. “I ran away,” he said. “I swam the river, and I ran away.”

He seemed to expect no response to this, so Thanakar said nothing. He relaxed back onto the couch,
feeling the familiar mix of pity, irritation, and embarrassment that so often possessed him when he listened
to tales of other people’s misery. He put awkward fingers on the boy’s hand and twisted his face into a
rictus of compassion. The boy had been afraid. He was confessing cowardice, and for a Starbridge that
had always been the most desperate of all crimes. The boy knew it and he felt it; suddenly embarrassed,
he turned his face away. But he turned back after a moment, when Thanakar had risen to his feet.

“Please,” he said, and when he raised his chin, Thanakar could see the movement of his epiglottis, a
shudder in his narrow throat. “Please,” he said. “I had no money when I came away. This thief of a
hotelkeeper is charging me six dollars a night. He has given me a mattress on the floor.”

Relieved, Thanakar fished some money from his coat, two fifty-dollar bills. The boy reached out to grab
them. He took them and crushed them between his fingers. He crushed them into little balls, and as he did
so, his face took on a sudden expression of hostility.

“Let me give you a receipt,” he said. “You understand—this is a temporary loan. I’ll pay you ten percent
a month.”

Outside there was a crash of thunder, and the rain came down redoubled on the greasy windows. The
common room was darkened; light came from a small fire on the stove, where three Caladonian
merchants sat smoking hashish from long pipes. Light came from the table, where the officers played
cards around an oil lamp; they had stopped in the middle of a hand and were staring at the doctor as he
looked around. They were playing for money. Loose coins lay scattered across the table.

What is it? thought Thanakar. What is it about me? He turned and walked away, spurning the receipt that
the boy thrust at him. His boots struck an uneven rhythm on the floor as he crossed the room and pushed
through the low door into the courtyard. Outside the raindrops danced and spattered on the flagstones,
while the horses in their stalls licked up the sugar and scraped the scum from each other’s backs with the
sharp edges of their beaks, standing head to tail in the rain.

The ostlers were bringing straw. One saw him and made the gestures of respect, but Thanakar turned
aside and limped up the small covered stairwell that led to his quarters on the second floor. At the top he
rested, ducking his head, for the ceiling in the corridor was very low. He leaned his head against the
doorframe. From along the corridor there came a sound that tore his heart, the sound of a girl crying.
                                                    ***

When Charity Starbridge was a little girl, she had played on the soccer team at Starbridge Dayschools.
She had been a good runner, graceful and strong, stronger than most girls, and sometimes after school
she would practice by herself in the playground. She would run as fast as she could, back and forth
across the deserted field, the silver ball floating in front of her—she never seemed to kick it. She would
be dressed in silver spandex, her black hair wild around her face, and sometimes Thanakar and Abu, her
brother, would stand out on the balcony of the Upper School, watching her practice on the playground
below them. Thanakar’s leg had never let him run like that.
In his hotel on the frontier Thanakar thought, She’s dead. Why think of her? One night he got up from his
bed, and limped over to the window of his hotel room, and watched the streetlights shining in the rain.
They shone on the statue of Argon Starbridge in the middle of the square, shone on the façade of the
stone customs house. He watched the wire fence gleaming in the rain. By day Thanakar’s mind was a
strong citadel, but at night his thoughts rioted and raised rebellions. God curse all Starbridges; the priests
of Charn had murdered everything he loved, and yet, and yet. Those palaces had been his home. It was
not welcome news to hear of their destruction.

At night he found it hard to sleep. And in the morning—every morning for three weeks in the last part of
October—Thanakar went to the customs house. Every morning the unravelers granted him an interview.
Even in those tempestuous days, when their antechambers were packed with supplicants, they never
seemed to have anything to do. They sat in their cubicles surrounded by stacks of unread documents,
their eyes fixed upon nothing, as if contemplating some ideal vision of bureaucracy, infinitely removed
from mundane paperwork. Their desktops were crowded with the tools of their profession—silent
telephones, broken calculators, pens with no ink. Always they exuded an impression of lassitude and
deepest melancholy, their soft, slow speech punctuated by silences and dismal sighs.

This melancholy was deceptive, thought Thanakar, because at some moments, deep beneath the surface,
they seemed full of glee. They took care to end each interview with some words of optimism, some hint
that no matter how insuperable the barriers might appear, some forward progress might be possible,
given time. This was the essential part of their power, thought Thanakar later. He would meet supplicants
who, even after forty interviews, were still hopeful. Thanakar himself, against his own better judgment,
found himself seduced by an illusion of progress: After the first few visits, no further mention was made of
Mrs. Cassimer’s and Jenny’s missing passports. It was as if that hurdle had been crossed. Instead, he
pursued the unravelers in new and hopeful directions. They listed the addresses of people he might stay
with in Caladon City. They speculated on his chances of finding a job. But always there was some new
obstacle. Once Thanakar arrived to find that his file had been mislaid. Thanakar asked himself what his
file could possibly consist of, since no one, at least in his presence, had ever done so much as write down
his name. Nevertheless, that day they had had to start everything again.

Or once, after a long interview, the unraveler had implied that he was finally satisfied, and that all the
doctor would have to do was show up the next morning to pick up his visa. Some inner wariness
prevented Thanakar from celebrating; he had seen other supplicants come back from the customs house
triumphant and boastful, and take exaggerated leave of everybody in the hotel, only to reappear at
breakfast a few days later. Sure enough, Thanakar arrived at the customs house the next morning to find
that the unraveler in charge of his case had been transferred.

Yet even so, despite these setbacks, there were intimations of progress. On each unraveler’s desk stood
a number of rubber stamps, including one large, important-looking one with a metal faceplate bearing the
Caladonian coat of arms. Though never actually stated, it was implied that this stamp was the coveted
visa—multiple entries, six months. On Thanakar’s first visit the unraveler had touched it with her
forefinger. On his seventh, the unraveler had actually picked it up and weighed it in his hand before
replacing it with a sigh in its little metal stand. And on his seventeenth, the man had reached for it
forcefully, only to hesitate at the last minute, think better of it, lean back in his chair.

During Thanakar’s twenty-seventh interview, the man mentioned for the first time another set of
documents. This man was unusually tall, even for an unraveler, and he was dressed in a dilapidated
uniform of yellow gauze. His veil was wrapped closely around his face, so closely that the cloth over his
mouth was alternately convex and concave as he blew in and out.

Thanakar had seen him several times before. Most he couldn’t tell apart, but this one had a distinguishing
eccentricity of speech: a kind of stammer, and a habit of qualifying everything he said, so that often the
sense of it was lost, mislaid in a fog of vagueness. “I-I don’t know if you know,” he said. “At least, at
least I hope you do. But there have been questions asked. There have been . . . inquiries.”

“Yes?” prompted Thanakar.

“Well, it has been noticed that you have not yet submitted certain documents, which may or may not be
needed, at-at least not at this time.”

“What documents?”

“They-they still may not be necessary,” demurred the unraveler. “Not yet. Nevertheless, I have heard
rumors . . .”

“What documents?” asked Thanakar between his teeth.

“C-certificates of health. Witnessed by a licensed physician.”

“I am a physician,” answered Thanakar. “Give me these certificates, and I will fill them out.”

“D-don’t misunderstand me. I am not sure these documents exist, in triplicate, or otherwise. The question
is, are you licensed to practice? In Caladon?”

“Licensed? My father was a prince of Charn. God help me, what do you want from me?”

“I understand,” said the unraveler. “Don’t misunderstand me. You are an eminent man. Eminent. At least,
I myself have never heard of you. And I am not talking about you anyway. But your companions, that is
something else.”

At last Thanakar understood where the conversation was heading. He sat back and put his fingers to his
forehead.

“Now,” continued the unraveler. “I will take your word for it. We trust you, you see. We can see you are
in perfect health,” he said, glancing down towards Thanakar’s crippled knee.

He had laid Thanakar’s passport and letter of safe conduct out before him on his desk, together with
three blank pieces of paper that Thanakar had come to recognize as visa forms. These he aligned with
great solemnity. And then he picked the stamp up from its cradle and frowned at it. With his other hand
he flicked open the top of his stamp pad. “Now,” he said. “Mrs.-Mrs. Cassimer. Your . . .
housekeeper.”

“She is in good health.”

“Fine. Excellent. And your daughter?”

For more than a minute Thanakar looked at him and then turned away. The unraveler closed his stamp
pad with a sigh. “At least now you appreciate the difficulties,” he said softly. “Although we try to be of
service.”

“She has a mental condition,” said Thanakar at last.

“Yes. We had heard rumors, you see. But never mind, mental illness is not unknown in Caladon, as you’ll
soon see. And in your case, it may not be significant. Perhaps we can waive these restrictions in your
case, if . . . if in fact they do exist. Perhaps we can make an exception in the case of such an eminent
physician, whose father was a prince of Charn. I will talk to my superior. If you could come back
tomorrow . . .”

This conversation was the lowest point in Thanakar’s negotiations with the unravelers, and after it was
over, he stood in the rain underneath the statue of Argon Starbridge with his heart full of hatred and
misgivings. It was evening and the barbed-wire barricade gave off a sullen glow. At the Caladon Gate a
single soldier warmed his hands over a fire in an old oil drum, while a woman sat at his feet against a pile
of bricks, smoking a cigarette. Along one wall of the customs house someone had put up a canvas
shelter, and a few men sat at tables underneath it, playing dice by the light of paper lanterns, while nearby
two children argued over a wicker ball.

The pedestal of the statue was painted gray and daubed with adventist grafitti, proclaiming the second
coming of Immortal Angkhdt. Underneath, some dissident had painted the red hand, symbol of the
Desecration League, and though subsequent zealots had smeared the place with mud, it was still visible.
It was a small hand, a child’s hand, beautifully rendered, the five fingers long and delicate, the thumb stiff
and decisive.

The beauty of the drawing made it ambiguous as a symbol of revolt, thought Thanakar. He remembered
talking to the unraveler. “She has a mental condition,” he had said. It was the first time he had said so;
standing in the rain, he wondered whether he believed it. Surely the vagaries of Jenny’s life, the
strangeness of the last few weeks, the violence and perversion she had seen in Charn did much to explain
the peculiarity of her behavior. Her parents had been dead less than a month. These days she hardly
spoke, but what was that? She had always been a quiet child. In Charn, when she was his patient,
Thanakar had first been drawn to her because he sensed she was a misfit like himself, branded like him
with the sign of God’s contempt, the birthmark on her cheek, his crippled leg. And now they had another
bond: They were alone and far from home. Abu and Charity, her mother and her father—the priests of
Charn had murdered everyone that they had ever cared about. Now it touched him more than he could
ever say, that she seemed to have accepted him in an alliance against all the world. That morning she had
sat upon his lap, crying uncontrollably, her fingers locked around his neck.

He reached out to touch the painted picture of the child’s hand. But there was more to it, he thought. It
was not just sadness; there are a hundred reasons to be sad. But at times it was as if some outside force
had become part of her, and the strangest evidence of that was the way that she had learned to draw.
Since they had been in the hotel, she had sat at her table all day, every day, and up into the night. She
had covered hundreds of pages with her drawings, so that every morning Mrs. Cassimer had gone out
shopping for more paper and new pencils.

She had begun naturally enough, sketching geometric symbols on the backs of envelopes and menus.
Soon she was turning out the wastebaskets for paper to draw on, and she had broken Thanakar’s silver
fountain pen by throwing it against the wall. That had been the second morning in the hotel; she had cried
and cried until he had come back with a ream of typewriter paper and some colored pencils. By midnight
she had covered five hundred sheets with circles and crosses, scribbling all day with a dark scowl on her
face.

In the days since then she had made tremendous progress. Now she would spend hours on a single
drawing before crumpling it up and throwing it across the room. When finally she lay asleep, curled up
tight in a corner of her bed, Thanakar would gather them up. He would uncrumple them and spread them
out, staring at them in amazement as every day they grew more competent and more complex.

And it was not just their sophistication that made him get up from his chair and go into her room, and sit
down to watch her as she slept. It was their subject matter—tapirs and watercats and centipedes and
naked apes, creatures she never, ever could have seen, even in photographs. She drew mountain villages
in the snow, and fields of summer flowers, and portraits of old men in uniform. “Where have you seen
such things?” he asked, but by that time she wasn’t speaking. Only once she climbed up into his lap and
put her arms around his neck and put her lips next to his ear. Yet even then he could barely hear her
when she whispered, “In my mind.”

A beggar came out from an alleyway and ambled towards him across the square. Thanakar pulled his hat
over his eyes and turned to go.

He walked back over the uneven stones, and back to his hotel. Mrs. Cassimer was waiting for him at the
threshold of his suite. She had her finger to her lips. “Hush,” she said. “The girl’s asleep.” But when she
saw the doctor’s clothes, sodden in the lamplight, gleaming faintly from the phosphorescent rain, she
found it impossible to keep quiet. “Look at you,” she said. “Oh, sir, how can you? Where is your
umbrella? You must have stood out in the rain for hours to get so wet. Give me your coat—I swear to
God, it’s as if you were a little boy again. No respect for anybody else’s feelings.”

A constant diet of unpleasant surprises had turned Mrs. Cassimer into a shrew. It was a way she had
when she was worried: “Look at you! I swear to God, your own mother used to say you had the
weakest mind in your entire postal code. ‘Mentally weak,’ she used to say. Mind you, she was one to
talk. But it takes one to know one, as the rapist told the judge.”

Smiling sheepishly, Thanakar gave her his overcoat. “Please, Mrs. Cassimer,” he said, “could you make
me some tea?”

“Tea! You think I’ve got nothing better to do than make you tea? You come in here, soaked to the bone,
and the first thing you can think to do is give me orders.”

The doctor put his fingers to his eyes. “Please, Mrs. Cassimer,” he said. “Just do it, please. I’ve had a
difficult day.”

“Oh, and I suppose you think it’s been a party here,” cried Mrs. Cassimer, furious now. And she would
have said a good deal more, only at that moment Jenny woke up, and Thanakar could hear her thin, even
whining from across the hall. He motioned for Mrs. Cassimer to be silent and then walked across to
Jenny’s bedroom.

When she saw him, she stopped crying and sat up in bed. Her face was smudged with ink where she had
rubbed it with her inky fingers. And the inside of her mouth, too, was dark with ink, for she had been
sucking on her thumb.

Thanakar stood in the doorway with his finger on the light switch. She sat up in bed staring at him, the
patterns of ink on her face mixing with her freckles and the birthmark underneath her ear. Around her the
bed and floor were littered with discarded drawings. From where he stood, Thanakar could see the same
pattern endlessly repeated, a round black smudge in the center of each paper, with six jointed legs.

Thanakar kicked through them as he limped across the floor. He brushed them aside as he sat down. He
put his hand, palm up, open on the coverlet, and waited. And in a little while she uncurled from the corner
of the bed, where she had sat hugging her knees, and came close to him. She was as timid as an animal.
But finally she came and sat by him and put her arms around his neck.

“Why is she—why is she yelling?” she asked at last, whispering, with her lips pressed up against his ear.
From where they sat, they could hear Mrs. Cassimer grumbling to herself and moving things around back
in another room.

Thanakar smoothed the little girl’s hair back from her forehead. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s
because she is afraid.”
There was a piece of paper laid out on her pillow. It seemed to be the finished drawing for which all the
rest were merely sketches: a large, careful drawing of an insect, minutely detailed, its hairy legs carefully
articulated. It was blind. It had sharp claws, and a sharp, heavy, long proboscis, for taking blood.

“What is that?” asked Thanakar gently, stroking back the little girl’s brown hair, his hand moving over the
crest of her skull.

“A flea,” said the voice inside his ear.

“And where have you seen such a thing?”

“I never saw it,” said the little girl. “I felt it—there. There where your hand is now.” His hand was resting
on the back of her head, where her skull swelled out behind her ear.
                                                      ***

Once when Charity Starbridge was a little girl, she had set fire to her brother’s house of dolls. Returning
unexpectedly from school, Thanakar and Abu had caught her with the match still in her hand. Thanakar
would always remember the look of passion and betrayal in her eyes, when Abu summoned servants to
take her to her room while he assessed the damage. He remembered her squirming in her housekeeper’s
grip, her eyes on fire, while his friend turned to him and smiled apologetically.
Thanakar remembered. Later, at her wedding, it had infuriated him to see a drugged, complacent look in
eyes that once had burned so bright. Later, much later, that squirming girl had almost disappeared.
Standing in his hotel room on the square, watching the border lights make patterns on the walls, Thanakar
remembered her lying asleep, curled up away from him, her foot making a small kicking motion at the end
of the bed.

At night he found it difficult to sleep. Instead he would stand alone at the window of his room, staring at
the customs house across the square.

On the morning of October 99th, the unravelers kept him waiting for the first time. He sat on a bench in
the large, empty, circular chamber that made up the heart of the customs house. The ceiling had been
painted to look like the inside of a dome, and Thanakar sat staring up at it, cursing inwardly. Yet he was
encouraged, too, because that day there was something different in the atmosphere of the place. It
seemed colder, and the air had a crispness it had lacked before. Soldiers had come down out of the hills
during the night; he had passed their horses stabled in the square, and in the customs building he could
feel their presence. He could hear the sharp crack of their boot heels in the corridors, and occasionally
the sound of hurried voices. In the porch he had passed soldiers making a game of who could spit the
longest, until the stones were spattered with the black juice of their snuff.

The ceiling of the waiting room was painted to look like a circle of faces peering down over the rim of the
supposed dome. Thanakar glared up at them for as long as he could stand it, and then he got to his feet
and limped towards the door, vowing inwardly that he would not be made a fool of any longer. But at
that moment, as if to demonstrate that this was not yet quite the case, a clerk appeared under one of the
archways and beckoned to him and led him down a flight of stairs into a basement lined with concrete
blocks. It was a part of the building he had never seen, and this encouraged him, until he passed a row of
open doors and saw the unravelers sitting at their desks, staring off into space.

The clerk left him in an office that seemed larger than the rest. And the man at the desk gave the
impression of seniority, or at least of bulk. He took up more space than others of his kind, and his voice
was soft and clear, unmuffled by his veil. “Please come in,” he said. “Please sit down.”

Thanakar stood. The man had dyed his hair, pink on one side, orange on the other. It looked grotesque
over his pale forehead.
Thanakar’s patience had already been eroded down to nothing by the hours of waiting. But the dyed hair
was too much; something bent in Thanakar, and then it broke. “Listen,” he said. “I won’t wait anymore.
It doesn’t matter—I don’t care if I die here in this town, but just let me explain to you before I do, how
sick of you I am. All of you. You make me sick. And I wonder, how can a man like you keep from
despair? Or are you a man at all?”

The unraveler sat back in his chair. His veil covered his nose and mouth but left his eyes uncovered. They
were red, as if from weeping.

He stared at Thanakar for a moment, and then he looked away, past him, towards a calendar on the
wall. He sighed, and then he turned his plump, red hand over on a pile of papers on the desktop so that
Thanakar could see a cage tattooed on his right palm and a small black beast inside of it.

The unraveler’s voice was soft and clear. “And do you never . . . nauseate yourself?” he asked. And then
he dropped his eyes and closed his hand. “We do our best with the fate God gave us,” he said. “Who
can do more?”

A philosopher, thought Thanakar bitterly. He cursed him, mentally willing him to stop, but he went on:
“Besides,” he said, “you are unjust. My brothers and I have worked long hours on your behalf. We have
overlooked many restrictions. Today it was to have been my pleasure to inform you that our efforts had
been successful, and that your application had been approved. Now, of course, the pleasure is all gone.”

Thanakar held his breath. Wearily the unraveler uncovered the file on his desk and removed three visa
forms. He laid them out in front of him, and then he opened his stamp pad. He picked the rubber visa
stamp from its cradle and reset the date and then rolled it in the ink. As Thanakar watched, he lowered it
to within an inch above the paper, and then he stopped. “May I see your passport?” he asked.

With quivering fingers, Thanakar drew out his passport and laid it on the desk. The unraveler squinted at
it for a moment, and then he frowned. “Not that one,” he said.

“What do you mean? It is my passport.”

The unraveler frowned, and then he smiled. “Don’t you have a new one? That one is no longer valid.
There has been a change of government in Charn.”

Thanakar stared at him. Then, with a cry of rage, he leaped across the room and around the desk. The
unraveler tried to twist out of his chair. But Thanakar was too quick. He forced the man back down into
his seat and stood behind him with his arms locked tight around his neck, twisting his head until he felt the
bones stretch to their uttermost. His cheek was close to the man’s cheek, so that he could smell his rank
perfume and see a drop of sweat run down his neck under his veil.

Thanakar could feel the fat of the man’s neck between his hands. The unraveler was fat and powerful, yet
he never moved. In Thanakar’s arms his body felt completely passive, completely vulnerable and
receptive. There was something sickening in the way his fat flesh yielded to the doctor’s touch; caught up
in the sensuality of violence, Thanakar twisted the man’s neck still more, until he heard his soft, sweet
voice. “Don’t,” said the unraveler. “Please don’t . . . hurt me.” He could easily have been saying the
reverse.

Thanakar raised his head. The papers on the desk were spattered with ink where the unraveler had
dropped his rubber stamp. The stamp had fallen on one of the blank forms and then rolled over, leaving a
printed image. Thanakar recognized it. It was no visa stamp. It was an image popular in all those northern
lands. It was the beast with seven heads, symbolic of the seven kinds of loneliness, and underneath, the
endless knot of the unravelers.
For a minute and a half Thanakar did nothing, only tightened his grip, and though his brain was moving,
he was not thinking. He was staring at the endless knot, following each complicated strand until it found
itself again. He bent the man’s neck back until he heard a groaning noise deep in the bone. “Tell me,” he
said. “Who guards the border here?”

The unraveler still had not made the least resistance. His arms still rested on his chair, and Thanakar
could see that his muscles were completely loose. “We have not the power . . . some people . . . ascribe
to us,” he admitted, finally.

“You have no power to grant visas, am I right?” asked Thanakar.

“We have the power to deny,” admitted the unraveler.

“Then tell me, who guards the border here?”

The unraveler said nothing. Thanakar could see the sweat run down under his veil, streaking the powder
on his neck.

Later, as he waited in the darkness of the square, Thanakar wondered why the man had made no effort
to stop him when he left. He had not moved when Thanakar released him. Only he had touched his neck
and whispered, “Please. Do not tell the others. Please.”

There was a bell on the desk in front of him. He had not rung it, though Thanakar had walked all the way
up through the building thinking he would hear it ring. But the soldiers in the porch were friendly as he
came into the open air; they were laughing and chewing kaya gum, happy because there was a break in
the weather. The flags outside the customs house were flapping in the new salt air: the red swine of
Caladon, the silver dog’s head, and the endless knot. The mist had broken, and there were traces of a
sunset. Thanakar felt his heart lifting as he limped down the steps. Later that night, standing in the
darkness with his knapsack on his back, with Jenny’s fingers clamped so tightly around his thumb that
she was hurting him, with Mrs. Cassimer beside him bitching underneath her breath, still he felt easy in his
heart.

In front of him across the square, the gate shone in the night, a tangle of glowing wire stretched taut
against the darkness, green and violet, and deep black-red. Near it, five soldiers stood talking. Thanakar
could see the glow of their cigarettes and hear the mutter of their voices. From time to time one word
would stand out clear against the rest, the resolution of a story or a joke.

One of the soldiers was telling a story. Thanakar could see the gesticulations of his hands and hear the
sounds of laughter. Another soldier squatted down. He took his cap off and rubbed his head, and threw
back his head so that he could laugh more easily. That was when Thanakar knew that it was going to be
all right. Mrs. Cassimer had settled down to silence, and Jenny was quiet too, holding his hand as they
walked forward towards the gate.

The soldiers paid no notice. One stood away from the rest, lighting a cigarette. In the quiet air there were
still some remnants of rain, and as the soldier brought the match up to his mouth and shook it out, the
flame caught at some lingering phosphorescence near his hand.

Thanakar could smell the acrid marijuana smoke as he came opposite the barricade. He nodded to the
soldier, and the soldier nodded back, a barely perceptible movement of his head. “Good evening,” he
said, in a harsh, flat, northern voice. And as the travelers crossed over, it seemed to Thanakar that even
those small words could hold some promise in them, like a seed.
Part Four:
Charn

W hen Charity Starbridge was a little girl, she had had a nurse named Mrs. Greer, a hard, melancholy
woman with a fondness for punishment. Justly despised by little Charity, the nurse had terrified her
brother, who never once could summon up the courage to defy her. That had been before he was given
the tattoo of the golden sun, but even so he was a prince of Charn and head of the family after their father
died. Mrs. Greer had no authority to punish him, and yet he let himself be punished with a fatalism that
had infuriated his little sister. Even worse, he had allowed her to be punished, had allowed her to be
locked into her bedroom, when all he would have had to do was walk in and release her. Who could
have refused him? It was pure spinelessness, and it hurt Charity more than the punishment itself. Those
nights she would lie on her bed, and she would beat with a spoon upon the solid silver water pipes that
joined her room with her brother’s on the floor below: “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” in the Starbridge
code.
But one night, towards midnight, after an impassioned round of signaling, she heard a message coming
back to her, very slow at first, hard to distinguish, because her brother wasn’t as proficient in the code as
she was. He was slow with languages; that night she had cursed his stupidity and listened with her ear
against the pipe. But in a little while the beat grew stronger, and she had had to run to get a pencil and
write down the message on the wall, so that she could remember:
How can it fill me, unless I
offer it
an empty cup? Ah sister,
it is in surrender that we taste
our
lives.
These words stayed with her all the time that she was growing up. When the mark of the pencil finally
faded from the plaster, she retraced the lines in ink. Later, after she had married the old man and moved
upstairs, she had painted them in her new bedroom, on the wall above the statue of Immortal Angkhdt.
There she had used an alphabet of her own invention. She had drawn a gathering of horses on the wall,
and each one was a different letter, distinguished by a variant position of its legs, the curl of its neck or
horns or tail, or a new color.

She would lie in bed and smoke hashish and watch the letters stampede towards her on the wall. It was
an alphabet known only to herself, and that was appropriate, because by that time the words had taken
on a private meaning that she could not have explained to anyone.

“This is my empty cup.” For her the words had no real meaning. It was like a prayer that monks repeat in
temples. But on the day of her brother’s execution, perhaps then she understood for the first time. She
heard the words as if for the first time when she was kneeling in the Street of Seven Sins, watching the
pickup truck recede into the distance. She dragged herself into the gutter, where she lay in the shelter of a
cardboard box.

That was the way Mrs. Soapwood found her, later, after the sun was down. “Pretty,” said Mr.
Taprobane. “Pretty skin.” Crablike, he was moving up the center of the street, scavenging for food
among the garbage left by the departing crowd while his mistress waited in the shadow of the wall. He
was a twisted little man, the line of his shoulders set at right angles to his pelvis, and he moved sideways
with his shoulder to the ground, now on four limbs, now on two. He had a green hat on his head, and he
sang to himself under his breath as he combed through the mud. “Pretty skin,” he crooned.

Charity had dragged herself to the side of the road, where she lay propped up on the curb. Mr.
Taprobane squatted above her, and he lifted her head up by her hair and pulled it back so that he could
see her cheek. “Pretty,” he said, and then he staggered back, for she had put her hand into the middle of
his face and pushed him away. He grunted and fell down in the mud, while Mrs. Soapwood laughed.

Laughing, she stepped out of the shadow of a doorway. Uncovering a lantern, she raised it high above
her head. Blinded in all directions except one, the light cut sharply across the road. It cut Charity in two,
shining in her eyes.

“Taprobane!” laughed Mrs. Soapwood. “Come here—that’s enough. Find me something I can use.”

“You said garbage,” answered Mr. Taprobane, rubbing his nose; he sat lopsided in the mud. “She’s
garbage right enough. Look at her clothes.”

“But she’s alive!”

“Not for long,” contested Mr. Taprobane. He rose up on his hands and feet and scuttled sideways to the
curb, where his mistress was standing with her lantern.

Charity had been asleep when Mr. Taprobane first touched her. In her weakened state, she was not
careful. “Cripple,” she said softly, using a language of abuse reserved strictly for the highest classes.
“Mental, moral, psychic cripple. Your ugliness is symptomatic. Your damnation is assured.”

Like most Starbridge curses, this one was a quote from holy scripture. It was a story known to everyone,
Great Angkhdt’s chastisement of the leper, and Charity recited it in an exhausted voice. Nevertheless, it
had an impact. Mr. Taprobane jumped back still further and made a sign against the evil eye. Mrs.
Soapwood kept on laughing. “God rescue me!” she cried. “Where did you learn that?”

She was a bulky woman, muffled in a woolen cloak, already six months pregnant by that time. She
owned a brothel in the river ward, but even so she was kindhearted. It would have been hard for her in
any case to walk away and leave someone to die of hunger in the street, harder to leave a woman, a
young and pretty woman, a woman who had made her laugh. Besides, she was already considering the
possibilities of a woman who could mimic Starbridge manners. Such a woman might be quite popular
with certain types of men, if she were dressed in the right clothes.

She put her lantern down. Squatting with difficulty, she rummaged underneath her stomach and pulled out
some bread wrapped in a sequined cloth and a tin bottle full of wine. She put them down on the concrete
curbstone, then searched in her pocket for a cigarette. Deep in the crevice of the lining, she found a small
and dirty one, bent into the shape of a beckoning finger. She drew it out. “Let’s take a look at you,” she
said.
                                                     ***

Mrs. Soapwood’s hotel was on the Python Road, about a mile away. It was a tall, narrow building made
of wood. The recent fires had burned whole blocks along that road, though because of freakish winds the
south side of the street had not been touched. But on the north side, not one house in fifty was still
standing; Mrs. Soapwood’s hotel rose out of a block of smoking ruins. Formerly one of a row, it had
survived because the firemen, frequent guests, had blown the houses up on either side. A week after the
fire, the hotel was still surrounded by a perpetual mist, which leaked out of the piles of blackened rubbish
and the drifting rain. The smoke rose in a curl around the house, and the sign out front creaked in the
wind. Though burned and seared, the painting on it was still visible—a black bird with a flower in its
mouth.
Charity Starbridge lived at this hotel for most of a month after the bishop’s council was dissolved, after
the change of government. This was during the worst part of the terror, when January First was speaker
of the National Assembly, and the Rebel Angels and the Desecration League held rallies in the streets.
They broke into the houses and filled the jails with Starbridges, with sympathizers and collaborators.
During the month of November, in the eighth phase of spring, as many as a hundred prisoners were
burned alive each day in Durbar Square, or buried alive in dungeons underneath the city.

Captains of the League came regularly to the house of the black bird, but Charity escaped their notice,
for a time. She worked in the stables behind the house and in the kitchen, and she washed the sheets and
swept the stairs. She slept on a mattress in the laundry room and went to bed early every night before the
gentlemen came. She never left the house, except in the mornings when it was still dark, and she would
wash herself next to the outhouse in the greasy morning rain. Then she would go back and work all day,
changing the beds, scrubbing the landings, scouring the pots, working hard for two reasons at least. She
wanted to make herself indispensable to Mrs. Soapwood. She tried to satisfy the woman, so that she
would never think to put her to another, more distasteful labor. But more than that, she found a comfort
in the work. She remembered a loose line of holy scripture—“God created work to be the consolation of
the poor.” And it was true, at least for her, for working was a new activity, and it soothed her mind and
wore her out, so that she could fall exhausted into sleep each night.

She polished the metal plates and saucers until the scratches on them started to resolve. She was
fascinated by her own productivity. Also, she felt happy to be useful to the other women in the house,
because that month she had some friends for the first time since her marriage. There was Arabel, who
had a constant cold, and Licorice, tall and dark, and then Charity’s favorite, Marcelline, who was
practically her own age. She especially would seek Charity out, in the morning when the gentlemen had
left, and she would lie on Charity’s bed to watch her do the ironing.

Charity wore rubber gloves most of the day, and only took them off in privacy, where she could retouch
the greasepaint on her palms and cover them with powder. Among prostitutes it was bad manners to talk
about the past; most of the women in the house wore gloves, though of a more expensive kind. But
Marcelline was too young to have completely lost her sense of wonder. “Are you a cannibal?” she asked
one day, when she had surprised Charity without her gloves. Then she blushed, because it sounded so
stupid. But in Charn, in those days, only antinomials had no tattoos.

“No,” said Charity, frowning. She put her gloves back on. She was ironing a pleated shirt and was not
sure how to do it. “I am from another country,” she said.

“Where?”

“South of here.”

“Where?” asked Marcelline, and after that she would come every day to hear Charity’s stories. And
Charity would tell her stories about the country she was from, south, where the land was rich and it was
summer all year round. She told Marcelline about the farm her father owned, and the catbirds, and the
elephants, and the wild dogs. She told Marcelline about her seven brothers and her sisters and her
mother, who was very fat.

“And did you have a lover there?” asked Marcelline.

“Yes,” said Charity. That day she was ironing the sheets, and she paused for a moment in her work and
put the iron up into its stand.

“What was he like?”
Charity ran her glove back through her hair. “He was dark, like me,” she said. “He had a high, pale
forehead and long hair,” she said. “He had a beard.”

“Was he handsome?”

“No.” She frowned. “I don’t think so. Or at least—to me he was. He had beautiful hands.”

Often Mr. Taprobane would come down into the laundry, too, to listen to these stories. After a period of
sullenness he had become fond of Princess Charity, and often came to help her with her work.
Sometimes he brought newspapers for Charity to read aloud: Professor Sabian’sFree Word , as well as
broadsheets from the Rim. These were full of accusations, rumors of hoarding and profiteering, and every
morning they would publish a list of the condemned. Marcelline would lie on the mattress underneath the
stairs, dressed in her expensive underwear, while the little man would sit in an untidy heap, twisted
around his knees. Fascinated, they would listen as Charity read out the obituaries of princes, soldiers,
lawyers, priests. It was practice for her, to see if she could read the names without inflection. But
sometimes a description would conjure up a face into her mind, a cousin or a family friend, and then her
tongue would stumble. And once she stopped and put the paper down when, in a list of miscellaneous
names, she came across this one: “Starbridge, T.”

“What’s the matter?” asked Marcelline. “Sweetheart, what is it?” and she got up and put her arms
around her, and held Charity’s face against her breast.

“I don’t know,” whispered Charity. “I just wish I knew sometimes. I just wish I knew for sure.”

Then she looked down, because Mr. Taprobane had gotten up too. He was holding up a flask of
whiskey with a solemn expression on his face.

Charity smiled and reached down for it, and that was a mistake. In a little while she felt better. In a little
while she was sitting cross-legged, drinking whiskey on the bed with her arm around the cripple’s
shoulder. And then she let herself be coaxed upstairs, for drinking made her easy to persuade. “No
wonder you’re unhappy,” said Marcelline. “This room would get the best of anyone.”

The laundry had no windows, and it stank of bleach. “No wonder you’re depressed,” said Marcelline.
“Look at you, why do you wear such clothes? You’re such a beauty; why do you hide it?”

Though it was dangerously near evening, Charity allowed herself to be coaxed upstairs, and soon she
was sitting in Marcelline’s bathroom, while the younger woman cut her hair. “I hate to do it,” Marcelline
confided. “It’s beautiful stuff, but not very stylish, unless you keep it clean. Real Starbridge black, we
used to call it; not very popular nowadays.”

I deserve a bit of cosseting, thought Charity, and after her haircut she found herself taking a bath in
Marcelline’s huge bathtub. Mr. Taprobane had gone back to work, but Charity had barely noticed his
departure, her head was so full of liquor. The windows were clouded up with steam, and Charity lay
back and let herself be stroked, and rubbed with perfumed oils.

Marcelline was a big girl with a fine, full figure. Her skin was flushed from her exertion, and in the damp
air of the bathroom, her hair hung wet around her face. Her legs were naked, and Charity could see her
skin through her wet camisole, her nipples and her hair. “The gentlemen would love you, that’s for sure,”
she said as she scrubbed Charity’s arms. “I mean it. I don’t understand why—oh my God.”

The girl had scraped her thumbnail along Charity’s palm, and the greasepaint, weakened by the water
and the soap, had given way. Charity opened her eyes and jerked herself upright, splashing water on the
floor. She tried to pull her hand away, but the girl wouldn’t let go. She was stronger than Charity, and she
held Charity’s fingers open while she studied the scrape in the greasepaint that her thumbnail had made.
She was staring at the tattoo of the silver rose. Then she let go suddenly and sat back on her heels beside
the bathtub, bowing her head and making the gestures of respect.

Charity jumped to her feet. Terrified, she ran into Marcelline’s bedroom, covering her nakedness with a
bathrobe of red silk. Then she hurried out into the hall and down the staircase, not thinking and not
listening. Otherwise, she would have heard the stamp of heavy boots coming towards her up the stairs.
But as it was, she ran down the steps until it was too late, and she saw on the landing below her the figure
of a man.

In the middle of the stair she tried to stop herself, clutching at the banister, slipping down onto the steps.
Panicked, she turned her head away, not bearing to look as the boots stamped towards her and then
stopped. She closed her eyes and did not open them again until she felt a man’s fingers on her chin,
gentle and strong, pulling her face around. Then she opened her eyes and found herself staring into the
face of a young soldier standing on the step below.

He was dressed in the uniform of the Desecration League, and his fingers were dyed red. The throat of
his tunic was closed by a pin in the shape of a child’s hand. He was a handsome man, with a hard,
clean-shaven face, and he was smiling. “What have we here?” he asked.

Charity’s forehead was still hot, and her hair and skin were still dripping wet. She had tensed every
muscle of her body; one hand held her robe closed, and the other was locked into a tight fist. This was
the palm where Marcelline had scratched away the paint, and in her mind Charity uttered a prayer she
did not think she knew, when the soldier reached down for her hand and started to caress her fingers, as
if to loosen them.

“Please, sir,” she said. “Please, sir, may I go?”

The soldier smiled at her a moment, and then he bowed and stepped aside.
                                                      ***

A week after this incident on the stairs, Mrs. Soapwood called Charity to her bedroom. By that time she
was so pregnant that it was hard for her to move; her arms and legs were bloated, her skin shiny and
green. Charity had heard rumors that she could no longer stomach solid food. Charity had heard that she
had sent Mr. Taprobane out all over the city, searching for olive oil and mince pie, but then had vomited
them up onto her bed.
Charity found these stories easy to believe. Already past the time of any natural confinement, Mrs.
Soapwood lay gasping on the bed. The room stank of disinfectant and perfume, but there was another
smell underneath those, the smell of something poisonous and sick.

Yet Mrs. Soapwood’s mind seemed clear enough. “A gentleman has come to see me about you,” she
said. “He’s been here twice.”

Charity looked around the room. New municipal regulations had forbidden the private practice of
religion, yet even so there was a shrine next to the bed. The icons had been removed, but the candles
were still burning, and there was a brass bowl full of water, surrounded by framed photographs.

The blinds were drawn, and it was dark. Mrs. Soapwood lay on her side, breathing heavily, while the
rain rattled on the windows. “You’re a pretty girl,” she said. “What do you think?”

“I’d rather not.”

“Very well. But think about it. There are worse than he. And it would be easier than the work you’re
doing now.”
“I’ve thought about it.”

“Very well. But remember, it wouldn’t have to be what you have seen. I was thinking of something . . .
elegant. Expensive, like a palace. You know the Starbridge language. I’d have them treat you like a
princess.”

“No,” said Charity.

“You could wear a veil. You could make the illusion as perfect as you want. Only you would have to use
the Starbridge language. That’s why they would come.”

For a moment Charity was afraid that Marcelline had betrayed her. Then she remembered how she had
cursed at Mr. Taprobane and pushed him down into the mud. “I don’t know much,” she said. “Mostly
abuse. Words I picked up from my mistress.”

“But that’s all you would need. Mostly abuse. That’s why they would come.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Charity. “I’d rather not.”

Mrs. Soapwood turned over onto her back. “Very well,” she said. “Just think about it. I make no
demands. Only I would like you to wear some better clothes. Dress as if you worked here. There—I
have put some clothes out by the closet. Some of mine. Alter them to fit yourself. I can’t wear them
anymore.”

The sheets where she had lain were rumpled and wet. They were thick and made of silk, but they had
ridden up along one side to expose an old and rotten mattress stuffed with straw. Mrs. Soapwood
groaned and shook her head. “I am very sick,” she said.

Charity came to her and sat down. “It will be over soon.”

“Yes. For better or worse. God help me, I am so afraid. Touch me. Put your hand on me.”

Charity slid her hands underneath the bedclothes. “Touch me!” cried Mrs. Soapwood. “Do you feel
anything alive? Do you feel anything struggling? God help me, I have carried life before, and it was not
like this.”

Every spring in Charn, with the coming of the rain, there was a plague of monstrous births. According to
religious doctrine, this was a natural event. The twenty-seventh bishop had raised six women into
sainthood for bearing children to the rain. But in recent generations even the priests had had their doubts.
Chrism Demiurge himself had once expressed his skepticism. “I cannot believe that this rain is the literal
semen of Beloved Angkhdt,” he had once remarked. His words had provoked riots in the slums.

Nevertheless, there had been no other theory. Books about the sugar children had been violently
suppressed. Professor Sabian had spent four months in prison, and on a public scaffold in Durbar Square
the priests had made him eat the pamphlet he had written on the subject, page by page. But now all that
was different since the change of government. Mrs. Soapwood had a copy of the pamphlet by her bed,
annotated and reprinted in an edition of ten thousand. “Sabian,” she said. “Promise me you’ll get me
Sabian, when my time comes.”
                                                     ***

During the first months of the new government, the National Assembly of Charn met in a converted
bathhouse behind Wanhope Prison. The building had been abandoned since the end of winter, when it
had been one of nine similar facilities. In winter, poor people would come from all over the city to stand
naked in the enormous steam rooms, separated by concrete barriers according to their castes. The
bishop’s secretary had been afraid that they might freeze to death in their unheated homes.
In warmer weather these bathhouses had been abandoned, and some had already been torn down. The
one behind Wanhope Prison had been the largest of the nine, a single great amphitheater of stone,
windowless, but domed with milky glass. In it, in November of the eighth phase of spring, the National
Assembly had gathered to draft a new constitution. On November 12th, old style, a resolution came
before the Board of Public Health, and the four members of the board had put the matter to the full
assembly so that they could hear the debate before they voted.

The issue had originally been under the jurisdiction of Professor Sabian, for he was the board member for
food and medical distribution. He had hoped to dispose of it quietly, to present the Board of Health with
an accomplished fact, but members of the assembly who were hostile to his interests had caught news of
it.

That month the assembly was bitterly divided. On the lowest levels of the amphitheater, in a circle around
the dais, sat Professor Sabian and his moderates, sober men in dark clothes. Most had been professional
men under the old Starbridge regime, clerks and small officials. In the amphitheater they formed a central
fortress of middle-class solidity. But they were beleaguered in those days, surrounded by circles of
extremists. That month especially, it seemed that every day in the debates, men would leave the lower
seats and walk up through the upper benches, to where the followers of Raksha Starbridge sat along the
highest edge.

In November the extremists formed the largest single group. They called themselves the Rim. Orange
was their color; the delegates wore orange armbands, though many were distinguished better by their
loud, strident voices and their drunkenness. Many were from the lowest classes, unused to any power
but bitterness, full of a new importance that was breaking them apart.

Among them sat Raksha Starbridge, now called January First. He was slouching in his chair. By his side
stood another prominent member of the Rim, a man named Valium Samosir. Still young, he had gained
influence in the assembly by the beauty of his voice and his ability to transform the harsh and bitter
hatreds of his party into polished words. Outside the assembly, too, he had become famous for his
personal beauty. The common people had nicknamed him the Bishop of the Revolution. His austere,
noble features were on posters all over the city.

He was just finishing his speech. “Gentlemen,” he said. “Far be it from me to impugn the honesty of any
member of this council. Who can forget the first glorious days of our rebellion, when men like Martin
Sabian stood alone against the forces of oppression? Who then could have doubted his patriotism, when
he first raised the standard of revolt in Durbar Post Office? What man among us does not love him—let
him dare to raise his hand. Who does not love him for his kindness, his compassion, his steadfast courage
in the people’s fight? No one has loved him more than I. Even now I find it hard to raise my voice against
him.

“But there are crimes of silence, as well as speech. That is what he stands accused of, and I too would
be guilty if I were to remain silent. Even now he has not lied, gentlemen. Don’t think that. He has not
spoken one word of falsehood in this chamber. But there are many kinds of lies—gentlemen, every day
we have heard him speak. Every day we have sat mesmerized and listened in respectful silence while he
outlined the minute details of public policy. Yet in this matter, which affects us all, he has said nothing. We
have honored him with the most important post in our new government—minister of distribution. Yet now
we learn that he, of all people, has conspired to release half a million criminals onto our streets. He is
minister of distribution, let him tell us now what plans he has made to feed and clothe this multitude. What
plans has he made to find them shelter, in a city where the recent fires have left one hundred thousand
homeless, where most of the sixth ward is still under water? Gentlemen—I have seen them sleeping every
night under the Embankment—these people are subsisting on five grams of artificial rice a day!”
Throughout the speech of Valium Samosir, the noise in the assembly had been building, until finally it
blocked out his words. Delegates from the outer circles of the amphitheater stood on their chairs to hurl
abuse down on the moderates, while the president of the assembly rang his bell. One drunken member,
wearing an orange headband, beat the back of the chair in front of him with a wooden club. Raksha
Starbridge said nothing, only slunk down deeper into his seat and made a cage out of his trembling
fingers. Then suddenly, a smile passed over his lips; he turned towards Valium Samosir and winked.

The young man still had not finished. “Mr. President!” he cried, raising his hand. “Mr. President!” But it
was no use. So in a little while he gave up, and crossed his arms over his chest, and stood scowling
contemptuously out over the pandemonium that he had made.

He was a fastidious young man, well washed, his white shirt beautifully laundered. He was over six feet
tall, but fine-boned, with high cheekbones and pale lips. So that when Professor Sabian stood up, even
his supporters saw the contrast, the beautiful young man and the tiny old professor. Emaciated and
intensely frail, Sabian stood leaning on his desk, supporting his weight on his knuckles. He seemed very
tired, his neck bent, his head bowed low, as if overburdened by the weight of his features—his big eyes,
his enormous nose and ears.

“Gentlemen,” he said, and the sound of his high voice succeeded where the bell of the president had
failed, for all around him the assembly settled down to listen. “Gentlemen,” he said. “I sense an
accusation in what my . . . honored colleague says, and yet I don’t understand it. What he says is true: I
have given orders for the release of all the political prisoners of the former government, a number which
my sources put at not above three hundred thousand. And it is true: I did not think it necessary to advise
this assembly of my decision. That is not a mark of my contempt for this assembly, as the honorable
gentleman has implied, but of my trust: I still cannot believe that any citizen of this city could find it in his
heart to disagree with my decision. But it seems I was mistaken.”

Professor Sabian raised his head for a moment to peer around the room, and then he looked back down
at the notes upon his desk. “I was mistaken,” he said quietly. “Now we have heard this morning from the
honorable gentleman, introducing Motion Number Four-four-one-c and d before the Board of Public
Health. Several gentlemen have spoken up in favor of this bill, and still I don’t believe it. That any
delegate of this assembly should seriously introduce a motion proposing that the gateways of the
Mountain of Redemption be walled up and that three hundred thousand men and women there be left to
starve, whose only crime was that they were enemies of our great enemy—brothers and sisters, these
prisoners are the first heroes of our revolution. Many are in urgent need of medical attention.”

He paused for a moment, then went on. “Now I know. No one understands, as I do, the burden this will
place on our resources. But in all conscience, we have no other choice. And there is a way—for the past
week I have been working on the preliminary arrangements. They are practically complete. And I believe
that with courage and confidence, and with God’s help . . . ,” but after that he could go no further. The
assembly, which had been listening in silence, suddenly broke out into an uproar of shouting and abuse. It
was a serious political mistake, to bring the name of God into that debate, for it touched everything that
Sabian had said with the stigma of reaction. It was a slip of the tongue, and political observers later
claimed it never would have happened if Professor Sabian had not been so tired, so broken down with
working. He was not a religious man, not in the old sense.

Later analysts would claim that if it had not been for that one mistake, Sabian’s party would have carried
that vote, as it had so many others. But what use are such speculations? For a moment the professor
tried to make himself heard above the din. Then he sat down. He took his glasses off to rub his eyes, and
then he looked up towards the other members of the Board of Health. Raksha Starbridge sat slouching
on the upper rim, scratching and smiling nervously. Below him and to the right, Earnest Darkheart sat
sucking on a pencil.

Darkheart was unpredictable in these debates. He was a man of intense and violent principles. Yet it was
as if he understood that the time for his ideas had not yet come; he favored the abolition of all property,
collective labor, and equality for women. Traditionally, such experiments were part of the political climate
of another season, late spring or early summer. In spring it was too early in the year for him to speak his
mind, except to a few chosen followers. Instead, he wavered, voting sometimes with the moderates and
sometimes against them, according to an inner criterion that Sabian had yet to understand.

With him sat his wife, a big woman, as handsome and as black as he. As Sabian tried to catch his eye,
she leaned over to him and whispered in his ear. He nodded, and wrote a few words on a slip of paper.
Raising his head, he stared down at the professor for a moment and then lifted his hand. A messenger
sprang forward, a young girl with her hands dyed red, who took the slip of paper from his fingers and
then started down through the rows of seats. She moved quickly through the banks of shouting delegates,
until she stood at Sabian’s side. The dye from her hands had come off on the paper, but the sentence on
it was still legible, a rough, heavy scrawl. It said, “I am with you.”

Sabian felt a surge of hope. He turned to look back up behind him, to where the fourth member of the
board sat surrounded by his officers. This was Colonel Aspe, commander of the army, still in the black
uniform he had worn in the service of the bishop. He too was unpredictable—born an antinomial, a
warrior chieftain of the frozen north, he had been broken by a life of service in the army, broken but not
tamed. He had no politics and seemed to vote at random, but on the other hand, he had abstained from
six out of the last seven votes. Again this time he showed no sign of listening to or understanding the
debate, but sat heavily in his chair, his gaunt, enormous frame dominating that entire section of the
chamber. His fierce eyes were fixed on nothing. One of his hands was made of steel. With the other, he
tightened and untightened the screws that moved his fingers.

Professor Sabian came to a decision. He motioned to the president of the assembly, signaling for him to
adjourn so that the Board of Public Health could stand apart and vote. But Raksha Starbridge had
anticipated him. His drugged, dilated eyes missed nothing, and he had seen the note pass between his
rivals. Guessing what it said, he was already standing up and speaking, and his harsh, nasal voice cut
through the uproar and the noise of arguments.

Fearing defeat, or at best a deadlocked vote before the Board of Health, Raksha Starbridge called upon
the president to put the motion to the assembly as a whole, where he knew he had the strength to win.
“Mr. President,” he said. “You understand I have no wish to threaten the authority of the board, of which
I am a founding member. Together, my colleagues and myself have worked long hours in the people’s
name. We have accomplished much that could not have been accomplished otherwise. Yet from time to
time it is my fear that we forget the power on which our power rests. In love with our own arguments, we
forget that we are mere extensions of the people’s will. Mr. President, today is such a time. Mr.
President, I ask your permission to read this motion in front of the entire assembly. What I want to know
is, is there a precedent for this?”

In those days Raksha Starbridge was an intimidating sight. He had traded his parson’s cassock for a style
of clothing then in vogue among the delegates of the Rim, the old, urine-colored uniform of the starving
class. It was ripped and filthy. His face, too, had not been washed in days; it was streaked with dirt and
with the purple kohl that he used around his eyes.

In those days his methamphetamine addiction had started to affect his entire system. His legs, his fingers,
and his head were all afflicted with a constant trembling, and his arm was shaking as he lifted it to point
down at the president at the conclusion of his speech.
The president was sitting at his high desk on the dais in the center of the chamber. It was a rotating
position among the members of the assembly, and that day the president was a weak-willed man, a
lawyer underneath the old regime, in love with legal precedent and terrified of Raksha Starbridge. He
rang his bell, and in the hush that spread around the room, he let his voice sink to a whisper. “There is a
precedent,” he said.

He spoke so softly that the upper benches couldn’t hear him. He cleared his throat and started to repeat
himself, but in the gap, with the whole assembly silent and straining to hear, Professor Sabian stood up in
his place. He took off his spectacles and shook them in the air above his head.

“Citizens!” he cried. “How long will you stand for this? Does this not sound familiar to you? Am I the
only one among you who remembers? God help me, when I was a child I remember standing up in
Durbar Square to hear my father read a proclamation from the bishop’s council, when Marson
Starbridge was the minister of family planning. Does no one here remember? One hundred thousand
children were rounded up that day—my own brother was condemned—and taken to the mountain. God
knows, perhaps he is still there. Brothers and sisters, can you have forgotten? Can you have forgotten
your own suffering, that you let our ship of state be captained by this Starbridge parasite, this Starbridge
and his band of sycophants, who sanction murder as a public policy, as they have since I was born . . . ?”

He would have continued, only he was interrupted by the president’s bell, and by the shouting of the Rim,
and by the voice of Raksha Starbridge rising up above the crowd: “Do not call me that! You are lying—I
have changed my name!”

“Fool!” shouted Professor Sabian. “Show me your hands, Raksha Starbridge. Do you think it is that
easy?” And then suddenly his voice was overwhelmed, and the assembly was conscious of another
sound, darker and more ominous, coming from the right, where Earnest Darkheart and the Rebel Angels
sat. They were stamping their feet in a slow rhythm till the floorboards resounded, and pounding on their
chairs. “Starbridge!” they were shouting. “Starbridge, Starbridge, Starbridge, Starbridge, Starbridge!”
                                                     ***

Resolution 441 passed narrowly that evening, after a long debate. When it was over, Professor Sabian
loaded his briefcase full of papers and walked slowly down into the hall. He ignored all offers of
assistance, all inquiries about his health, and when a colleague approached him and invited him to dinner
at his house, he turned away. Instead he walked down alone through the gates and out into the street,
past the expensive carriages of Valium Samosir and other prominent members of the assembly. A group
of lobbyists and petitioners sat waiting for him on the steps underneath a headless statue of Sebastian
Starbridge. He forced himself to stop and listen for a moment, and accept the pamphlets that they thrust
into his hands. But as soon as he could, he left them and stepped down, planning to walk the half mile to
his lodgings in the Street of the Old Shoemaker.
There too, all around the gate of his building, people were waiting for him with petitions and complaints.
He had let it become known that his door was never locked, that night and day he was accessible to any
man or woman in the city who might seek him out.

Also in those days he still had a public practice as an obstetrician. Throughout the city there was a
shortage of trained doctors, for most had fled away, and many more had been imprisoned. The ones that
remained worked overtime; Professor Sabian’s house was built into a tower above Shoemaker’s
Hospital, and the lobby of the tower was full of pregnant women.

His wife was one of these, though she was past the age when women generally conceive. She waddled
out to meet him in the courtyard, and pushed away a supplicant, and took his hands. “What happened?”
she asked.
“We lost. The soldiers go tomorrow to wall up the gates. They have enough food for a week inside the
prison, maybe more. But after that . . .”

The woman said nothing; only she took his briefcase and led him from the crowd, back into the house, up
into the tower, into their private rooms. She had some dinner waiting on a hot plate: nothing much.

She put him down into an armchair, and he sat there without speaking for a long time. Outside it grew
dark, and after seven o’clock it began to rain again, big, heavy drops that hit the windowpanes and stuck
there like old pieces of gum. He ate rice porridge out of a bowl, and then he put it aside to take his wife’s
hands again as she pulled up her chair by his. From time to time they were interrupted, but she had given
orders to the servant girl to keep the people out. It was only the most strident of supplicants that
managed to get past, and even they went away quite soon, because they saw quite soon that there was
nothing to be done. Professor Sabian was sitting with his eyes closed.

But at nine o’clock, the hour before midnight, a young woman forced her way up the stairs of the tower
and into the professor’s room, not through violence or loud language but by the pressure of her need.
She didn’t say a word. The professor was asleep. He woke from the middle of a dream to see her
standing there, her back against the door. How long she had been there, he had no idea. His wife had
disappeared.

The woman was standing with her hands behind her. She had black eyes, high cheekbones, and black
hair cut short, and she looked around the room with quick, nervous movements of her head. She was
very thin, but in those days that was not unusual.

Mrs. Sabian came in through another doorway. “Don’t,” she said. “Please don’t disturb him. Can’t you
see that he’s asleep?” She crossed the room to take the woman’s arm and lead her out. But the woman
shied away and put her hands up to ward her off. Sabian noticed for the first time that she was wearing
gloves. That in itself was not unusual; since the revolution, it had become the style in Charn. But not
gloves like these: beautiful white linen gloves up to the elbow, and covered with blood.
                                                     ***

Mrs. Soapwood’s time had come that evening, when the top part of the house shook with her screams.
Mr. Taprobane had closed the door that afternoon and marked it with black chalk to keep the gentlemen
away. But when the screaming started, many of the women fled as well, fearing contagion. Even women
who were used to childbirth blocked their ears and hid themselves away, for the birth of sugar children
was a terrifying thing, and was always presaged by that terrifying sound. It was a roaring and a gibbering,
as if someone were torturing a monkey in an upstairs room: That was the signal. The pious thought that
Angkhdt himself was speaking through the mother’s lips, and they feared what he was saying. When
Charity came up from the basement, summoned by her mistress’s cries, the house was dark and empty.
Only Marcelline and Mr. Taprobane were left.
They were in the bedroom, and Marcelline was holding Mrs. Soapwood by the wrists while the cripple
held her head. “Oh, ma’am,” she said. “Thank God you’ve come.”

She had called Charity “ma’am” since the incident in the bathtub, and could not be persuaded to stop.
Fortunately Mrs. Soapwood was past noticing. She lay on her bed with her spine bent like a bow, while
Mr. Taprobane sat above her on her pillow and held her shoulders down. There was froth on her lips,
and her eyes were rolled back in her head.

Suddenly her left hand broke free, and she grabbed a spoon from the bowl on her night table. She
stabbed it up into her face and managed to draw blood out of her cheek before Marcelline could wrestle
it away. “This part of it started last night,” said Marcelline. “She’s tried to hurt herself.” And in fact the
woman’s lips were bitten, and her arms and cheeks were badly scratched. Her hair was bloody where
she had tried to pull it out.

“Help me tie her hands,” said Marcelline. Charity tore one of the silken pillowcases into strips, and then
together they tied the woman down and tied her hands in front of her. “What shall we do?” cried
Marcelline. “She’ll die like this. You know she will.”

“Shut up,” answered Charity. She was sitting on the woman’s legs, with the woman’s belly in her hands.
“Tell me,” she said. “Have her contractions started? Did her water break?”

Mr. Taprobane was crying quietly, the tears running down his face. Mrs. Soapwood was babbling and
shouting, the words like curses in the language of the gods. She was bleeding heavily from between her
legs, blood mixed with water. Charity’s gloves were soaked in it.

She jumped down off the bed. “Stay here,” she said, “and hold her still. I’ll go get help.”

“Where?”

“Shoemaker’s Hospital. It’s not far, is it? Professor Sabian has a clinic there.”

Marcelline turned towards her, horrified. “Not Sabian,” she said. “You can’t go there. You won’t fool
him. Not him. One look at you, he’ll know.”

“You shut up,” answered Charity. “I fooled you, didn’t I?”

Nevertheless, she took precautions. She sent Mr. Taprobane out for a rickshaw, and while she waited,
she examined herself in the mirror in the hall. She found some lipstick in the pocket of Mrs. Soapwood’s
raincoat, and with careful fingers she rubbed some color in around her eyes. It was a common shade,
yellow mixed with brown—a shade most Starbridges would rather die than wear. She tied a rayon scarf
around her shoulders, the peach-colored emblem of the guild of prostitutes. She tied it in the knot of
bondage and was searching for clean gloves when the rickshaw came.

It was not far. But when she got to Sabian’s house, she felt afraid. There was nothing to worry about;
Marcelline had showed her how to streak her hair, and now the solid Starbridge black was streaked with
red. It was a good disguise, but that was all it was. It had not changed her. Courage was still the
obligation of her caste.

She told her rickshaw driver to wait, and then she stepped across the road and under the archway of the
building. There she hesitated, for the court was full of soldiers, a detachment of the revolutionary police.
They were playing bowls by torchlight, wrapped in yellow capes against the rain, and some were eating
vegetables out of a bucket.

One of them saw her and made a gesture with his fork. He whistled, and others turned to stare at her.
She felt the pressure of their staring on her naked cheeks; even though it had been most of a month since
she had fled from home, still she was not used to the glances of strange men. It was pollution, and that
was a feeling that had lost the thrill of novelty in the filthy streets of Charn.

She pulled her collar up around her face and walked across the yard. The soldiers were staring at her,
and two of them had their mouths open. But none of them tried to stop her, and none said anything. And
in the house itself no one asked her where she was going, though the rooms and staircases were full of
nurses and ink-stained secretaries working late.

She continued up the stairs, slipping past servants and orderlies from the hospital, ignoring their questions.
“I can see him,” she said. “Any citizen can see him, that’s what the posters say. Don’t tell me it’s a lie.”
And after that they let her pass. They asked her name. “Rosamund,” she said.
They let her pass. And in an upper room she found him, sitting asleep, a small, big-featured man with
something childlike in his face once sleep had smoothed away the lines. His glasses had fallen down into
his lap.

Unsure of what to do, she stood with her back against the door. She put her hand out towards him and
then drew it back. But then an inner door swung open and a fat woman came in. “Ssh,” she said. “Don’t
wake him. Please go away.” But he was awake already. He put his fingers to his eyes.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” said Charity. “My mistress has gone into labor.”

“Please go away,” repeated the fat woman. “How did you get in? You need a midwife, that is all. Does
my husband have to deliver every baby born in Charn?”

“No midwife will touch her,” said Charity. “It’s a sugar birth.”

Professor Sabian was having trouble focusing. He sat looking from one woman to the other, blinking his
eyes. But when his wife went to the door to call to the people in the outer room, he spoke. “Sugar birth?”
he asked.

“Yes, sir. I knew you had an interest,” answered Charity. Then, as the fat woman took hold of her arm to
lead her away, she continued, “Sir, you’ve got to help her. She’ll die if you don’t come.”

“Sugar,” repeated the professor, still not quite awake. He rubbed his eyes and put his glasses on. “Let go
of her,” he said.

His wife tightened her grip. “Martin,” she said. “Look what she is. She’s with the guild; look at her
clothes. Don’t let her fool you.”

Sabian frowned. “Let go of her.” And then, to Charity: “Don’t be afraid. Tell me what you know.”

“Please, sir, she’s forty days beyond her time. At least that’s what she told me.”

“How long has it been?” asked Sabian.

“Almost seven hundred days. That’s not normal, is it, for this time of year? My mother carried me that
long, but that was wintertime.”

“It’s far too long. Why is this the first I’ve heard of it? Surely she had time enough to make
arrangements.”

“I don’t know. She was afraid.”

“Afraid? But there is nothing supernatural about this. It is a natural phenomenon.”

“She was afraid,” said Charity.

Professor Sabian got to his feet. He was grumbling to himself. “Where are you going?” asked his wife.
“You sit down. Why is it always you—can’t you send somebody else?”

“She asked for you,” said Charity. “She asked for you by name.”

At that, Professor Sabian looked her full in the face. His eyes seemed enormous underneath his glasses.
He frowned and then he shrugged his shoulders. “Today my government condemned three hundred
thousand people to a cruel death,” he said. And then he turned back to his wife. “I have a debt to pay.”
                                                     ***
A little before midnight he followed Charity out into the rain, where her rickshaw was still waiting. The
driver recognized him and bowed his head and pressed his knuckles to his forehead. “Stop that,” said
Sabian. “We are all equal under God.”
Sitting beside him as the rickshaw wheeled out into the street, Charity turned her head away. He was still
very sleepy, and he looked at her benignly, nodding his head to the rhythm of the wheels. “It’s what this
revolution is about,” he said. “It is a change in public thinking above all, so that we can free ourselves
from the slavery of these myths.” He held out his palm, and a raindrop splattered onto it obligingly. He
rubbed it into a viscous ball between his fingers. “According to the myth,” he continued, “this is the semen
of Beloved Angkhdt. It falls from heaven every spring, and where the soil has been depleted by the
winter weather, the rain builds it up over the course of time, so that once again it is capable of supporting
life. That is quite reasonable; to call it sperm is just a metaphor. But the myth goes further. We’ve all
heard stories of how, when the rain builds deep enough, all kinds of life erupts from it spontaneously:
trees, flowers, insects, animals, all the species that have disappeared over the winter. But who has ever
seen this, an animal erupting from the earth? Growing from a seed—in fact, this rain is much like other
kinds of rain. Its overwhelming component is water. Only it has varying amounts of a trace chemical,
which we call sugar, though of course there is no sugar in it.”

He spoke slowly, lazily, fingering his earlobe, his head back against the seat. “These priests,” he said,
“they took a religious metaphor and turned it into an instrument for political repression. That is what we
can never allow to happen again. Like all tyrants, they based their power on the people’s ignorance.
How shall we progress, how shall we break out of this cycle of tyranny, unless we can learn to look at
these natural phenomena for what they are? Otherwise, these myths breed a kind of fatalism that poisons
every enterprise, for we are powerless against the will of God. But these plagues and scourges are
natural phenomena. That is why I find it so discouraging to hear that your friend took no precautions,
made no arrangements for what she knew was happening to her.”

“She was afraid,” said Charity.

“Precisely. It is terrifying to give birth to something that is not human, particularly if you’ve seen in every
church, ever since you were a little girl, images of a not-quite-human god. It is a terrifying thing to feel
yourself impregnated by the seed of that fierce god. Nevertheless, if she could only have understood that
these myths are born out of the phenomenon, that the phenomenon is the reason that we picture God the
way we do. That the phenomenon came first and that all the myth has done is prevented us from
understanding it. Then, perhaps, she would not have been afraid.”

They had reached the house. It was completely dark, save for the window at the top, and even from the
street they could hear the gibbering screams. Professor Sabian looked doubtfully at the sign of the black
bird, as the rickshaw slowed and stopped. “Here?” he asked. Charity nodded.

Mr. Taprobane was waiting on the stoop. When he saw them, he came running out into the road and
fished the professor’s bag out of the boot, gesturing to him to come quickly. Unsure, the professor
hesitated, but then he shrugged his shoulders and stepped down and followed Mr. Taprobane into the
house.

The cripple took Professor Sabian’s coat and ran back along the hall with it slung over his shoulder. And
when he reached the stairs, he started up them without pausing, clambering on his hands and feet, with a
strange, corkscrew motion of his twisted frame. He paused at the first landing and looked back. “Come
on,” he hissed. “Come quick.” It was unbelievably fast the way he moved, like a monkey or a rat, with
the professor’s coat hanging down the steps behind him. “Come on,” he said, and the professor followed
him slowly, peering up into the dark.

Having paid the driver, Charity entered the house last of all and turned the lights on in the hallway. From
the stairs Professor Sabian looked back at her, a puzzled expression on his face.

In the rickshaw he had not even asked where they were going. Looking up at him, she could tell that he
was thinking for the first time whether he had been wise to come alone. She smiled at him to reassure
him, and gestured with her head.

She had not planned to follow him upstairs. But in the end she did. She was confident in herself. But
Marcelline almost wrecked it from the start. She got up from Mrs. Soapwood’s bed, her hands and
dress covered with blood, and came to meet the princess at the door. “Oh, ma’am,” she said. “It’s
worse and worse.”

“Shut up!” said Charity between her teeth, and she grabbed hold of the woman’s upper arm. But
Professor Sabian had his back turned, and Mrs. Soapwood’s screams were drowning out all other noise.
Charity relented. “Get some rest,” she said more kindly. “It’s my turn now.”

Marcelline would have curtsied, only Charity was holding her upright. Instead, she bowed her head and
went away, and Charity turned into the room, towards where Mr. Taprobane and the professor wrestled
with the woman on the bed. One of her hands had gotten loose, and she was holding it above her head,
every muscle tense, her fingers splayed out wide. “Let me go!” she shouted in a voice that was not her
own. “God damn you, let me go!”

They were tying her across the body with long silken strips ripped from the bedclothes. They tied her to
the posts. “God damn you!” she was shouting, and the voice inside her mouth was as low and harsh as
an animal’s or a man’s. “You will freeze in hell,” she cried, and then was silent, because Mr. Taprobane
had seized hold of her jaw, and Sabian was trying to gag her with a strip of cloth tied through her mouth,
around her head. But she was stronger than he was, and she was twisting her head back and forth and
banging him with her free hand until Charity grabbed hold of it and held it down. Then, finally, the woman
was overpowered, gagged and trussed, though her back was still arched and her legs still thrashed and
kicked.

Professor Sabian prepared a syringe full of tranquilizer and shot it home into her neck. Then she was
quiet, though her feet still spasmed periodically while Sabian made his examination. “Will she be all
right?” asked Charity.

The professor shook his head. “She has already started her descent.” He worked for a little while and
then sat back and pushed his glasses back onto his nose. “I think that she will live,” he said. “She’s a big
woman—nature has been kind. There is no need for extraordinary measures.”

Nevertheless he shot her full of drugs, to relax her and to kill the pain, and to dilate her as far as possible.
And after that it was just waiting. Mrs. Soapwood had lost consciousness. They ungagged her and untied
her hands. Charity took her head onto her lap and washed her face out of a basin of hot water that Mr.
Taprobane had brought. She cleaned the spittle from the woman’s lips.

Professor Sabian sat back and watched her. “Who are you?” he asked.

Taken by surprise, she answered hesitantly, but he seemed not to notice. He grunted and then looked
away, and took the conversation onto different subjects, because for a long time there was nothing they
could do but wait. He told her about the new constitution of the city while Mr. Taprobane fell asleep,
curled up in a corner of the room with his arms around a pillow. He asked her questions about her life,
with a puzzled expression on his face, his eyes big and liquid underneath his spectacles. And even though
she had prepared answers in advance about her birth and upbringing, still she was taken by surprise.
Because he was asking her about her opinions, about her dreams, about her hopes for government, and
as she answered, she couldn’t help but think that she was making some mistakes, taking positions that
were not appropriate. So, after a while she was silent, but by then it was already too late, because
already his attitude towards her had begun to change. His gestures and his way of talking took on a
certain formal quality, very gradually at first, as if he were not yet aware of it. In a dozen different ways
he was more distant, deferential, and at first Charity thought that he was making fun of her. But later she
decided it was something true to him: later, as the night wore on, and everything he did became a
ceremony, a gentle ritual of manners. His voice, his grammar, his vocabulary changed. When she handed
him the forceps from his bag, he murmured his thanks and made a little bowing motion with his head.

There was something in Professor Sabian that brought back memories of servants. For a revolutionary
there was something strange about his little bows, his mastery of the nine degrees of self-abasement.
How strange it is that he is such a snob, thought Charity. Small wonder that he hates us so. In fact there
was no hatred in the way he was behaving. When the crisis came and they were working hard together,
he seemed glad that she was there, though he was careful not to touch her hands.

“There,” he said, when it was done. Mrs. Soapwood had lost consciousness, but when the crisis came,
she had cried out, and Charity was afraid that she was dead. “Please don’t concern yourself,” said
Sabian. “Please don’t—I entreat you.” He pushed the woman over onto her side, and in a little while they
could hear her breathing, hard and deep.

What had come out of her had no real shape, and it was dead. Professor Sabian wrapped it in a
pillowcase. “I’ll take it back with me,” he said. “Permit me. Such specimens are rare.”

Charity woke up Mr. Taprobane and laid him down beside his sleeping mistress. “I’ll send somebody up
to clean the room,” she said.

Professor Sabian was standing with his bag next to the door. He had wrapped his bundle up into his
raincoat. “Thank you for your help,” said Charity, and he bowed low and motioned for her to precede
him through the door. But for the first time there was a complicated expression in his face, uncomfortable
and tentative.

She, on the other hand, felt very calm. She walked slowly down the stairs, down the hall, and out into the
street. It was early morning, and the sky was gray; a soft rain was just starting. The professor followed
seven feet behind her, as propriety required.

In the street she turned back towards him, but he dropped his eyes, embarrassed, and raised his hand to
stop a rickshaw. “Thank you,” she said again, and again he bowed, elegant and formal. This time, for the
first time, the gesture seemed a little overdone, as if he had allowed some irony to mix with his respect.
She smiled, and as a mark of special favor, she stripped off her glove and put her hand out towards him,
turning her palm so that he could see the tattoo of the double ring, the symbol of good fellowship. She
wore no greasepaint; it was her naked skin, and he bent over it, careful not to touch her, to pollute her
with his breath. He closed his eyes. “I thought it might be you,” he said. “I used to read about you in the
social page, when you were just a little girl.”

The rain was insubstantial and as fine as dust. It made a mist around them as they spoke. “Go back,” he
said. “There’s time to sleep for a few hours.”

He turned and walked across the street to where the rickshaw waited. From the seat he made a little
wave. And late that morning, after breakfast, he sent round the soldiers.

Part Five:
The White-Faced Woman
L ater, of course, there was to be some semblance of justice as the city grew more prosperous. Later in
the season, when the farms outside the city had begun to function, the tension in the streets grew less. By
then, too, the revolution had already eaten its first children. Raksha Starbridge, Valium Samosir, Earnest
Darkheart all followed each other, willing and unwilling, to the scaffold. They were replaced in the
assembly by less passionate, less imaginative men.
Later that same season the effects of a new religious movement were first felt, the Cult of Loving
Kindness. In summer it was to consume the politics of all that northern country. But in the time we speak
of, at the end of the eighth phase of spring, 00016, in the first days of the revolution, there was no
compassion in high places. The judicial system had not been much altered since the bishop’s days; only
the names of the judges and the criteria for condemnation were different.

If anything, the trials were even shorter, the chances for acquittal even thinner. The trial of Charity
Starbridge was quicker even than her brother’s had been under the old regime. She did not once appear
before the revolutionary tribunal, nor was she notified of the charge. But on the seventh evening of her
arrest, she was taken from her precinct cell to a new prison near the Battle Monument, where she was
visited by Raksha Starbridge. He said, “I was wondering when we would find you. I never thought you’d
be so stupid as to search us out.”

Charity shrugged. “I was working as a laundress. I was tired of it.”

“Ah. So what appears to be stupidity is really self-destruction. It must run in your family.”

“Yes,” answered Charity. “Where I am going, there are no dirty clothes.”

Raksha Starbridge laughed. “Don’t be so sure. No reliable reports have made it back.”

He took a tablet from the breast pocket of his shirt and laid it on the tabletop near where she stood. “The
desanctification vaccine,” he said. “Now in tablet form. People who have taken this will never wake in
Paradise.”

“I’ll pass,” she said.

He laughed. “Don’t worry. Since I saw you, I have changed the formula.” He took a few more from his
pocket and popped them in his mouth. “Aspirin,” he said. “Mostly.”

“I’d rather not.”

He smiled. “I don’t want to have to force you. After all, we both know it’s nonsense. I feel sure that
where we spend eternity will not be influenced by a pill. All the same, I have a duty to my government.”

The desanctification pill was not the only drug he was taking. His pupils were dilated and his fingers
shook. Charity reached out to touch the tablet with her finger. “Where will this one send me?” she asked.

The pill had a small number stamped on its underside. “Proxima Vermeil,” said Raksha Starbridge. “The
third planet. Not the worst alternative. It has water. Some kind of atmosphere. A tribute to your youth
and beauty.” He winked. “You made quite an impression on poor Sabian. It was a wrestle with his
conscience to turn you in at all.”

“How gratifying.”

They were standing in a small, narrow, high-roofed chamber, with one wall of shoddy wooden bars. It
looked out along a corridor of similar spaces, all occupied.

Since the closing of the Mountain of Redemption, there was a shortage of prison space in Charn. This
building was a converted stable. Formerly it had housed a troupe of circus elephants. Months before,
they had all been requisitioned by the army, leaving behind huge mounds of dirty straw. Most of this was
stored in the central courtyard, but there were also piles of it in every cell.

Charity had made a nest out of her pile and covered it with a blanket. That evening, when Raksha
Starbridge left, she sat down on it and took the pill into her hand, to study it and wonder if it were
poison. Why had he come? In the end he had not forced her. No doubt he made a round of all the
Starbridge prisoners, administering his vaccine. It was not fatal, she had heard, but perhaps this pill was
different. Perhaps, as a mark of special favor. . . . She rolled the pill between her finger and thumb and
then pitched it across the room through the bars of her cell. It rolled a short distance along the floor of the
corridor.

Staring after it, her eyes met those of another prisoner. He was in the cell opposite hers, squatting by the
open wall, his hands protruding through the bars.

“That was January First,” he said.

She nodded.

“Who are you?” he asked. “You must be important.”

She shrugged. “I knew him once.” She stood up to look across the hall. The man had melted a small
candle to the bars of his cell, and it illuminated a face that seemed familiar. There was something familiar
in his features, his bulk, his balding head. Familiar and not familiar; now that she looked at him straight on,
she saw that his face was very red, very white, and covered with small scars.

“Who are you?” asked the stranger.

For an answer she stretched her hand out through the bars so that he could see the silver rose, the
emblem of her father’s family, tattooed in the middle of her palm. It had an effect on him. Instantly his
eyes filled up with tears. He put his fist up to his mouth, and then he stood and backed away into the
recesses of his cell. Later he came back again to stare at her, but only for a minute—again the tears came
to his eyes, and again he turned away.

How strange, thought Charity. And there was something else: The cell beside his was in darkness, and
she had thought it was unoccupied. Only now she heard a sound there, barely audible, as soft as breath.
And even though she had scarcely in her life heard any kind of music, yet she had read about it. Now,
listening, she found she could identify it. The sound started to lengthen and contract, moving up and down
the scale. Charity listened, her heart beating faster. She had no way of guessing how the sound was
made; she only knew it was not made with one of the instruments sanctioned by the bishop’s council in
the old days. The thirty-first bishop had banned everything but percussive instruments: the xylophone, the
drum, the cymbals, and the gong. He had banned every music that was not molded to a central beat. He
had banned any music that was not dampened by religious singing—melody alone could light a fire in
your mind, he had said. Listening in her cell, Charity wondered whether it was true. The man opposite
her was weeping for no reason as the music of the flute went up and down. He was pressing his forehead
against the bars of his door.

The sound from the dark cell stopped suddenly, interrupted by a deep, low coughing. The man turned his
head in its direction. And in the silence that followed, he took a piece of paper from inside his shirt, a
creased and wrinkled scrap of paper. He handled it reverently, as if it were a precious jewel or a
religious amulet, and he unfolded it with special care. “I have a message for you,” he said. Then he
looked towards Charity across the corridor, a strange, yearning expression on his face. “At least, it is
you, isn’t it?” He turned the paper over so that she could see what looked like a name and an address
written on the outside, though she was too far away to read the words.

“P-princess Charity Starbridge,” said the stranger slowly, running his finger over the first line. “That’s
you, isn’t it?”

She nodded.

“It’s from your brother. Shall I read it to you? You don’t mind, do you? I’ve read it so many times.”

“My brother,” she said softly.

“It’s very short. They blocked out the whole first part. Chrism Demiurge—look.” He held the paper out
to her across the corridor, and she reached out her hand. It was still more than six feet beyond her
fingertips, too far away to read, but Charity could recognize her brother’s awkward handwriting. The first
two paragraphs had been painted over with gold ink.

“Read it,” she said. Suddenly it was terrifying how much the stranger looked like Abu, the way he
fumbled with the paper and peered at it shortsightedly.

“Please excuse me. I can’t read very well,” he admitted. “I believe I used to have some education. Not
anymore. It was among the things they stole from me.”

“Read it,” said Charity.

The stranger rubbed his hand back over his forehead and the bald crown of his head, a parody of a
gesture painfully familiar to the princess. But his voice was not like Abu’s. It was lower, hoarser. But his
trick of hesitating was the same, his tendency to stammer.

When the man started to read, she closed her eyes. “The first part of the page is all blocked out,” he
said. “But then he writes, ‘As you can see, it hasn’t been too bad. They give me enough food. They’ve
got litchi nuts and pickled ginger, and . . .’ Something else I haven’t been able to make out. ‘Nothing to
drink, of course, but that’s just as well. The man I’m sending to deliver this . . .’ Something else is
crossed out, then he writes, ‘Anyway, I wanted you to know that I’m all right, and that I’ve not been
treated badly. No torture, nothing like that. But it gave me time to think. Charity, I believe a change of
government is coming. Now I know you may not think that my opinion is worth much. But I worry about
your safety. Now that I am gone, and your husband too, I’ve heard, you’ll need someone to help you.
Get in touch with . . . ,’ and then there is a name beginning with aT . It’s been blocked out.”

“Thanakar,” said Charity.

“That’s right. It’s got aK in it. ‘Get in touch with Thanakar. Send a message—he is with the army. Or if
not, then he has gone to Caladon. He always talked of emigrating, and if I’m right about the government,
then you should join him. Take money from the bureau drawer. There’s nothing for you here. He likes
you very much. He told me so.

“ ‘You must forgive me for rambling on, but I’m in a philosophic mood. I wasn’t a religious man; now I
regret it in some ways. But I feel these questions of belief are too much stressed. These questions of faith:
Faith comes from the outside in. How can our hearts be dirty, if our hands are clean? I always thought
they were peculiar, these priests who murder people in the name of God. Don’t they understand that
kindness is the only thing?’ ”
The man stopped speaking for a moment; then he continued. “The end is all blocked out, except for the
signature. And the date: ‘Wanhope Prison, October 44.’ The day before he died. And look at this—next
to the date, he’s drawn a picture of the Sun.”

Again Charity heard the sound of a deep, hard, hacking cough from the dark cell. The stranger was
holding the letter out to her, pointing at the signature. “Yes, I see,” she said. “It’s strange—you look very
like him. You must know you do.”

For the first time a flicker of what looked like anger passed across the stranger’s face. “Of course I look
like him,” he cried. “Of course I do. How do you think I got this letter?”

“I don’t know. I was going to ask.”

Again tears came to the man’s eyes. “How could you know?” he asked irrationally. “How could you
guess? How could anyone guess something so cruel? I got this letter . . . ” Here he shook it in the air. “I
got this from Chrism Demiurge, may he suffocate in hell. He bought it from your brother’s messenger.”

“Why?”

“Why? I don’t know. I don’t know—he never told me his whole plan. Or if he did, I have forgotten.
There’s so much that’s been wiped clean. What does he say? Your brother, here: ‘How can our hearts
be dirty, if our hands are clean?’ But that’s just foolishness, because he never knew. I could have told
him how a man could be the center of the most perverted schemes yet keep his innocence. I don’t
remember my own name!”

The man was crying, leaning his bald forehead against the bars of his cell. His words were wild and full of
tears: “How can our hands be dirty, if our hearts are clean? But a man who stumbles in the mud, is he not
still defiled?”

“Calm yourself,” said Charity. “You’ll bring the guard. If you didn’t know what you were doing, then you
can’t be blamed.”

“I blame myself. Don’t you understand? This”—he shook the letter in the air—“this was a great man.
‘Faith comes from the outside in,’ is anything more true than that? He was a great man. And I am his
counterfeit. Yes, I look like him. Don’t you see the surgeon’s marks? I don’t even remember what my
own face was like. And look here.”

He stretched out his right hand and opened up his fingers. His palm was covered with a silver membrane,
bonded to his skin, obscuring whatever tattoos lay beneath. But in the center of his palm was painted, red
and gold, the shining Sun in splendor, Abu Starbridge’s tattoo.

“I understand,” said Charity. “They made you in my brother’s image.”

“Yes,” croaked the man, interrupting. “So that Chrism Demiurge could kill the prince and still use him
somehow. He wanted people to believe the prince had died and then risen again, like a god. The night
after the execution, they took me to a bar in Beggar’s Medicine. I sat there drinking the whole night. God
help me, I was just fresh from the hospital. I didn’t understand why they were staring. I didn’t understand
why no one came to sit with me. I had enough money to buy drinks for the whole bar.”

From the dark cell beside him came the sound of coughing and the clinking of a chain. Charity turned to
peer into the shadow, but saw nothing. “And after that?” she asked.

“That was the only thing I did. If Demiurge had other plans, he never told me. The revolution came too
fast—a week later he was dead. I was arrested in my cell in Kindness and Repair. They took me for a
Starbridge. Then they weren’t so sure. I told my story to the guards, to everyone. They brought me
before January First, and I told him. He laughed. I thought that he would let me go. But yesterday he
sentenced me to die. He said the revolution has no place for oddities left over from the old regime. God
knows he’s right.”
                                                    ***

The next morning when the soldiers came, Charity was standing by her door. She stuck her head out
between the bars of sawn-off two-by-four, so that she could see them open up the dark cell and drag out
the prisoner. Four men went in, and two more stood guard in the corridor with rifles in their hands. But
even so it took a long time, and there were sounds of fighting and swearing and the cracking of a whip.
And when the men came out again, one of them was limping, and one was bleeding from a cut over his
ear.
The prisoner was unconscious. They dragged her face down along the floor past Charity’s cell, by a
chain knotted around her wrists. She was a big, muscular woman, with coarse, gray hair. She was
dressed in rags, open down the back, and Charity could see blood on her shoulders and the welts of
frequent beatings.

“Not a pretty sight,” said the guard who was opening her door. “Antinomial scum. They should have shot
her out of hand.”

“What is she accused of?” asked the princess.

“She’s a savage. She eats dead animals. She had trapped a falcon when the soldiers caught her, and torn
two of its wings off. She put two men in the hospital when they arrested her.”

He was the man who had been cut over the ear. He had been carrying the woman’s flute under his
armpit; now he held it up for Charity to see. “Look at this,” he said. “A real souvenir. Made out of a
bamboo club. Someone must have broken it over her back the night she lit her cell on fire. She must have
kept the piece.”

Charity reached out to touch it. It was a marvelous thing, made of a broken stick of split bamboo,
hollowed out, punctured at intervals, bound back together with twine and copper wire. One long split
down the back had been filled in, patched with soot and melted wax.

The guard handed it to Charity, and she brought it to her lips.

“Stop that,” said the guard, snatching it back. “Behave yourself. You don’t want to be dragged out like
her.”

The princess smiled and shook her head. “I don’t know how to play.”

The night before, she had tried to learn how to listen. After the stranger had gone to bed, after he had
blown his candle out and lain down on his pallet with his arms crossed over the face that was not his
own, then Charity had sat up to listen. The whole night she had listened to the music from the dark cell.
She had tried to understand what music meant, and she had failed. But even though she didn’t know the
language, even so the music spoke to her, comforted her, and quieted her heart. She sat on scraps of
straw, leaning with her back against the bars of her cell, her legs stretched out, her head bent back,
listening. Once the flute player broke off into a fit of coughing—that too for Charity became part of the
music. Then, when the melody started again, she could hear the imperfections of the flute, the buzz of the
split along its back in the lower notes, as if someone were singing with something loose caught in the back
of her throat. But after the first few notes, Charity couldn’t hear it anymore, after the song had taken
hold. It was telling her of freedom in a language she would never know—she understood why it was
banned. Why musicians were hunted down and killed.
In school she had read about the antinomials. She remembered an illustration: men and women riding
together in the snow, standing in their saddles to look forward as the snow erased their tracks. It was an
illustration from her anthropology text; shaking her head, Charity reached behind her, above her head,
and took hold of one of the wooden bars of her cell. She thought this music was the first and last that she
would ever hear. And when it stopped, she had felt too sad to sleep. But in the morning she found that
the music lingered with her, or rather, not the music but the picture, the giants in the snow, their harsh,
bitter faces, their horses and their dogs. It comforted her and opened up a space in her where she could
live apart, some protection around her when the soldiers came and beat the antinomial, and dragged her
away.

“Stop it,” said the soldier, and he snatched the flute out of her hand. “You don’t want to go like that.” He
nodded up along the corridor after his companions.

Charity smiled and shook her head. Her face was calm, and she looked pretty, standing in the milky
morning shadows. For that reason the soldier was gentle as he tied her hands, and gentle when he led her
out, down the stone corridors, out into the courtyard where the tumbril waited.

It was an open cart drawn by donkeys, their shaved heads oscillating, their meager voices whining. The
antinomial was already in the back, lying with her head against the side. She was conscious, though her
yellow eyes were swollen down to slits. Charity nodded to her and received a hard, contemptuous stare.

Then they brought the stranger out, whimpering stupidly, his hand still clasped around Prince Abu’s letter.
They threw him up into the back of the cart, and he sat down clumsily as it began to move. He was
whimpering and hiding his face. He was no Starbridge, Charity decided. He could not be reconciled to
his death. Charity alone kept to her feet, her hands tied in front of her, resting on the rail. She felt very
calm.

There were only a few soldiers in the courtyard, but when the tumbril passed the gate into the street, its
way was hampered by a crowd. There were perhaps a hundred people come to watch, encouraged by
the weather. It was nothing like the crowd at Abu’s execution. His had been a spectacle, with marchers
and men beating drums. That crowd had been delirious, stirred by currents that had since subsided.

Less than a month ago; it seemed ten months. Since then the people had gotten used to these
processions. But even so, a cry went up when she appeared, a crude, angry shouting like a crashing
wave. “Starbridge!” shouted the crowd. “Starbridge, Starbridge, Starbridge, Starbridge, Starbridge!”
The people had been well rehearsed. But even so, among the angry faces she saw others that were not
as angry, and some people even made the gestures of respect. The ritual touched her in a way it never
had before.

She had thought that she would never hear any more music. But as the sounds of the crowd crashed
around her, she heard part of another sound. “Shut up!” groaned the stranger, and the man who drove
the donkeys turned back from his seat and snarled. He lifted his whip above his head, but the antinomial
didn’t care. She was beyond his reach. She sat in the bottom of the cart, staring at the sky with her head
bent back, humming a wordless song.

Charity looked up too. Above them, the sun had broken through the clouds. It shone fiercely above their
heads, deluging the city with cascades of amber light. Men and women in the crowd looked up blinking,
their faces pale and astonished, for the sun had not been visible for weeks. And not for months had it
been visible like this, shining unimpeded, making rainbows in the upper air. Later chroniclers would
remember how the sun shone briefly on the day of Abu Starbridge’s execution and then not again until his
sister Charity was pulled through the same streets; they would make a point of it, for religious reasons.
But in fact there was no comparison—on the day that Princess Charity was buried alive beneath the
Morquar Gate, the sun burned brighter than it had since the beginning of the rains. And all the while the
antinomial stared up at it, scowling fiercely, singing her wordless music louder and louder.

In the crowd, people made the sign of the unclean or put their fingers to their ears. The driver whipped
his donkeys like a crazy man. He stood up in his seat and goaded them with a stick thrust up their anuses
until they screamed aloud. He had twisted their tails together and tied them to the reins; he pulled their
tails as cruelly as he could as they clattered up the Street of the Seven Sins out towards the gate.
                                                     ***

In those days, in Charn, in the first days of the revolution, people were desperate for entertainment. New
regulations had constricted the flow of drugs and alcohol into the city—on November 1st, workmen had
built ten tons of sinsemillian into a pyramid in Morquar Square. Once on fire, it had burned for days,
filling the streets around the gate with thick, intoxicating smoke, incapacitating the people in that
neighborhood. In such quantities, the drug made it hard for them to walk.
On November 2nd, six marijuana profiteers were crucified along the north edge of the square. That same
morning, Rebel Angels visited every public tavern north of the river, smashing bottles and destroying
stocks. Pools of alcohol collected in the gutters, and men and women filled their buckets and their boots.
The next day theFree Word published a photograph of men passed out under a hoarding, under a line of
posters condemning public drunkenness.

Useless in the long term, these laws combined with others to encourage sad short-term effects. On
November 3rd, Professor Sabian gave a speech before the National Assembly about recent increases in
violent crime. “It is not the looting that appalls me,” he remarked. “It is not the activity of the black
markets or the reports of profiteering. Those seem to me regrettable but legitimate by-products of the
current emergency. No—it is the other kind of crime. In the past five weeks alone, the incidence of rape
in the sixth ward has risen ninety-two percent. Murder has risen thirty-six percent; violent assault by
sixty-four percent.

“Of course,” he continued, “there are reasons for this. The previous government of this city based its
power on violence and coercion. Now we are seeing reaction, like a spring that is released from
pressure. But that is not the only factor—brothers and sisters, the tyranny that once held us in slavery has
loosened from our lives. All the outward trappings of that tyranny have been destroyed: the shrines, the
idols, and the icons—though I am told that many still worship them in secret. But, brothers and sisters,
noxious as it was, the ceremonial of the old regime contained some public benefice. It distracted the
aggressions of us all. This benefice is something we have not been able to replace.”

Swayed by the professor’s speech, the assembly sat far into the night, and by daybreak it had appointed
a commission. Raksha Starbridge, the majority speaker, received the task of drafting a new civic religion.
It was to favor ritual over content. It was not to involve the worship of any deity of any kind.

Raksha Starbridge was delighted with the resolution. He laughed and clapped his hands. But Professor
Sabian was horrified, even though his speech had been the seed of the idea.

Yet even he could never have anticipated the malice and the ingenuity that Raksha Starbridge brought to
his new job. For almost one hundred days he used his power to terrorize the city, until even his own
party turned against him. From October 94th, when he was inaugurated as director of the Desecration
League, to November 87th, when Earnest Darkheart beat him senseless on the floor of the assembly, he
presided over such a reign of violence in Charn that a generation later it was forbidden to allude to it, by
imperial decree.

Nevertheless, later historians would agree that the most hideous of all the crimes of Raksha Starbridge
was the sealing of the Mountain of Redemption and the abandonment of almost half a million prisoners to
slow deaths from starvation. This work was started on the 13th of November. It was accomplished by
the Desecration League, for even though the job was authorized by the assembly, neither the Rebel
Angels, nor the police, nor the army, nor the guild of bricklayers wanted anything to do with it. The guild
went on a strike of public protest, which ended with the arrest and disappearance of its leaders.

And for weeks the League kept guards around the mountain’s base, for fear of sabotage to the wet
masonry.

For weeks, on every street corner, wherever the summit of the mountain could be seen, crowds gathered
with telescopes and binoculars. And whenever there was a break in the mist, cries of anger and disgust
rose to the skies, for the crowds could see the prisoners swarming on the mountain’s upper slopes. From
time to time, a prisoner would jump down from an upper balcony. Though the bulk of the building would
prevent him from ever reaching the street, still he might fall a thousand feet before he disappeared.

This was the worst crime. But there was another that was even more spectacular, and in some ways
more symbolic of the season. On November 9th, Raksha Starbridge opened the so-called Sugar
Festival, on the fairgrounds out beyond the Morquar Gate. It was to run for more than ninety days. But
within a week of its opening it had become the center of the life of Charn. All day and all night the festival
was packed with noisy, celebrating people, and they scarcely noticed, or they scarcely cared, that every
day among the carousels, the colored lights, and the free candy, dozens of prisoners were being hung,
shot, buried, crucified before their eyes. For many, it was the reason they had come.
                                                     ***

On the morning of November 21st, when Charity Starbridge was scheduled to die, the fairgrounds at the
Morquar Gate were still only half built. Yet to come were the ferris wheels, the electric roller coasters,
and the bumper cars. Yet to come were the circus acts, the trapeze artists and the tightrope walkers, the
tumblers and performing dogs. Yet to come were the bandshells full of drummers, and choirs singing new
patriotic lyrics to old hymns.
Nevertheless, the heart of the fair was already then in place; hundreds of small cardboard booths,
housing potshies, gunshoots, soothsayers, wheels of fortune, guess-games, cardswaps, number tables,
duckstools, finger-switches, and a dozen more, games of skill and games of chance. Already in place
were the distribution booths, where script won in the games could be exchanged for clothing, and
blankets, and liquor, and painkillers, and little bags of new synthetic meal. Already in place were the
massive canvas awnings, stretched tight from poles over the cardboard streets, sheltering them from the
weather and the constant rain. And in the center, beneath the shadow of the Morquar Gate, the execution
grounds were already in place, the whipping posts, the burning pits, and around them a circle of steel
crosses, forty feet high, bolted together, held up with steel wire.

In the sixth ward, the city walls had been demolished long before. The Morquar Gate stood by itself in
the middle of the fairgrounds, a gigantic structure of carved brick. On it the League had hung a series of
enormous banners proclaiming the maxims of Raksha Starbridge’s new civic religion. Prisoners on the
cross could spend their last remaining hours pondering these messages. “Life is senseless suffering,”
cautioned one, white words on a gray background. “I am the spirit of denial,” claimed another: “Through
me lies the gate of joy.”

Charity squinted up towards another banner, hanging from the end of a long pole. “What have you got to
lose?” it asked ambiguously. Another was more simple: “God does not exist.”

“Small consolation,” murmured Charity, as they rode in through the gate. In the early morning light, the
carnival looked tired and unprofitable to her. The sun bleached out the colors of the neon and the crystal
lanterns, and gave the crowds a pasty, furtive look.
“Morning crowd’s never the best,” remarked a soldier of the League. He was standing by the donkeys,
wiping down their bellies with his hand. “Dark’s the best, or in the rain. Then you can see the lights.”

“I was expecting more excitement,” Charity confessed. She had heard about the carnival from Mr.
Taprobane.

“Ah. They are a lot of cowards really. They are frightened of your friend.”

As soon as he had stopped the cart at the loading platform underneath the gate, the driver had jumped
out and disappeared. Now Charity saw him, standing in a group of men next to a few wretched-looking
canvas stalls. He was pointing back at them and shouting, and making the sign of the unclean.

“He’s frightened of the singing,” continued the young soldier. He was dark-haired and would have been
good-looking, except that when he smiled his teeth were full of holes. His brows met in a line over his
nose. He had loosened the bridle on the lead donkey. The dye from his red hands had made a smear
across the animal’s cheek and on its belly, too, in the place where the scales joined the flesh. “Life is
meaningless,” he said. “What can it matter if we sing or not?”

Ordinarily there was more of a ritual in these proceedings. But the sunlight put a weight on things. This
was only the first of sixteen tumbrils expected at intervals throughout the day, and the mode of execution
was not spectacular. Even so, ordinarily there would have been a crowd. This morning, frightened of the
antinomial, the people retreated back into the fairgrounds, where some squatted down to watch from a
safe distance.

Another soldier had come forward and climbed up into the cart. Smiling, he forced the stranger to his
feet, but the antinomial rose by herself. She stood up straight in the back of the cart, her legs spread
wide, and now she started to sing in earnest, staring at the sun.

The stranger put his hands over his ears. He was gibbering with fear, and when the soldier touched him,
he cried out. Charity looked at him, surprised; he was afraid of death.

Fear required a concentration that she did not have. Reflexively she touched her lion’s-head tattoo. It
was good to be a Starbridge, but it was not necessary. All around her were distractions.

The handsome soldier was still stroking the donkeys and untying their tails. But in a little while he came to
help his friend put down the tailgate. Grinning at each other, they helped Charity to the ground. Then they
dragged out the stranger; he was kicking and biting until they hit him on the head, and then he began to
cry. They threw him out onto the concrete, and he knelt, weeping, on all fours. Charity went to him and
raised him up. “Hush,” she said. “You’re not dead yet.” It was no consolation. He put his face into her
neck and wept.

The antinomial jumped down unaided, singing all the time. Singing, she followed the others to an open
space of poured concrete a hundred feet away, where a metal cover was set into a concrete ring. The
soldiers opened it, and they poked down a ladder that was lying to one side. They held it steady for
Charity and the stranger, and then they stood up, waiting. But the antinomial was busy with her music.
She looked up at the sun; it was burning like a fire overhead. She sang part of the fire song while the two
soldiers smiled at her. And then she climbed down the ladder until she stood in darkness, and she was
still singing very quietly, just whispering, because she could still see some sunlight through the little hole
above her head, until someone pulled the ladder up and closed the cover with a clang.
                                                     ***

There was air from someplace, cold, new air. And the bottom was not muddy. It was dry. Deep sand, it
felt like. Charity sat down and ran some through her fingers. In the blackness it gave out a comforting,
small sound.
Her hands were tied together, but not tightly. She poured a stream of sand onto her foot. The antinomial
was quiet, finally. “Sweet God, deliver us,” prayed the stranger, next to her ear.

Thirty feet above them shone a ring of orange light, where the manhole cover made an imperfect seal.
The light was not enough to penetrate the darkness or allow Charity to guess the dimensions of the well.
She could not see her two companions.

Hearing about this new form of punishment from Mr. Taprobane, she had pictured it a different way. She
had thought she would be gagged and trussed and lowered down into a space barely larger than herself.
She had thought that she’d be lying on her back, watching the workmen pick up shovels above her head,
and then there would be dirt in her face—it would be over in a moment. She had not pictured it like this,
lying in the comfortable sand, and everything so quiet. She poured some sand onto her foot.

“It’s not so bad,” she said.

“Just wait,” murmured the stranger, close to her ear. He was calmer too. He too had been expecting
something worse.

The air was cool and had a faintly sour smell, as if it came to them over a stagnant lake.

“It’s as if we’d come into another country,” said Charity after a while. “There must be an opening
somewhere.”

She put her cheek down on the sand. She watched the orange ring, suspended in the dark.

Once, not long before, the last time Paradise was close to Earth, she and her cousin Thanakar had gone
out on the balcony, when Paradise was rising above Monmouth Hill. For a moment they had been alone.
Then Paradise had been as big as the whole world, when they were leaning on the balustrade, their
elbows almost touching. The light from the planet had been on his face when he turned towards her,
smiling. That was all.

In another moment her husband and her brother had arrived, laughing and making fun. With mock
seriousness, the old man had pointed out a scar on Paradise’s surface—the Ocean of Iniquity, where his
family once had a beachhouse. His grandmother had seen it in a dream.

It was with thoughts of her cousin Thanakar that Charity fell asleep, and her head was full of thoughts of
him when she awoke. She had no recollection of where she was, until she turned onto her back and saw
the glowing ring above her. It had lost its orange color; it was a milky gray.

She strained her ears to hear something of the festival, but there was nothing, only the sound of a deep
muttering close beside her. Turning her head, she could see the outline of the stranger’s shape, deep
black against a gentle black. Beyond him was another shape standing erect. It was the antinomial.

The stranger was saying prayers. Charity sank back down onto her elbow and listened for a while to the
quick, careful rhythm of the chant, and from time to time the incantation of her brother’s name. It was a
blurred, restful sound, mixing with her thoughts—she was not quite awake.

“As You suffered injustice, now deliver us,” chanted the stranger. “None of us can suffer as You
suffered. Nonetheless we have no wish to try.”

His voice went on for a long while. And then it stopped suddenly, because the antinomial had spoken
too, and her voice was different.

“Some,” she said.
There was breathless silence for a moment, and then the stranger’s prayer started again, quick and soft,
almost inaudible.

“Now,” said the antinomial. “Black now bright now fire. See.”

Again the prayer stopped, and there was silence. “I don’t see anything,” said Charity.

“Not eyes.”

The antinomial’s speech had none of the sweetness of her music. It was deep and very rough, with an
uncouth rumbling at the back of it. Yet even so, there was some music in it, Charity was sure. She could
feel it rubbing at the back of her neck, tingling on her skin, as if it existed in a frequency beyond the range
of Charity’s ears, so that she perceived it only indirectly.

“See,” said the woman.

Charity looked, and for a long time she could see nothing. She stared at the woman’s outline in the dark.
After a moment she thought she could distinguish the antinomial’s outstretched arm, and so she looked in
that direction, trying to penetrate into the darkness layer by layer. At length she saw the faintest glimmer
of a light.

“There is something. Over there,” she said.

For a while it burned unsteadily, a beacon marking the farthest limit of her sight. Then it sagged and
glimmered out, and reappeared again, lower down. Then it seemed larger, shaky and more blurred, until
it split apart into two separate lights, closer now. For the first time she could hear a noise, the sound of
lapping water.

She was lying in a stone chamber. She could see that now. Its diameter was not more than forty feet. But
a large, jagged hole had been broken through the wall. She saw its outline as the lights came closer, the
blocks of fallen stone, the low boundary where the hole approached the sandy floor. Beyond the hole she
could distinguish nothing, for soon all that space was filled with light.

The light came from two guttering lanterns held on poles. It was not bright, but even so, Charity turned
her head away because her eyes had been made sensitive by so much darkness. She looked instead at
her companions, their faces illuminated by the long red beams, their bodies half in shadow. More than
ever the stranger looked like Prince Abu, for the light was bleaching out their differences and covering the
marks of surgery. His terrified expression was very like the prince’s, the way his mouth flapped open.

Charity’s hands were still bound together at the wrist. The stranger’s hands were also bound; he put them
up together to block out the light. But the antinomial had loosened hers. She was standing with her arms
crossed on her chest. One of her eyes was swollen shut, and her face was covered with bruises.

Yet she stood in an attitude of fierce indifference, almost of inattention as she stared into the light. It
reassured the princess. Awkwardly, because of her tied hands, she rose to her feet.

Two men were climbing through the hole and down into the chamber, while two others held the lanterns
on the other side. They were dark-skinned and almost naked. Their hair was yellow, hanging straight to
their shoulders, and their faces were sharp and cleanly formed. Their cheeks were covered with a kind of
powder or dark paint that made them shine like masks. Their eyes were large and very pale, blue or
gray, one of the illegal shades, Charity couldn’t tell which. Their movements were quiet and sure, and
they said nothing as they dragged the stranger to his feet.

“Come quietly,” said another man, a fifth man standing framed outside the hole between the two lanterns.
He was a different kind of man, older, with white hair, and he was dressed in a white robe. It was a type
of clothing that Charity recognized from Starbridge funerals when she was young—the ritual garments of
the corpse of some great gentleman, pilfered from some underground sarcophagus a long time ago, she
guessed. The material was ripped under the sleeves. Nevertheless, the man’s face was kind.

“Nobody will hurt you,” he said. He gestured to his men. One of them was leading the stranger, cowed
and unresisting, over the barrier of broken stones, while another put his hand out for the antinomial.

“Do not touch me,” she said softly, her voice resonant with music, and the man drew back uncertainly.
He pulled a flashlight from a pouch at his waist and shined it in the woman’s face, while the man in white
stepped over the barrier into the tomb. He spoke a few words in some foreign language, and then he
smiled. He put his hands together in an old-fashioned gesture of greeting. “Welcome, sister,” he said, and
then he added a few notes of music in a high voice. But he stopped when he saw the woman’s face fill up
with fury and contempt and loathing.

“Barbarian!” she cried. “Barbarian!” She reached out suddenly and grabbed away the flashlight that was
shining in her face and then leaped over the barrier between the two men with the lanterns. One put his
hand out to restrain her, but she slapped it aside. Then she stepped out beyond the circle of the lamplight
and disappeared into the darkness.

The man in white stared after her. Then he turned back to Charity, and again he made the same gesture
of greeting, joining his palms together and bowing slightly. “My name is Freedom Love,” he said.

The name meant nothing. But the gesture reminded Charity of something, a description from some book,
or perhaps an illustration: an old man joining his hands together in front of him, hiding his tattoos.

She tried to speak, but the man shook his head. “Come quick,” he said. “Let’s see if we can find her.
Otherwise, she’ll starve to death here in the labyrinth.” He turned and led them out over the barrier
through a gap of broken stones. On the other side the lanterns illuminated a low, straight corridor, hacked
out of the rock.

They walked single-file, the lanterns first and last. Charity was behind the man in white, looking at him,
searching for a clue somewhere, his clothes, his hair, his way of walking. And then she found it: a chain of
amber beads around his neck. In her religious history text, when she was a girl at Starbridge Dayschools,
there had been a picture of a man joining his hands and bowing, and underneath a diagram of a necklace
of small beads. Underneath that a caption was printed in small black letters—“The Cult of Loving
Kindness.”

As she walked along the corridor, Charity cast her mind back to the book. Six generations before, in
winter, the twenty-third bishop of Charn had had a dream, a chain without end, wrapped around the
girdle of the Earth. After six days of meditation he had made a proclamation. He declared the existence
of a great chain of precedence, a hierarchy in which every living creature was arranged according to its
rank. He postulated a social language of infinite gradations, with forms of address peculiar to each
individual, and gestures of respect or contempt that differed only by fractions of millimeters.

The twenty-third bishop had devoted his life to sorting out these differences. Subsequent bishops had
abandoned the attempt. Such a structure was impractical on Earth, beyond the subtlety of mortal minds
and fingers. But even so the dream had become part of the mythology of Charn. It was a vision, some
said, of Paradise, where the soul of every creature would be arranged according to its worth, in a
structure so harmonious and perfect, it would bring tears to the eyes of everyone who witnessed it.

Nevertheless, some sections of the Song of Angkhdt were open to quite different interpretations. In
Charity’s great-grandmother’s time, St. Gossamer Marquette had preached another gospel, claiming that
all human souls were equal in God’s love.

St. Gossamer Marquette was burned to death on the first day of autumn, 00015. Her disciples had
scattered, and two seasons later her followers were so few as to be almost mythological. But the saint
had worn an amber necklace, Charity remembered that from books. The necklace was the only thing that
had survived the flames, and it had become the symbol of her heresy. That and a way of bowing she had
preached.

“Where are you taking us?” asked Charity. The walls of the corridor had broadened out of sight, and the
gravel underfoot had given way to coarse blocks of quarried stone. The way still led straight on, without
a twist or a turn. From the burial chamber she had seen a light shining, far away. She had seen a distant
light, and she had heard the sound of water lapping. Later, that sound had been obscured by the shuffling
of their feet, but now she heard it again close by. In front of her, Freedom Love stopped walking and
took a flashlight from his robe, while the lanterns drew off some way ahead. Outside the compass of their
light, Charity could see more clearly where she stood, a triangular stone chamber perhaps fifty feet along
each side, the ceiling perhaps twenty feet above her head. Near her, a stone stair was let into the wall.
She guessed it led up to the surface, because some light was dribbling down it. It dribbled over rows of
simple graves along the floor.

“We’ve lost her,” said Freedom Love. “She must have gone another way.”

They were in the tomb of some important bourgeois family. The cover of the grave where Charity had sat
to rest was decorated with a list of modest privileges, together with some modest optimism that the dead
man’s punishment would not be hard or long. Charity ran her hand over the stone. A chart of the solar
system was etched into the dusty surface. The dead man’s soul had been consigned to Mega Prime.

The chamber was the terminus of an underground canal. Freedom Love climbed down into a ditch
between the graves and gestured with his hands. Charity got to her feet and followed the lanterns
towards the entrance of a low tunnel. There the water had receded back into the dark, leaving a scum of
mud along the bottom of the ditch. But the men with the lanterns jumped down into it, and so did Charity
and the stranger. They followed the lanterns into the tunnel’s mouth, where the light seemed to burn much
brighter. Fifty feet along the ditch the water was around their ankles. Then the tunnel widened to the right,
and they clambered up onto a stone landing, where a boat was drawn up into a stone trough.

“It took us thirteen days to find this place,” said Freedom Love. “It’s not on any of the maps. The Dogon
don’t come up this far. But Sarkis remembered from his childhood, and after that we had to find the
execution chamber by dead reckoning, under the pilings of the Morquar Gate. It took us three days with
picks and shovels to break through. You have Gudrun Sarkis to thank—that man there.”

He pointed to the edge of the landing, to where one of the men was fussing with the boat. He was a
squat, unlovely person of indeterminate age. His chest was decorated with a chain of bones and fur, and
when he grinned up at Charity, she saw that his teeth were pointed, sharpened with a file.

“Why?” asked Charity.

“Human life is sacred, is it not?” replied Freedom Love vaguely. “Great Angkhdt tells us to succor those
in pain. They were killing men and women for no reason—burying them alive. There were forty people in
that room when we broke through. All but six of them were dead.”

“Not for no reason,” said the princess. “My family had a lot to answer for.”

“And his?” Freedom Love motioned towards the stranger, who was squatting by the water’s edge.
“He has no family.”

“An antinomial? Surely not.”

“Of a kind,” said Charity. “Not by choice. His memory was surgically removed.”

The stranger was less frightened now, though still his voice was trembling as he spoke for the first time. “I
hate these stupid ropes,” he said. Again Charity was amazed by his resemblance to the prince, his
childlike way of talking, the futile motion of his hands. He was pulling his hands apart, straining at the
ropes, fluttering his fingers.

“I hate these ropes,” he repeated sulkily. But he shied away when Gudrun Sarkis, responding from a
word from Freedom Love, drew a knife from his belt and came towards him. The stranger’s face took
on an expression of slack terror, and the men around the boat started to laugh.

“Don’t torture him,” said Charity, for Sarkis was rolling up his eyes and twisting his lips in an expression
of ferocity while the others laughed. “He has no memory of how a person should behave,” she said. She
held out her own wrists, and at another word from the old man, Sarkis drew his knife under the knot and
cut her hands apart. Then she went down to the edge of the landing to where the stranger was crouching
against some fallen stones. And as she fumbled with the knotted ropes around his wrists, she tried to
soothe him. She whispered to him and caressed his naked forearm in a gesture that was somewhat
intimate, though he didn’t seem to be aware of that. She could not have touched him if he had not
reminded her so strongly of her brother, who had been teased so cruelly when they were children.

“What are we waiting for?” she asked aloud. “Why are you all just standing around?”

Freedom Love was consulting his wristwatch. “We are waiting for the wind,” he said. In fact, the men
had let the boat into the water, and they had pulled erect a flimsy mast.

“There is no wind down here,” said Charity, but at that moment there was a booming noise above their
heads and a grinding of harsh gears. Immediately, the dead air around them seemed to move a little, and
the lanterns flickered in their chimneys.

“Five-seventeen,” commented Freedom Love. “Every afternoon they open up the garbage doors below
Saint Morquar’s Square, where the river runs underground. When the doors are open, there is a draft
over this pool.”

Charity looked down into the water. It stretched away into the dark, as perfect as a sheet of steel. The
light upon its smooth black surface seemed less an effect of shadow and reflection than of paint, as if the
semicircle of lamplight were just painted on. When finally, after a moment, a pattern of ripples spread
across the surface of the pool, it was like the swirl left by some unseen brush. Charity could see no hint of
three dimensions, until Gudrun Sarkis pulled the boat against the stones and leaped aboard. Then thick
black waves smacked up against its wooden sides as the vessel found its equilibrium, jostling the
lamplight into a million shapeless dots.

As Gudrun Sarkis raised the sail, the rest of the men jumped down. They gathered up the lanterns and
suspended them from poles in the bow and stern. Freedom Love reached out his hand to help Charity
aboard, but she hung back. The stranger was still frightened. His eyes were shining, and he was tugging
on her sleeve.

“Where are you taking us?” asked Charity again.

For the first time, Freedom Love evinced some irritation. “Come quick,” he said. “The doors only stay
open thirty minutes. Do you want us to leave you in the dark?”

“Where are you taking us?” demanded Princess Charity.

“To safety. Come. Great Angkhdt tells us that we must trust each other.”

The sail flapped lethargically over to one side. It was a narrow triangle of red cloth, ragged and much
patched. But the wind was gathering strength, and soon the boat started to draw away from the stone
bank. Gudrun Sarkis leaned on his paddle to keep it in close, but still Charity hesitated. It was not until
the last possible moment that the stranger jumped aboard, and Charity stepped after him.

“That is good,” said Freedom Love as the boat heeled away. It was a wide, shallow craft, sluggish and
unresponsive, but it rocked as the stranger stumbled forward and sat down in the bilge. The four
tribesmen sat on benches with paddles on their knees, while Freedom Love moved aft to take the
steering oar. Charity sat at his feet as the boat moved out over the water, and she was listening to him
sing under his breath. After a few false starts the melody came clear, and then the words:
What can I do to make you trust me?
Is it not enough to give you pleasure
Six times out of seven?
He had to be singing from the Song of Angkhdt, Charity decided. In Charn, before the revolution, it had
been a criminal offense to duplicate the rhythm of a verse of holy scripture, even in casual conversation.
Nor had it been the fashion for at least a generation to set the words to music.

“You talk about religion in a new way,” she said aloud, finally, after the song had drifted down to nothing.
“What did you say before? ‘Great Angkhdt tells us to help those in pain.’ I never heard of that before.”

“It is from an old translation,” replied Freedom Love, staring straight ahead over the bow. “Soon these
verses will be common knowledge, now that it is spring.”

“What do you mean?”

The old man rubbed his head, and waited a while before speaking. “The word of God is like a living
thing,” he said at last. “It has its seasons underground.”

All around them the water stretched away into the dark. From time to time the wind seemed to shift
direction, so that the sail flapped and rattled overhead. But still the boat moved slowly on as Freedom
Love tugged upon the oar. “Winter is a barren time,” he said. “If people turn for comfort to these phallic
images, is it any wonder? When the Earth is sterile for a man’s entire life, is it any wonder that he makes
a cult out of fertility? That is his need, and in winter, the Song of Angkhdt adapts to it. The subtler verses
are all stripped away. Our God becomes a phallic monster, deformed, inhuman, cruel, but with a
supernatural vitality, a potency that covers all the Earth. It fills the sky. His sperm is in the rain.”

“And now?” asked Charity.

“And now the world is changing. Our faith is changing, too. But as always, the change is very difficult,
because men and women are always ready to die for what they think is true. It makes it hard for them to
let go of the old ways. There has been violence and bloodshed, and there will be more. But you are
young enough. You’ll live to see the Earth become a garden. Your children will know verses of the Song
that you have never heard. And even the crudest of the verses now, you will find that they have changed.
The crudest and the most obscene—you will find they are about love.”

“That’s not what I meant,” said Charity. “I mean, what happens now? There has been a change of
government in Charn.”

The old man shrugged his shoulders. “It was to be expected,” he replied. “There were some grave
abuses. Spring is the time for atheistic governments. But the people are still with us in their hearts.”

“I’m not sure. When they brought the great brass statue of Immortal Angkhdt down from the temple into
Durbar Square, ten thousand people stood in line for seven hours in the rain, just to file past and spit on
it.”

Again the old man shrugged. “But that too is a kind of worship. It goes deeper than that. You will see.
Every week dozens come down from the streets to hear me preach. They risk their lives to bring us food.
How do you think we live?”

The boat was moving faster now. It had reached some kind of current; the water was turbid up ahead,
and the boat was carried by its own momentum as the sail lolled and flapped. “I hadn’t asked myself,”
said Charity. “Who are these men?”

“They are a tribal people called the Dogon. They have lived down here for generations. I am a newcomer
by contrast. A refugee. I was censured by the bishop’s council, four, almost five months ago. I was
condemned for heresy, but I escaped. These men are my converts.”

They were entering a channel where the current flowed more rapidly. The lanterns on the stern and
forward poles swung wildly back and forth. All was in darkness beyond their flickering reach, and out of
that darkness came a constant roaring sound. The wind was stronger now, and damp and hard to
breathe. Charity’s hair was slick with moisture, and there were beads of water on her clothes.

“They call themselves the Dogon,” continued Freedom Love. “They speak another language, far more
ancient than our own. And until I came, they had no inkling of the truth—they fished in these lakes and
ate the roasted carcasses. They worshiped pagan gods.”

“How many of them are there?”

“Seventeen. At least there are many tribes down here. The labyrinth stretches for fifty miles. But not all
tribes are so receptive to the truth. These are the first. They are my children. I have taught them to grow
mushrooms in the lower crypts.”

Charity was asking questions to keep herself from thinking how Freedom Love could steer his boat
through total darkness underneath the earth. But there must have been something in her face, for he
laughed as he pushed upon his oar, and the boat scudded out into the roughest current. “I put my faith in
God,” he said. “Besides, look there.”

He pointed up ahead to where some greenish lights were shining in a row. At first they were very small,
and seemed to jiggle in the darkness like a row of dots along the inside of her eyelid as Charity turned her
head. She raised her hand to block out the glare from the forward lantern, and then she saw them clearly,
thirteen pinpricks in a line, growing all the time as she rushed towards them. After a few minutes she
could see that they, too, were lanterns, strung out along the width of the vast cavern.

“It is the Morquar Dam,” said Freedom Love.

The current was gentler now, and in the gathering light, Charity could see the water breaking apart into a
series of small whirlpools, losing its momentum, turning back upon itself. In front of her the lights were
strung along the top of a white barricade. She could see the pumping station and the weir.

Freedom Love turned the boat in a wide, slow semicircle, and the current brought them around close to
the dam. Charity could hear the rushing of the water through the sluice. Up ahead the current was slowly
wheeling back upon itself, turning back out into the darkness behind them. But Freedom Love was
keeping the boat along the barricade, which rose a dozen feet above their heads. There was no wind in
the sail, but the Dogon had taken up their paddles. They pulled the boat into a stagnant stretch of water
below the east end of the dam, where Charity could see for the first time the rock walls of the cavern,
and even its ceiling far above. The water around them was full of dust and bits of wood.

From the house above the sluicegate, the keeper of the lock was peering down at them. She was a tiny,
ancient woman, with white hair braided down her back. Freedom Love called up to her in a language he
seemed to speak only indifferently, for he could only manage a few words. But the woman said nothing.
There was no expression on her face either; she just leaned on the railing of the dam and stared down at
them. The Dogon were pulling down the sail.

In the bottom of the boat the stranger looked up anxiously. “What’s happening?” he asked, but Charity
shook her head. She was looking at the woman, studying her colorless, enormous eyes, wondering how
many generations of living underground it took to develop eyes like that. The Dogon didn’t have them.
They were a dark-skinned race.

The woman held up five colorless fingers, and Freedom Love threw her a coin. It was a wide, copper
penny, and he flicked it with his thumb so that it turned over in the air. The woman caught it overhand and
rubbed it between her fingers before thrusting it away into the bosom of her dress. Then she bent over
the wheel, straining with her skinny arms until the sluicegate opened up.

The dam was made of concrete, but the doors were wooden and elaborately carved, and painted with
scenes from the life of the Beloved Angkhdt. Once on his journey through the universe, the Prophet had
come to a planet where there was no light. The only light in all that world came from the Prophet’s mouth
when he spoke the word of God.

The door into the Morquar lock was painted to represent this episode in the immortal life. The outer
panels were all decorated with barren landscapes and frozen cityscapes, painted black so as to be
invisible. But the Prophet’s open mouth was on the central panel, golden red behind a fence of canine
teeth. And when the gate split open, Charity could see that the inside of the lock was painted red.

“Ah, God,” she murmured, as the Dogon pulled them inside. The air was dank and close, and an oily
foam covered the top of the water. Behind them, the doors churned closed, leaving them in a small red
room.

“The lock is four hundred feet high,” said Freedom Love, as the water started to suck away beneath
them. The sides of the shaft were painted from top to bottom, circles of orange and red. They seemed to
glow brighter as the boat descended. Something in the paint reacted with the lantern light, a
phosphorescent sheen mixing with the orange of the Prophet’s throat. But as the air got worse, the
lanterns flickered low, so that the color was lost. Soon all that remained was the gleam of the
phosphorescence on the dripping walls. “It’s from the rain,” said Freedom Love. “It drains into the river
lower down.”

After many minutes the lock let them out into a small pool at the bottom of the dam. Behind them the
great white wall stretched out of sight, out of reach of their lanterns, while in front all was in darkness.
Around the boat, bubbles rose and broke constantly on the surface of the pool, filling the air with a noise
like crackling fire.

The boat swung sharply around. The Dogon dug their paddles deep into the water. The stranger was
sitting in the bilge, staring back at the dam with a look of empty wonder. His mouth hung open, and there
were beads of sweat along his upper lip. “D-do people live down here?” he asked. Freedom Love
pushed on the steering oar. He was looking for the channel down out of the pool, and he slid the boat
into a gap between low banks of fitted stone. It was only a few feet wider than the boat. The Dogon
scraped their paddles along the channel’s sides, yet still they made swift time, moving as if haste were
important.

“In ancient times,” said Freedom Love, “there was a period of seven years when the weather was far
harsher than it is even today. Winter and summer, the extremes of temperature were much harsher. It is a
periodic fluctuation; the last time was many years ago, and at that time, it is recorded, half the population
of the city lived underground. Even more, at certain times of year. Half a million people lived down here.
Rich people, mostly. They had tunnels dug as far as Caladon.”

He pulled his flashlight from the breast of his robe and shined it up above their heads. “Look,” he said.
“Look there.” The lanterns in the boat had guttered low, and the beam of the flashlight pierced the
darkness where they could not follow. It illuminated the ceiling of the tunnel they had entered and played
among the carvings and the painted figures with their eyes of mirrored glass. “The dam fed an electric
generator,” said Freedom Love. “This tunnel was once called the Prince’s Walk.”

He was steering with one hand, while with the other he shined his flashlight at the pictures on the wall and
into the doors of abandoned galleries. He told them the history of the place, and took detours into other,
smaller corridors to show them special things: a crystal chandelier still hanging from the dome of one small
chamber; the portals of the summer house of Lord Berylliam Starbridge; the winged, porcelain statue of
the Snake of Relativity; and one enormous cavern where the vault was set with moving lanterns, long
extinct, to duplicate the constellations of the winter sky.

As he explained these wonders, Freedom Love seemed calm and at his ease. But Charity noticed that
the Dogon were paddling as fast and as hard as they could. They had turned down the lantern on the
prow until it was scarcely bright enough to guide them, and they looked back anxiously at their leader’s
powerful flashlight. Yet they had no way of expressing their disapproval except by the energy of their
work, their bent backs and the sweat along their arms, the flash of their paddles and the power of their
stroke.

“They are afraid of something,” remarked Charity.

Freedom Love made a careless gesture with his hand. “The woman,” he replied. “The white-faced
woman. It is true, she has been seen near here.”
                                                     ***

How to measure time in that black hole? Charity was hungry and exhausted by the time they reached
their destination, an island in the middle of a lake. The stranger was asleep in the boat, but Charity was
awake. She had seen the island from far away, lighting up the vault, shining over the surface of the lake.
On its beaches, acetylene torches hung from poles stuck in the sand.
The Dogon had paddled without ceasing until they came into the reach of a long spit of sand. Then they
put their paddles on their knees and let the boat drift up onto the beach. Gudrun Sarkis stepped out into
the shallow water and dragged the boat the last few yards, until its bottom groaned ashore.

Men and women came to greet them down the beach. They all greeted Charity in the same way, a little
bow with their palms joined together. But when Freedom Love descended from the boat, they got down
on their knees in the dark sand. They made a line on either side of him, and as he walked up the beach
between them, they put out their hands for him to touch.

When he had passed, one got up and came forward and took Charity by the hands. She was a dark,
handsome woman, younger than Charity and still dressed in the remnants of a rich, embroidered gown.
She too had pressed her palms together, but not so carefully that Charity had failed to glimpse the flash of
gold and silver in the lamplight.

She was a Starbridge of the soldier’s blood, a member of Charity’s own clan. But still she did not
introduce herself that way. “My name is Varana,” she said, and then she laughed when Charity looked
puzzled. “It is the name my master gave me,” she explained. “It means ‘the bell that God rings,’ in I don’t
know what language. Don’t you think it suits me?”

She was a constant talker, but kind, too. She took Charity to her own house, a wooden hut down by the
water’s edge. She made Charity lie down in her own bed, and brought her soup and basins of hot water.
And all the time she chattered constantly, a blithe, comforting sound, until Charity fell asleep.
                                                     ***

“I’ve been here a long time,” said Varana, hours later. Charity was sitting up in bed. Again the girl was
feeding her with mushroom soup and talking all the time. “I came here the same way you did, just the
same. It’s hard to tell how long ago—thirty days, a month, oh, I don’t know. My trial was October
eighty-third. I was buried in that pit, just the same as you. Only worse, of course, because my mother
and I, we were among the first the master saved.” Suddenly there were tears in her eyes. She swallowed
and went on more slowly: “There were people in the pit, many people who are gone. I was there six
days, my master told me. I was with my mother, holding her hand, touching her as I am touching you, but
we were dying. My mother died that morning, and I didn’t know. I couldn’t tell. There were people
crying out. And I heard someone banging on the stones. It was my master, breaking down the wall with
hammers. He broke down the wall.”
“You don’t have to tell me if the memory is painful,” said Charity after a pause.

“No. Let me finish. I want to tell you why I love him, so that you will love him too. It is because he gave
me life. He took me from my grave; if there is pain, it belongs to my past life. Before me there is nothing
but joy,” she said, the tears still on her cheeks.

Charity put down her bowl and spoon and held her hand out tentatively. The girl seized it in both of hers.
She turned it palm up on the coverlet and started squeezing it, kneading the muscles in between the
bones. “My master says that this is good for stress,” she continued. “He is full of knowledge. Relax your
hand—let me show you. The reason I’m telling you this is because I want you to stay. The people that he
rescues, he gives them their choice. I want you to know this is the best house in the village if you want to
stay. I’ve been so lonely. Some of the people are kind but they are not my kin. My father was Baroda
Starbridge. I cannot talk to them as I can talk to you.”

The hut was ten feet square, lit with oil lamps. Charity sat on a low bed, a metal frame strung with strips
of cloth and covered with a woven mat. There were some quilts and blankets. On a block of stone next
to the door, Charity could see, neatly arranged, a broken piece of mirror and a comb.

“Who lives here?” asked Charity. “Who lives here on this island?”

“Refugees,” Varana replied. “Every Monday the tribunal condemns another batch of prisoners. Every
Tuesday they are buried. On Wednesday my master brings them back. Then on Fridays, he goes up to
Bishop’s Keys. People come to hear him preach, and always one or two come back with him. They
bring food from above.”

“And the Dogon?”

Varana wrinkled her nose. “They live here too. But they are primitives. Not worth the time he
spends—did you know, until he came, they ate the flesh of animals? They hunted fish with spears. Their
kin still do, across the lake.”
Charity shrugged. “And now they live on gifts from other people. What do they do all day, the ones that
used to hunt?”

Varana frowned. “You don’t understand. They had strange rites and strange beliefs. They had no
knowledge of the truth. How could you know? You’ve only just arrived.”

She let go of Charity’s left hand, picked up her right hand, and started rubbing it. But soon there was the
faint sound of a bell, and she got to her feet. “My master sends for me,” she said.
                                                      ***

When she was gone, Charity got up and dressed herself. She washed her face in a basin of cool water.
She combed the dirt out of her hair. She washed her hands and feet, and then she left the house.
The stranger was walking on the beach below the town. Charity called out to him, and he turned his
head. He was carrying a lantern, and looked as if he were searching for something in the sand.

Near him a line of wooden pilings stretched out into the lake, and the sand gave out onto a stone pier.
The stranger stepped onto the pier and squatted down next to the water’s edge. As Charity came close,
he was throwing sand into the water, scattering it a few grains at a time. Wherever the sand hit, the lake
glimmered briefly, a silver gleam deep beneath the surface. “I’ve been trying to understand why it is not
colder here,” he said without turning around. “You’d think it would be freezing so far from the sun.”

“The lakewater is warm,” said Charity.

“Yes. I noticed it when we arrived. Perhaps it flows over some deep thermal activity. Look at this.” He
dipped his lantern down over the edge of the stone pier, illuminating a green scum of algae on the surface
of the lake. “It’s what they eat,” he said. “I had a bowl of it.”

“How was it?”

“Not good. Look at this.” With a flick of his fingers he scattered some sand into the water, and
immediately a fish rose to the surface, a small, slow beast with a back of luminescent scales. The stranger
frowned. “Hah,” he said. “What could that creature be expecting?”

Bats played over the lake, dipping low onto the shore, calling to each other in susurrant voices.
Occasionally they came to rest, their long legs clumsy in the sand. One fell over onto its back, and
Charity watched its struggles to get up.

“We can leave here if we want to,” she said. “Freedom Love gives us the choice.”

“Hah. Some choice. We’d never find our way.”

“But we could try. I don’t want to eat algae till I die.”

The stranger looked up at her. “It’s not so bad for you. But I’m in a stone barracks, with fifteen other
men. Our host has an eye for a pretty face, I’ve noticed.”

“Perhaps he’ll give us a guide.”

“Who’d go? They’re terrified. They’re afraid of the white-faced woman. I don’t blame them.”

“Who?” asked Charity. She was watching the bat as it struggled on the sand. By pushing with one wing,
it had managed to right itself. Now it stood on one leg, cleaning the skin of its small body with the other.

Again the stranger flicked some sand into the water, and the luminescent fish came to the surface. “It’s a
superstition,” he replied. “A superstition come to life. My guards were telling me about it when I was in
prison. They’re not stupid. Every week they’d put a new consignment of prisoners into that pit, and every
week it would be empty. They thought the white-faced woman was stealing them away.”

Charity was watching the bat. “You are afraid,” she said.

Furious, the stranger turned on her. “Of course I am,” he cried. “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you
have any feelings?”

For an answer, Charity touched her lion’s-head tattoo, and wondered what it would be like to be without
it. “Freedom Love,” she said. “You heard what he told us. He said there are tunnels here that take you all
the way to Caladon. They take you all the way across the border.”

“If you can find them,” grumbled the stranger. But Charity wasn’t listening. She was watching the bat,
how it gathered itself into a jump and leaped away into the dark.
                                                    ***

“He wants to see you,” said Varana. “You and the other one.”
The princess had wandered down to the end of the island, and Varana came up behind her as she stood
watching the Dogon women working in their garden. The rows of pallid plants were marked by tiny oil
lamps set in the ground, six to a row, and the women moved up and down between them, shoveling out
fertilizer from baskets on their backs. Unlike the men they wore a lot of clothing, shawls and shapeless
robes, and their heads were veiled. They made somber, shrouded figures, for they chose always the
darkest colors. Sometimes Charity would lose sight of them entirely in the gaps between the lamps, and
sometimes she could only guess at where they were, as the lamplight snatched quickly at the opalescent
thread and the bits of mirror that they used to decorate their clothes.

The circle of Dogon houses stood out on a peninsula into the lake, poor huts of clay and broken stone,
away from the rest of the village. Charity stood on a small embankment with Varana at her side, looking
out over an open space of trampled dirt. There, while the Dogon women worked, the men sat idle in
small groups, laughing and conversing. Some played a game with spears and a small wicker ring. The ring
was soaked in oil and set on fire; it flickered with a bluish flame. One man would set it rolling in an area
of darkness, while another tried to throw his fishing spear so that its double barbs would catch the rim.

That whole section of the town was darker than the rest. The women grew their plants almost in
darkness. As for the men, Charity could barely see them, though she could hear their laughter and their
shouts as someone missed his cast.

“He wants to see you,” Varana repeated, for Charity had not turned around.

At the sound of her voice, one of the women stopped working below them and looked up. Varana
muttered part of a prayer and made the sign of the unclean. “Let’s get away from here,” she said, putting
her hand on Charity’s arm. “I hate them,” she confided. “They make me feel dirty when they look at me,
especially the men. One man exposed his penis to me—there, that one. Come, let’s go. I want today to
be a happy day. My master put his hand on me today.”

Charity turned to face her, mildly surprised.

“Oh, not like that,” continued Varana, leading her away. “I mean he touched my head.” She gestured
towards her forehead. “Here. The place is still on fire. He can touch the energy resources of the brain.
Ask him when you see him. Perhaps he’ll do the same for you.”

Charity smiled and shook her head.

“Why not?” asked Varana. “It’s perfectly safe. His hands are clean.”
“How do you know? What caste is he?”

“I’m not sure. Some kind of scholar. He has a candle marked under his thumb.”

“A teacher!” exclaimed Charity, still smiling. “And you let him touch your head?”

Varana frowned. “There are some distinctions that we should transcend,” she replied with dignity.

They had reached the main street of the village. Here the dark was chased away by lanterns hung from
poles. Walking with her arm through Charity’s, Varana nodded to everyone they passed.

At length they stopped in front of a long building, the grandest in the town. This was the meetinghouse,
and inside a meeting was in progress. They passed under the portals of the central chamber and found
themselves among a small crowd of respectful listeners. Freedom Love was standing on a wooden dais,
talking to his people.

“When I was young,” he said, “I lived with my family on the northwest frontier, south of the River Rang.
We were a community of shepherds, very poor, for it was wintertime. I would take the sheep up into the
meadows to feed on insects incubating in the snow.

“My family’s land overlooked the river. It was at the bottom of a steep crevasse, and there were cliffs
upon the other side. Occasionally you could see people there, wild tribesmen, antinomials, riding their
horses close to the cliff’s edge.

“Our priest told us that they were devils out of hell, atheists and heretics. When the river froze, we were
always afraid that they would ride across and murder our livestock. We would build huge bonfires in the
fields, and our priest would ring the bells all night, but they never came. They never came.

“Stupidity that tries to justify itself, we call it fear. Ignorance that justifies itself, we call it hate. This sounds
like foolish insight, but you must understand, in those days it was part of our catechism that every morning
upon rising we would recite aloud, at six-fifteen precisely, the forty-second verse of the Song of the
Beloved Angkhdt. You know it: ‘Listen to me, my love, and to no other. I am the only one. These others
tell you lies. They want to use you for your beauty, that is all.’

“Nowadays these lines admit a myriad interpretations, as you know. Then we believed what the priests
told us. Later when I came to Charn, I saw the remnants of these tribes. Defeated and starving, they had
migrated down into the city, and they were selling their own bodies and begging in the streets. It was a
sad sight, for once they had been proud.

“Perhaps you don’t remember the antinomials, how they spoke with music, and danced and played music
all night long. They are few and scattered now. Then, they were creatures of denial, savage in so many
ways. They had no families, no names. They had no interest in such things. As I say, they were primitive
in many ways. But it was a willful kind of savagery, as if they had passed through civilization and stepped
back. Or stepped forward, who can tell?

“A man can learn something from people who are not like him. In Charn I took them into my house. I fed
them, and in return they taught me to love freedom and freethinking. They taught me a man is what he
does. They taught me to judge men by their uses, for we must live forever in the present tense, and there
is no point in pretending otherwise.

“When people ask me to define God, I say to them, ‘God is a creature who lives in the past and in the
future, as we live in the present.’ That is why we never see Him face to face. That is why He always
seems to be receding from in front of us or traveling close behind. That is why sometimes it is as if we are
entering a room where He just left, and the scent of Him still lingers.”

“Isn’t he incredible?” asked Varana, giggling and poking Charity in the ribs. But she quieted down when
Freedom Love looked down at her and frowned.

“Now, here in our community,” he said, “I have heard something that reminds me of the way we used to
be when I was young and we had corralled our sheep into their pens and were waiting for the antinomials
to attack across the river. There is a superstition in our town. People are talking about the white-faced
woman, as if she were a devil or a witch. Once more, it is foolishness and ignorance. It is hate and
fear. . . .”

As he talked, Charity found her attention wandering. She looked around the room. Some of the Dogon
were sitting on the floor, scuffling their feet in the dirt, smiling at each other, looking bored. The others
listened more attentively. Like Charity, they were refugees from Charn; they had been rescued from the
burial pit, or else had followed Freedom Love of their own will, down into the dark. They were a dirty,
ragged lot, thirty-seven men and women, most past their first youth. Charity looked them over with faint
stirrings of distaste.

The stranger was standing by the door. As Charity looked at him, he raised his eyebrows, as if to signal
his desire to speak with her. But Varana had pushed her in the ribs again, and Freedom Love was asking
her a question.

“Well,” he said, “now that you have seen us, what do you think? Charity Starbridge, tell me, have you
decided? Will you join our poor community? Believe me, we are nothing now, but we will be important in
the days to come.”

Before replying, Charity detached herself from her companion’s arm and moved a few steps forward, so
that she stood in a more open space. “You saved my life,” she said.

“Then you’ll stay.”

“No.”

A spasm of annoyance passed over the face of Freedom Love; then he was calm again. He motioned to
the stranger. “And you? What about you?”

“I think I’ll stay,” the man responded, staring down at his feet.

“Speak to me,” said Freedom Love. “Look at me when you speak to me.”

“I think I’ll stay,” the man repeated, raising his face.

Freedom Love gave him a long, contemptuous look, and then he nodded. “I wish that it were otherwise,”
he said. “We have many like you; few like her.” He glanced at his wristwatch and then shook his wrist.
His voice was sulky as he turned away: “You all have duties to attend to, I believe.”

Charity avoided Varana in the crowd as the hall emptied out. Once in the street, she walked through to
the lake and turned onto the beach, moving swiftly and purposefully, as if there were someplace to go
down there. But when she heard the stranger’s footsteps behind her in the sand, she turned to face him,
furious.

“I’m sorry,” he began, but she interrupted him. She said, “You have decided. You have decided what
you are.”
“What do you mean?”

She made an impatient gesture with her hand. “Tell me you weren’t listening,” she said. “A man is what
he does. Not what he thinks or what he feels. Not a family or a name. Judge men by their uses—weren’t
you listening? Freedom Love! He may be a liar, but he’s not a fool.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

Again she made a gesture with her hand. “You’re like my brother, the way you apologize.
Listen—you’re a coward, like my brother. But even he was a hero at the end.”

“I want to be like him in all things,” said the stranger humbly, looking at his shoes.

Again Charity interrupted, too angry to listen. “When I first met you, I felt sorry for you. Because you
had no mind. Because so many things that go towards making up a person had been stolen from
you—your face, your memory, your past. Your name. But now I envy you. Don’t you understand? You
have been given a new chance. So many people, they wake up in the morning cursing God because they
haven’t changed. They’re locked up inside their characters; by the time they’re grown, the traits of their
personality are like heavy stones, impossible to budge. They’re like the bars of a cage. But you are
different. That cage is unlocked for you. The memories that made you cowardly and foolish have
disappeared. A man is what he does. If you want to be brave now, you can be. You can be loyal to your
friends. You are free.”

The stranger had been looking at his shoes, but now he turned to her. “Why are you so angry?” he
asked.

“Don’t you understand?” she said. “It’s a long way. It’s a long way in the dark.”
                                                      ***

He gave them warmer clothes. With relief, she moved out into the darkness beyond his lantern, onto the
dark beach. She stepped out of the dress she’d been arrested in and put on her new Dogon dress. Over
it she put a black cotton jacket, and on her feet new rope-soled shoes. She wadded her old clothes into
a ball and handed it to Freedom Love when she went back.
He gave them blankets and flashlights and a bag of food. “It’s all that I can spare,” he said. “You’ll lose
weight, but you’ll live. It’s only eleven days. Look here.” He showed them on the map that he had drawn
for them. “This way. The second tunnel and then back. It will bring you up just twenty miles from the
Caladonian frontier. The way is marked. And there’ll be water, too. You cross water here and here.”

She folded up the map and put it in the inside pocket of her coat. “Thank you,” she said.

“Angkhdt tells us to share everything we have,” responded Freedom Love, scratching his lip.

He was standing on the pier holding a lantern. Varana had not come to see them off. But seven people
from the town were there, and some of the Dogon too, for Freedom Love had lent them Gudrun Sarkis
to ferry them across the lake.

The boat was pulled up on the sand, and the Dogon stood around it, talking. Gudrun Sarkis was already
there, looking nervous and unhappy. He was stowing six long fishing spears aboard the boat while his
companions spoke to him. Once Charity heard the only word of their language that she had learned:
onandaga. Onan meant “face,”dag meant “milk” or “whey,” anda was the ending for all feminine nouns.

Freedom Love frowned. “They are a superstitious lot,” he said. “They think she is some kind of devil.
But she is a mortal woman, just like you.” He took his wallet from his robe and removed from it a tiny
glassine envelope filled with yellow powder. “If you meet her, give her this and she will let you pass,” he
said. “It is heroin. I have heard she has a . . . partiality.”

The stranger was standing with his hands in his pockets. He looked ill and frightened, and in the lantern
light the scars stood out all over his pale forehead and his cheeks. The hair grew in patches on his jaw, a
result of the uneven skin grafts there. The Dogon brewed a stuff called raxshi, and he smelled as if he had
been drinking it. “I try to emulate your brother in all things,” he had said when she asked him.

He bent down to wash his face in the lakewater. Gudrun Sarkis stepped into the boat. He was setting
lanterns fore and aft, in metal brackets atop poles. The townsfolk had all moved away except for
Freedom Love and the Dogon, who were waiting for his signal to push the boat adrift.

Charity stepped aboard and sat down in the bow. She held her hand out to the stranger, and he followed
her and sat down next to her, avoiding her eyes.

On the pier Freedom Love turned around and walked towards the town. He didn’t say goodbye, didn’t
look back as the Dogon pushed the boat along its groove of sand and out into the water. But Gudrun
Sarkis raised his paddle in the air, and the people on the shore responded, crying out as if in mourning as
he backed water and then swung the boat around.

There were other paddles in the bow. Charity took one and gave the other to the stranger, who held it in
his lap. “Like this,” she said encouragingly, dipping hers into the water.

“Do I have to?”

“Come on,” she said. “I want to get away from here as fast as possible.”

“Where are we going?”

“The entrance to the tunnel. I don’t know. But Gudrun Sarkis knows. Don’t you, Sarkis?”

“Ma,”came a coarse voice from the back of the boat.

The stranger tried a few halfhearted strokes and then gave up. “Do I have to?” he whined. “I feel so
awful.”

Charity smiled. “Come on, don’t be lazy. I think you must have been a priest in your past life. Does that
sound right? Lord Chrism must have found you in the temple.”

Charity stroked steadily. Gradually the shore lights started to recede. “Thank God for that,” she said. “I
hated that place. Freedom Love! There’s no freedom there, and no love either, that I saw.”

“He saved our lives.”

“For reasons of his own. He wanted converts. I never asked him to interfere.”

“Nevertheless, it doesn’t change the fact.”

Charity burst out laughing. “Youare a priest. I knew it. Where else would Chrism Demiurge have found
you?”

“Believe me, I’ve considered it,” the stranger said. “But aren’t there some physical differences? Besides,
there would be something left. Some special knowledge, something.

“I seem to know a lot of numbers,” he continued after a pause. “I can see them in my mind, big numbers,
and they seem to mean something. Sometimes I can see them in my dreams.”
“What are they like—your dreams?” asked Charity.

“Unsettling. They are full of people I don’t recognize, places I don’t remember. But sometimes I know
that it’s important. How can I tell? I wake up with an empty feeling. I could be dreaming about my father
or my mother, my wife or my children, and I’d never know.”

From time to time the light from their lanterns would catch on something overhead, a low part of the roof,
a stalactite or a mass of sculpture. They were in a complicated area of currents and crosscurrents. In
places the water was as sheer and shiny as black glass. In others it had a stippled texture, and the boat
swung back and forth. Charity guessed that the lake had narrowed suddenly. According to the map, the
way they were to take rose from above a waterfall, where the river drained out of the lake. Already she
could see a hint of shoreline to her left, black against a darker black.

“Tell me,” said the stranger. “What was your brother like when he was young?”

“Fat,” responded Charity. With her paddle, she cut long strokes in the water, though her arms were
beginning to get tired.

“That was all you remember?”

“No. But he was . . . very fat,” she said. “I didn’t like my brother much when we were children.”

“And later?”

A lock of Charity’s hair had fallen down over her eye. She pushed it back before she spoke. “He was
my only friend. He and my cousin Thanakar. After my marriage, they were my only friends.”

“I didn’t know you were married.”

Before replying, Charity tried to summon up her husband’s face out of the darkness ahead of her, without
success. Yet she remembered him so well; her mind was full of memory, but the image wouldn’t come
clear. It was the opposite of the stranger’s dreams.

She frowned. It was as if she could remember every feature, but couldn’t structure them into a face. “He
was a kind old man,” she said, and then instantly she saw him in her mind. It was as if the image had been
liberated by the words; she remembered a drawing that Thanakar had made, a pencil sketch on the flap
of an envelope. It was a caricature, but in her mind, Charity shaved away the excess, until she saw her
husband’s smiling gray face, his melancholy eyes.

“He was an army officer,” she said. “Three times my age—it was the custom in my family. He died on the
Serpentine Ridge, fighting the Caladonians. Murdered before the battle, that’s what I heard. He was too
old to be a soldier.”

“You don’t sound as if you cared.”

“But I did,” said Charity, staring ahead. “He was always kind to me. But there was nothing he could do.”

“What do you mean?”

Charity shrugged. “Spring is not the season for sentimental marriages. That is something Chrism
Demiurge once said. The weather is too harsh. ‘Sterility breeds violence,’ he said. Besides, the women in
my family were like slaves. It was the custom. We were like slaves, except there was no work for us to
do. No, it was different—my mother and myself, they treated us like patients. Mental patients. And if our
doctors were considerate and kind, what difference could that make?”
She paddled strenuously for a few strokes, and then she stopped. “Of course I cared,” she said. “My
brother was arrested at just the same time, and my cousin. Two of them are dead, and the third, I don’t
know. I suppose he is dead, too. But whatever happens, what could be worse than all that waiting? All
that waiting to do nothing. I’m glad to be out in the fresh air.”

Dubiously the stranger looked around the boat. To his left he saw waves hitting a shelf of rock, making a
low, scraping sound. The lamplight shone on a white froth of water, and something gleaming deep
beneath the surface. “Did you see your brother when he was in prison?” he asked.

“No. In my own house I was a prisoner as much as he. More than he, for it was not my choice. Yet I
escaped—do you understand? That’s why I find it hard to forgive him, even now. He didn’t have to die.
He could have stopped them just by lifting up his hand.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you? Because he chose the luxury of dying in a prison he had made himself, he is a hero and a
saint. Other people cling to life—you, me. Don’t we deserve some credit? What we do is harder, after
all.”

“You are jealous,” said the stranger.

“No. It’s just that I was a victim far too long to value it in other people. A man should stand up for
himself, especially him, a Starbridge and a prince of Charn. That’s what I tried to tell him at the end.”

“So you did see him.”

“Yes. One time. Didn’t you hear the story? Even I heard it: how a washerwoman broke past the soldiers
at the very end, as they took him to his place of martyrdom. She jumped into his truck as they were
driving him along the Street of Seven Sins.”

The stranger stared at her, astonished. “That was you?”

“That was me.”

“I heard the story twenty times,” said the stranger. “My guards in prison told it to me. It was a woman of
the starving class. She fell at his feet to worship him, and he raised her up and kissed her on both cheeks,
and comforted her. And when the soldiers were dragging her away, he said, ‘Don’t be afraid. Among a
hundred thousand, I will know you. And when I see you in the land of Paradise, I will kiss you on the
lips.’ It is a famous story.”

“It is a lie. He was stinking drunk,” said Charity. “You could smell the liquor on his breath,” she said,
tears in her eyes. “He had a mask on his face and silver gauntlets on his hands, and they had put him in a
cage. I told him to stand up, to stand up like a man. He had fallen down and was leaning on his side, and
I told him to stand up. Because a man has a duty to his family and his friends, and to whoever loves him.”

“He was dying. You are very harsh.”

“It’s not what I said, it’s what I thought,” continued Charity, tears in her eyes. “It’s what I should have
said. He was my brother.”

“And didn’t he say anything at all?”

“There wasn’t time before the soldiers threw me out. But yes, he said one thing. He said, ‘This is my
empty cup.’ ”
The stranger looked at her, baffled, and she wondered if she wanted to explain to him about the poem
and the silver pipes. But before she could make up her mind, she heard a grunt from Gudrun Sarkis; he
pulled upon his paddle, and the boat slid in a circle. Simultaneously there came a shout out of the
darkness to their left, a challenge and a curse. And then a flare went up, dousing that low shore with
silver light. Charity could see a dozen men standing naked and motionless among the rocks. The nearest
was not fifty feet away. He was squatting by the water’s edge, a flare gun in his hand.

“Onandaga,”cried Gudrun Sarkis. Paddling furiously, he swung the boat out into deeper water, pausing
only to extinguish the lantern above his head. Charity reached up to do likewise, knocking the wick with
the end of her paddle. The stranger was stroking steadily, tiredness forgotten. Though in fact the men on
the shore were more eerie than threatening—they stood motionless as the flare settled above them,
grazing the cavern ceiling, making massive shadows on the water.

The men were armed with spears and long arrows and short bows, and they made no motion as the boat
drew out of range. But the man on the water’s edge reloaded his flare gun. He shot it off again as the light
glimmered away: a silver bead that seemed to rise so slowly before it shattered on the surface of the
dark. The flare gun made no noise, only a soft puff that was lost in the creak of the boat, the slap of the
paddles and the stranger’s panicked whine.

But as the boat sped away, the man on the shore tilted his hand. He let the muzzle of his gun slip down a
few inches, so that the third flare he fired burst not above himself, but above the boat, beyond her bow. It
lit up the water for the space of forty yards.

Dead ahead, there was an obstruction in the water. It towered up above the boat, an enormous mass of
painted stone carved in the shape of a woman’s head. It was half sunk in the water; the lake had risen
almost to the woman’s eyes. She stared out over its surface, her eyes white and empty. She wore a great
stone headdress in her thick stone hair, a crown and diadem in the fashion of the old kings of Charn.

“Onandaga,”whispered Gudrun Sarkis as the boat drifted to a halt. Charity took her paddle out of the
water. There was no sound anywhere, except water dripping from the paddle blade, and the puff of the
flare gun as the man behind them fired again.

This time he lit the water back the way they had come, and revealed five boats drawn up motionless in a
line. They were long and very low in the water. Seven men were standing up in each, serene, attenuated
figures, dark-skinned, but with their chests and faces painted white. They too were armed with spears.

Noiselessly Sarkis turned the boat towards shore. There, on an outcropping of rock, stood the
white-faced woman, black-haired and dressed in black, with an onyx ring through one nostril.

So much blackness only accentuated the sick pallor of her skin, the changing color of her eyes. “Her
eyes,” croaked Gudrun Sarkis. Throwing down his paddle and snatching up a spear, he bounded to his
feet. As quick as thought, he aimed the spear and flung it, but at the very end his throw was spoiled by
the force of a single arrow passing through his chest. His arm wavered. The spear clattered on the rocks
beside the white-faced woman’s foot, and then Gudrun Sarkis fell over backwards into the water without
even a cry, as the boat drifted in towards land. Charity stood up, but he had disappeared. Deep below
the surface, he left a trail of phosphorescence.

The boat rocked gently in the water. As they drifted in towards shore the stranger hid his face, but
Charity was curious. Varana had told her about the white-faced woman’s eyes, how they shone in the
darkness. It was a lie; as the light faded above her, Charity could see nothing. Then someone lit a torch
behind the rocks, a softer, reddish glow, full of soot and smoke. Soon there was a row of moving
torches: wadded cotton dipped in kerosene, carried on the end of spears. Holding torches, the men
gathered in around the white-faced woman, and by the flickering torchlight Charity could see what
Varana had meant.

As the boat drifted up the narrow beach, Charity watched the woman’s face and saw her eyes change
color. At first she thought it was a trick, a figment of the smoky light, but the woman was not ten feet
away as the boat grunted to rest. Charity could see her clearly. Her eyes, which had seemed black at
first, took on a reddish tinge, spreading from the pupil. Then they seemed to lighten to a nauseating pink,
then lost color altogether. But then flecks of yellow appeared and spread into a pool; her eyes flashed
yellow for an instant, until they were polluted by a mist of violet darkening to black—a full circle of
unnatural shades.

Her skin was ageless and unlined, her face clear and handsome. Her hair was loose around her
shoulders, and she was dressed in a long gown of Starbridge silk, cut low over her breasts. She was tall,
with an expression of uncompromising pride upon her face. Standing in a circle of naked warriors, she
made a proud and regal figure. But when she stepped down to the beach, Charity noticed that her teeth
were badly stained.

The stranger was making a low, stricken whine. But he stopped abruptly when the white-faced woman
spoke. “Where are you going?” she asked, and her voice was soft without being gentle. It was almost a
whisper, audible only in the perfect silence, coldly arrogant in its softness, as if it were not even
imaginable that anyone could speak while she was speaking. “Where are you going?”

“To Caladon,” said Charity.

“To Caladon. No. Your guide mistook the way,” whispered the white-faced woman. “It is easy in the
dark.”

“We mean no harm,” said Charity, looking back over the lake. A pale fin broke the surface near where
Gudrun Sarkis had disappeared. Beyond, Charity could see the five boats slowly approaching, paddled
gently by their crews.

“They were hunting a big fish,” whispered the white-faced woman. “They say it lives near here—a very
big one. Big as a ten-man boat. I came to watch them.”

“We mean no harm,” repeated Charity. “Show us the way and let us go. Please. I was told to give you
this.”

She reached into the pocket of her coat and pulled out the glassine pouch of heroin. When the woman
saw it, a yellow stain was spreading in her eyes; she stepped across the beach and plucked it out of
Charity’s hand. With her fingernail she slit the tape that held it closed. She licked her little finger and
scooped some of the powder onto the pad and rubbed it on her gums. “It is second-quality,” she said.
“Where did you get this?”

She closed the pouch and tucked it underneath her clothes. When Charity didn’t answer, she continued:
“This is good, but I have heard of better. There is a new medicine, a new kind of vaccine. Have you
heard of it? It interrupts the hierarchy of nature. It desanctifies the blood.”

“Please let us go,” said Charity.

“No. I need this medicine. Come with me.” She turned and walked away into the darkness. Her men
came down from the rocks to help Charity and the stranger from the boat. They pulled the boat up onto
the beach. Then they escorted the two travelers away, down a muddy track among the boulders and
over a small creek.
In single file, they passed over an expanse of packed dirt and then entered a narrow tunnel. Countless
footsteps had worn a groove in the rock floor, and the ceiling was seared by the fire of countless torches.
Above their heads were cracks and fissures in the rock, and Charity could hear the scurrying of rodents
and lithe bats, and perhaps even larger animals. When finally they came out into an open cavern, the air
above them was full of circling white birds.

At the outskirts of a small town of canvas tents, the white-faced woman waited for them. “You are my
guests,” she whispered. “Though that may change. Until it does, I will prepare a place for you, with food
and water. When you are ready, come to me.” Again she turned and walked away, but Charity could see
where she was going. The shantytown of tents was built around the base of a small hill, and there was a
stone staircase leading to the top. Each step was flanked with urns of burning fire, and Charity could see
the white-faced woman passing up between them, followed by two men carrying torches.

At the top of the hill was a stone mausoleum. Charity walked up there some time later, after she and the
stranger had sat and rested in a tent, and naked men had brought them bowls of mushrooms. “I won’t
go,” the stranger said. “I’ll tell you that right now.”

So Charity went alone, and climbed the stone staircase in between the urns of fire. At the top she stood
for a while against the parapet, looking down at the lights among the tents, and listening to the shouts of
children playing. Then she turned and walked along a wall, a six-foot frieze of carved obsidian depicting
the exploits of the eighteenth bishop of Charn. This had been his mausoleum—Charity recognized it from
photographs. In some places she recognized the story of the carvings: the bishop receiving the felicitations
of the guild of prostitutes; the bishop wrestling with sleep; the bishop at the end of his life, mad and blind,
grazing on grass as if he were a pig.

Again the wall was lit with glowing urns. But at the first corner stood a man with a torch, and he bowed
solemnly as Charity approached, and motioned her inside a narrow door. She looked up and caught a
glimpse of the roof of the cavern, high above her beyond the circling birds, and then she stooped down to
enter, for the gate was low. It was just a slit cut into the stone.

Inside, Charity found herself walking through a narrow corridor, barely wider than her shoulders. It was
lit with candles set in niches in the wall and decorated from the floor to the ceiling with painted friezes
from the visions of Beloved Angkhdt: the constellations of the zodiac as seen from Paradise; the angel
with a thousand mouths.

The corridor led her to the burial chamber where the white-faced woman sat waiting for her. A brazier of
raked charcoal had filled the air with smoke and with a strange, hot odor that made Charity dizzy. The
brazier was set below the bishop’s black sarcophagus, next to a marble throne. On the throne sat the
white-faced woman. Guardsmen came and went around her, perhaps six men in that small space, and
they were tending the fire and bringing lights and vessels from a room farther back.

From a grate over the fire hung strips of some strange substance, and everywhere there was a smell of
murdered animals. Charity sagged against the wall and put her hand over her nose. But she could not go
back, for there was a man standing in the door behind her, blocking the whole space. “My God,” she
cried, “you did not bring me here to murder me?”

As she spoke, the white-faced woman was aware of her for the first time. She clapped her hands, and
instantly one of the men ran forward and pulled the grate of meat out of the fire. But the smell remained.
To steady herself, Charity leaned back against the wall and put her head against the stone. In that
moment all her courage left her, and all she could think about was the sunlight far above her head. She
had a pain in her heart that felt like hopeless love, and she was very tired.
“Come closer, child,” whispered the white-faced woman, and in her voice there was a parody of real
concern. “Poor child,” she said, smiling softly, but again there was a tone of falseness deep within the
words, as if she were trying to reconstruct from memory a gentleness that she no longer felt.

“Poor child,” she continued. “Don’t be afraid. It is meat from fishes. Dumb, cold, stupid fish—these men
have always eaten it. It is what there is.” She rose and came towards Charity, smiling. All her men had
disappeared except for two, who stood as stiff and quiet as cadavers, on either side of her throne.

“It is against the laws of Angkhdt,” said Charity.

“It is what there is. Besides, the laws of Angkhdt are not for you and me. Let me see your hand.”

Before Charity could pull away, the woman had seized hold of her right hand and bent her fingers back.
Charity could feel the aching coldness even through the woman’s gloves. She shuddered and tried to
close her fingers. But the woman was too strong. She pulled Charity forward into the torchlight.

“The silver rose,” she whispered. “Yes—I knew your mother well. Yes. I held you in my arms when you
were first baptized.”

Charity shuddered at the thought. The woman, who had been scanning her face with an eager, rapt
expression, scowled suddenly. She pulled her lips back to reveal her teeth, and then she turned away,
back to her chair. “Come close,” she whispered, and Charity took a few steps forward and then
stopped.

“I hate the smell,” she said.

“You will get used to it. I have.”

“I’m surprised their stomachs tolerate it.”

“Nonsense, child. Don’t be naive. It’s what keeps them strong.” The woman put her hand out to the
guardsman on her left, a tall, muscular figure, dark-skinned and naked, with white paint on his face and
genitals.

“We others have become decadent,” whispered the white-faced woman. “We have spoiled our strength.
But the fire of life burns very hot here, underground.”

As she spoke, she was stroking the man’s thigh, fingering the muscles down his leg and on his knee. Then
she reached up to hold his testicles in her left hand, weighing the sac, stroking the flesh until it came alive.
She slid her fingers around the root of his sex and teased it until it stiffened, and then she put her hands
around the shaft and squeezed until its veins stood out. “This one is particularly strong,” she whispered.
“You can have him if you like.”

Charity was looking at the man’s face. He had not moved, or shifted his position. He was staring straight
ahead of him, not even blinking as the woman stroked his penis with her thumb.

“No, thanks,” said Charity.

“You come from a family of prudes,” whispered the white-faced woman. Then she let go of the man’s
sex, as if it suddenly disgusted her. When she continued, her voice was wistful and a little sad: “I was a
prude myself.”

“Who are you?” asked Charity.
“I am the white-faced woman,” she answered, her mouth twisted with contempt, whether for Charity or
for herself, the princess couldn’t tell.

That was all that she would say. When Charity pressed her to speak further, she shook her head. “Those
things are finished, gone,” she whispered. “I have come so far along another road, I cannot recognize
myself.”

She had been studying Charity with some curiosity, but now she looked away. Her face was white and
still, the only movement the changing color of her eyes, from black to red, from red to yellow. “Do you
believe in Paradise?” she asked suddenly.

“I don’t know.”

“Then you are a fool. But I was more foolish than you. More foolish, and fresher and more beautiful than
you will ever be, when I let the priests of Charn take hold of me and fill my body with their drugs. They
stole my life from me. Chrism Demiurge! But he will pay.”

“Some say Paradise is in the mind,” murmured Charity. She was thinking about other things.

“Do they? No one ever said anything like that to me. No. They drew me diagrams of my soul’s journey.
The exact trajectory, they said, for Paradise was in orbit around Mega Prime. Two hundred million miles,
they said; not very long. They told me I would wake up in my father’s house. They told me he’d be
young and happy, as he was before the accident. They said it would be summer there. Summer all year
round, and there was nothing for me here, after my prince was broken from the army. Just my crippled
child, and it was not enough. I chose to go. But it was lies.”

In Charn before the revolution, some high-ranking men and women had been sent to Paradise
prematurely, some in disgrace and some in honor. They had not waited for their natural deaths. Instead
their bodies had been put to sleep, their souls set free to start the long cold climb through space. “I was
asleep for fifty months,” the woman whispered. “I tell you Paradise does not exist, not even in our
dreams. They pumped the blood out of my body. They turned me into a monster, and for what? Only
they never expected me to wake. How could they have known that I had such a clever doctor . . . in the
family?”

“He woke you up,” said Charity.

“Yes. He woke me up. Yes. By giving me a hunger that I couldn’t bear. He woke me after fifty months
of restless dreams, and I fled down here into the darkness, where I fitted like a key into a lock, into these
people’s monstrous superstitions.”

Charity glanced up at the guardsmen, but they hadn’t moved. They stood quiet and impassive while the
white-faced woman slouched between them, gnawing on her fingers. Then she snarled a few words of an
unknown language. Still staring straight ahead, the men fitted their hands over their ears.

“You see?” whispered the white-faced woman. “They are savages.” She clapped her hands, and
someone appeared in the doorway behind her, a bent old man carrying a silver tray. He came and knelt
beside her chair and put the tray down on the step. On it were some stoppered vials, an oil lamp, a
hypodermic, and a silver spoon.

Crooning to himself, he shook some powder from a vial into the spoon. The white-faced woman ran her
thumb down the inside of her arm. But when the old man put the spoon over the fire, she jumped to her
feet. “Come with me,” she said. “I want to show you something.” And without another word she left the
chamber.
Part Six:
Chrism Demiurge

O n the 50th of October of the eighth phase of spring, in the year 00016, elements of the new people’s
militia had captured the Temple of Kindness and Repair. But by the time they had penetrated all that
way—two miles of courtyards and corridors from Slaver’s Gate to the council chambers of the Inner
Ear—the council had had opportunity to flee. The bishop’s private doctor had administered the sleeping
drug to two hundred of the members then in residence, to start them on their flight to Paradise. By the
time the soldiers had broken through the chamber doors, it was too late. The members of the council
sprawled unconscious in their chairs and could not be revived. Their trials for treason and subsequent
executions were a grim affair, for even the most fanatic supporters of the new government could take no
joy in executing sleeping men.
At the trial the indictments against Chrism Demiurge, the secretary of the council, ran to forty-seven
pages. Offering no defense, he was found guilty of crimes against humanity and was executed in absentia
on the 92nd of October. This was a curious spectacle: At noon precisely, various effigies were set alight
on scaffolds all over the city, for the government had never managed to procure Lord Chrism’s body,
though they had hunted for it in the temple for three weeks.

That season, rumors of Lord Chrism’s whereabouts were as common as the rain. He had been seen
disguised in Beggar’s Medicine, in Durbar Square, in Caladon. He had been photographed crossing the
southern border, dressed as an old woman. He had escaped into a hidden tower in the temple built
entirely of mirrors, invisible to the naked eye.

Other citizens, more practical, swore that he was safely dead, that his body had been so mutilated during
his interrogation that there was nothing left to burn. About an equal number claimed that he had risen up
to Paradise in a golden car.

It wasn’t until the following autumn that two speleologists, working for the University of Charn, proved
from dental records the identity of a body they had discovered in the lower town beneath the city’s
streets. It was the body of an old man. The flesh of his hands had deteriorated, so that his tattoos could
not be read, but he was carrying the crystal seal of the council on his forefinger, and a silver chain of
office around the bones of his neck.

He was found in an old burial ground, a site important to the tribal history of Charn. By then nothing
remained of the old cult of the White-Faced Woman, and the caves and crypts were dark under the city.
But at the time we speak of, in the eighth phase of spring, the lower town was full of energy and light and
a new species of religion. When Princess Charity Starbridge came out of the mausoleum above Tribal
Site Number 471, she stood at the top of the stone stair amazed, for the floor of the cavern was lit to its
far recesses with torchlight and with bonfires. On the parapet in front of her, the white-faced woman
raised her hand, and from down below them came a roaring and a shouting, the clash of metal and the
beat of drums.

Hundreds were gathering to see her, from every corner of the underworld. They surged towards her up
the steps, chanting her many names.

“Better to lick cocks in Paradise than reign in hell,” muttered the white-faced woman. It was a
paraphrase of holy scripture. Nevertheless, she was a queenly figure as she started down the steps: her
rich black hair, her eyes, the dead white pallor of her skin. She was supernaturally pale; the blood had
been pumped out of her body and replaced with a cold, colorless fluid, a nutrient developed by the
bishop’s council.

Charity followed her down into the throng. The white-faced woman reached out her hands, and in an
instant her people were around her, grasping, touching, plucking, struggling with each other to get near.
They were desperate to touch her, to feel the cold miracle of her flesh. For it was not every man or
woman, even in those days, who could claim to have touched a god and held her hand. And this was not
just any god, but an incarnation of the White-Faced Woman, who had spread her legs for Angkhdt
himself.“Onandaga! Onandaga!” they shouted, struggling in a mass around her.

At first she accepted them. She held out her hands as if to warm her fingers, and smiled back at Charity
through the crowd. But when she reached the end of the stair and stepped out onto open ground, the
mob around her grew. Charity lost sight of her among the flailing arms and heads, but could see by the
movement of the crowd how she was jerked and pushed from place to place. Then there was a shout
and a scream, and the crowd pulled back for an instant, long enough for Charity to see the white-faced
woman, disheveled, with her bodice torn and her mouth contorted. She had bitten a young woman who
had come too close.

But the tribal people of the caves did not require politeness or good manners from their deities. Proof of
inhumanity was enough for them, and after a moment they closed in again. But the white-faced woman
pulled a whistle from around her neck, a piece of silver jewelry in the shape of the penis of Beloved
Angkhdt, and she put her lips to it and blew a note so high and pure that Charity could hear it in her
bones and in her teeth. Instantly members of the woman’s bodyguard, who had been standing idle on the
edges of the crowd, cut through it to the center, cleaving their way with sticks of scented ebony. The
mass of people broke apart, and some were battered to their knees. The White-Faced Woman stood in
the middle, with her men ringed around her.

She looked back towards Charity and gestured for her to come closer. “Follow me,” she said, as if
nothing had happened. “I’ve got something to show you,” she said. She turned as if to walk away. But
then she hesitated, because a woman was kneeling in her path, a mother who had brought her child to
receive the blessing of the god. Charity saw the White-Faced Woman stoop, and with a gesture that was
almost careful, she brushed the hair back from the child’s head and rearranged his blanket.
                                                       ***

“I wanted him,” whispered the white-faced woman. “So I found him. Two miles from here, on Bishop’s
Keys, there is a stair that rises to the temple. When I was a child, my mother used to visit my great-uncle,
who was in the council: a long, long, spiral stair. It comes out in his bedroom. So I climbed up. I had just
been wakened, and I was full of strength. But more than that—it was my hatred. My hatred made it easy
to find him. Easy to drag him back; I waited for him in his bedroom. He is an old, blind man. You’ll see. I
dragged him by his head, but carefully. He must not die. Not yet.”
They were on a long, curving beach next to a pond. With them walked a single naked guardsman
carrying a torch. The rest had stayed back to keep the townspeople from following. Looking back,
Charity could see a knot of torches at the isthmus where the two ends of the pond curved back together.
A small island was joined to the mainland at that point. It was a sandy, dirty place, covered with low
dunes and coarse, white, noctiferous grass, perhaps half a mile from the mausoleum. The water had a
strong mineral smell, for it was brackish and stagnant, with no outlet to the river.

“It’s not his fault,” said Charity.

“It is his fault. How can you say that it is not? He is the father of the lie that robbed me of my life.”

“Some lies have no father,” murmured Charity.
“No. But I was rich and proud, and he was jealous. He promised me that he would send my soul to
Paradise. Instead he poisoned me with his foul drugs.”

They came up over a low hill of sand. On the other side stood a row of ancient tombs in various stages of
dilapidation. Some were half-buried in the sand—small stone structures with elaborate roofs. Stone
columns supported the four corners, thin and delicate, and between them stood curtains of carved stone.

Most of the tombs were empty and abandoned. But here and there a light shone from the doorways, or
through the holes in the stone curtains. “These are my prisoners,” whispered the white-faced woman.
“People who have come upon me in the dark.”

In an open circle in the center of the tombs, there stood a shallow, artificial pool, still full of water. Charity
bent to wash her hands. She watched the torchlight on the surface of the water. From where she was, the
place resembled a small town. The light from the occupied tombs seemed sleepy and inviting: little oil
lamps placed on the steps or behind the curtain walls, so that shadows from the delicate stone tracery
were cast out upon the sand, patterns of flowers or fighting beasts.

Guards sat in the open doorways, conversing in low tones. They called out greetings to the white-faced
woman, their voices friendly and relaxed. And there was music too, a low, melodic, coughing sound.

“What’s that?” asked Charity.

“It is peculiar, is it not? I find it soothing. But he hates it. He puts his hands over his ears. Therefore I
encourage her to play.”

The white-faced woman had turned her head towards the sound, and Charity watched her eyes change
from black to red. “Not that she needs encouraging,” continued the woman. “She plays without stopping.
But I have put them in together. It hurts him. You’ll see.”

Charity reached down to skim her fingers over the surface of the pool, scattering the reflection of the
lamps. Then she rose and walked up the pathway towards one central tomb, following the music. Two
guardsmen were sitting on the steps, boiling potatoes over a pot of coals. They stood up to salute as
Charity passed, their fists over their hearts. The white-faced woman was coming up the steps behind her.

The music came from just inside the door. Shackled to the wall, the antinomial sat cross-legged. Light
from a single candle illuminated her worn face and ragged clothes, and glinted on her flute. She had
contrived to break a row of holes into a length of copper tube. It was a coarse and rasping instrument.
Whole sequences of notes were missing, but it didn’t matter. As always, she was using music as a way of
talking; this music was like food in a broken pot. The song, the song itself was the important thing, and
each coarse note was so specific, they were like words in a language Charity almost knew.

“Why do you keep her here?” asked Charity. “She means no harm.”

“No harm?” whispered the white-faced woman, behind her in the doorway. “She killed two of my
soldiers. Besides, look there.”

She motioned with her arm. In the far corner of the tomb, in a tangle of red robes, Lord Chrism
Demiurge lay on his side. His hands were clamped over his ears and he was talking to himself, reciting
verses from the Song of Angkhdt. “Unclean,” he moaned. “Unclean. ‘By the freshness of my body you
will know me. Nor am I corrupted in my heart of hearts.’ ”

The tomb stank of excrement and filth. But inside it was still beautiful, the marble floor inlaid with lapis
lazuli, the ornate walls. Chrism Demiurge lay chained to a screen of carved marble, an intersecting pattern
of triangles and squares. From time to time he banged his head against the floor.

“The shock has been too much for him,” conceded the white-faced woman. “He thinks he is in hell.” She
squatted down and took his arm in her cold fingers, and pulled him upright so that Charity could see his
shriveled features.

Charity had not seen him since the night of an official reception when she was a little girl. Even then he’d
been an old man with an old, fleshless face, and she had been afraid of his blind eyes, his quiet voice.
Now he looked so frail; she could see the blood vessels underneath his skin, and underneath them she
could see the bones of his skull, brittle and sharp-edged. Of his authority and pride, no residue remained.
He shrank from the woman’s touch, fumbling and muttering and making the sign of the unclean.

Behind them the antinomial had stopped her music, and they could hear her harsh, even breath. “How
long has he been like this?” asked Charity.

The white-faced woman shrugged. “My people have no words to measure time. Days, hours,
weeks—some words are useless in the dark.”

Lord Chrism pulled himself away. His eyes seemed huge in his dead face; staring and luminous, they
moved wildly around the chamber. “ ‘I make no excuse; she was a monster,’ ” he quoted. “ ‘I make no
excuse; a hundred men could not have filled the cistern of her cunt.’ ”

“He has lost his mind,” whispered the white-faced woman. “He thinks he is in hell.”

“What is your plan for him?” asked Charity.

“I have no plan. No. One time it would have made me happy to cut out his heart for what he did to me
and to my family. Instead I feed him nothing but the raw flesh of fishes, but he will not eat it. I took him
down to see if I could force him to profane the statue of Beloved Angkhdt, but he would not. I tried to
force him to defecate onto the altar, but he would not. He just lies here in this place, reciting poetry. No.
You understand—I want him to die. Die and be damned. But when I was a little girl, my mother told me
that every Starbridge, no matter what his sins, rose up to Paradise when he was dead. It is our birthright.
It is in our blood. You understand—I don’t want it to happen. Not to him.”

Charity looked back towards the antinomial. She had not moved; she was sitting cross-legged, and with
a piece of wire she was rasping out the embrasure of her flute, enlarging it, changing its shape. Her yellow
eyes were slitted down to nothing, and she was breathing heavily.

“So he is still alive,” whispered the white-faced woman. “He is still alive. But I have heard of a new drug.
The desanctification drug—it takes away that Starbridge privilege. It pollutes the blood. So I have sent
men up into the light to scrounge for it. When they come back, then we will see.”

The antinomial opened her eyes. She stared at Charity, but there was no flicker of interest or recognition
in her face. But she was caressing her copper flute and scratching out one of the holes with a bit of wire.
Then she stopped, and looked up behind Charity to the wall, with a gaze so pointed and direct that
Charity followed it. There, hanging from a hook, was a ring of keys.

Lord Chrism Demiurge had dozed off for a little while, but now he started awake. “ ‘She had no heart,’ ”
he quoted groggily. “ ‘Her skin was cold, her breasts were cold, and her face was white as milk.’ ” Then
slowly, sleepily, he put his hands over his ears again, for behind him the antinomial had started to play
again, a whisper of low notes.
                                                     ***

“I think if we went now, she would not hinder us. I think she is already bored of us. Bored and repelled,
because I remind her of the way she used to be. She feeds herself upon a diet of revenge, and now she
knows I am no use to her.”
The stranger frowned. “How do you know? How do you know what she is thinking?”

“Since last night she’s put no guards on us,” said Charity. “What can that mean but we are free to go?
Look,” she said, “here’s where we are. The entrance of the tunnel is northwest of here, no more than
seven miles overland.”

“And from there?”

“I don’t know. It’s not marked—perhaps a hundred miles to the border. But we can get outside the city
limits, that’s the most important thing. Perhaps then we can go up.”

She was sitting in a tent in the shantytown below the mausoleum, with the map that Freedom Love had
given her spread out on her knees. “We could go up here,” she said. “And here, by this waterfall, if the
way has not been blocked.”

The stranger stood beside her. Light from a candle gleamed upon his face, softening his lost, puzzled
expression. At such moments, his resemblance to her brother seemed uncanny. His fat lips were
trembling, and his reconstructed chin. He held in his right hand, as he so often did, Prince Abu’s letter. It
had become his talisman. Often before he slept he would whisper its injunctions: “How can our hearts be
dirty if our hands are clean?”

He had folded the letter into a square. Now he pressed the greasy paper to his forehead. “Caladon,” he
said. “What’s Caladon to you? To me it’s just a word.”

When Charity said nothing, he went on. “What did that man say? Freedom Love. ‘We live forever in the
present tense’—that’s how it is for me. In these dark caves the world does not exist, except the one
place where your lantern hits, the one place where you are.”

He took the prince’s letter down and started to unfold it. “You understand,” he said, “I’m following you.
I have no past; it’s hard for me to have faith in my future. Just where the lantern hits: here. ‘Get in touch
with Thanakar. He is gone to Caladon. You should join him there.’ ”

He sighed, then raised his head to look at her. “It’s not much,” he said. “Who is Thanakar?”

She dropped her eyes back to the map. The way to Caladon was marked in red. “He was my friend,”
she said. “He was my brother’s friend, and mine as well.”

“Was he your lover?”

Charity shrugged. The question brought back Thanakar so vividly, standing with her on the balcony, their
elbows almost touching. She remembered his high forehead and long nose. “Yes,” she said, and then she
shook her head. “What’s love? Besides, he may be dead.”

With her forefinger she touched the name of Caladon upon the map. “His memory serves a purpose, that
is all,” she said. “Like you, I have no vision of the future. Caladon, I’ve never been there. I can’t picture
it. So instead, I picture him, his face, his hands. Because I need a goal. Something to climb towards.
Otherwise I’d stop. Otherwise I’d stop and die.”

“There, you see,” he said. “It’s memory that makes a picture in the mind.”

The tent was large, smelling of fish and littered with the detritus of the family they had displaced: baskets
full of wood and rags and coal and bones. A child came to stare at them from time to time through the
open doorway, small, serious, potbellied, with long hair and a greasy nose. He was clutching a small
wagon carved from bone.

The stranger made a face, and the child disappeared. “I need my memory to survive,” he said.

When Charity had told him about Chrism Demiurge, he had said nothing. Now with patient fingers he
refolded the prince’s letter and put it in his pocket near his heart.

“He won’t tell you anything,” she said. “He’s lost his mind. I’m sure that he won’t recognize you.”

“I’ve got to try,” answered the stranger.

“You’re better off not knowing. Aren’t you afraid to know?”

“I’ve got to try.”

So later, when they left, instead of heading north along the road to Caladon, they wandered west beyond
the mausoleum, back towards the prisoners and the pool. “There are guards,” said Charity.

“I’ll show them my tattoo.”

They had thought to choose the time when there were fewest people in the streets. But there was always
someone. Old women sat cross-legged in the dust, sewing strips of plastic into sheets, while men played
betting games with pebbles and the vertebrae of fish. When finally they left, with their packs on their
backs, a crippled child followed them along the water’s edge. He followed them along the beach. But
when they wandered up over the dunes, he let them go and squatted down in the wet sand.

From the top of the dune, they could see the lights around Lord Chrism’s tomb. “It’s no good,” said
Charity. “Look at them all.” The paths and steps were lined with oil lamps, and the pool presented a flat
circle of reflected light. It was ringed with torches, and there must have been three dozen tribesmen sitting
around it in the dust. They were racing boats over the surface of the water, tiny canoes rigged with tiny
sails. By blowing through long, metal pipes, they made an artificial wind.

Others sat in clusters on the steps, spears in their hands, and some even carried rifles. But the stranger
was undaunted. “That’s the one,” said Charity, pointing to the largest tomb, and then she followed him as
he walked straight ahead under the lights. And as the guards called out their challenges, he lifted up his
hand, displaying the symbol of the golden sun crudely cut into his palm, the counterfeit tattoo of Abu
Starbridge.

To Charity’s surprise, the symbol seemed to mean something even there, so far from the sun. The
guardsmen stood apart to let the stranger pass, and they knocked their fists against their hearts. Charity
followed the stranger as he marched up the steps, and she stood on the top step looking back. Behind
them, the tribesmen had returned to their game, though one or two looked after them with open mouths.
The air over the pond smelled flat and stale and full of salt.

Charity turned to go inside. Near the door the antinomial lay back against the wall, her eyes slitted down,
her flute held loosely in her lap. In the far corner the stranger knelt over Lord Chrism Demiurge, rousing
him from sleep. The old man had a gash on his left eye. The blood had dried to a black powder, which
had streaked his face and stiffened in his hair. And when he turned his head, Charity could see that he
was wounded in the eye itself. Blood had leaked into his eye, extinguishing the fire that had always
glowed there.

“ ‘I dreamed that I had died in my own house,’ ” he quoted, his voice desperate and shrill. “ ‘And in my
dream there was a darkness rising up around my bed, around my cup and chair, my book and bottle and
the faces of my friends . . .’ ”
“Hush now,” the stranger interrupted. “Quiet now. B-be quiet. I mean no harm. Only there is something
you must tell me.”

“No harm?” cried the old man. “ ‘I was alone. And in my dream the darkness was as cold as space, and
I came down onto a world of darkness, breaking like a star. And like a star I squandered all my strength
and all my light, until I was alone in that dark world.’ ”

“Hush now,” said the stranger. “Quiet, please, and look at me. Touch my face and listen to my voice. It is
not so long since you last heard it, in my cell in Wanhope Hospital. You were there when my bandages
were taken off.”

For a moment it seemed that he had caught the old man’s attention. Lord Chrism put his fingers out and
touched the stranger’s face. He was mumbling deep in his throat; he coughed and swallowed, and the
words came clear. “ ‘Dark streets,’ ” he said. “ ‘Dark houses. I came down onto an endless plain. Oh
my beloved, how could you have left me, when the world without you has no rest or comfort, and the
darkness burns like fire?’ ”

“Be quiet.” The stranger grabbed Lord Chrism by the jaw and slid his hand over the old man’s mouth. In
the doorway Charity had pulled the ring of keys down from the wall and stooped to unlock the chains
around the antinomial. The woman had not moved, but her eyes were open.

Charity broke the padlock apart, but the woman wasn’t even watching her. She was staring at the old
man, so Charity looked back to see the blood pulsing in his temples as the stranger squeezed his mouth.
She saw his eyes stretched wide in fright. “Stop,” she said.

But the stranger wasn’t listening. He was shaking the old man’s head from side to side, but when he
spoke, his voice was soft and level. “Think,” he said. “Just think. I am the double of Prince Abu
Starbridge. But I was someone else before. I had a name, a life, a home. Perhaps a family.”

He released his hand over the old man’s mouth. Demiurge stared up at him with his blind eyes. “ ‘Sweet
God,’ ” he said. “ ‘Make for me a Paradise in all the darkest places of my heart. Make it shine like
sunlight, like the early morning sun . . .’ ” But then he stopped, his voice shaken from his mouth, for the
stranger was slapping him across the face and battering his face against the wall. “Stop, you’ll kill him,”
cried out Charity. But it was too late. The old man’s eyes stared wildly for a moment, and then his pupils
drifted up into his lids. Charity knelt down and pulled the stranger’s hand away, but Lord Chrism could
no longer be revived. A spasm shook his body, and then his head fell to one side.

The stranger let the corpse sink to the floor. Charity turned away. She looked up towards the stranger’s
face. He was trembling with frustration, but his eyes were full of tears. She put her hand upon his wrist.
“Never mind,” she said. “Never mind. It was a mercy,” even though she knew that that was not the
reason for his tears. But she hadn’t time to think of any other consolation. She heard a hiss of anger from
the open doorway, a cold, angry whisper, and she looked back and saw the white-faced woman
standing there. She did not speak. Only she gave that same wordless hiss, and then she started forward.

The stranger stumbled to his feet. He shrank back flat against the wall, trembling and full of fear, his arms
stretched out. In one hand he held a piece of rock that he had snatched up from the floor. But when the
white-faced woman grabbed him by his collar and his shirt, he let it drop. She pulled him up, away from
the wall into the center of the chamber; he was weak in the knees, but she supported him, and shook him
by the front of his shirt. She bent her face to his and bit him on the cheek, and on the shoulder, and then
she pulled open his shirt and bit him deep and hard over his heart.

Then she raised her head. She was supporting the stranger with her hands under his armpits, standing
with her back to the door, so that she never saw the antinomial at all. But Charity saw her. Charity
watched her getting to her feet, stiffly at first, rubbing her knees. Charity watched her straighten up, until
she stood erect behind the white-faced woman.

She was holding her copper flute in both hands above her head. Charity scrambled up and grabbed hold
of the stranger from behind, just as the antinomial brought her flute down on the back of the woman’s
head, a single, massive stroke. For an instant Charity was aware of the woman’s face next to her own,
her cold breath, her lips, her eyes changing from pink to yellow. Then she went down, without noise or
protest, and lay crumpled on the floor.

“Now,” said the antinomial. She stood at the doorway looking out, and in one hand she held her copper
flute. Charity had her arms around the stranger, but soon he found his feet. He stumbled over the two
bodies on the floor, his hands clutched to his breast. He was whimpering and there was spit in the corner
of his mouth.

Outside, the tribesmen stood around the tomb. They stood in a semicircle, three or four men deep, the
torchlight shining on their painted faces. But still they showed no symptoms of alarm, even when they saw
the antinomial kick over the oil lamp inside the door.

She kicked over the lamp, and a puddle of oil started to spread across the stone mosaic of the floor.
Weak blue flames rustled on its surface, making a sound like the beating of a pigeon’s wing. The
antinomial stepped into the middle of it, and the fire burst around her foot, changing color as it rose.
“Now,” she said again, and she stalked out of the door and down the steps.

The stranger clutched his hand over his heart. His breath was wheezing and rattling, and there was a
scum of foam over his lips. But Charity pushed him forward, and she took his other hand and raised it up,
so that the tribesmen could see her brother’s symbol on the stranger’s palm, the tattoo of the sun. They
didn’t care, they weren’t paying attention. They moved apart and let the travelers push through their
ranks. They were standing up straight with their weapons in their hands, watching the tomb, and some
had tense, puzzled expressions, and some were weaving and chanting and clapping their hands, and
swaying with a kind of rapture. But it wasn’t until she had reached the dunes that Charity looked back
and saw the reason. By then the flames were showing through the doorway and the geometric screens,
and the crowd was wailing and moaning, because the white-faced woman was standing on the steps, her
gown on fire and her hair ablaze.

All around her, her people had sunk down to their knees. They had cast away their weapons, and they
were wailing and rubbing sand into their hair, while their god burned like a candle on the steps. And as
Charity watched, the white-faced woman pulled a whistle from her bosom and blew a shrill, high,
noiseless blast that thrilled in Charity’s ears and hurt her teeth.

At the sound the stranger bent double, heaving and vomiting. The antinomial had disappeared into the
darkness. Charity had not seen her go. She had one arm around the stranger’s waist as he vomited and
coughed. When he could walk, she pulled him to his feet and led him forward, up over the rim of sand.
Behind them the tombs were lost from sight, and lost, too, was the light from the torches and the fire. In
front of them, to the left, a single torch was burning at the water’s edge, stuck at an angle in the sand.
Beyond it, half a mile away, lanterns shone on the slopes of the eighteenth bishop’s mausoleum, and in
the town beneath it.

Charity fished a flashlight from her pack and set off down the back of the small slope. The stranger had
his arm over her shoulders; he was walking, but she supported much of his weight. His legs were
uncertain, and he was trembling. His face was dripping with sweat. “Cold,” he said. “So cold.” He
clamped his hand over his heart.
And those were his last words until he died. Charity gripped him underneath his armpit and led him away
from the lights, north out of the great caverns where the blind birds flew, and into the old catacombs
again. She was following the map, and from time to time she had to stop and rest and study her map in
the circle of her lamp, while the stranger collapsed into the dust and hugged his knees. She talked to him
to keep her spirits up, showing him the map and asking his advice, although he could not speak.

But after many hours she found the way. Six miles from the mausoleum, in a tangle of small corridors, she
lowered the stranger down next to some boulders and shined her flashlight around the entrance of a
narrow tunnel, decorated on one side with the head of a wild pig crudely daubed in red. She pushed her
hair back from her face. She shook the flashlight once; it was failing, and there were no batteries. The
stranger had left them in his pack, near the corpse of Chrism Demiurge.

“Cold,” he said. “So cold.” He was lying on his side. His teeth were chattering, and there was sweat over
his lip. His hands and legs were shaking, but he quieted down when Charity turned him over and
wrapped him in a blanket. She took a jar of water from her pack and tried to make him drink, but his
jaw was trembling and his teeth locked shut. So instead she washed his face and talked to him and
reached down into his shirt to touch his breast. She brought the flashlight down to try to find his wound,
and rubbed his flesh over the mark of the white-faced woman’s teeth. He groaned and pulled away: The
skin there was unbroken, but it had a bloodless, yellow look, and it was very cold. Her fingers left a
mottled mark, which faded as she watched.

But in a while he was quieter. He stopped shivering and accepted water and a few morsels of food.
Charity sat back against the boulder, saying nothing, only shining the flashlight down the corridor where
they had come, shining it along the rows of graves, the great stone sepulchers and metal statues of
Beloved Angkhdt, and angels with their scaly wings.

In time the flashlight failed. Then she sat in the dark. The stranger was unconscious, lying curled against
her, and she was holding his hand. She was rubbing it between the two of hers, but in time she must have
fallen asleep. When she woke, his hand was stiff and cold, and it was hard to pry her fingers loose. She
had some matches in a box; she lit one and looked at his face. His eyes were closed, and he was smiling.
“Good night,” she said as the match burned out, and then she settled back against the rock. She ate some
food. Then she must have slept again, for by the time she heard the music of the copper flute, it was
already very close.

Part Seven:
Jenny Pentecost

“Hear me,” said the antinomial. She blew a few notes, paused, and then added two more.
Charity lay back and stared up at the roof of the tunnel, unseen in the darkness. “Snow,” she said.

“Snow. Now.” The tune was complicated this time. The snow was part of it, but there was something
else, a variation.

“Mountain in the snow,” said Charity.

“No. See rock. Big rock, black, red. Wet. Hear me. This is mountain.” She played almost the same tune
again, but louder this time, in a different key, an octave or so higher. “Rock is mountain-small,” she said.
“Sharp, flat. Red, black. Gray. No wind. Snow. Hear me.” She blew a few soft notes.
“Yes,” said Charity. “A snowfall. Very light.”

“Snow,” agreed the woman. “Just few. Five. Six. Seven. All. Clouds now. Clouds. Now falling.” She
played the snow song again, simply, almost clumsily. “Hear me. Nothing there. Snow. No and. Deep
one. In. Out. In. Feet. Hear now: wind.”

Charity lay back. She had cleared the sharp stones from an area big enough for her own body. She was
comfortable, wrapped in the blanket that she had taken from the stranger. She was finishing her seventh
meal since she left his body, a few squares of artificial food, the gift of Freedom Love, but welcome after
all.

The antinomial had lit a fire. At intervals the roof of the tunnel was supported by a row of wooden posts.
Out of a row of six, she had kicked one down and broken it apart and lit a tiny fire out of the splinters.
She sat cross-legged next to it, and from time to time she took her flute from her mouth to warm her
hands. The fire cast no light.

“Now,” she said. Charity was using her thumbnail to clean her teeth, but she stopped so that she could
listen. “This is never-know,” said the antinomial. She smiled. She grinned, and then she played for about
two minutes, a bitter, complicated melody in many different parts.

Charity lay back and cleaned her teeth. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “I don’t understand.”

“No. This and this.” The antinomial blew the mountain theme again, so that Charity could see how it fit in.

“Think,” continued the woman when Charity said nothing. “Think here, not here.” The woman touched
her eyes and then her mouth. “Knowing world, be world up there River Rang, and I child.” She played a
few notes more and then relented. “For you is never-know,” she said. “This is my song. My song. No
name. Hear me: broken mountain. Sun, snow red. Cold in finger and this foot. Hunger after nothing food,
when I so child and free. I free.”

“That sounds like a sad song,” said Charity.

“No sad. Never, and I free.” She played a few notes of the freedom song.

The voice of the antinomial was slow and coarse, her words badly pronounced and hard to understand.
But over the days of their journey she told Charity a story. Words were all she had at first, and at first it
was hard for Charity to listen. But in time the music made a part of it, and then a larger part. Charity was
greedy for the music. She suspected that she would never, ever get down deeper than the first few layers
of meaning, even if she listened her whole life. But in time she could recognize the simple melodies and
even a few variations. In time she could lie down and close her eyes and listen to the music making
pictures in her head.

“Snow,” grunted the antinomial. “Hard snow. Rock. Wet rock. Wet rock and me child.” She was
patient. After they had eaten, after they had slept, they walked for miles through the tunnels. The
antinomial carried the pack. Charity walked in front. In one hand she held her map, and in the other the
torch that the antinomial had seized from Freedom Love and managed somehow to retain—a small,
intense light. It skewered rocks and boulders with a narrow beam.

They walked for miles in the dark. “Rat,” grunted the antinomial. “Rabbit.” And then she whistled the
bare music for the word, the barest sketch. She was strong and tireless. Even at the end of a long march,
she could whistle for a whole minute without drawing breath. “Ice,” she said. “Black ice. Black ice,
smooth.” And sometimes she would sing a wordless song in her coarse voice, to illustrate the difference
between words.
The torch punctured the darkness. Sometimes the air was bad. In time Charity’s eyes would tire, and she
would find a place to camp, to stretch out her blanket and sit on it, and portion out their food and water
while the antinomial scrounged for wood and struck sparks out of the rocks. Then Charity would lie back
and try to recapture the music in her mind, so that when the antinomial sat down and took her flute and
rubbed it in her hands and put it to her mouth, the sound would mix with the music that was there already
in the dark.

At first the sound was tentative, then overwhelming. Charity lay back and closed her eyes. She let the
pictures come. After a while she no longer wondered whether they were accurate, because her head was
full of them and she would never know. In her mind she pulled apart a skein of tangled images and let a
world grow out of the space between them: snow. Wet rock and mountains. An empty town clasped in
the fist of the high mountains, and horses slipping on the black ice, and the dogs barking and fighting over
bones, and the red sun shining, and a little girl stamping with the snow around her shins, her hair wild and
tangled, a flute stuck in her belt.
                                                       ***

Jenny Pentecost woke up. For a while she lay without moving, staring at a stain in the wallpaper above
her head. There was a beast in the jungle, and its head was darkened and deformed. Below, a bird had
ripped its wings.
The stain had frightened her, her first night in that room. Now, after ten nights, she was used to it. The
room seemed similar to others. The doctor always chose the same type of hotel—expensive, gone to
seed.

The room had been luxurious once. It was large, with casement windows and a stone floor. The
wallpaper was rich and richly colored, a pattern of animals and trees that never once repeated. But all the
furniture was gone; the room was empty, except for the ornate wooden bed, a table, and a wicker chair.

In one corner of the room a drain was set into the floor, and next to it a fat clay jug. This was the
Caladonian custom. In the early morning a chambermaid would bring a jar of steaming water and clean
towels.

In the room the air was cold, and the floor was very cold. Nevertheless Jenny shrugged her nightdress
from her narrow shoulders and got out of bed. She walked on the sides of her feet with her toes screwed
up, and when she reached the jar, she stood on one of the towels, to one side.

She was carrying a mirror in her hand. She stood naked on the towel, her shoulders hunched, her belly
sticking out. For a minute before washing, she examined her small body in the glass. The mirror was not
large enough to show her more than one part at a time, and she held it very close. As a result, there was
no coherence to the images. Fascinated and detached, she stared at her knee, her buttock, her
still-hairless sex.

She had a scab on her right hip where she had fallen down and scraped herself the week before. She
examined it carefully, tilting the mirror by its silver handle to reveal a small circle of red skin with the scab
in the middle of it.

She brought the mirror to her face and stared solemnly at her left eye. Below it, a dingy, mottled mark
spread to the mirror’s edge, a birthmark on her cheek. In Charn it had been a sign of God’s displeasure,
God’s thumbprint in her mother’s womb, where God had touched her and rejected her. People who had
seen her, even relatives, had mumbled prayers and made small gestures with their hands. Every morning
her mother had painted over the mark with grease and cosmetic powder. Jenny had never gone outside,
for fear of the police.

But the police had come. Her parents were both dead. She touched the birthmark with her thumb.
Strange that people could be killed for such a thing—in Caladon she could wash her face and keep it
washed and no one seemed to notice. People avoided her for other reasons.

In Charn her jailers had sold her to a shrine operated by the guild of prostitutes. On the top floor of one
of their hotels they had built a shrine, sacred to Angkhdt the God of Children. There she had lived for
many weeks, until Thanakar Starbridge had found her and taken her away. It had been a violent and
painful time. Still her stomach rose when she smelled incense, and still her legs were weak from so much
kneeling, so much squatting in the dark. The prostitutes had bound her feet, to please certain customers.

Now all that was over. Now chambermaids brought fresh hot water every morning to her room. It was
no use. Some stains never could come clean. When she was a little girl, her mother had bathed her cheek
every morning with patent remedies and solvents.

Jenny turned the mirror in her hand. Her hair was very fine. Under it she could see the contours of her
head, bloated behind her ear with dreams and too much sleep. What was it? She had dreamed of tunnels
underground, an empty labyrinth of tombs.

On her desk by the window lay the drawing she’d been working on before she went to sleep. She could
see it from where she stood, a drawing of a human head, with the bone cut away to reveal a
cross-section of the brain. In her drawing the brain was full of caves and paths and corridors, and rows
of little cells. Perhaps, she thought, a memory could be imprisoned in the brain, locked up like a murderer
inside a cell, perhaps forever, perhaps not. Perhaps events and thoughts could be imprisoned in the past.

Jenny put down the mirror and picked up a clay dipper from the floor. She ran a dipperful of water
through her hair and rubbed it dry. Then, before she was even dressed, she went over to the table.
Shivering, wrapped in a towel, she turned the papers over. She was looking for a drawing she had made
two days before, and when she found it, she took it over to the window, to see it in the light. It was the
picture of two women in a cave. They were crossing a bridge over a small crevasse. In the foreground a
precipice of stone led down to a pool of water, the terminus of a small stream that was boiling and
rushing down the center of the page. The women and the bridge were in the background, almost lost
among the carefully drawn rocks. Their faces were invisible, covered up in darkness.
                                                    ***

Fire was important to the antinomial, more than food or safety. She pulled a wooden post out of the wall,
dislodging stones and pebbles from the vault above them. When Charity shouted at her to stop, she
seemed angry. She took the princess by the shoulder and threw her down against the wall, but then she
laughed. “Barbarian,” she said. “Barbarian. You can not know. You can not think.” And later, when she
played her flute, the music was incomprehensible to Charity. It was full of a subsidiary tone, the song of
some emotion. Through it Charity detected snatches of the melodies that she already knew—horse and
mountain, snow and wind. But they were distorted by this other music. Finally, in a storm of desperate
playing, all the other images were covered up and lost, and the antinomial cried out and threw her flute
against the wall. “Hungry,” she cried. “Now. What are you?”
Every time when they had stopped, Charity had portioned out some of her small store of food, plastic
rice cakes, sugar pills, and aspirin. The woman had accepted water but had spurned the rest. “Food for
pigs,” she had said. Now she reached out her hand towards the four transparent squares that Charity had
put out on a level rock. She picked one up between her finger and her thumb. She closed her eyes and
placed it in her mouth and chewed on it for a while before she spat it out. She spat it out and made a
face. “Aah,” she cried. “Biter, biting. No.” And then she jumped up to her feet. “I,” she cried. “But I.”

Lying against the tunnel wall, wrapped in her blanket, Charity groped in the dust and found a
sharp-edged piece of rock. Antinomials ate meat, it was well known. Occasionally in the darkness they
had heard the scurry of a rodent or a bat. Once while playing, the woman had put up her flute. Holding it
poised, her fingers still over the holes, she had turned her head to listen to the noise of something moving
outside the circle of the fire. “I smell life,” she had said.

This time the woman snatched her flashlight from the floor and ran away into the dark. Charity sat up with
the fire for a while, and then she fell asleep.

In time she became familiar with the many songs of wanting, the hunger songs that were the heart of
antinomial life. And in time she put together the woman’s story, words and music.

“This love not mine,” the woman said. “This place. Brother, no, nor sister. Oh my sister, when I am so
child. So child in River Rang, river and I small. No more. Now black so hard, in this hard stone is dark.”

“This is,” she said once, sitting near the fire, relaxed, almost coherent. “River running, in my mind. Now
is. Now. Right now. Ice on the water, and the red rock cliff.”

Sometimes her words almost made sense. “Water,” she said, and then she blew a melody that Charity
had come to recognize: the name song of the River Rang, the only name the woman knew. There the
antinomials had lived, far to the north and west of Charn. A cult of atheists and revolutionaries had fled
up there into a wilderness of mountains. They had no law, no faith, no love, no learning. In the end they
were sustained by pride alone.

And as the webs of culture and tradition loosened and let go, whole families of concepts had disappeared
out of their language. Single words had become isolated. Ideas receded from each other, farther and
farther, as all the ways of joining them were lost. But because the mind is devious, and because there are
ideals that never, ever can be reached, a new language had grown up to reinforce the old. It was a
language not of words but of music, of melody and tone. It was a way of making language personal, so
that every antinomial could speak a different one, yet still could understand each other. Words remained,
simple nouns and verbs, each one suspended in a web of music.

For generations they had lived alone, harsh and isolated lives, hunting in the snow. But in the first weeks
of spring, the thirty-first bishop of Charn had sent an army. When Charity was a little girl, the soldiers had
crossed the river by the Anzas Bridge, and they had burned the towns and villages, and erected rows of
gallows on the hilltops. The survivors they had dragged to Charn in chains, and some were locked away
up on the Mountain of Redemption, and some escaped into the city’s slums. There they had joined with
others who had come south by themselves, and they had lived together, persecuted and despised, eating
garbage, pigeons, rats, mixing with adventists, flagellants, Brothers of Unrest, playing their music in
abandoned warehouses next to the abandoned docks. Many had been born there, half-breeds of various
kinds. But there were others who were old enough to remember; Charity’s companion was gray-haired,
and her face was seamed and scarred. When the soldiers crossed the bridge, she had been almost
grown. Fiercely, with great bitterness, she played the music on her flute. Charity lay on her back, staring
up at the shadows of the firelight on the rock surface of the roof.

After they slept, they went on. In the tunnels there was neither night nor day. The only clocks were in
their bodies. Charity was hungry. She was tasting dirt in her mouth, and the water was all gone. But from
far away they had heard a roaring sound and the wind whistling in their ears. They came out on a ledge
above a stream.

Charity shined her torch across to the opposite wall, where a waterfall was boiling through a cleft in the
rock. She let the light play on the surface of the current, and followed it along the floor of an enormous
cavern. “Look,” she said. “Look, there’s the bridge.”

Even without the light it would have been visible, a span of stone that crossed the cavern at its narrowest
point. The roof of the cavern had pricked up into the open air, and dim light shone down from above.
The water poured from a deep fissure in the roof and fell into a pool, and mixed there with the light of
day. The bridge rose through a cloud of vapor, while the water thundered underneath it.

Charity walked down along the ledge. “Look,” she said. But then she stopped. The woman hadn’t
followed her. She was standing with her hands to her head, holding her head as if in pain, and then she
was scrambling down another slope, up to her ankles in loose sand and scree. She was heading for the
water, shouting and crying, banging her flute against the stones, until finally she tripped and slid down into
a small pool, out of the main current which the backwater had filled with scum and floating wood, and
bottles and tin cans. There she wept and wailed, kneeling in the water while Charity looked on, unable to
understand until she caught the music in the woman’s cry. Then she took the map out of her jacket and
turned her light on it and studied it until she found the cave, and found the river rushing through it, and
followed it with her finger up into the world, and up through many permutations north and west, to the
map’s edge and then beyond, the names unreeling in her memory, for she had won prizes in geography at
school: Poldan, Visser, Medong, Koo, a dozen tributaries and a thousand miles, up to its farthest source,
the River Rang.
                                                     ***

In Caladon the psychiatric arts were highly prized. On the Monday of his third week in the city, on the
morning of November 45th, Thanakar took Jenny Pentecost from their hotel, and together they walked
down the Street of the Harmonious Mind, searching for a block of offices that looked inviting.
Unlike Charn, Caladon was a city of straight lines and low buildings. By law, no structure could exceed
four stories, that being the tallest height that Argon Starbridge, the present king’s great-uncle, could climb
to without throwing up. He had been afflicted with a rare condition of the inner ear, which made him
sensitive to air pressure. When he was crowned king, he had had all high buildings in the city truncated or
demolished, citing some scriptural authority. As a result, the city had a sprawling, relaxed air. During the
winter many houses had collapsed from the weight of snow on their flat roofs, and by the eighth phase of
spring they had not yet been rebuilt, so that even in the center of the city there were open spaces, not
precisely parks, but pleasing nonetheless.

At least they pleased Thanakar Starbridge as he walked along the street: The accumulating rain had
covered everything, as if in dusty layers of new paint. People walked leisurely under their umbrellas, and
it seemed to Thanakar that they lacked the desperation of the citizens of Charn, the wild fanaticism, the
public drunkenness and frenzy. In their clothes and in their houses, he noticed fewer excesses of rich and
poor.

In Caladon the worst of times had already gone past; the countryside was richer than the stony hills of
Charn, less eroded, less exposed. North of the city, under long plastic awnings, the first corn of the
season was already grown—tiny, bitter husks, but it was food. In Caladon, though distribution was a
government monopoly, technology at least was in the hands of private merchants, and even in the darkest
winter they had managed to produce something—strange hybrids grown in caves under electric lights.

In every way it was a richer city. The Street of the Harmonious Mind was lined with prosperous buildings
faced with marble and white brick. On Mondays and on Thursdays the street was closed to traffic, and
the doctors were available for unscheduled consultations. As Thanakar and Jenny studied the directories,
the pavements behind them were crowded with people seeking appointments. Some were making a great
show of their ailments, twitching and shouting, and striking themselves on the face. Others were gagged,
or led along by keepers, and a few spectacular cases were dragged by in wheeled cages.

In Charn, reflected Thanakar, people were too poor to be insane, too poor and too afraid. But here the
citizens seemed proud of it; it was proof of their leisure and prosperity, for treatment was not cheap.

“Fifteen dollars,” said the nurse, before Thanakar had even taken off his gloves. He had chosen Dr.
Caramel out of a list of ten in the lobby of a building that seemed less pretentious than the others they had
passed. The other nine were all psychic abortionists and electrotherapists; by contrast, the specialty of
Dr. Caramel—cerebral massage—seemed benign.

In addition, Thanakar had hoped, from the name, that Dr. Caramel might prove to be a woman. But in
this he was disappointed. After he had paid the nurse, he and Jenny were shown into a comfortable
waiting room, and after a suspiciously short time, they were joined by a short, balding, middle-aged man
in a white suit. He shook them gravely by the hand and peered with mild curiosity at their tattoos.

“Charnish,” he said at last.

The nurse had given Thanakar a card to fill out while he waited. It had requested information of a general
and harmless nature. Dr. Caramel took it and glanced at the top line. “You are a doctor,” he remarked.

“A surgeon.”

“Hmm. Charnish medicine is very backward, I’ve been told.”

“In some ways.”

Dr. Caramel turned the little card between his fingers and glanced at the back of it, which was blank.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.

Thanakar looked at the floor. “May we speak privately?”

“Of course.” The little man clapped his hands, and when the nurse appeared, he instructed her to take the
child to an inner room where there were games and juice. Nevertheless Jenny kept her grip on
Thanakar’s finger, squeezing it until it hurt. Thanakar had to slide his finger from her tiny grasp.

“Go with her,” he said. “I’ll be right here.” But he turned his face away, so that he would not have to
watch her expression as she went out the door. In fact, there is nothing wrong with her, he thought. It is
not so strange, to be unhappy.

He had brought a sheaf of Jenny’s drawings, and he laid them out along a table in the center of the room.
Dr. Caramel stood behind his shoulder. “You are very talented,” he said.

“They are hers.”

“Incredible.” Dr. Caramel picked up one of the drawings, a pen-and-ink sketch of a skull, seen from the
side. The bone was cut away behind the ear, to reveal a tangled web of brains. “Incredible,” he repeated.
He brought the drawing over to the window, where the light was stronger. A small desk was there; he
rummaged in the drawer for a magnifying glass, then drew it out.

“Incredible,” he said for the third time. The detail of the drawing seemed to progress towards some
microscopic infinity, halted only by the failure of the human eye. Under the glass the tangle of brains
spread apart into its component strands. As the doctor’s eye adjusted to the fineness of the drawing, they
were revealed first as a labyrinth of corridors and then as lines of little rooms, rooms without doors, each
one with a prisoner inside. Some were squatting in the corners, shackled to the walls; some sat reading
on their beds; some paced back and forth. Some spoke together secretly, through holes scratched in the
walls. Some slept.

Dr. Caramel sat down in an armchair and held the paper to his eye. Thanakar approached him from the
table, carrying more drawings. “She calls that ‘The Prison-Mind,’ ” he said. “Look at this.”
He showed Dr. Caramel another drawing, similar to the first. Again a human skull was cut away behind
the ear. But this time the brains took the shape not of corridors and hallways but of tunnels and caves.
The bone of the skull itself was drawn to resemble rock in some places, masonry in others. The socket of
the eye, the nose, the jaw seemed built out of rotting brick, carved into the surface of a hill. Farther back,
where the skull was cut away, the rock was permeated with a maze of holes: caves, tunnels, rivers,
islands, waterfalls, a whole subterranean world.

Another drawing, this one in brown pencil, highlighted in red: again, a human skull. The eye was still in its
socket, the teeth in its mouth. Through a crack behind the ear the brain showed puffy and convoluted, a
mass of tissue caught in a net of blood.

The brain had receded from the back of the skull. There at the opening for the spinal column, an
enormous insect had dug out a cavity for itself. With sharp mandibles and claws it was tearing down the
wall of tissue that enclosed it.

“Here,” said Thanakar. He handed Dr. Caramel the last of the sketches, a pencil drawing of the insect
itself, huge, blind, and hairy, with long, segmented legs. Under it, in childish letters which contrasted
strangely with the beauty of the sketch, was printed: THE FLEA.

“What are her symptoms?” asked Dr. Caramel.

Thanakar was staring out the window. In an antiseptic courtyard, a tree with no leaves on it was reflected
in a rectangular pool. “She has no symptoms,” he said. “But there is something about these drawings that
breaks my heart.”

“Tell me,” said the doctor gently.

“She does not speak. She has a kind of sadness that seems morbid to me—you understand, I don’t have
much experience with children. She is my adopted daughter. I took her from a house of prostitution in my
city. Her situation there was beyond words, but it was not for long. Nevertheless, perhaps there are
some wounds that can’t be healed. I had hoped it was enough just to be kind.”

Dr. Caramel made a cage out of his fingers and knocked it thoughtfully against his lips. “Kindness is
meaningless outside a program of therapy,” he said. “And I’ve never heard of a mental problem that was
not physical at bottom. This”—he tapped the drawings in his lap—“this is the key.”

But Thanakar kept on speaking, as if he hadn’t heard. “She came from a poor family. An only child; her
father once was in the guild of carpenters and clowns. Nevertheless, I can’t pretend they were incapable
of love. There are worse things than poverty. Her parents died in prison. Is that enough to kill someone
with sadness? The human heart is such a mystery.”

Thanakar was staring out the window. It had begun to rain again—soft, slow drips which disturbed the
surface of the pool. He said, “I took her from a house of prostitution. They had dressed her as a priestess
in the shrine of Angkhdt. Yet it was a long time ago. Ten weeks. Life is hard for many people—why
can’t she forget about these things? I have been kind to her.”

“Kindness means nothing,” repeated Dr. Caramel. “Look at this.” He tapped the drawing of the flea.

“I cannot think that she is mad,” said Thanakar. “What is normal, in these circumstances? It is more
healthy to forget, for a wound to heal and show no trace. But there are wounds that bleed and bleed.”

Dr. Caramel was embarrassed by this talk. “There is always some physical manifestation,” he said, rising
from his chair. “I would like to examine the young lady, if I could.”
“She has terrible dreams,” continued Thanakar, but then he stopped. Dr. Caramel had clapped his hands
again, and in a moment the nurse brought Jenny in. She seemed subdued. She came to stand next to
Thanakar near the window, but did not look at him. And when Dr. Caramel approached her, she let him
touch her. She bent her head forward so that Dr. Caramel could examine the back of her skull; he had a
tiny flashlight in one hand, and with the other he pulled the hair back from her neck, stroking it against the
grain. He had put on a pair of glasses, and his mouth was partly open. His lips were taut. “Aha,” he said.
“Aha, I thought so. Look. I told you.”

He had combed her hair back from the nape of her neck, revealing sad, pink skin. Just where her spinal
column met her skull, there was a little mark.

“Look,” said Dr. Caramel. “That’s where it entered in.”
                                                     ***

Thanakar took her away. In his pocket he carried Dr. Caramel’s surgical diagram, drawn on tracing
paper over one of Jenny’s sketches. He had proposed making a small incision in the skull, wide enough
for his fingers. He had proposed reaching in to see if he could grab hold of one of the insect’s legs. Or if
the disease had progressed, and the flea had burrowed out of reach into the corridors of Jenny’s mind,
he proposed tempting it out with sugar-coated tweezers.
The next morning Thanakar took Jenny to another doctor. “I’m glad you came to me,” said Marcel
Paraclete. “In this city you will find a scandalous number of incompetents and quacks. I pity the poor
invalid who finds himself in any waiting room but mine.”

At least that’s what Thanakar thought he said. It was hard to tell. He was dressed in a suit of plastic
overalls from head to foot, and his voice was muffled under a mask of plastic gauze that covered his
whole face. His waiting room was a cubicle of white tile, without windows or furniture. He had observed
them through the skylight, and then told them through a speaking tube to proceed into an inner office,
where he greeted them. He motioned them to chairs, and then sat down at his desk.

On a table stood an array of surgical gloves and facemasks, under a sign that read, For Your Own
Protection. Dr. Paraclete indicated the display with plastic fingers, but Thanakar shook his head. “It
is . . . premature,” he said, looking around the room. The office did not seem particularly clean, though it
stank of disinfectant. There were stacks of books and papers everywhere, and dust on the carpet near
where Thanakar and Jenny sat.

Inside the plastic suit, the doctor shrugged. “Contagion is a subtle thing,” he mumbled.

There was an uncomfortable silence while Dr. Paraclete fished out a cigarette. His suit had a zipper over
the mouth, and he unzipped it. He lit the cigarette and blew a puff of smoke into the room; Thanakar
could smell tobacco mixed with marijuana, as well as something else, some sweet antiseptic smell.

“Contagion is a subtle thing,” repeated Dr. Paraclete, more clearly now that his mouth was bare. “Subtle
and insidious. Viruses and microbes, I have devoted my life to them, classifying, analyzing, and
destroying. I see from your hands that you, too, are a doctor, though doubtless of an insufficient kind.
Even so, even in Charn you must have heard of me. Otherwise you would not have come.”

Uncomfortable, Thanakar caressed his knee. “I understood you were a psychoanalyst,” he said.

“Precisely. I am the first. I am the only man who understands the true pathology of mental illness.
Microbes, sir, microbes! For generations we have treated influenza, bloodpox, cholera, sometimes with
wonderful results. We have had success with many new antibiotics. Why not neurophrenia, paranoia,
unhappiness, and hysteria?”
“You believe these to be contagious illnesses?” asked Thanakar.

“Highly contagious. Let me exemplify. One patient is an alcoholic. Well, what is the first thing I discover,
but that most of his friends are also alcoholic. What is more, his father also drank. You see? It is because
a child’s immune system is so weak. Adults are resistant, but a child can be exposed and never know it.
There is an incubation period, of course. I am working with a man who has a history of child abuse. Well,
as it turns out, his uncle had abused him when he was only twenty-three months old. The period of
incubation lasted most of his adult life.”

“I’ve never thought of it like that,” said Thanakar, caressing his leg.

“Think of it now. Think of yourself. Are you happy? No, don’t tell me. Think. Think about your friends. I
tell you, two unhappy people can infect and reinfect each other until they die.”

“And you,” asked Thanakar. “Are you a happy man?”

Dr. Paraclete shook his head. “Too soon,” he moaned, sucking on his cigarette. “I was exposed too
soon.”
                                                      ***

Thanakar spent the evening in Jenny’s room. He had a stack of drawings on his lap, and they sat together
on Jenny’s bed, examining them by the light of the bedside lamp. Jenny was sucking on her thumb and
stroking her upper lip with the edge of her forefinger. She was leaning her head against Thanakar’s
shoulder, and from time to time she would turn her head to press her face against his shirt, to sniff at the
dark material.
“This one,” said Thanakar. He had picked up one of a new series. Jenny had finished with her drawings
of the head-shaped mountain, and instead had penetrated deep inside. There, among caves and
waterways and rough-hewn tunnels, two women slowly struggled up into the light. Some of these new
drawings showed islands and dark lakes, and cirques covered with houses, and caverns lit with bonfires,
and rocky warrens full of life. They showed armies marching, and struggling together in the dark. They
showed people washing livestock in the murky pools. They showed tunnels cut out of the rock, and some
were dry and clean, and some were damp and fleshlike, with bulging stalactites and slick walls. And
always somewhere, prominent in the foreground, distant and occluded in the back, separate from the rest
of the detail, always the figures of the two women were included in the drawing, muffled in shadows and
black clothes, their faces always hidden.

“This one,” said Thanakar. In the middle of the page a village rose up the sides of a great cavern, built on
tiers cut into the rock. A central bonfire illuminated the streets and cast its beams into the far recesses of
the drawing, down into the far left-hand corner, where two women crouched among the stones. They
were in a narrow passageway, separate from the rest of the cavern. One had collapsed against a boulder,
hiding her face, while the other was holding up a lizard by its tail.

“This one,” said Thanakar. He rubbed his finger over the image of the woman, the one holding the lizard.

Jenny shook her head and buried her face in Thanakar’s shoulder. “Tell me,” he said. “Who is she? Who
is this one?” He pointed to the other figure, crouched against the stone.

Again Jenny turned her face against the doctor’s shirt. And she didn’t look again until he had reached the
last of the drawings. At long last it was a landscape, a hillside aboveground, and there was weather and
fresh air and light. Two women struggled down a slope of gravel and shaped rock.

Then Jenny looked up. She reached out her hand to the doctor’s neck, to where a golden locket hung
from a chain, a tiny thing, unopened now for weeks, containing a single hair and a photograph of Charity
Starbridge, taken when she was a young girl.
                                                      ***

That evening, far away, Princess Charity emerged out of a hole in the ground into a light, fine, crystal rain.
By that time she had spent several weeks in the dark, and her pupils were dilated, and there was mud on
her face and cobwebs in her hair. In the hour after sunset she crossed through a barricade of planks put
up in the shape of an X over the mouth of an abandoned mine just twenty miles from the Caladonian
frontier. The mine emerged into a gravel pit, a long, broken slope stretching down into the rain. If Charity
had not been too fatigued to raise her head, if she had cared to look, she would perhaps have noticed
that the entire hillside had been built into the shape of a woman’s face. Ruined and eroded by the rain,
nevertheless it was still recognizable—the face of the fourteenth abbess of a local priory, who had been
part owner of the mine. Charity emerged through a hole under her left eye and slid halfway down her
cheek before she was able to stop herself. She sat down wearily in a pile of shattered rock and looked
around.
Above her the antinomial labored down the slope. She was bleeding from cuts on her forehead and her
hands, and the lines in her face were filled with grime. She was whistling through the gaps in her teeth,
and she held her flute in her left hand. Then she stopped suddenly, and crouched down in the hump of a
small boulder, and the music she was humming changed a little. She was out of breath, and the notes
came in ragged gasps, but soon they formed themselves into a different melody, more solitary, less
compromising, the song of herself, which no one but herself would ever understand. She watched Charity
diminish among the rocks of the lower slope; she made a small gesture with her flute, and then she turned
away. For she had seen in her mind’s eye a stream of water flowing from the north, over the next hill, and
in her mind she followed it, mile after mile, back up into her own country. When Charity looked back she
had disappeared, and the princess was too tired and hungry to go back up to find her. She didn’t care,
for she had seen the lights of a town shining down below.

On the hillside Charity sat listening for a moment, to see if she could catch a wisp of melody somewhere,
an intimation of the song called “now I am.” But there was nothing, only the crystal rain as fine as mist,
drying to a crystal powder on her shoulders and her hair. In a little while she got up and went forward,
down into the world.

That night, past midnight, Jenny Pentecost drew a picture of the princess eating dinner. In that little village
on the slopes of the mine, Charity fell in among simple, pious folk, for whom the revolution was just
distant words. She was too tired to dissimulate, and when they found out who she was they fed her the
first new vegetables of that spring—potatoes as small and as precious as pearls. They made a bath for
her in a tin tub, and then saved the dirty bathwater and decanted it in earthen vessels, and sprinkled it
upon their hearths and fields, their children and their household gods. They bowed their heads and would
not look her in the face.

In their village many houses still were empty, abandoned and not yet reoccupied. In one of these, a stone
building that had been a shrine, they made a home for her. Each family brought gifts: blankets, pillows,
mattresses of straw. And they were with her constantly, asking her blessing or advice, or just sitting near
her, staring at her every movement. They were amazed by everything she did, by the way she sat and
drank and combed her hair, by the way she yawned and slept. Sometimes when she was asleep, they
would come near to touch her hands.

During the next week Jenny Pentecost drew many pictures of these scenes. But always Charity’s face
was hidden, so that as Thanakar pored over them, he was concerned only with trying to find some clue
as to the child’s illness. He had no way of understanding, nor could Jenny have told him, for by that time
she only spoke in whispers, and in a language that was private to herself alone. It was based on a system
of numerology that seemed to have sprung unaided from her own heart, for it had no basis in mathematics
or mythology.
She had assigned numbers, arbitrarily, it seemed, to weather patterns, places, states of mind, types of
food, and articles of clothing. These she would multiply and combine with the date and the hours of the
day, to form a calculation for each thought and action, each event, identifying its position in a landscape
of her own. “5719076 x 9191919,” she would whisper to herself very softly.

She had made a catalog of all her thoughts and memories. And every morning she would draw a quick
cross-section of her head, with the flea growing ever larger, its chamber at the back of her skull ever
expanding. Every morning it would crack the wall of some tiny cubicle in that vast labyrinth and suck out
the occupant into its mouth. The flea was feasting on her memories. Every day the number she had
penciled in the margin of her sketch grew smaller.

One day Jenny came to Thanakar, shaking with urgency, and she showed him a drawing of a small town
below a hill—dilapidated stone houses on a single street. And there were horsemen coming down out of
the hills, carrying the flags of the League of Desecration: a child’s red hand upon an orange ground. In the
cellar of a farmer’s house, Princess Charity crouched under some bags of straw, her face hidden in
shadow.

Thanakar was good with numbers. He made some calculations with the numbers in the margin. He was
acute enough to understand them, partly. He was acute enough to understand that this was something that
was happening at that exact moment in the landscape of Jenny’s mind, perhaps a hundred miles to the
south and west. But more than that he couldn’t understand.

Though he could not bring himself to follow any of their advice, Thanakar was still taking her to various
psychiatrists around the town. On the morning of November 66th, he stood out in the slowly settling rain,
in the courtyard of a block of offices in the Avenue of Bliss. Jenny was undergoing a second battery of
tests inside, in the office of a doctor that specialized in clairvoyance.

The results of the first test had been confusing. The psychologist had come out to Thanakar as he was
pacing the halls. She was carrying a sheaf of papers.

“How did she do?” Thanakar had asked.

She had done badly. The psychologist explained. “Look. This is a test in which she tries to guess the card
that I am holding in my hand. Out of ninety times, she couldn’t do it once.”

“Well, that tells you something, doesn’t it?”

“You don’t understand. There are only four choices—a circle, a cross, a square, and a dog’s head. A
normal person, answering at random, should achieve a score of twenty-five percent. To fail on every
question, that is remarkable.”

The psychologist had asked him to bring Jenny back to be retested. He had taken time away from work
and come down through the crowded streets. In those days every hour brought more refugees to
Caladon, sixty thousand in that week alone. Pushing through the streets, Thanakar felt new currents of
resentment and unrest, and there were soldiers everywhere.

The refugees were all his countrymen. In Charn the National Assembly had banned the practice of
religion. In the first weeks of November, soldiers of the Desecration League rode out into the countryside
of Charn, smashing shrines and killing priests. Always they were preceded by waves of refugees, the
faithful and fanatical, the wealthy and well born. Two hundred thousand refugees had cut the knot of the
unravelers and crossed the border into Caladon.

When Thanakar had first come into the city underneath the Argon Gates, he had been one of a small
number, for most were held at the frontier. But each day after that there had been more: Starbridges on
horseback and in carriages, crowding the hotels and the restaurants. And they were followed by an
endless stream of poorer folk, beggars on the road, crossing the soda plains with their pots and pans
upon their heads, pushing wheelbarrows piled high with kettles and with clothes.

At first there had been room for them in the capacious streets of Caladon, but on the forty-second of
November, the Argon gates were closed by orders of the king to all but the most influential. Under the
walls the people camped in plywood shelters and under sheets of corrugated iron. Thanakar had found
work in a miserable shantytown strung out along the red-brick battlements. A gynecologist from Caladon
had staffed a clinic there; she was a priest of Angkhdt, and required no certificate. She and sixteen nuns
had built a new dispensary in an abandoned brickyard. Under canvas shelters the sick lay in concentric
circles, arranged according to disease.

Thanakar had read about this doctor in the papers, which otherwise were full of xenophobia and hate. In
the fourth week of November he had crossed the barbed-wire checkpoint, to work among his
countrymen. And while the gynecologist delivered sugar children, and the nurses and the nuns distributed
fresh water and first aid, Thanakar was put in charge of seven patients.

Soon he had them taken up, and taken to a separate tent, where their ravings would not harm the others.
For it was at that time, among the Charnish refugees, that the first cases of a new and strange disease
were diagnosed. Later it would devastate whole dioceses. But it was first observed by Dr. Thanakar
Starbridge, in the camp at Kethany, and he called it black brain fever. In his diary from that time he
described the symptoms—melancholia, followed by hallucinations, and then by catatonia. Death came
rapidly, sometimes in a few days, and when the skulls of the corpses were split open, it was found that
their brains were black and rotten, almost liquid in their cases.

In his diary for the sixth week of November, Dr. Thanakar made a note of his own feelings, when he was
working with these patients. He was sick at heart. He feared that in his daughter he was seeing a slow
progress of the same malady. It was for this reason that he took off time from work, to bring Jenny to all
the specialists in Caladon, to try to find some clue. In the office of one alienist, an old, obese woman with
sunken eyes and a slow voice, he had heard for the first time a theory that was later to become famous.

“I believe you,” the alienist had said. Her voice was slow, without being particularly rich or deep. “I
believe you. The conditions are related, that is clear. I have heard of this brain fever. It is contagious, is it
not?”

“I don’t know. How could it be?”

“How, indeed? I am summarizing what you told me. But perhaps your patients catch this illness from your
hands.”

“No,” said Thanakar. “How can you say that? In most cases, death comes in sixty hours.”

“And do none survive?”

“Yes. Some do. In some the symptoms have been less acute.”

“And these survivors, do they have anything in common? Do they have anything in common with your
daughter?”

“I don’t know,” said Thanakar miserably. “Two are out of danger, but they have suffered terrible brain
damage.”
The alienist wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Let us look at this another way,” she said. “You
love your daughter, do you not?”

“Very much. Of course I do.”

“Have you considered, perhaps, that it is love that is keeping her alive?”

“I take good care of her.”

“I’m not talking about that. Perhaps you take good care of all your patients. I’m talking about love. I
mean as medication, not as therapy.”

“I don’t understand.”

Like most Caladonians, the alienist had disgusting manners. She blew her nose onto her hand and then
rubbed her palms together. “Let me put it another way,” she said. “This spring every patient that I see is
starved for love. I don’t mean that in a sentimental way. I mean it is a hunger that is killing them, a
function of the weather and the insecurity of life. In summer we have other epidemics—surfeits and
venereal diseases—not like this. But one full year ago, in spring, there was a devastation on our eastern
coast that forced the evacuation of twenty fishing villages. It sounds similar to the fever you describe.”

“It was not the same,” said Thanakar.

“It was a fever that killed many. At that time philosophers first speculated about the cause.”

“No, it is ridiculous,” interrupted Thanakar. “I have read the history, and it is not the same. If love were
medicine, my daughter would be well.”

“At that time, Saint Carilon Bargee first speculated as to the cause,” continued the woman, frowning. “He
said there were many kinds of love. He compared it to a source of light. He said if we could manage to
break love apart into its component elements, the way a prism breaks apart a beam of light, then we
could have a panacea for all ills. If you could find the precise type of love that would most benefit your
daughter. . . . It is not sexual love, I feel sure.”

“No?” cried Thanakar, furious, his voice full of sarcasm and rage. “I don’t see why not. Didn’t I tell you
that in Charn she had been terribly abused? Perhaps she feels the lack of it. Besides,” cried Thanakar,
“don’t tell me about Carilon Bargee. He was a lunatic. Didn’t he poison himself with his own serum, an
injection that was supposed to duplicate the feel of being loved? He set his skin on fire.”

“He was before his time,” the alienist had said.

Now, standing in the courtyard on the 66th day of November, waiting for the results of Jenny’s second
test, Thanakar again felt some of his anger. All psychiatrists were fools, he thought. They inhabited a
realm of darkness and ate despair like food. What was the alternative? thought Thanakar.

He was standing in the courtyard of a block of psychiatric offices, staring at the rain. The courtyard he
had found by chance, searching for a toilet. A pair of doors had given way into an open space, a garden
surrounded by windowless, white walls, where the sugar drifted down like snow. It was a rock garden:
round, white pebbles like the tiny eggs of some small bird were raked in swirls around a central pile of
rocks. Nothing grew. Nevertheless it was a restful place. The arrangement of the rocks was pleasing to
the eye. Thanakar stood on a path of polished stones, next to a tiny spirit house of bronze.

Across from him, at the other end of a raked path, there was a marble bench set into the wall. On it sat a
boy, young and handsome, with a thin, high-boned, delicate face. He was richly dressed in a uniform of
blue and gold, the mark of the highest of the six varieties of Caladonian Starbridge. But the sleeves of his
uniform had been extended past his hands, and they had been tied behind him, so that he sat hugging
himself as if against the cold. He was staring down at the gravel in front of him, and with the toe of his
boot he was obliterating the careful marks of the rake.

He kicked at the gravel with his foot, digging a trough down to the bare earth. He jerked his head back
and noticed Thanakar for the first time. Instantly his face took on a look of bitter scorn, and his fine black
eyebrows drew together. “Well,” he said, “What are you staring at? You also, have you come to laugh at
me?”

Thanakar found this question hard to answer. Involuntarily he glanced around the little garden, though he
knew they were alone.

But the stranger had a way of speaking that Thanakar, though he had used it often, had never heard
addressed to himself—a phraseology pitched from high to low, as if he, Thanakar Starbridge, had been a
jeweler or a slave. The stranger’s voice was thick with drugs, and the contempt in it was almost palpable,
like spittle on the doctor’s face.

The doctor made a gesture in the air, one of the ninety-seven gestures of self-revelation. But the boy had
already dropped his head. As he did so, Thanakar realized who he was.

The king of Caladon had had two sons. The younger one was still an infant, a strange, misshapen boy,
the source of many rumors. The elder had been grown when the younger was born—a popular, erratic
prince, a drinker and carouser, a singer and a poet. Many nights when he was growing up, he would slink
down from his cold palace, fooling the ancient priests who were his teachers and his guardians with a
series of preposterous disguises. Alone or with a few companions, he would pass the night among the
brothels and the wineshops of the lower town. Enraged, his father had sequestered his allowance, and
even at one time had locked him naked in his room, but he had always managed to escape. Once Craton
Starbridge, his best friend, had held a ladder to his window, and he had come down in borrowed clothes
to be among his people. Poor folk came from miles around to be with him and hear him sing. His poems
were on everybody’s lips—long songs, drinking songs, songs of harsh captivity. In the brothels of the
lower town the prostitutes tied silken scarves to the posts of their beds, to show that he had been there.

But on the first day of July, in the eighth phase of spring, Prince Argon Starbridge had been born in
Caladon Cathedral, and five days later the king had disinherited his elder son. A crowd of fifty thousand
had marched in protest all the way from Starbridge Covenant to the cathedral, carrying signs and
banners, and wicker cages full of pigeons and white doves. But on the steps of the cathedral, the queen
had met them, heavily veiled, with her newborn baby in her arms. There she had shown the child to the
multitude, and they had gone down on their knees.

And after that the troubles of the elder prince had been forgotten. He was convicted of insanity—a long
list of mental maladies that had been dormant in his mother’s family—and imprisoned in a lunatic asylum.
In the city, new violence and epidemics claimed public attention. The Peacock Prince, as he was called,
Samson Mantikor was soon forgotten, though his songs were everywhere. And in the brothels certain
combinations of solicitude were still named after him: the pigeon’s tail, for example, the flutter of wild
wings.

Now, in his royal straightjacket, he leaned back against the stone wall of the courtyard and wagged his
handsome head from side to side. It had been five months since his first incarceration, and his hair had
grown down past his shoulders. It was dusted with rough sugar, and there was sugar on his knees and on
his boots. Ignoring Thanakar, he was humming a tune to himself, a tune then popular in Caladonian
dancehalls:
To the wings of the wild dove,
The winds and rocks are cruel.
I have been battered without cease,
By flatterers and spies.
“I am not here to laugh at you,” said Thanakar angrily, at last. “I came this way by chance.” He used the
tone of discourse between equals, as was his birthright, and at the sound of it, Samson Mantikor raised
up his head.

“Don’t lie to me,” he said. “The door was locked.”

“It was not locked,” retorted Thanakar. “I came this way by chance.”

The prince stared at him keenly and then got to his feet. “Come, then,” he said. “If you are not a liar,
come loose my hands. Your voice is strange to me. Who are you?”

“I am from Charn,” said Thanakar, limping forward across the narrow courtyard, holding up his palm.
And when the prince saw the tattoo of the golden briar wrapped around the doctor’s finger and down his
wrist and forearm, some of the hostility left his face, and his eyes took on a look of sober calculation.

“From Charn,” he said. “Who was your father? A prince of the ninth rank—don’t lie to me. Swear to me
that you are not some new utensil of my father’s. Swear to me—I have heard the virtues of our race are
still alive in Charn. Loyalty, courage, and singleness of heart; I have heard the Starbridges of Charn still
keep their ancient oaths.”

“You were misinformed,” said Thanakar.

But the prince wasn’t listening. He was speaking very fast, in a tone verging on hysteria. “Courage,
honesty, and simpleness,” he said. “When my first ancestor made his vow to Angkhdt himself, how many
men were there with him? And now how many, in this sink of treachery? And yet, I can remember when
I had so many friends—come, speak to me! Are you deaf? Untie my arms!”

His voice was thick with medication, and his eyes were bright. He kicked his foot and made a clinking
sound; Thanakar looked down and saw for the first time that he was chained. A chain locked around his
ankle was stapled to the marble wall. It was cruelly tight, for the cloth of the prince’s boot was torn
away.

“I mean no harm, I promise you,” said Thanakar. He reached out to untie the prince’s arms. But then
Samson Mantikor pulled away.

“Do not touch me,” he said. “You have not the tools to loose this chain, and anyway the place is full of
soldiers. They must not know that you were here with me, or they will take me to some other place. But
you will take a message for me, to the home of Craton Starbridge. He is my faithful friend—tell him you
have seen me. Tell him where I am. Take him this.” He inclined his cheek. There was an earring in his
right earlobe, a golden stud in the shape of a wild bird in flight. “Take it,” said the prince.
                                                     ***

Again the results of Jenny’s tests were inconclusive. Sick at heart, Thanakar took her from the
sanatorium, and together they walked down the Avenue of Bliss towards their hotel. Jenny squeezed his
hand. But the questions had exhausted her, and so he took her in his arms the last few blocks and carried
her. He was limping and his knee hurt badly. But he would not stop to rest, not wanting to disturb the
rhythm of her breathing, the pressure of her cheek against his cheek. She was asleep, and when he came
to the hotel he went upstairs without a word and laid her down upon her bed. Mrs. Cassimer undressed
her, but she was fast asleep. Thanakar stood in the doorway for a while, and then he turned and went
downstairs.
Craton Starbridge was the seventh minister for agriculture. His house was in the Baekland Road.
Thanakar gave the prince’s earring to a steward, wrapped in a written message, and within twenty
minutes he was standing in the conservatory of the minister, a long gallery of glass at the top of the house.
The room was lined with tables, from a few of which, in pots and trays, protruded feeble and
malnourished plants.

The seventh minister was alone. He was a big man, burly and strong, with a wide face and a cropped
head. He was older than the prince, about Thanakar’s age. When the doctor entered he was fiddling with
a bank of fluorescent lights above one table. But in his left hand he was holding the prince’s earring by its
golden shank, spinning it between his forefinger and thumb.

“How do I know that you’re not lying?” he said at once. He turned, and strode rapidly across the floor
towards Thanakar. “This earring could mean anything. It could mean the prince is dead.”

Bored, Thanakar turned to go. “That’s not my concern,” he said. “I am a foreigner. I wasted my own
time to bring this message. What you believe is up to you.”

“Wait,” said Craton Starbridge. He came into the center of the room. He had a strong, open face, but it
was strange with doubt. “Wait,” he said. “Don’t go.”

Thanakar made a bored, dismissive gesture with his hand and continued towards the door. Behind him,
the seventh minister cleared his throat. “I cannot let you go,” he said. “Please try to understand. I don’t
mean to insult you. You have given me a token of my friend. This is news that I have prayed for. It is
because I want so much to believe you that I listen to my doubts.”

Thanakar turned back to face him. “I have told the truth,” he said.

Craton Starbridge spun the prince’s earring in his fingers. “It is hard to believe that they would have left
him unguarded. You say you found the door unlocked?”

“That’s what I said.”

“I wonder. My friendship with Prince Mantikor is well known. Don’t be insulted. But if the king wanted
to tempt me to an act of treason, what better tool for him than you, a foreigner from Charn? Impossible
to trace. Anyone else, and I would know their sympathies.”
                                                     ***

When the brother of Prince Mantikor was born in Caladon, in July of the eighth phase of spring, there
had been festivities around the clock. The story was that even in his mother’s womb, Prince Argon
Starbridge had recited verses from the Song of Angkhdt. Philosophers, the story went, had been invited
into the cathedral. They had pressed their ears against the queen’s vagina; it was a lie.
The prince’s birth, the story went, was painless and uncomplicated, despite the largeness of his head.
When he was just a few days old, his mother had been strong enough to hold him in her arms on the
steps of the cathedral, confronting the protesting crowds. He had spoken to the protesters, calling them
by name until their leaders had dropped down in the dust upon their knees, their hands clasped out in
front of them.

It was all lies. On that occasion the queen had been heavily veiled. In fact, she had died in childbirth. Her
labor had lasted for more than fifty hours, and her screams had penetrated from the sanctuary far into the
labyrinth of the cathedral. In Caladon it was the custom for the queen to be delivered in the sanctuary of
Beloved Angkhdt, behind a silver screen. It was the custom, at the perfect moment in the litany of
kingship, for the nurse to bring the newborn child from the altar to his father on his throne a dozen yards
away. The nurse would walk in rhythm to the drums, and the king would wait for a particular passage of
the singing before he lifted up the child to his breast. All would be performed in silence, the child’s mouth
taped to stop its crying, until the supplicant before the altar had reached a certain section of his recitation.
Then he would ring a little bell, a signal for the seal upon the child’s lips to be undone.

That was how Samson Mantikor had come into the world, taking his place like an actor on a stage. But
on the night of July 1st, after the queen’s labor had gone on for forty hours, the supplicant had dismissed
the congregation. The king had sat, immense, immobile on his throne, his expression hidden behind his
golden mask, while the queen’s screaming echoed to the utmost vault. The candles in the sanctuary were
all extinguished, all but one. The midnight ritual and benediction were suspended; the musicians and the
dancers were dismissed. The king had sat immobile in the dark. Perhaps he slept. But as the queen’s
delivery reached its climax, one of the acolytes reported seeing a drop of moisture run down under his
mask and down his neck. And at the moment of crisis, when the screams burst out redoubled and then
stopped, the acolytes saw him lurch heavily to his feet, his jeweled fingers curved in a gesture none of
them had seen before.

Despite appearances, the king was not a fool. Towards four o’clock, when the litany had been resumed,
he beckoned with his little finger. In the pause between the versicle and the response, Lord Bartek
Multiflex, the king’s first minister, inclined his ear to Argon Starbridge’s fat lips, and in a few short,
whispered words, he received the instructions that reshaped the kingdom.

For the king was a student of history. He had made himself aware of the progress of events. In July and
August of that phase of spring, his armies reached the gates of Charn before they were repulsed; what on
both sides was perceived as one more surge of strength against his ancient enemies was really an attempt
to forestall a revolution there. For he was aware that in the course of seven of the past nine springs,
uprisings in Caladon had quickly followed those in Charn. His own great-grandfather had ended his
auspicious reign upon a scaffold. Tensions in both cities were the same—the people desperate and
malnourished, the Starbridges exhausted and corrupt.

But when his son was born, King Argon saw one difference, and saw how to exploit it. What in Charn
was heresy, in his city was the people’s faith. In shrines and pulpits throughout Caladon, adventists
proclaimed the coming of the risen Angkhdt, the dog-headed master, the new made flesh. For
generations they had waited, fervently, impatiently, for God to come and tread the Earth again, as He had
in the beginning of all things. They waited for His touch.

All winter and all spring the people of Caladon had turned their famished hearts to these teachings. Each
change in the weather, every discoloration of the sky, was enough to bring them out into the streets. On
the night of July 2nd, in the eighth phase of spring, Lord Bartek Multiflex announced the horoscope of the
new prince from the steps of the cathedral. That night there was jubilation in the streets. And for months
afterwards the government was born aloft, drifting on a swell of popular enthusiasm. Rumors from Charn
could find no purchase. New decrees were greeted with a frenzied acclamation—taxes, laws, and
military stratagems—as if even the most mundane aspects of public policy were suddenly made sacred.

And in the general euphoria, people gave no thought to the disappearance of Prince Mantikor. It seemed
reasonable and just for him to surrender his claim to his divine younger brother. A golden cradle was
installed in the sanctuary of the cathedral, a dozen paces from the throne. It was surrounded with mirrors,
and every day the court was crowded with pilgrims seeking entrance, to prostrate themselves before the
holy child. Priests and philosophers interpreted his screams and wails.

But still, there were rumors of unpleasantness. A palace servant, dismissed for drunkenness, published an
account of how, at five months old, Prince Argon’s eyes were still unfocused; how he cried incessantly
unless his mouth was taped; how he was still incapable of reaching out his hand, of recognizing those
around him. She had been, or so she claimed, a midwife at the birth, and it was she who first published
the rumor that the queen was dead, that the person who had presented the baby to the multitude five
days after his birth had been a fraud, a veiled imposter, a nun out of the sanctuary, or else Lord Multiflex
himself.

After this account was published, the servant disappeared. Some said she’d been suppressed by the
authorities, but it was more likely she had fled the city, chased by angry crowds. For days, wherever she
was, people had spat on her, and pelted her with mud, and called herOnayan Kundega, “she who
mocks the living God.”

But on the morning of November 79th, the situation changed. In a front-page editorial of the leading
opposition daily, Craton Starbridge announced the formation of a new political party, a coalition of
reactionary and progressive Starbridge elements, unified by a new political agenda. Warlike, secular,
antimonarchist, they advocated a return to ancient Starbridge values and denounced the government of
Argon Starbridge, which was sunk in bureaucracy and superstition.

The editorial was widely ignored, for party politics had little use in Caladon, which was ruled by the king
and nineteen ministers. Party officials were entitled to wear certain clothing and were permitted certain
seats in the sanctuary of the cathedral. Certain salaries were paid them by the state, and that was their
whole function. Nevertheless that same day fifteen members of the new party broke into the offices of
Dr. Karan Blau and liberated Samson Mantikor, who had been held against his will. In the evening they
staged a rally on the Goostep Road, calling for the abdication of the king. Samson Mantikor read several
poems which he had written in captivity.

He was greeted rapturously by the crowd, which included a fair sprinkling of common people. But there
must have been two thousand Starbridges, young and old, sick of the inertia of the government and
bored by the expectations of their careers in civil service. They applauded wildly the speech of Major
General Antrim Starbridge, who recited in his ancient voice the ancient duties of their caste. “We have
sold our pride,” he quavered. “Many thousands of our cousins have been martyred on the scaffolds of
Charn, and what have we done to succor them? The king has sent his protests to the embassy. On many
sheets of paper he has recorded his disapproval, while our armies lie idle at the frontier. But I tell you, out
of the new National Assembly in Charn a wind is rising to engulf us all, while we do nothing. Now we
must act. Now!” He raised his hands, and on the podium he embraced the doddering form of General
Tarpon Starbridge, leader of the government-in-exile of Charn. It was a touching moment, for on the
battlefield they had been frequent enemies.

This kind of language was unusual in Caladon, where even public protest tended towards certain
ritualized forms. Offended, the editors of the other major newspapers rallied to support the government.
The signatories of the new manifesto included the assistant chief of police and most of the general staff;
nevertheless, public opinion was staunchly with the king. The next day more than ninety thousand people
demonstrated around the cathedral, while the archbishop read a statement from the steps.

Later chroniclers, with the objectivity of hindsight, would say that if the king had acted then, with the
people behind him, no force could have withstood him. If, in answer to the people’s acclamations, the
archbishop had produced the infant prince, if he had demonstrated to the mob the new-made flesh, then
the Starbridge party would have been dissolved that day. But instead the prelate discoursed vaguely on
the duty of each citizen. He did not even mention the young prince. Later it was clear why he did not. But
in the meantime the crowd was full of noxious rumors: The prince had succumbed to black brain fever, he
was dead, he had disappeared, it was a trick, it was a lie, a wax effigy in a golden cradle, animated by
some mechanism. Rumors seemed to grow up out of nothing.
                                                      ***

The truth is, on the night of November 78th, Zenith Malagond, a junior acolyte at the cathedral and a
former friend of Samson Mantikor, choosing a quiet section of the litany, stole behind the inlaid screen,
bearing an embroidered pillow in his hands. That much is well known. But chroniclers of the period, and
even some contemporary historians, have confused what followed, some for corrupt reasons, and some
through honest ignorance. Caladonian legend has transformed Samson Mantikor into a murderer. Sixty
months after these events, the playGod’s Death opened in Caladon. In it Prince Mantikor, a tragic figure
dressed in black, murders the boy himself, after a hesitant soliloquy. Zenith Malagond does not appear;
the prince smothers the child himself, holding a jeweled pillow over his tiny nose. In the play, the death of
Samson Mantikor a month later on the battlefield of Charonea achieves a kind of tragic symmetry.
On November 79th, the body of a man, tortured beyond recognition, was buried privately beneath the
stones of the cathedral. Whether that was Zenith Malagond, or else the captain of the watch, remains
conjecture. The fact remains: In the morning the cradle in the sanctuary was empty. Three days later, in
response to certain rumors in the capital, Lord Bartek Multiflex issued a proclamation. He announced
that the infant prince had been taken to a place of safety, to an estate outside the city, following an
attempt upon his life. Official historians of the period, who believed that Zenith Malagond was executed
for an attempt that failed, account for the prince’s disappearance in this way. They claim the prince was
murdered later, after the fall of Caladon. They claim he was disposed of secretly by Charnish troops.

Predictably, the adventists present a third alternative. Later, a legend was to be retold as part of the
scriptural cycle of the Cult of Loving Kindness: how the young prince, perfect in his innocence, ascended
up to Paradise. Or in another version, through good luck and the power of God, he evaded all the snares
that had been set for him and escaped into a far country, to the town of K-----, where he grew to
manhood.

It is this version that is closest to the truth. On the night of November 78th, between compline and
morning invocation, while Argon Starbridge sat slumbering upon his throne, Zenith Malagond stepped
behind the golden screen, a pillow in his hands. In the morning this pillow was discovered with the
prince’s mantle cunningly arranged on top of it. But the child was gone, stolen away, and by morning
Zenith Malagond was far away inside the labyrinth of the cathedral, carrying the child underneath his
robe.
                                                      ***

On the morning of November 81st, Thanakar Starbridge was working at the new dispensary at Kethany,
in a shed of fallen brick under the city walls. That day Samson Mantikor had issued the first of many
public proclamations, charging that the infant prince was dead and challenging his father to produce him.
Towards three o’clock, as Thanakar stood up to stretch his leg, the bells in the steeple of St. Pandolph
Unguentine started to ring, a plaintive scattering of notes. From the field outside the shed the cries of
fever victims rose up to the sky, mixing with the bells and the clatter of the rain.
Thanakar had been kneeling at the cot of a young woman, administering a sedative. Now he stood up, a
scowl of disappointment on his lips, his head dizzy with nausea and despair. His clothes and gloves were
streaked with black.

Around him in the operating shed, men and women lay unconscious on low canvas cots. Thanakar was
skilled at trepanning, and he had taken several desperate cases to see if he could find, through trial and
error, a way of relieving some of the pressure in their brains. In some manifestations of the fever, the
victims’ heads swelled up until they cracked apart. Thanakar had thought—but it was hopeless. From the
eyes of the woman he had just abandoned, a black bile had poured out over his hands. Choking with
disgust, Thanakar turned away. The woman had been young, a handsome woman, what was left of her.
She was from Charn, with tattoos of the oil pressers’ caste. The marks of her horoscope, cut into her
palms, foretold the onset of a loathsome and untreatable disease. How did they know? Thanakar asked
himself. How did they fucking know?

Incense smoke was rising from a brazier in the middle of the floor. It flickered slightly in the draft, and the
light from the doorway was interrupted for a moment as a man bent underneath the flap and stepped
inside. He was a heavy man in a rich cloak and a big hat, and he carried a small burden in his arms. It
was a child, wrapped in a coarse, linen sheet, and Thanakar watched with a sense of sickening
inevitability as the man pulled the sheet away from the small face.

The man was Craton Starbridge, seventh minister for agriculture, leader of the party of Prince Mantikor.
Embarrassed, apprehensive, he took off his hat and looked around at the recumbent bodies, wrinkling his
nose up at the stench. “He doesn’t eat,” he said, as if that were sufficient explanation for his presence.
“He is suffering from dehydration. They told me I could find you here. I sent for you at your hotel.”

The child was swaddled tightly, so that it could not move. Its head was swathed in bandages, and its lips
were sealed with transparent tape. Its little cheeks were purple and distended; it was close to suffocation,
Thanakar could see at once. Without a word he snatched up a scalpel from his table and, coming close,
he slit the tape over the baby’s lips. Relieved to take some clear and useful action after a morning full of
failures, he stripped off his glove and put his fingers into the baby’s mouth, clearing out a wad of vomit
the color and consistency of clotted cream. He pushed his fingers down its throat to clear its nasal
passages. “You people are beyond belief,” he said.

“It is my son,” said Craton Starbridge.

Thanakar passed his hand over the outline of the child’s swaddled head. “You must take me for a fool,”
he replied angrily. In the distance the churchbells were still ringing; then they stopped.

Again Craton Starbridge glanced around the room. “All right,” he said. “But remember, I have your
deportation papers in my pocket. If you are tempted to make a public statement, now or later, just
remember: Sentiment against you refugees runs high. There is a proposal in the Cabinet to quarantine this
entire area.”

Thanakar had taken the child into his arms. It was snuffling weakly, trying to cry, and he was cleaning its
face with a wet cloth. Where the cloth touched its lips or the inside of its mouth, the skin began to bleed,
it was so dry. “You people are beyond belief,” he said again. “Why me?”

“Who else? The doctor’s guild has come out for the king, like all the middle class. There is not one whom
I could trust. But you are not like them. You are a Starbridge and a foreigner, here on our sufferance.”
He turned away, embarrassed. “You will be given a place of refuge, far from here. Soon you will go. The
child is not safe, not even from some members of our party. He is not safe in my own house. Yet it is
clear he needs a doctor’s care. It is the deepest wish of Samson Mantikor that he not be harmed.”

The baby had begun to wail, a dry, clicking noise deep in its throat. “Go now,” said Thanakar. “Fetch me
a nurse with an IV. She’ll know. I will think over what you’ve said.”

Craton Starbridge nodded. “Very well. In the meantime I have given you a guard. At the moment he is
engaged in transferring your household here from your hotel. He is putting up a tent here, for your use. It
will be very private.”

“No,” said Thanakar. “I don’t want my daughter here.”

Craton Starbridge shrugged his shoulders. He replaced his hat over his face. “I understand,” he said. “I
understand—this is a place of death. But let me say this: You will be well rewarded.”

Part Eight:
The Whisper Bridge
I n those days at the end of the eighth phase of spring, the city of Charn was broken and divided by
bitter factional disputes. East of the Mountain of Redemption, from the river to the Morquar Gate, the
Desecration League had claimed its territory. Its partisans wore scarves, and feathers in their hats. They
chalked their palms with reddish powder, to leave their mark on everything they touched. They
swaggered everywhere, armed with knives and cudgels, urinating against walls, covering the buildings
with their nihilist graffiti.
In that area they were paramount, but if they chanced to cross the Street of Seven Sins, they walked
more circumspectly and pulled their cloaks around their shoulders. The fairgrounds of the Sugar Festival
and south to the buildings of the National Assembly made up a narrow band of neutral ground, but
farther west the sixth and seventh wards were in the hands of Rebel Angels, less numerous but better
armed, dressed in coats of midnight blue.

These two companies of independent soldiery met frequently in bloody brawls. In the precincts of the
National Assembly they preserved a wary peace. But elsewhere they fought viciously. There was no one
to prevent them; in their respective territories, they had taken over the duties of the metropolitan police.
Colonel Aspe, commander of the army, rarely came into the city and was not interested in keeping order.
He sulked in his own quarters, spending most of every day in bed. His officers had requisitioned a small
village seven miles from the southern gate, where their troops were more easily supplied.

In the city, the Rebels and the League fought freely. In this they reflected a political struggle that was just
as fierce then taking place in the amphitheater of the National Assembly. There Raksha Starbridge still
maintained a small majority, though by the last weeks in November the grotesque excesses of the Sugar
Festival had changed the hearts of many waverers. During the roll call of November 76th over a minor
point of precedence, five members changed their seats. The final vote, 418 to 411, was widely touted as
a victory in the broadsheets of the Rim, but most political observers had their doubts. The majority had
been achieved only after hours of lobbying by Raksha Starbridge, during which several delegates had had
their teeth knocked in.

In those days the Desecration League provided the security for the assembly. They were everywhere in
the chamber, lining the upper banks, moving back and forth between the deputies. First hired as pages, in
theory they were an unarmed peacekeeping force, to be used at the discretion of the majority speaker. In
fact they were the private thugs of Raksha Starbridge, and as his abuse of power grew ever stranger and
more desperate, their truculence increased. In those days it was nothing, during a crucial vote, for them to
physically restrain the members of the splinter opposition, locking their hands behind them, gagging them
for minutes at a time, blocking out their speeches with derisive shouts.

But certain members were too powerful to be intimidated. By the middle of November the leadership of
the minority had shifted away from Martin Sabian, though he still held his seat upon the Board of Health.
After he had lost the vote over the Mountain of Redemption, after the gates of the great prison had been
sealed, he made fewer public speeches. He devoted more time to his hospital and to his family. The
members of his party changed their seats, moving up among the benches of the right side of the hall,
where Earnest Darkheart sat beside his wife. The League never penetrated to that side of the chamber,
where almost two hundred delegates sat together in a block, dressed in midnight blue.

Over the veto of the majority speaker, Earnest Darkheart was allowed to provide his own security, after
the third attempt upon his life. The Board of Health had voted three to one, the president pro tempore
abstaining. Colonel Aspe had voted for the first time that month. Standing alone at the top of the
chamber, glowering down over the banks of seats, he had searched out Earnest Darkheart with his stare.
The two men’s eyes had met, and later in the antechamber the Colonel’s adjutant was observed in
conversation with a captain of the Rebel Angels.

That had been on November 63rd. By the seventh week in November, more than a dozen Rebel Angels
sat around their master, blocking the steps, denying all but urgent access. They were evenly divided
between men and women, for Earnest Darkheart was a man before his time. They were unarmed, but
even so, their mere presence was significant, for Raksha Starbridge had argued strenuously against it.
Politics is so often a matter of whim; that small victory was applauded loudly by the opposition. The
exchange of glances between Darkheart and the colonel hinted to them a new axis of power. Starting that
same week, the colonel came to the assembly every day. After the sessions he was often observed riding
in the city with a small guard. And on the evening of November 85th, he spent several hours at the Sugar
Festival, stalking in between the booths.

That evening, at nine o’clock, a spectacle of grotesque cruelty was offered to the patrons of the festival.
Coriel Starbridge, widow of the former postmaster of Charn, had been discovered hiding in a garret in
the thirteenth ward. A neighbor had alerted the police after she had seen the face of a child in an upstairs
window, in a house where two old pensioners, former postal employees, were known to live alone. The
Desecration League had found a secret stair. Behind a bookcase in a tiny attic underneath the eaves, they
had discovered the unfortunate lady and her son, a boy not seven months old.

The pensioners had been killed during the search, but on the night of the 85th, the public was invited to
attend the execution of the lady and the child. Almost four thousand people crowded near the scaffold. In
the words of a contemporary chronicler:
There were so many, part of the gallery collapsed and four were trampled. Though it was worth the
sight—they lit torches, and first the young man’s eyes were put out with the heated iron, and then his
body broke in pieces, all the time his mother was kept by. And though her hands were marked with
silver, and though she had the blood of parasites and tyrants in her veins, yet still she impressed many
with her beauty and her courage, for while others of her cursed race had put abuse upon their
persecutors, or called out to their God to take them up, still she did neither, only turning from the crowd
to hide her tears, and saying to the hangman, “Sir, do not make me wait,” which sound was so pitiful, that
many of the spectators wept sweet tears, and some risked death to call for her relief . . .
This passage is instructive because it shows for the first time a kind of satiation with the violence of
revenge. And it is this sense of satiation, rather than any event or personality, that was responsible for
what later became known as the December Revolution. But as so often happens, it is in the action of a
single individual that the feeling of the time is first made manifest. On the gallery that evening, surrounded
by his officers, Colonel Aspe glared down with brooding, bloodshot eyes.

The hangman, perhaps distracted by the reaction of the crowd, required seven strokes of the hammer to
complete his work. After the fourth stroke, the colonel dropped his marijuana cigarette and crushed it
with the heel of his boot. His adjutant, in his memoirs, describes him leaning with his elbows on the rail,
staring down upon the place of death, his hard, hatchet face thrust forward, his steel hand and his gauntlet
clasped in front of him. And when the seventh stroke was done, he hawked a great gob of spit out of his
throat. Turning aside, he spat it down between the slats of the floor, splattering the people in the gallery
below. “Enough,” he whispered in his harshest voice. “Enough.”

And the next morning he was up at dawn. At the sound of the whistle, when the first soldiers tramped out
onto the parade grounds—a muddy, open plain outside the city, where for a month they had drilled and
skirmished, and fought mock battles—he was there already, sitting motionless on his horse. His face was
shaven and clean, his gray hair combed over his shoulders. All morning he sat without moving, without
speaking in the center of the vast ground, while his troops drilled in concentric circles around him in the
rain. Towards two o’clock he beckoned to his adjutant and bent low to whisper in his ear.
Those who saw the colonel in this period report that he had changed much from his earlier campaigns,
when he had led the bishop’s armies to a series of spectacular victories in the last phase of the fighting
against Caladon. If anything he was less communicative, harsher, more morose, more susceptible to fits
of anger. He was less active, more prone to delegate authority, often staying in his tent for days at a time,
staring at nothing with his angry eyes. But at the same time he seemed more sensitive to politics, less
irrational in his command. Always before, he had shown his undisguised contempt for strategies and
plans, discussion and debate, preferring always action. Military analysts attribute his early victories less to
his tactics, which were nonexistent, than to his ability to forge an army into an instrument of his own will,
which he could then lay about himself with wildness and irrational abandon, battering his enemies into
submission.

But in his later career as commander of the revolutionary armies, and later still as virtual dictator of Charn
and Caladon, he showed a new political acumen. At three o’clock on the afternoon of November 86th,
his adjutant rode in over the Harbor Bridge, into the sixth ward of the city, where Earnest Darkheart had
his party headquarters. He stayed there for perhaps two hours, after which he rode east towards the
Mountain of Redemption. There, at about six o’clock, a company of soldiers chased away a small
detachment of the League, which was guarding the new masonry at Patience Portal. There, with
sledgehammers and iron bars, the soldiers broke the seal on the door, reopening the mountain for the first
time since it had been closed, by order of the National Assembly, seven weeks before.

It was, of course, far too late to help most of the inmates; the bells upon the mountain’s summit had been
silent for twenty-three days. The bonfires on its upper slopes had long burned out. For weeks hundreds
of vultures had been observed passing in and out through the upper windows. Clouds of them had reeled
and flapped around the Cathedral of the Holy Song, disturbing the city with their rude cries. And when
the portal was finally broken, none of the colonel’s soldiers ventured inside. Instead they leaped away
from their battering ram and dropped their hammers and their picks, for out of the hole that they had
made was issuing a huge tide of vermin, rats and surgeon bugs and furry lizards, escaping as if under
pressure, scattering down the streets.

It was not until about five hours later that the first of the survivors crawled out, alive through God knew
what horrors of cannibalism, and she was taken on a stretcher to Shoemaker’s Hospital. Later on
through the night, others appeared, singly and in groups, several thousand in all.

On the morning of the 87th, the majority speaker of the National Assembly stood up in his seat to
protest. “This arbitrary action . . . ,” he began, but then was overtaken by a fit of coughing. Called
January First by his supporters, who had lobbied hard for a new calendar, the former priest of Angkhdt
was still known in the city by his old, prerevolutionary name: Raksha Starbridge. That day he was at the
height of his power—commander of the Desecration League, director of the Festival, president of the
Tribunal, speaker of the National Assembly. His lectures on the liberation of the mind were reprinted
every day and pasted up on broadsheets all over the city. His “New Precepts of Denial” were mumbled
and misquoted at cocktail parties all over Charn. Passages from his book of essays,Postmodernism and
the Structure of Despair , were embroidered onto people’s clothes and tattooed on their skin. Painted
onto flags, they hung sodden in the rain above the Morquar Gate.

Nevertheless his intellectual prestige had cloaked for weeks the frailty of his political position. For weeks
his power had depended on a fragile coalition of extremists. Though his gift for parliamentary
maneuvering was unequaled, still the base of his support had eroded with each vote, as the mood in the
assembly changed. All through the month of November his recklessness had found a sympathetic echo in
the people, as with viciousness and frenzied hate he had scattered every remnant of the old regime. But
finally all that was done, the ancient structure of the state demolished. People stood in the wreck, looking
for the first time towards the future.
On the morning of November 87th, the government of Raksha Starbridge depended from a bare
majority of seven votes. His own supporters, called the Rim, still comprised the largest single group, but it
was losing ground. In order to preserve his power, for weeks Raksha Starbridge had resorted to
chicanery: bribery, extortion, kidnapping, and fraud. These devices, effective in the short run, had made
him a hero to what remained of his own party. That morning, when he rose to address the National
Assembly, his supporters rose with him, and they clogged the air with shouting. Two of them leaped up
to bear him on their backs down from his seat along the upper rim, down through the rows of benches to
the speaker’s platform on the dais. And this was necessary, because in those days Raksha Starbridge
could no longer walk without assistance. Weakened by drugs, his body had begun to break apart. He
had lost most of his hair, and what remained was streaked with blood. Always he was bleeding, from his
nose, his lips, his cheeks, his hands, as if the vessels of his blood were too fragile to contain his life. Not
able to stomach solid food, he had lost flesh until his arms and legs were like sticks. His whole body had
shriveled and decayed, though he was not yet an old man. And when he got to his feet, he had to hold
himself upright, clasping the rim of the speaker’s rail in his bandaged, shaking hands.

Yet his voice was still strong. Nasal and compelling, it rose up to the vault of the vast chamber, calling for
silence as the crowd stamped and roared. “Citizens,” he cried. “This arbitrary action on the part of our
armed forces—my colleagues have put forward a response, which I hope you will support. Soon you will
hear from them. But first, I would like to speak my mind.”

At this point many members of the opposition jumped to their feet, hooting their derision and crying out,
“Precedent! Precedent!” until at length they, too, were shouted down. Raksha Starbridge waited
patiently until the hammer of the president was heard above the noise; then he resumed. “Citizens,” he
said. “For weeks our colleague Dr. Sabian, as well as other members of this great assembly have dinned
our ears with their complaints. Those who support the recent actions of the army—the events of
yesterday night—doubtless will justify themselves on the same grounds.”

Here again he was interrupted by a rising swell of voices. He shrugged his shoulders and then turned to
the table on the platform, to where a glass of water stood next to a ceramic pitcher. But his hands were
shaking. He upset the glass onto the table. It rolled to the edge in a puddle of water and then broke upon
the floor, as the noise of the crowd hushed abruptly. It was a trick to gain attention; in the silence
following the crash, Raksha Starbridge spun back to the rail. Raising his pallid face, raising his shaking
hand, he pointed towards his assembled enemies—towards Colonel Aspe, glowering on his bench,
towards Earnest Darkheart and his wife, towards Martin Sabian. When he spoke, his voice was high and
shrill.

“Cowards!” he shouted. “Cowards! Fools! I heard with my own ears, when Coriel Starbridge and her
son died for their crimes upon the people’s scaffold, how some of you cried out in pity. Are you insane?
Or else, are your memories so short? One hundred days ago, when we first gathered in this building, then
I promised you that I would hunt these devils down, exterminate them all, and not a man stood up against
me. Even you, Martin Sabian, even you. Where was your compassion then? One hundred days, one
month—is that how long it takes you to forget what you have suffered, what your parents and their
parents suffered from this race of tyrants? When you were coughing out your blood upon the altars of
Beloved Angkhdt, when you were swinging from the gibbets of the Inquisition, do you imagine Coriel
Starbridge wept for you?

“Now, to be sure, certain of our colleagues have addressed this question, claiming that our ancient enemy
is crushed, that it is beneath the dignity of this assembly to be vindictive, that we must show ourselves to
be superior, after all. They do not understand. Citizens, I am not a monster. It is not that I am thirsty for
more blood. But I am a student of history, and I tell you, in four years out of five in this season there has
been a revolution of the people. And in four years out of five, in summer and in fall, these Starbridge
parasites have crept back among us, until they were as strong as ever. This time, more than ten thousand
have already escaped across the border into Caladon. How many have we caught and killed? Fewer
than four thousand. Is it any wonder that I have tried to make them an example, so that other generations
might not have to go through this again?

“Now of course, this question of the Mountain of Redemption is another matter, one vastly more difficult
and sadder. It was my decision, and I reached it after hours of sad imagining. People say I have no
heart—I ask you, is it mercy to release a crowd of half a million homeless people into the streets? I tell
you, they would have starved, and we would have starved with them. If Martin Sabian claims differently,
he is a liar. Even now in the sixth ward, the citizens are eating seaweed scraped from rocks, and even
that has to be imported.

“Now, be that as it may, it was my opinion that if they were to starve, then better privately than publicly.
In my speech to this assembly I made a comparison, saying that if a man has just enough to feed himself
and gives half of it to a stranger, then both will starve. It was my opinion that the population of the
mountain formed an ever-present danger to the population of this city, as well as to the safety of this
government. It was my opinion, simply that, and it was taken and made law by the members of this great
assembly.

“But now, because of the policies of the present government, the specter of starvation has receded
somewhat. Now we can afford to be compassionate. Now we can afford to assign blame, once the
problem is no more. It is true: Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, have died. That is a tragedy.
All death is a tragedy. I myself, I know, am soon to die. It is for this reason, perhaps, that I think
differently than you, who are yet in the middle of your life and strength. Look at me! Look at my hands,
look into my face, and believe me when I say that a man’s life is nothing, less than nothing, and that we
should not be afraid. Justice is everything, liberty is everything, but a man’s life is worth nothing, for it is
gone in the tremor of an eye. From inside ourselves we seem like magic beings, our brains as big as
continents, and we fear death like the annihilation of the world. I thought so once myself. But now I see
that men barely exist. I look about me and I see the dead, all those who died so that the state might live. I
see in my mind’s eye an image of the state, a huge, imperishable building of blank stone, and all about it a
vast park, with all the souls of all the dead men underfoot like grains of dirt. Soon I will be one of them.”

This was the final speech of Raksha Starbridge before the National Assembly of Charn. Along with some
other writings it was collected into a book of posthumous essays,The Illusion of the Self . When his
followers fled the city they took this manuscript; elsewhere it was banned. Together with his other
writings, it formed the base of a new book. Brutally suppressed, nevertheless it flourished underground,
and in time a cult of true believers, remnants of the League, bore its message north, beyond the range of
persecution. Later that same year, it was reported, children and grandchildren of these people passed
beyond Rang-river. There in that traditional refuge, they hunted and ate meat, reading the precepts of
denial until language failed and they used the books for kindling.
                                                      ***

But on the 87th of November in the eighth phase of spring, in the chamber of the National Assembly,
when Raksha Starbridge had finished speaking there was silence for about half a minute. Then Valium
Samosir got up to read the resolution, which was designed to make the army more responsive to civilian
government. It was a complicated proposal, but nobody was interested in debating it. Both sides—the
Rebel Angels and the Rim—were anxious for a show of strength and used the resolution as a pretext.
After a few hours of halfhearted arguments, the president asked the delegates to stand apart. Soldiers of
the Desecration League moved among the benches, stopping fistfights and disputes. The delegates
returned to their places, and the tense, enervating business of the roll call was commenced, with the bailiff
reading out the names. Each delegate would raise his right hand or his left.
That day there were many abstentions. People hesitated to commit themselves, for they all knew that
something was about to happen, the voting was so close. And at every name, men raised their heads to
stare up at the vote, which the bailiff recomputed on a board above the dais, and to stare at the
combatants, who waged their struggle silently in this war of alternating numbers. Raksha Starbridge stood
upon the platform, his head bent low, his hands shaking on the rail. Colonel Aspe sat immense and silent,
picking his nose with the index finger of his steel hand. Earnest Darkheart, black-skinned and somber,
leaned backwards to listen to his wife, who had her hand upon his shoulder.

Raksha Starbridge had voted first, which was the prerogative of the majority speaker. But finally, after
half an hour, as the bailiff read the third-to-the-last name, Raksha Starbridge raised his hand. On the
bailiff’s board the vote stood deadlocked, 319 to 319, with 121 abstentions. But the last three delegates
were on their feet. One, a solid member of the Rim, was waving his right hand. But the last two were
Rebel Angels, and when he saw them standing in their places, clothed in midnight blue, Raksha
Starbridge signaled to the president to stop. “I’d like to change my vote,” he said.

Instantly Earnest Darkheart was on his feet. “Little fuck-face!” he shouted. “It’s your own law. You can’t
vote against it.”

But again, Raksha Starbridge raised his hand. “It is my prerogative,” he said. “The proposal was read by
Mr. Samosir, not me.”

At issue was a parliamentary device by which any delegate who voted with the majority could ask for a
recount on a variety of pretexts. Raksha Starbridge had used that loophole once before, changing his
vote when defeat seemed certain. During the recess the Desecration League had visited a dozen
members in their houses, to ensure that at the recount the next day the Rim would be victorious.

But this time, Earnest Darkheart was prepared. “No!” he shouted. “Starbridge murderer! How long can
we endure this tyranny?” And then he went storming down the rows of seats, pushing delegates aside as
the president rapped his hammer. Instantly soldiers of the Desecration League went up to meet him, their
truncheons in their hands.

But on the left side of the chamber, the seats around the colonel were dark with his officers in their black
uniforms. As Earnest Darkheart rose, they had risen too, though their leader still sat sprawling in his chair,
picking his nose. One shouted out, and at the word, sixteen soldiers of the new model army burst through
the doors at the top of the chamber and spread out among the upper benches with automatic rifles in their
hands. At the same time, the colonel’s adjutant drew a pistol from his waist. Holding it in both hands out
in front of him, he blew a hole through the captain of the League, who was charging up the steps. At that
the whole hall erupted into violence, and in the confusion Earnest Darkheart pushed his way down onto
the dais. Leaping over the rail, he jumped onto the speaker’s platform, and he took Raksha Starbridge’s
head between his hands and crushed him down onto the floor, crushing him senseless and breaking his
jaw.

That was the end of him. He was led away by Aspe’s soldiers and kept under arrest in Wanhope
Hospital, close by. That night an enormous crowd of people rioted for his release. From Morquar Gate
to the assembly, they burned shops and pillaged houses, and towards dawn they tried to break into the
hospital. But there they were dispersed by Aspe’s troops: two companies of what had at one time been
the bishop’s purge. They had taken down the silver dog’s head from their flags, and torn the bishop’s
ensign from their collars. But they were still the purge, black-coated and contemptuous, their officers on
horseback, armed with whips and nothing else, the men striding through the crowd, looking for the
orange badges of the League.

By five o’clock it was all over. Many of the members of the Rim had been imprisoned, on various
charges of malicious mayhem. The League was scattered; even so, Valium Samosir and five hundred
followers left the city by the northern gates, half an hour before dawn. They took with them a treasure of
gold and works of art, reported variously at seven and eleven million dollars, looted from the public
storerooms and from Kindness and Repair. Fifty miles north of Charn they joined with local cadres of the
Desecration League, in the abandoned glassworks of Badgaon.

But in Charn, on the 91st, when he was strong enough to stand, Raksha Starbridge went on trial before
the National Assembly. The charges against him—perjury, fraud, and possession of a
hypodermic—seemed out of balance with the penalty, but it didn’t matter. In the assembly chamber there
were only ninety delegates still wearing the colors of the Rim. Of the rest, most were in prison or had fled
away. Of those who remained, few dared to speak; they sat huddled in their seats.

The evidence took seven hours to read. When it was over Raksha Starbridge asked to be assisted to his
feet, so that he might address the chamber. He was sitting in the dock below the speaker’s platform,
which was empty. But no one ventured to assist him, and no one could understand him when he spoke,
for his jaw was wired shut. He tottered to his feet, and staggered to the rail and raised his hands, but no
one could understand him. No one could hear him over the chanting of the Rebel Angels, who were
stamping their feet and pounding on their chairs, and chanting, “Starbridge, Starbridge, Starbridge,” till
the chamber shook.

After a few minutes Raksha Starbridge sat back down. The assembly passed a vote of censure, and after
that the verdict of the Tribunal was inevitable. Of the seven members, five had been appointed that same
day.

On the 92nd, Raksha Starbridge met his end, grinning and shaking on the scaffold of the Morquar Gate.
Spectators jammed onto the roofs of the adjoining houses, breaking the slates and kicking down the
chimneys.

Two days later they climbed again onto the same roofs, to watch Colonel Aspe lead his soldiers up the
Street of Seven Sins, out over the fairgrounds and northward over the hills towards Badgaon. In the
evening there was a terrible storm, a hail of crystals as heavy as ball bearings, which bruised people’s
skin and made the roads impassable. In the poorer wards, people crouched under their shelters as the
rain fell like blows from a hammer on the boards above their heads. Many small buildings fell down that
night, collapsing from the weight of sugar on their roofs. In the morning the rain lay everywhere in crystal
piles, smoldering from the pressure of its own mass. In the fairgrounds of the festival the canvas hung like
rags from the tentpoles, and more than half the booths were beaten down. The ferris wheel had fallen on
an angle, twenty degrees away from perpendicular.
                                                     ***

This new weather lasted intermittently through January. Every day there was some kind of hard
precipitation. Sometimes the sky seemed full of glass. Some nights there was a sound like breaking
bottles everywhere, and in the morning there were jagged shards of crystal in the streets. Children sucked
on it like candy, and some fell sick. It contained unhealthy minerals which affected the nervous system,
causing insomnia and fretfulness. In the countryside beyond the city, Aspe’s soldiers followed the uneven
ground. In barren valleys and in rifts of clay they camped under shelters of corrugated tin. At night they
wore earplugs, and by day they carried steel umbrellas. The rain battered them and pounded down upon
their heads, but even so they kept strict discipline, marching north through country that had recently been
desert. Now, under the deluge, life was coming back: lichens and mosses creeping over the stones, the
cracks full of beetles and wet slugs.
And there were people, too. There were people in the hills, returning to farms and villages abandoned by
their grandparents, trying to scratch some living off the rocks. In a town of fifty houses, nestled in a rock
ravine near the Caladonian frontier, half a dozen families had made new homes. They had raised new
rooftops, repaired old walls. Dry all winter, the creek was full of water, and on the morning of December
1st, Charity Starbridge stepped from rock to rock above the stream, trying to find purchase on the heavy
sugar crust. Off balance, she waved her hands in the air. Upstream, up ahead, a small boy waved back.

She had left the village at first light, well rested and carrying a pack. It was twenty miles to the Whisper
Bridge where she would cross to Caladon: two days’ journey over that terrain. The village had provided
a guide, a young boy, the youngest child of the family who had first taken her in. Four weeks before,
when she had first come up from underground, they had nursed her and fed her with a kindness that had
seemed bewildering in that stark land.

She had stayed in the village longer than she had intended. It had taken her a long time to regain her
strength. And the villagers had been so kind; some days she had thought that she might stay forever. They
had begged her to stay, and sometimes she had thought, What’s Caladon to me? My cousin may be
dead.

Sometimes, lying in bed, or walking with the shepherds as they took their flocks into the canyons, she
had been tempted to stay. She had been lulled into a sense of peace. But in the last week of November,
there were rumors of new soldiers in the area. A skirmish had been fought at Axel’s Cross, between the
League and Aspe’s troops, and then the League was scattering northwards, refugees themselves. On the
evening of the 98th, boys from the village had seen fires on the ridge. On the 99th, the village elders had
brought the princess gifts: a shagweed blanket, a steel knife, and a new coat. They had knelt to kiss her
hands.

Up ahead the trail left the creek and wandered up a slope of barren scree. Her guide waved back at her,
and she stopped, resting, pushing the sugar from her eyes. She tilted her head, turning away from him and
looking towards the ridge, searching for the music that she thought she had heard all morning, above the
sound of water and the pounding of the rain. Throughout her whole stay at the village she had sought for
it, the music of the copper flute. Sometimes she was sure the antinomial was keeping with her, unseen
among the rocks, coming down in darkness, playing music just beyond the limit of her ears. Sometimes
Charity was sure that she had gone. Why would she stay? Once Charity had taken food up to the ledge
above the village, new potatoes wrapped in grass; in the morning they were gone, proving nothing.

She wiped the rain out of her eyes and clambered up the slope. At noon she rested with her guide, and
again at four o’clock. At sundown they stood upon the highest ridge, under the shelter of a pinnacle of
rock.

“Look,” said the boy. He pointed out over the valley, and in the distance she could see the Whisper
Bridge, a single, arching span of metal, built in the reign of the nineteenth bishop to commemorate some
victory. Half-hidden in the mist, it rose up on the far horizon, joining the lips of a deep crevasse. On the
other side lay Caladon, shrouded in darkness. For thirty miles in each direction, the bridge was the only
place to cross, for the Moldau River was impassable that season, swollen by the rain.

The bridge itself, a metal span not five feet wide, was dangerous. It had been built for purposes of
ceremonial, back when the road through the crevasse was dry, and it had supported a great lantern, a
beacon of victory, hanging from the middle of the arch. The light had been extinct for generations, but
there still existed, clamped to the outside of the span, the steel rungs that the lamplighters had used, up
one slope and down the other. On still nights, travelers had been known to slip across.

In the shelter of the pinnacle, in a cave hollowed from the rock, Charity made camp. She sat with her
back against the stones, exhausted, looking out towards the bridge. There she fell asleep, curled in her
blanket while the boy sat guard. He was proud of his responsibility, but in the morning he was fast asleep.
At dawn Charity left him behind, curled up among the rocks, and she left the steel knife, too, determined
not to find a use for it. She felt lighthearted, safe: the trail ran straight and true down to the bridge, or so
she thought. But by midmorning she was lost, for the rain had washed away the route. The boulders were
the size of houses, and the scree was slippery and loose. At one point a whole slope of it started to
move, and she fell down to her knees in bitter sand and shards of silicon.

Cursing with frustration, she continued on, choosing the way at random, searching for higher ground. And
when she heard a noise behind her, she turned around, hoping that the boy had followed her. But it was
not he. Down below, at the bottom of the ravine, a man was leading a horse.

He was a soldier, dressed in high boots and stiff black pants. He wore a vest of some quilted material,
which left his arms and shoulders bare. His hair was long under a studded steel cap, and he was carrying
a rifle on his back. His horse was a good one, sleek and well fed, its horns sharp and gilded. It was
heavily loaded, with a high, wooden saddle and many odd-shaped bundles.

Charity crouched down behind some rocks. She was too far away to see the soldier’s hands, but he was
wearing an ensign, a tattered orange scarf tied to his naked bicep. It was the token of the League, and
when she saw it, she staggered back, twisting her foot between two stones. Dislodged by her heel, one
clattered down the slope, a rock the size of a man’s head, and it came to rest between the soldier’s
boots.

He raised his face. Charity ducked down out of sight, but the movement betrayed her. Other stones
followed the first. Peering through the sticky rain, the soldier took his rifle from his back. “Come out,” he
said. “Come out where I can see you.”

Charity stayed low. But when the soldier started towards her up the slope, she turned and ran. Leaving
her refuge in the boulders, she clambered on all fours over the uncertain shale, diagonally up the wall of
the ravine. She trusted that the soldier would not leave his horse; nevertheless, her back felt cold and big.
She was hoping that his rifle might misfire in the rain. It often happened, but in fact he never raised his
gun. He just stood there, up to his ankles in the slippery rock, while she scampered on up the ravine. But
after a few yards the shale gave out onto a slope of powdered silicon, and the rock was mixed with mud
and shards of rain. She slipped and fell, and then the whole slope subsided downwards, so that she lost
her balance and fell down, sinking to her elbows in the sticky marl. The soldier never moved. He waited,
and in time she came to him, sliding downwards in a clatter of small stones.

“What have we here?” said the soldier. She did not look up. But he reached down and put his fingers
underneath her jaw, and Charity could smell the dust on his hand, the cinnabar dye that the soldiers used
to cover their tattoos. It left a mark upon her cheek. He used no force; he didn’t have to. But she could
feel his strength, and so she turned her face to look at him.

It had been a young, trim soldier who had accosted her with the same gesture, upon the stair in Mrs.
Soapwood’s house, the brothel in the Python Road. This man was younger still, but he looked tired.
There was sugar crusted in the corners of his eyes, and a bandage on his collarbone. He had broken his
front tooth. But his smile was the same, and the courtesy with which he helped her to her feet.

“What have we here?” he repeated, and then he pushed the hair back from her face.

As she had upon the staircase, she had knotted her hands into fists. But with insinuating ease he coaxed
open her fingers and rubbed away some of the mud. And when he saw the silver rose, he clicked his
tongue. Once more he touched her face, polluting the skin next to her eye while she said nothing. But then
his smile widened to a grin. He took her hand again and rubbed the skin under her thumb. Then, with a
movement that was neither fast nor slow, he forced her hand behind her, turning her around so that he
stood in back of her. He forced her hand up between her shoulderblades and then let go, almost before
she felt the pain. She stumbled forward and the soldier followed her, stopping, when they passed his
horse, to pick up the end of the halter. The horse had wandered a few feet away, searching for insects
among the rocks.

“Straight on,” said the soldier. “Don’t talk.” He touched her on the back with the barrel of his rifle, and
pointed up the bowl of the ravine. It was a different way than Charity had chosen; she had been aiming
for the ridge, up to the right. The soldier’s way was easier, more suitable for horses. In time they reached
the banks of a small stream. It had been flowing through the rocks beneath their feet. She had heard it
gurgling and coughing for many minutes before it rose up through a pile of rock debris.

Behind her the soldier was singing in a sweet, gentle voice. It was a love song, but he had forgotten many
of the words, and so he filled the gaps with nonsense syllables, laughing to himself. He stopped at the
stream to let the horse refresh itself. Charity moved ahead, and he didn’t try to restrain her, only followed
her when he was through, up over the saddle of the land, and into a small valley.

In time they came to a small camp: five tents in a circle next to a clear pool. The sky was threatening and
overcast, but the rain had stopped. Charity was grateful for the quiet. She ran her fingers through her hair.
“Where is your commander?” she said suddenly. The valley seemed deserted.

“He was killed at Axel’s Cross. We are equals—six of us. The rest are foraging.” The soldier squinted at
the sky. “I don’t expect them back tonight.”

Charity sat down on a rock above the pool. “I was lucky,” said the soldier. “Look at this—real wood. I
found it in a mine shaft, south of here.” As he spoke, he was unloading the bundles from his horse.

Charity looked down into the pool. She took off her quilted cap and reached down into the pool to wash
her face. “Wash yourself,” suggested the soldier. “You can’t be used to this.” Then he laughed. “What
are you doing here? Starbridge, aren’t you?” The soldier smiled and returned to work.

He heaved the saddle off his horse’s back, and from the mouth of a nearby tent he pulled a long, quilted
blanket. After rubbing down the horse and combing out its tail and mane with a steel comb, he hauled the
blanket over the beast’s head. The cloth was fitted into sections. Long flaps hung down over the animal’s
flanks and legs, but they were tied up tight around its buttocks and its neck. Over its head the soldier
fitted a kind of hood, covering its eyes but leaving its beak exposed, protruding through a hole in the
material. Then he walked around the animal, fastening buckles, opening and closing zippers, until the
beast was swaddled to his satisfaction. Then, last of all, he pulled a plastic bucket from his tent, and
Charity could see that it was full of slugs.

All that time Charity had been washing herself as best she could, at first more out of nervousness than any
desire to be clean. But it felt good to wipe the sugar from her face, to wash the mud out of her hair. As
she did so, the familiar movements took on a kind of rhythm that was comforting. It soothed her and
made her feel more powerful, as if she were preparing herself physically for what she had to do. When
the soldier is asleep, she thought, I will break away. I will break away in darkness, before his friends
come back.

At that moment came a groaning, tearing sound from far away, a metallic creaking on the wind. The
soldier stopped and looked up towards the east, holding the bucket of slugs between his hands. “The
Whisper Bridge,” he said. “Is that where you were headed?”

“And you?”

He shrugged. “I’ve got a lot to carry. And a horse. Besides, I can’t imagine that I’d be welcome at the
border, scum like me.”
As he spoke, he reached one hand in through the hole over the horse’s mouth, and he was fussing with
the bridle there. A hook was sewn into the blanket underneath the horse’s head; he brought the bucket
up and hooked it by its handle.

Through the open hole, Charity could see the thick, cruel beak dig down into the meat. Sick to her
stomach, she turned her face away and watched the soldier rummage through her pack. He was clicking
his tongue in pleasure over her small bag of food. The villagers had given her potatoes and a container
filled with isinglass.

“This is good,” he said, looking up at her and smiling. “We’ll have a feast. I’ve got chocolates and
candied ginger, and of course all kinds of wine, but no food—where did you find this? I’ve been eating
candy for two days.”

In the open space between the tents, the soldier made a fire. As evening fell, slowly the flames became
visible to Charity as she sat by the pool. The rain had stopped, and at intervals there was a breath of
wind, accompanied always by the music of the bridge. At other times the soldier sang, as he pulled wood
from his canvas bags and broke it into shards, as he watered his horse and tethered it outside the circle of
the light. He was boiling the potatoes in a bucket on the fire.

Yet all the time he was watching Charity closely, and his gun was always near to hand. Once, while he
was squatting by the fire, he bent down with his back to her. She got up quickly, silently, but then she
noticed he was staring back at her, even while his hands were busy with the fire. He was grinning back at
her through his own legs, his face framed by his own body, upside down.

Then, when it was almost dark, he called to her. He came out from the brightness of the fire to stand near
where she was sitting. He was carrying some clothing in his hands. She couldn’t see the color, but it
seemed light and insubstantial. He laid it carefully upon a rock. “Put this on,” he said, and when she made
no motion, he frowned. “Do as I say. People can be brutal. I want to be kind.” He had a knife in his belt,
a cruel, hooked blade.

Charity took the dress into her hands, unfolded it, and laid it out. It was made of spider gossamer and
gold embroidery, miraculous and beautiful. “Besides,” said the soldier. “I didn’t think you’d be offended.
It is part of the wardrobe of the bishop of Charn.”

Charity bowed her head. “No,” she murmured softly. “I can’t wear her clothes. She’s dead.”

Again the soldier put his hand out to touch her cheek. “You’ll do as I say,” he told her, his voice no
louder than her own. “You will. How can I know that I exist? By what I make you do.” He was playing
with her hair.

“Go change,” he said. “There.” He gestured towards the entrance of the largest tent, but she did nothing,
only sat there with the bishop’s dress upon her lap.

“Besides,” the soldier said after a moment. “If it makes you feel better, she may not be dead.”

He had a pouch of canvas hanging from his belt. He reached into it and pulled out a small silver ball. It
was streaked with dirt and sugar, but when he knelt down by Charity she could see how fine it was, the
silver apple of the world, with the continents engraved in silver gilt.

“We were the first in Kindness and Repair,” continued the soldier. “Jonas and me. When we broke in,
her funeral pyre was still smoking, and Earnest Darkheart offered us a hundred dollars to comb through
the ashes. There was nothing there. No bones, nothing. Then we broke into the grave where they had
laid her lover. The heretic. The cannibal. But it was empty.”
Charity shrugged, but he went on: “I know that doesn’t prove a thing. But we must have taken close to a
thousand prisoners. Not one had seen her die—actually seen her burning in the flesh. They all said that
they had seen a vision, a fruit tree on fire in the middle of the courtyard.”

The soldier was excited. He was rubbing the silver apple on his pants, smudging its surface with his dirty
fingers. “This is the fruit I found,” he said. “I found it in her prison cell, in Kindness and Repair. The door
was standing open and the room was wrecked. I found it underneath her bed.”

A wind had sprung up from the south, full of sugar grit. Charity hugged her arms around her chest. “Tell
me what it says,” resumed the soldier. He turned the apple in his hand. “Summer continents,” he said.
“The shorelines are all different. Tell me what it says.” Charity could make out a line of Starbridge script
in the ocean underneath his thumb.

“ ‘Look for me among the days to come,’ ” she read.

“There!” the man exulted, rising to his feet. He tossed the apple in the air and then replaced it in his
pouch. He was smiling and laughing, and then his face turned cruel. “There,” he said, drawing his knife.
“And here you are. You be the bishop now.” With his other hand he pointed to the tent.

It was a rectangular structure perhaps twelve feet long. Outside, a small lamp was burning, a kerosene
lantern with a wire handle.

Charity took it with her when she stepped inside. She ducked under the flap, but in fact the tent was
almost tall enough for her to stand erect. And when she lifted up the lantern, she was astonished, for the
light fell crookedly on an enormous pile of wealth: carpets, ingots, tapestries, and loose jewels; rolled-up
canvases, and balls of musk; vials of attar, and carved gold. It was loot from the temples and the palaces
of Charn, her family’s wealth, and to Charity the sight of it was heartbreaking in a way she couldn’t
analyze. She sat down upon a roll of silk brocade and began to cry.

But in a little while she felt stronger, less afraid. Thousands had died, yet she was still alive. Surely that
could not have been by chance—surely she was not meant to die here, after all? She put the lantern
down upon an empty section of the floor.

The soldier shouted at her from outside the tent, something she couldn’t hear. She blocked it from her
mind. She picked up an embroidered linen towel from a pile, and with it she rubbed the sugar from her
hair, and wiped her face and arms. She stripped off her wet clothes and rubbed her body clean, until her
skin felt fresh and hot. Then she unrolled the bishop’s dress. It was in two parts, a loose outer garment
and a sheer white slip. Made for a smaller woman, it fit well enough, though it was snug around her
breasts and hips. And the softness of the silk made her feel better just to touch it. Her skin remembered
the old feeling. All through her journey she had dressed in borrowed clothes; this, finally, was a garment
suitable for her. Putting it on, she felt a flush of strength.

In a bronzewood chest she found a necklace of gold beads and malachite. The holes in her earlobes and
nostrils had grown closed; she passed over a tray of earrings and jewelled studs, and selected instead a
golden bracelet, and clasped it to her wrist. It hung down over the back of her right hand, a web of
interlocking chains, fastened to her fingers with gold rings. It jingled when she moved her hand.

Again, outside, she heard the soldier’s voice but took no notice. She sat cross-legged on a carpet,
rubbing her nails. In a lower section of the chest she found a case of aromatic powders: kohl, crushed
amber, and antimony. With a rat-tailed brush she traced a line of gold along the hard muscles of her jaw,
and rimmed her eyes with indigo. She put a drop of kohl into each eye.

The brush was long and made of silver, intricately carved and sharpened to a point. She held it
suspended above her eye, staring into the mirror that was set into the back of the box. She had not seen
her own face in a long time.

She was still sitting there when the soldier came into the tent. He too had washed and changed his
clothes. He wore a satin shirt with a ripped sleeve. In one hand he carried an open bottle of champagne,
and in the other a tin plate of food. He ducked his head under the tent flap and then stood in the doorway
looking down at her. Already he smelled drunk, and he wavered a little on his feet. She couldn’t see his
face. The lantern threw a soft and peaceful light.

“I’ve brought you some food,” he said. Two white, round potatoes rolled along the edge of his tin plate.

“You take them,” said Charity. Her voice had no expression, and she didn’t look at him. Only she sat
with the brush poised over her eye.

“Not good enough, I guess,” complained the soldier. But he shifted the neck of the bottle to the crook
between his fifth and smallest fingers, and with his forefinger and thumb he picked up the potatoes, one
after the other, and put them on his tongue. He closed his eyes and crushed them in his mouth, and
washed them down with wine.

“There’s chocolate in the bag,” he said, wiping his lips. He nodded towards the corner. But when Charity
made no movement, he grunted: “I don’t blame you. Six weeks ago I had my first piece, and I thought
I’d never get enough. Now . . .” He shook his head.

Charity sat still, and admired the lamplight on the canvas of the tent, and on the heaps of Starbridge
treasure. The gold, especially, seemed to glow. On a pile of maps and manuscripts in the corner of the
tent, fourteen golden statues lay in a line, arranged upon their backs. There was Angkhdt the Lord of
Animals, and Angkhdt the God of Light, and Angkhdt the Dancing Master, and Angkhdt of a Thousand
Eyes, and Angkhdt dismembered in the Warlock’s tomb, and Angkhdt the God of Rapture, his penis stiff
and hard, and winking with encrusted gems.

The shadows moved. The soldier made a movement with the bottle in his hand. “Take some,” he said.
And when Charity made no reply, he stepped forward, away from the entrance of the tent, holding out
the bottle by its neck. “Take some,” he repeated. “I want you to enjoy it. Enjoy it when I . . . when I fuck
you.”

At that, Charity drew her eyebrows together, and knotted her forehead into a frown. She looked at the
soldier for the first time since he had come into the tent, and she studied his face and clothes and hair, and
saw for the first time how young he was, how vulnerable, how dangerous. A woman has a kind of
power, she thought, her mind slow and sad.

She had been holding her silver paintbrush in the air, poised between them like a weapon. “I am not
making myself beautiful for you,” she said.

“No?”

“No. Tomorrow I will be in Caladon.”

The soldier took another swig of wine. “We’ll see about that,” he said. “When the rest get back, then
we’ll see. The last woman we had here, she lasted a long time.”

Charity looked at the lamplight on the soldier’s young face. She remembered part of a song that the
antinomial had taught her, one of the many kinds of fire songs, and this one was about shadows on an
uneven surface when the lamplight touched it like a finger. “Not for you,” she said. “Not for you and not
for them. You think I am a whore, but I am not. I am Charity Starbridge, princess of the seventh rank. I
am not the woman for your stupid games.”

The soldier sat down in front of her. “What a pain in the ass,” he grumbled, but Charity wasn’t listening.
The lamplight fell obliquely on the moving canvas near her head. Her mind was full of songs and wordless
memories. And then suddenly she became aware of something in the tent, an object that protruded at an
angle from a pile of gold and gems. It was a length of copper pipe, with a row of holes punched into its
side.

With a cry, Charity lowered the silver paintbrush and reached forward. For many minutes, without seeing
it, she had been staring at the copper flute. Now suddenly she understood why the fire music was so
fresh in her, the presence of the antinomial so imperative. With a cry, she reached forward and plucked
the flute out of the pile of gold. The soldier shied away, reaching for his knife, but Charity did nothing.
Only she sat cross-legged, grasping the flute in her left hand, feeling unexpected strength course through
her. “What is this?” she cried. “Where did you find this?”

The soldier looked at her warily, his hand upon his knife. Then he shrugged. “It belonged to a woman
who was here.”

Again Charity felt the music surge inside of her, tangled fire songs, snatches of memory. “Where is she?”
she cried. “Where is she now?”

The soldier set the bottle down between them on the carpet. It was empty. “She ran away,” he said.
“She bit through her ropes and ran away.”

He was the kind of person who finds it hard to ignore a question. He had an instinct for the truth, and he
was young and nervous. Charity felt that with a reflex of her mind, and felt where her advantage lay.

More than that, there was something about this subject that still puzzled him. “Her teeth were sharp,” he
said. “She bit through the gag between her teeth. The ropes around her hands. She stole one of the
horses. Jonas said that he would kill her. He rode after her, but never came back. That was a week ago.”

“She escaped?”

The soldier shrugged. “Who knows? I didn’t care. She was an ugly brute. Ungrateful. We rescued her
from farmers who were trying to kill her. On the riverbank. They were hitting her with shovels, but we
chased them off. That first night she bit a hole in Joney’s cheek.”

“But did you know? Did you understand what she was?”

The soldier frowned. “Of course. We could hear the sounds she made. She was a meat eater.
Antinomial. Marco wanted to kill her right away. But Jonas and the rest—besides, I am not like them. I
had read the speaker’s book.”

He had been staring at the flute in Charity’s hand. But then he looked up at her face. “Enough of that,” he
said. “Besides, what do you know about it? No—don’t answer that. I found you, and I want you. Before
the rest get back. I want you first.”

Impatient, Charity shook her head. “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me what happened. Later, perhaps I’ll give
you what you want. You’d like that better, wouldn’t you?”

A gust of wind shook the tent, bringing them the music from the Whisper Bridge. The soldier turned his
head, as if he were listening to something else, far in the distance. Charity took advantage of the moment
to slip the silver paintbrush into the sleeve of her silk gown. When the soldier turned back she was
frowning at him, and she put the flute down on the floor beside the bottle of champagne.

The soldier shrugged. “I’m not like them,” he said at last. With unsteady fingers he reached into the top of
his left boot, and withdrew a stained and battered pamphlet. It was entitledThe Redundancy of Suicide
in crude block letters. There was no author’s name. But Charity recognized the coarse yellow paper on
which Raksha Starbridge printed his tracts.

The pamphlet was much smudged with orange dye. The soldier leafed through it, and then ran his finger
down the margin of one page. “Listen to what the speaker says,” he said. And then he began to read,
badly and very slowly, mispronouncing many words.

“ ‘How then,’ ” he said, “ ‘can we know that we exist? Surely not by our own sensations, for, as we
have seen, such subjective information is worth nothing. God created man, but God does not exist, that
much is clear. What does that say about the universe, to know that its architect and builder was fictitious?
No, we cannot look for proof outside ourselves.’ ”

The soldier broke off in the midst of reading. “You understand,” he said. “Look—here in your eyes, I see
something. I talk, you talk. I know that I’m alive. But what if that is part of it—just nothing, just two
ghosts? Two ghosts, trying to fool themselves? But that woman—so I thought, here is a woman who is
free. No future. No past. No name. We all say that God does not exist; here was a woman, finally, who
knew it. Not just in her brain, but in her heart.”

The soldier laid the book aside. After a little while he went on: “We tied her up. This was a week ago.
The others were asleep; I got up and went outside. It was raining. So dark. Only in the darkness I could
hear her breathing, in another tent. They had tied a rope around her mouth, but she was making a noise.
Whistling in the dark. Music. Very slow. I went in and lit the candle. She was lying on her side. Tied up,
you know. Tied hands and feet. But her eyes were open. I bent down to see. Her eyes were black from
the darkness, but they got smaller as I brought the candle close. You understand—that was the only
movement in her face. Her pupils closing down. Most people, their eyes are like a room, and you can go
and live in there.”

“You let her go,” breathed Charity.

The soldier shook his head. “I hate to see an animal tied up,” he said. “I cut the rope between her teeth.
She did the rest. In the morning she was gone.”

Charity felt a surge of hope. “Well then,” she said softly. “Perhaps you’ll do the same for me.”

As soon as she had spoken, she realized the mistake. She had succumbed to the temptation of
weakness; the soldier put his thoughts aside. He picked up the empty bottle of champagne, raised it to his
lips, and put it down. Then he reached out his hand and seized her wrist.

With a single flex of his powerful arm, he twisted her around and pushed her down, so that she lay on her
stomach on a pile of rolled-up carpets. He caught hold of both her wrists in one single massive hand, and
with the other he grabbed her by the back of the neck, and forced her head down into the hard wool.

“There is something else,” he said. “Some other way to tell.” He removed his hand from her neck and
drew his knife with it, and laid the crooked steel next to her ear, along her cheek. He was kneeling
behind her, forcing one knee up between her legs, forcing her forward until her thighs weakened and let
go. She bit her lips to keep from crying out.

Still, after all, he felt disposed to talk. “How do we know?” he said, from between clenched teeth. “How
can we know that we exist? What is outside? Rocks and water and a few bugs. The speaker taught me
everything, and now he’s dead.”

He was hurting her. His hands were hard and strong. But at every twist, every shove, they seemed to
hesitate, as if his brutality were still unreal to him, an act of will and not of instinct. And still he kept on
talking. “When I was a kid,” he said, “I used to think, gold in my pocket, chocolate and champagne,
naked women, princesses, freedom to go—I used to pray to God. But look at me. I have all that, and
look at me. How can they pretend that life has meaning?”

He forced his knee between her legs. He released her wrists; with one hand, filthy, orange, he held his
knife next to her ear, and with the other he probed under her dress, scraping the flesh there with his
fingernails. Charity lifted herself onto her forearms. She turned her cheek against the rough nap of the
carpet. It was wet from her spit.

The soldier put his hand around her tail. He was still talking, his slow, puzzled voice in contrast to his
violent hand. “That speaker had discovered a new kind of sex. It’s in the book.” He ran his fingernail
between the lips of her vagina. “Not here,” he said. Then, hesitantly, he forced his bunched-up fingers
into her rectum, bringing tears to her eyes, bile to her mouth.

“Here,” he said. “The speaker tells us we must change our ways.”

Suddenly, miraculously, the hand was gone from her. On the cushions beside her, he was fumbling with
his book. “ ‘We must take our sexuality out of the myth of procreation,’ ” she heard him say. He
stumbled over the words and lost his place. Then again: “ ‘Making life is an illusion.’ ”

As he spoke, he was unbuttoning his pants. But too much pedantry had robbed him of his urge; he
pressed against her, and Charity could feel the limp skin along her back. And something else: Distracted
by his own despair, he had let his knife slip from her ear. She turned her mouth into his hand and bit his
thumb with all her strength. She felt her teeth turn on the bone.

He cursed, and dropped the knife. With his other hand he tried to find her face, but she rolled away
under his arm, reaching for the paintbrush in her sleeve. She stabbed it up into his neck, and he let go of
her, bringing his hands up to protect himself; he thought it was the knife. She rolled free, and as he
struggled to get up, she jumped on him.

It was no contest. She was furious with rage, while he was drunk and dizzy. Besides, he didn’t care. He
thought it was a game. In the end she knelt over his back, pulling on his hair, pressing the sharp end of the
paintbrush deep against his throat. He was lying face down on his open book, his shoulders shaking as he
laughed.

“Do it,” he said. “Starbridge cunt!” His pelvis squirmed under her legs. He was humping his stiff cock
against the floor.

“Shut up,” said Charity. She thrust the silver paintbrush into his neck until she thought she must be hurting
him, and finally he was quiet. But there was nothing in her mind. It was empty of possibilities. She looked
around the tent: There was the lamp, its chimney still intact. There was the knife, under some pillows.
There was the bottle; it had rolled onto its side. There was the flute. As she saw it, a small tremor of
music started in her mind, and it mixed with the sound of wind in canvas, and the distant groaning of the
bridge. And something else: quite close, the sound of drunken singing.

The soldier heard it too. “Here they come,” he said.

“Shut up,” she told him. “Shut your mouth.” She pushed his head down on the floor, but she could see
that he was smiling.
Together they listened to the voices coming closer. The soldier was wriggling his hips, squirming for relief
against the carpets. “Do it,” he said again. And then he forced her, shouting out for help in his strong
voice. She pressed down upon the paintbrush, running it deep into his neck, looking for the vein,
spattering the open book with blood.
                                                      ***

That night, in Caladon, in her oilcloth shelter, in the hospital beneath the city walls, Jenny Pentecost sat
drawing. It was late. On the cot beside her, Mrs. Cassimer lay sleeping. Her fat old face was softened
and relaxed. Her mouth was open, but she made no sound.
In the corner, in the crib, the baby lay, sleeping too. From where Jenny sat, she could see his pale fist
through the bars, but his head was hidden by his pillow.

Light came from a single candle on her desk. Jenny turned back to her drawing. In it, three men led their
horses over a rise of polished stone. One was carrying a torch. One was pointing down the slope,
towards where five tents stood next to a small pool. One had stopped, astonished, his mouth shaped like
an O. Above them, the wind had blown away the clouds, opening a path of blackness in the sky.
                                                      ***

Charity leaped to her feet. The soldier was struggling wildly, rolling back and forth and screaming,
stopping the blood flow with his hands. She stepped over his body. She bent to pick up the copper flute;
with it she broke the chimney of the kerosene lamp. She remembered how the antinomial had broken the
white-faced woman’s head with that flute and set afire the tomb of Chrism Demiurge. Bending low,
Charity struck the soldier on the face, and then raised the lamp up to the canvas roof. Small flames fled
from a central point above her head, chased by the wind. She turned, and threw the lamp down in a pile
of painted manuscripts. Then she ducked out through the door, running barefoot on the slippery stones,
listening to the shouts of the soldiers—they were very near. But she thought that they would stop to save
their wealth. The tent was well alight, burning in the wind. She turned and ran up past the little pool,
towards the Whisper Bridge.
With a cry, one of the men sprang after her. He was carrying a torch in one hand and a revolver in the
other. He raised it up, but she was gone, vanished into darkness. Without the torch, perhaps he could
have seen her jump from rock to rock. Perhaps he could have brought her down. But with the torch he
was as good as blind, not that it mattered. He knew where she was going. He took the straightest path
while she ran up to hide among the rocks. She watched him pass beneath her.

Hugging her knees, she sat up among the rocks, waiting for the shouting to subside. She watched the men
cavort around the fire, their shadows large and strange. One splashed water from the pool and pulled out
treasure from the burning tent. The other knelt by their companion, bandaging his neck. Charity waited.
And gradually the noise grew less, the light sank down. Occasionally a voice rang out, and clumps of
darkness moved against the embers of the fire. But the man with the torch had not returned. For a while
Charity had seen his light, up over the rise, glowing behind a mass of rock.

Perhaps an hour went by before she dared to move. For a while she crouched upon her hands and
knees, testing each stone before she trusted it. Her feet were bare. On the slope above the camp the
rocks seemed smoother and more solid than they had down in the valley. The rain had washed them
clean. And she could see before her the outline of the hills, smooth and gentle, black against a lighter
black.

She moved slowly, one hand and then one foot. She had no idea how long, but slowly behind her the
embers of the campfire were submerged in darkness, and the voices grumbled and grew less, losing their
edges as she made her way. One hand, and then one foot. She stared into the blackness, inches from her
nose. There was no wind. In front of her the Whisper Bridge was silent.

Finally she climbed up over the breast of the hill. Around her a strange light began to burn, objectless,
unilluminating, as if the darkness had become a different color. Behind the outline of the horizon the sky
took on a different color, a soft, dull brown, and then a line of red. It was the Caladonian frontier.

From between two boulders she stared out. She had reached the hilltop. Below her, half a mile away, the
Whisper Bridge shone like a beacon, a span of yellow metal glowing from within, still lit by some ancient
art. Under it the abyss was black, the river silent, but on the other side, along the lip of a cliff which ran to
each horizon, the sky was lit by a red glow. An ancient barricade of glowing wires sprawled out of the
darkness and sprawled along the cliff.

A half mile away, up on the ridge, Charity could feel a gentle wind upon her face, and then she could hear
the bridge, too, breathing softly in the night. She looked for the third man, the soldier with the torch, and
then she spotted him, a small daub of fire below the first rungs of the bridge.

By the time she reached him, his torch had flickered low. He had perched it in a cleft between two rocks:
a crooked stick from which the bark still hung in rags. At the top a nest of straw was soaked in burning
phosphorus; it cast an eerie, bluish light. Under it the soldier sat, his revolver in his lap.

Ten feet behind him, the bridge reached up into the darkness. From close at hand, the gleam of the metal
seemed less noticeable. It struggled dully with the torchlight, which spread out around the base of the
bridge in an uneven pool. In the middle sat the soldier, his head sunk on his breast as Charity crept close.

She crouched behind a boulder, watching him for many minutes. He never moved, and she was hoping
that he was asleep, had dozed off in his waiting. Experimentally, she moved her knee, shifting her weight
and making a small sound. The soldier raised his head. His face was illuminated in the fitful glow, and
Charity suppressed a cry. He was a great, tall hulk of a man, and his face was terribly deformed. He
seemed to resemble not a human being but another species, shocking in its strangeness. At first Charity
could make no sense out of its face, its bumps and holes, its rough places and smooth. She shuddered
and bent low, murmuring an inward prayer, making with the smallest motion of her forefinger the sign of
the unclean.

She turned away her face, counting under her breath. When she reached one hundred, she turned back,
and she was calm enough to see a pattern in the alien flesh—the great mane of hair, the fat fleshy nose,
the small revolting eyes.

Once when she was young, her uncle had taken her into the Starlight Temple, to see the great brass
statue of dog-headed Angkhdt. There had been torchlight and darkness and silence like a heavy weight.
Before the altar, the image sat cross-legged, its hands clasped around the base of its brass penis. The
penis was like a power in its hands; under the bridge the soldier held his gun upon his lap, the thick, ugly
snout pointing at the sky. Calm and quiet, he stared out into the darkness. It seemed to Charity that he
could not fail to see her, yet still he made no movement. Not daring to retreat, she was huddled up
between some boulders. In her silken gown, she was shivering with cold. The wind had come up slightly,
a cold breath on her face. From time to time the Whisper Bridge moaned ominously, a low sound rising
out of nothing.

Charity prayed. “Sweet God of Childhood, fill me with Your love. Let me feel Your power in my body,
for You are all my hope and all my pride, and all my strength is from Your seed.”

She prayed: “By the rushing river I sat down, and by the clear brook I lay down. My God was like a
shadow on the grass. He was like a whisper in the trees.”

These were verses she had learned when she was young, how great Angkhdt came upon a woman by
the water. Her lips trembled as she prayed, but her heart and mind were strangely still. As if soothed by
the rhythm of her thoughts, the soldier closed his eyes. In a minute, his head fell down upon his breast. He
was asleep.

Charity waited. Above him the bridge stretched away into the night. Every two feet along its span the
way was studded with a steel rung, representing one of the five hundred and eleven visions of Immortal
Angkhdt, incidents in his great journey through the stars. In the winter of the year 00011, the nineteenth
bishop of Charn had taken the first line from five hundred and eleven verses of the holy song, and woven
them into a poem of his own. It was a poem that seemed to guarantee, as if by divine right, the bishop’s
own vision of empire; victorious here, on the banks of the Moldau, his army had been broken on the
plains of Caladon.

The Whisper Bridge still stood, the only remnant of his dream. A line of letters was inscribed above each
rung, poetry in seven languages. Love lyrics from the Song of Angkhdt had been ransacked to provide
words of bloodshed and conquest. The nineteenth bishop had seen an angel in his sleep, who had given
him the key.

When she was young, Charity had won prizes in mnemonics. Crouching underneath the bridge, she found
the words of the poem clean in her mind, rising up out of her lonely prayer. After another hour of waiting,
after the torch had sputtered into darkness, after the soldier’s head had fallen forward so that she no
longer saw his face, she rose. The soldier slept. She could hear his snoring as she stumbled forward, her
limbs recalcitrant and cold. She laid hold of the first rung of the bridge. It seemed warm to her touch, and
the line of poetry above it glowed, as if cut from fire. “ ‘I have walked in this sad place too long,’ ” she
murmured. And then swung herself up: “ ‘This simple garden in my lady’s heart. But from an upstairs
window I have seen another land. A dry land rising out of sight. A dry ridge in the desert. Love—you
and me and seven others, we will smear our palms with lime, and with spikeweed in our hands we will
continue up, up into the morning of the world, burned white and ocher by the laughing sun. Where
women wash their clothes beside the stream, crimson, scarlet, and the nine kinds of red, we will lift them
onto poles. These cloths will be our flags, for we are kings upon this earth, this bitter, worthless
ground.’ ”

The wind shook the bridge and filled the air with groaning. Around her there was nothing, only blackness
and the glowing steel, until she came up over the crest of the arch, weary and cold, and saw the wire
fence below her, stretching out to each horizon, shining bright as she climbed down. Some of the rungs
had fallen loose, and once she slipped and almost fell. Once her gown caught on a corner of torn steel,
which opened up a gash above her knee. And always the bridge was shifting in the wind, trembling and
groaning while the rungs burned her hands. And always she was chanting the bishop’s poem in her mind,
the words and images disjointed, reduced to their bare sounds. Sometimes she closed her eyes. And at
the very end she slipped the last few rungs, twisting her ankle, falling to her knees on the sharp rocks.

Near her stood the fence, a mass of tangled wire perhaps twelve feet tall. With her back to the cliff’s
edge, she stared at it, adjusting her eyes to the strange light. It seemed impenetrable, tightly woven,
cruelly barbed. Charity sat nursing her foot. She leaned back against a pile of rocks and looked into the
mesh of colored filaments, searching for a flaw. The fence glowed scarlet, green, and cobalt blue.

Towards morning it began to rain, fluttering, small drops which sizzled as they hit the wire. Charity sat
dozing, but then she started awake, cursing the rain. Cursing, she stumbled to her feet, ignoring the pain in
her ankle. In the gathering daylight she found a path down the rock slope, leading parallel to the clifftop
for a hundred yards, and then turning inward towards the barricade. There, for a distance of a couple of
feet, the lower portion of the fence was shorted out. Several wires had been cut. They hung colorless and
dull. Charity went down on her hands and knees; there was a tunnel cut into the heart of the wire.
Wriggling on her belly in a slough of sugar mud, she entered in, picking her way as if into a briar of
poisoned thorns. In front of her the wires had been severed and bent back, but still they caught in her
clothes, ripping her fine gown to shreds, scratching her wet skin. In this way she came at last to Caladon,
emerging out into the rain. Shivering and miserable, she lay on her stomach in the rain.

It was there that the district customs officer found her, after his morning walk. Tall, angular, swathed in
strips of gauze, he stepped down from the porch of his cabin and raised a white umbrella to the sky.
Moving with great slowness and precision, he walked out across the road. His mailbox was empty; that
was no surprise, but beyond it, huddled in a culvert, lay a human woman. She was watching him as he
approached, with a dazed, puzzled expression, in which curiosity had not yet given way to loathing.

She was dressed in silken rags. He bent down above her till their heads were very close, and she did not
flinch away. “Good morning,” he said softly, using the common tongue. “Have you anything to declare?”
                                                     ***

In those days, in Caladon, certain noble families employed the services of child assassins, hereditary
murderers, devotees of Angkhdt the God of Fire. On the same night that Charity crossed the border,
past midnight on the morning of December 3rd, Mrs. Cassimer got up from her cot, in the camp at
Kethany. She had heard children’s voices laughing in the dark outside her tent, squealing with delight as if
at some new game. Pulling on her bathrobe, grumbling to herself, she got up and went outside, and stood
watching in amazement while a half a dozen young ragamuffins practiced gymnastics in an open space
nearby. They had hung a carbide lantern from a pole, and by its light they somersaulted and turned
backflips, and danced upon their hands.
Standing in the flap of the tent, still half asleep, for many minutes Mrs. Cassimer watched the antics of the
children. A little girl stood on her brother’s shoulders, juggling three rings and a rubber ball. A boy
balanced a chair upon his chin. Many children lived in that camp of refugees below the city walls, and
Mrs. Cassimer supposed that she was watching some of these: junior members of the guild of players,
sharpening their skills.

But there was something wrong. She noticed a gold ring in the ear of one young boy. Though dressed in
rags, some of the others, too, wore jewelry—sapphire rings and silver bracelets. Mrs. Cassimer was
listening to a whisper in her mind, and it mixed with a noise inside the tent. Turning quickly, she ducked
back inside, in time to see a small form bending low over the baby’s crib.

She waddled forward with a cry of rage. The child had something shining in its hand, but Mrs. Cassimer
was in time. In the darkness of the tent the child mistook its aim. With an open razor, it sliced apart the
pillow near the baby’s head, then twisted away, out of reach of Mrs. Cassimer, and slipped out through a
cut in the tent wall.

“Nasty, filthy, thieving brat,” cried Mrs. Cassimer, bursting into tears. She gathered up the infant prince
and held him to her breast. Jenny Pentecost sat up in bed. She reached for a small electric torch, which
she kept beside her in the night, and turned it to illuminate the figure of the housekeeper, standing in the
center of the floor, rocking the baby in her arms.

“That’s it, you just sit there,” cried Mrs. Cassimer with some bitterness. “What’s the matter, lizard got
your tongue? I suppose it’s too much to expect—look at the little darling: still asleep.”

Her words were contradicted by the baby, who squirmed and fretted in her arms. After a moment,
despite her best efforts, he began to cry, a weak, snuffling noise. “There, there,” said Mrs. Cassimer,
fussing with a pacifier. “It’s all over now.”

In the past two weeks, unexpected quantities of maternal love had come out in Mrs. Cassimer, dormant
since Thanakar was grown. And though retarded, the child was not insensible to her affection. Quite the
contrary; in just a few days he had responded, seeming to recognize her, smiling and holding out his hand.
The night before, for the first time, he had slept undisturbed till six o’clock.
In fact, his case did not appear as hopeless as Thanakar had feared. Some of the deformities of his great
head had proved to be a ruse—painted ridges of putty and papier-mâ·ché applied by the priests of the
cathedral, to make him look less human. Thanakar had repaired his deviated septum, had stitched
together his harelip. He had removed a cataract from one eye and cut through the flaps of skin that had
sealed his ears. There was sugar in the baby’s blood, that much was clear. But within certain limits he
responded to the doctor’s care. And Thanakar worked on him with a kind of gratitude, a full feeling in his
heart, because in that hospital, in that stricken settlement of refugees, so much of his work was hopeless.
That week he had six new cases of the black brain fever, two in newborn children.

On the morning of December 3rd he had been working in the clinic. Past midnight, he had left his work
unfinished. Returning to the tent where his family was staying, he had stopped to watch two children
juggle hoops of fire. Mrs. Cassimer was awake, he saw. He raised his hand, but she turned back under
the flap of her tent. Laughing, the children scattered, leaving their hoops to smolder in the dirt.

Thanakar heard the voice of Mrs. Cassimer crying out inside the tent. Wearily, he turned his feet in that
direction, entering just in time to catch the brunt of her attack.

“You!” she cried as he came in. “What have you to say? Up at all hours playing the fool while we get our
throats cut. A lot you care. It’s bad enough to live in this disgusting place.”

She was standing with the baby in her arms, illuminated by Jenny’s torch. He blinked stupidly at her, and
at his daughter sitting hidden by the light, upright in her bed. Then, again, Mrs. Cassimer started to cry.
Wordlessly, shaking her head, she showed him the split pillow, the cut in the oilcloth of the tent.

“But he’s all right,” said Thanakar.

“Yes, he’s all right, no thanks to you. A fine excuse for a doctor. Up all night, God knows where. Don’t
you ever sleep?”

Thanakar sat down upon the cot. His leg was hurting him, and he was very tired. “I was trying some
research on my own time,” he said. “No more. Tomorrow we will go.”

“And high time too,” cried Mrs. Cassimer, unmollified. She had been fussing with the baby, but now he
was sucking on the pacifier and she was free to speak. “It’s been weeks since that gentleman came to
give you your safe-conduct. We could have left here anytime. But every day you have been gone, with
people dying all around, and all the riffraff of the country, God knows why—”

Thanakar held up his palm. “Enough,” he said. “You don’t understand. I had work to do. No more. We
leave at the first light. Soon as we can. I’ll send to Craton Starbridge for some horses.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Cassimer, suspiciously. “And why the sudden change of heart? Don’t tell me it’s
because of this.” She motioned to the pillow in the crib.

“No,” confessed Thanakar. He held up his hand. “Please, Jenny,” he said, and she switched off the light,
leaving them in a murky half-light, which filtered in through the oilcloth walls.

“The director asked me to go,” Thanakar confessed. “She fired me. I have been experimenting upon
animals, and four have died. That is still a crime, in Caladon.”

In an instant Mrs. Cassimer had changed. Her voice was softer as she came to sit down next to
Thanakar on the cot. “It’s a crime all over the world,” she said. “Oh sir, Great Angkhdt tells us to love all
animals. Especially in springtime, when they are so few.”

“I had thought, in this camp, that there were rats enough,” said Thanakar. “Not that it matters—it will be
good to go. You’re right, it was unfair to keep you. Now that Craton Starbridge has provided such a . . .
generous alternative.”

In Mrs. Cassimer’s arms the baby was asleep. The pacifier dropped out of his open mouth. Thanakar
looked up and saw that Jenny Pentecost had gotten out of bed. She was standing in front of him in a
nightgown, her hair braided on the nape of her neck, and she was staring intently at his face. She reached
out her hand, and before he could move away, she touched with her forefinger the locket round his neck.
                                                     ***

Later that same night, while Charity was lying in the rain outside the unraveler’s house, Thanakar
Starbridge got up from his cot. He couldn’t sleep.
Working in the hospital laboratory at midnight, for the first time he had caught glimpses of a theory. When
the doctors had broken in and found him with the carcasses of four fat rats, he had been excited. He had
been too excited to explain himself, too excited to speak, though he had slapped one of his superiors
across the face. But when he saw they were not interested, that they did not even want to hear what he
had found, then his excitement died, and he had stumbled home, disgusted and angry with them and with
himself. “It serves them right,” he thought, stumbling back through the rows of tents.

That feeling had not lasted long. Coming home to his own tent, he had passed the orphans’ hospital, and
his lantern had reflected in the eyes and faces of abandoned children, curled up on pallets of raw straw.
Once he had stopped to listen to some children laughing, and his anger had not survived the sound.

It had been replaced with weariness and a dull strange ache, which helped him fall asleep once his family
was calm and he had helped them to their beds. But in the middle of the night, suddenly the excitement of
his discovery resurfaced, and he jumped out of bed and paced upon the floor. It was not yet light.

He limped to the flap of the tent and stood looking out over the deserted hospital. He shook his head to
clear it. Wisps of a theory seemed to surround him in the air, drifting close around him, then receding.

He shook his head, resolved to march on back to the laboratory and break in, and if the doctors were
still there, to slap them in the face and make them listen. Listen to what? The theory drifted out of reach.
Still, he limped back to his cot and pulled on his boots. He pulled on his overcoat. But then he paused,
looking around at his sleeping family and at the cut in the tent wall. Mrs. Cassimer had taken the infant
prince into her bed. Jenny was sleeping curled away from him, her long hair covering her pillow.

The tent was built like an umbrella of oilcloth and strips of steel, radiating from a central wooden pillar.
Light came from a kerosene lantern hung from a nail in the central shaft, and it shone on Jenny’s hair, and
on her desk, and on the drawings stacked upon it.

Thanakar took the lantern from its nail, and he limped over to stand next to her cot. He put the lantern
down upon her desk, and he stood over the pile of drawings, examining them one by one. He sat on the
edge of Jenny’s cot and held one of the drawings up to the light. It was her most recent flea, dated seven
days before.

He reached into an inside pocket of his coat, where he kept a small case of instruments and specimens.
Unzipping it, he removed a magnifying glass; turning the wick of the lantern higher, he studied the drawing
underneath the glass.

On the bottom of the insect’s carapace, between its lower limbs, there was a small protuberance, a small,
sharp spiral, like the end of a small drill. Thanakar frowned, and then unfolded from a pocket of the case
a piece of paper, an earlier rendition of the flea, one of the first Jenny had drawn. The bottom of its
carapace was clean.
Finally Thanakar took out a pair of tweezers and a small vial full of samples. He unscrewed the top of the
vial, and with the tweezers he caught the body of a small specimen, an insect in the vial. He pulled it out
and stared at it under the magnifying glass. It was a small, translucent dot, one-sixteenth of an inch long,
innocent of detail even under the glass. Nevertheless, Jenny Pentecost, sitting up in bed behind him,
whispered, “You have found it,” in his ear.

“Is it the same?” asked Thanakar, without turning around.

“Yes.”

“I found it on a rat,” he said. “Look,” he said, indicating Jenny’s drawing. “That’s where it keeps the
virus. In that drill between its legs.”

He put down his magnifying glass, and held the flea up to the light. “Of my new patients,” he continued,
“four of six are members of the oil pressers’ caste. They were temple servants, in Charn under the old
regime. They mixed prescriptions for the priests.”

He was speaking more to himself than to her, and he was holding the flea out towards the light. Then he
brought the tweezers back up to his eye, until the flea was only inches from his face. “The curious thing,”
he said, “is that mental illness could be spread this way. By a virus.”

“It is spread in many ways,” whispered Jenny, close to his ear. She had put her arms around his neck.
Her face was close to his. She, too, was staring at the flea.

“Yes,” said Thanakar. “The king of the oil pressers had looted drugs out of the Temple of Surcease. He
kept rodents, too, sacred to the God of Animals. They were in jeweled cages in his tent. After his death I
brought four of them into the laboratory and cut them open.”

Jenny said nothing, but he could hear her soft breath on his neck. “Their guts were full of them,” he said.
“The sacred fleas of Angkhdt. In Charn they grind their bodies up for medicines. They make an
anesthetic paste. Once in the blood, it can cause hallucinations.”

“I know,” whispered Jenny.

“These cases I have seen, the first symptoms are delusions and hallucinations. Nevertheless, the patient
dies in sixty hours. It is because they have been bitten by the flea. You could not have been exposed that
way.” Thanakar indicated the difference between the drawings, the old one and the new. “You yourself
see this is a new mutation.”

“They grind them up for medicine,” said Jenny, in his ear.
                                                     ***

In the morning when he woke, she was still asleep. But she had left something for him, a black and
battered copy of the Song of Angkhdt, on the floor next to his bed.
She had been asleep when Thanakar had left her to return to bed. But late at night she must have gotten
up again, to find the book for him; it was Mrs. Cassimer’s copy, which she kept under her chamber pot.

The book was open to the sixteenth verse. In the margin a small passage was marked in Jenny’s hand,
one of the so-called interjections of Beloved Angkhdt. It read,
What is it that drives me on?
It is like the scratching of a flea.
It is like the biting of a flea.
The night before, he had dragged his cot in from his own tent, to stay close to his family. But in the
morning he went out, to wash and dress; when he returned, Mrs. Cassimer was awake, feeding the baby
from a bowl of artificial soup. He sat down next to her with the book in his hand. “What does this
mean?” he asked, indicating the marked verse.

“Oh, sir, that’s a naughty one,” said Mrs. Cassimer.

Jenny was still asleep. She had turned over onto her back. “Tell me,” said Thanakar.

“Oh no, sir, I couldn’t do that. Not to you. That’s a naughty one.”

Mrs. Cassimer was knowledgeable on all aspects of holy scripture. But she was also prudish, and
protective of her master. “No, sir,” she said. “I couldn’t tell you that.” But he insisted. “Please,” he said.

“Very well. That one’s about women. That’s what the parsons say. They’ve got a medicine for that. An
ointment that they use.”

“A medicine?”

“Yes, sir. They make it out of bugs. And a little sugar. Rainwater, I guess.”

“But what’s it for?”

“An ointment, sir. They rub it on their penises. Oh, sir, Angkhdt had fifty women in one day, the day He
overcame the nunnery.”

At 9 A.M., Thanakar sent a letter to the director of the hospital, enclosing several of Jenny’s drawings.
Then he sent a message to the ministry of agriculture. That one was fruitful: By the middle of the afternoon
a carriage had arrived, a large, heavy vehicle drawn by four horses. Craton Starbridge’s escutcheon was
painted on the door, a white ship under sail.

At four o’clock Thanakar was packed and ready. He loaded his family into the dark, stuffy interior and
then stepped onto the box, wearing an oilskin against the rain. He nodded to the coachman, and pulled
his wide-brimmed hat over his eyes. He had a pocket full of marijuana cigarettes. He put one between his
teeth.

Nobody had come to see them off.

From the walls behind him, the church bells rang the hour. Then they were moving, the horses struggling
in the mud, kicking through the radiating circles of huts and canvas shelters. A mist was rising from the
ground. People stood half-naked in the rain, gaunt, spectral figures, watching them.

Thanakar lit his cigarette, and pulled his hat down over his face. Mounted underneath him on the near
horse, the postilion was acting as a guide. He carried a letter of safe-conduct in his boot, countersigned
by the commander of the corps of engineers. Thanakar saw the flash of gold upon its seal, and through a
dull narcotic haze he watched the soldiers at the checkpoint stiffen and salute. They pulled back the
barricades of sharpwood and barbed wire, and let them out onto the road.

They were heading for the mountains. The postilion had already shown Thanakar their destination on a
map, a small village north of Gaur, two hundred miles northwest of the city. In other seasons it was
famous for its beauty, and wealthy Caladonians kept villas there. In spring most of these were empty, but
there remained a small local population, who farmed the terraced hills and fished the lake for weeds.
There was a hospital, where Thanakar had been guaranteed a job. There was also a small military
garrison, largely convalescents on half-pay. Craton Starbridge’s first cousin was the captain.
But to go west, first they headed south. In all other directions the roads were reserved for military
transport. Even on the great south highway, in the first few hours Thanakar counted seventeen convoys of
soldiers, and even a few ancient trucks.

Like the coach, these vehicles were moving towards the border. The coachman pulled aside out of the
road to let them pass. At other times he halted for another reason: Crowds of refugees, heading in the
opposite direction, made the horses kick and shy. It was not till after midnight that they reached the end
of their first stage, twenty miles from the border where the road split west. Rooms were ready for them at
the hotel. Jenny was asleep, so Thanakar carried her upstairs. They were to share a room.

Late at night he awoke from a strange dream. What was it? No—the details of it already were unclear to
him, a medley of strange images that slipped and twisted from his grasp. He saw a bright light shining in
his eyes. It seemed to hover a few inches from his face and disappear. He touched his fingers to his face
and raised his head. In the corner of the room, under a small electric bulb, Jenny Pentecost sat hunched
over a table.

Supported on one elbow, he watched her for a while—her narrow shoulders, the points of her thin
shoulderblades under her slip. Her fine brown hair was twisted in a knot behind her head, out of the way.
Single hairs stuck out at odd trajectories under the light. She had her back to him.

He remembered how he had found her, in a brothel by the Temple of Surcease, the night before they left
the city. He had come back from the army and had searched for her, and had found her on the top floor
of a brothel, near the altar of the God of Children. Was it there? It must have been there, that she had
contracted this illness. It must have been there that the flea had crept into her blood. No doubt there had
been a jar of unguent on the altar, where her clients had paused to anoint themselves. What kind of men
could they have been, to try to duplicate the prowess of Beloved Angkhdt upon a child?

A feeling of longing rose up in his throat, hopeless, like unrequited love. “Jenny?” he whispered. “Jenny?”
She didn’t turn around. Adjusting his pajamas, he got up to see what she was doing.

Before her on the table a drawing was spread out. It was in black-and-sepia pencil, with traces of red
ink—the pen was still in her hand. But she was staring at it without moving. The drawing was finished. It
showed a woman dressed in rags, her face hidden in shadow. She was lying on the ground next to an
empty bowl, her ankle shackled to a post. Beside her stood a chicken, searching the ground for insects
with its curious snout. Behind her a wire fence intersected with the wall of a small building.

This was in the corner of the picture. Most of the drawing was about the sky—a study of dark clouds
and sugar rain. But one more artifact was visible: At the top of the page, a span of metal drawn in red.
The clouds were parted by its edge.

“The Whisper Bridge,” said Thanakar. “How did you know?”

Jenny said nothing. Only she made a notation in red pen in the margin of the page: “21596.” And under it,
in careful print: “17.78 mi.”

“How did you hear of it?” asked Thanakar. He leaned forward over the page. From his neck, his golden
locket hung down close beside her ear. She turned and grabbed it, pulled it loose. The small chain
snapped in her small hand.

Surprised, Thanakar pulled back. Then he reached out his hand. But she had found the locket’s clasp,
had opened it, and was staring at the photograph inside. Cut from the yearbook of the Starbridge
Schools, it was a photograph of a young girl with long black hair, thick eyebrows, and black eyes. A
wide mouth, a wide jaw; two months after it was taken, Charity had married the old man.
Thanakar reached out to grab it back, but then he stopped. Jenny Pentecost had dipped her pen into her
well, and she was drawing the profile of a face under her numerical notation: Just a few quick lines, so
fast, so expert, and so sure. Thanakar cried out, with a pain like a needle in his heart. Then Jenny threw
the pen down on the page, spattering it with ink. She turned in her chair and put her arms around his
neck, squeezing until it hurt. She locked her arms around his neck and squeezed with all her strength, and
he could feel her small lips on his cheek. “Trust me,” she whispered next to his ear, her voice so soft,
almost inaudible. “Trust me,” she repeated.
                                                      ***

Before first light he limped down to the post station at the crossroads to barter for a horse. He left a
message for his coachman and his guide, instructing them to wait two days before continuing; he would
catch them up. He left a note for Mrs. Cassimer. He didn’t wake her, not wanting to hear what she might
say.
There were no horses. All had been sequestered by the army, or bought by wealthy refugees. But after
some negotiation he obtained a bicycle. He tied his knee in linen strips, injecting lubricants into the joint,
and at six-thirty he wheeled his bicycle out onto the road. It was an old, stiff, cast-iron model with
enormous rubber wheels. For hours he rode it grimly over the deserted countryside, along a roadbed of
crushed cinders.

The Whisper Bridge was in a range of washed-out hills, and there was no one on the road. At eight
o’clock it started raining. Thanakar cursed aloud. Once, at the bottom of a long hill, with the rain pulsing
from the sky like bullets of wet glass, he almost turned around. But finally, towards ten, he reached the
border.

By the banks of the Moldau River, in a landscape of wet clay, the road came to an end. The fog was low
upon the ground. He could not see the barricade; he could not see the bridge, but he could hear it in the
wind. In front of him there was a mailbox, across the way a small tarpaper shack. Nearby, at the top of a
high flagpole, flew an ensign he remembered well—the endless knot of the unravelers. Under it, the swine
of Caladon, red upon a field of white.

Thanakar parked his bike next to the pole. He took off his hat. His leg was so weak he could barely
stand. It throbbed and trembled under his weight.

He waited a minute and then walked around the shack. It was a two-story, dilapidated wooden
structure. In back there was an empty chicken run.

Returning to the road, he limped up the steps of the shack onto the porch. Through the screen door he
could see the unraveler at his desk, stretched back in his chair, his gaunt frame swathed in bandages. His
eyes were veiled, his face turned to one side. With a broken pencil he tapped idly upon his desk.

Thanakar tried the door. It was locked.

“Are you applying for a visa?” asked the unraveler, his voice high and soft. “Office hours start at four
o’clock.”

The screen was rotten near the clasp. Thanakar punched it with his fist and broke the lock. Already he
was angry, but also he was weak and close to falling. He stepped inside the door and leaned against it,
his back against the screen. “Is there a woman staying here?” he asked.

The unraveler leaned forward in his chair. “What do you mean?”

“I swear to God,” said Thanakar. “Tell me where she is, and then I’ll go.”

The unraveler placed his pencil on his desk, carefully among the littered paper. He seemed to frown
under the veil. “She is no longer here,” he said. When Thanakar said nothing, he went on. “You do not
understand. She was a foreign national, on Caladonian soil, without documentation. Not of any kind. I
could not let her stay.”

Thanakar limped forward into the room. He put his hands upon the desk, then stopped. From underneath
a pile of paper the unraveler had produced a gun.

“No violence,” he said. “You are the one. Yes, I have heard of you.” With one hand he held the small
revolver, and with the other he rummaged in the papers on his desk. “Hah,” he said. “This is from the
district headquarters at Sreshta Breaks,” he said, naming the border town where Thanakar had spent so
long. “Distinguishing marks? Tattoos upon both hands. A golden briarweed, among others. Yes. You are
the one. It says you failed to go through proper channels.”

Thanakar was leaning forward on the desk, supporting his weight upon his wrists. He caught a wisp of a
sweet smell. He breathed deeply. It was whiskey. A jar half full of whiskey stood upon the corner of the
desk between some books. He could smell whiskey on the breath of the unraveler, though it was not yet
noon.

“Here,” the man continued, reading from a crumpled piece of paper. “Yes. Thanakar Starbridge. Yes, he
has disrupted the morale of the entire district. Since he left, illegal penetration of the Sreshta Gate has
increased more than thirty times. Thirty times! And you have the impudence to threaten me.”

There was a pause. Thanakar sat down in a chair and put both hands over his knee. The unraveler stared
up at the ceiling. “Tell me what this woman is to you,” he said at last.

Thanakar put his hand up to his face. “Then she’s still here. You didn’t send her back?”

“No. It would not have been . . . humane. In your country they are murdering civilians. They have no
respect for regulations of all kinds. This woman, she would not even give her name. What is she to you?”

He turned his head. His face under the veil was thin and bony, hairless and gray. “I too,” he said. “I
should have sent her back. No, for her sake I have broken elementary statutes numbers fifteen through
twenty-one. Yesterday morning I detained her in the proper place. But it was raining. Now she is
upstairs, sleeping in my bed. Last night I fed her rations that were meant for me.”

Thanakar sat back. The unraveler gestured wearily with the revolver. It sank low to the desk, as if too
heavy for his frail wrist. “The fact remains,” he said, “she is an unlawful alien, on Caladonian soil. She
possesses two items of jewelry, but otherwise no means of livelihood, not to mention very little in the way
of clothes. That is why I ask you, what is she to you? Is she your wife?”

“Yes,” said Thanakar.

“Papers, please.”

Thanakar took them from the inside pocket of his oilskin and slid them across the desk. The unraveler
peeled them apart with his long fingers and held the seal up to the window. “You come under the
protection of a powerful personage,” he said. “But what is this? Marital status: S.”

Again Thanakar pressed his hand against his lips. Then he spoke. “Please,” he said, “I speak of my
intent. I have the means to support her. The government has granted me a house in K----” He named the
village by the lake.

“I see that.”
“Please,” said Thanakar again. But there was no sincerity in the way he said the word: His teeth were
clenched. Frustration had overcome his thoughts. That morning, cycling along the cinder road while his
knee clanked and throbbed, his thoughts had all been routed by an army of conflicting hopes and doubts.
They had driven him forward to the place where he now sat, his fingers twitching with frustration, an
empty buzzing in his mind. Once again, he put his hands down to his knee, rubbing at the swollen joint.

The unraveler reached for the jar of whiskey on his desk. He tilted it in his left hand, staring at the level of
the fluid. He laid down the pistol next to his right hand and once more turned his attention to Thanakar’s
papers. “It says here that you are traveling with your two children, both suffering from mental handicaps.
Where are they?”

“I left them with my housekeeper,” said Thanakar, naming the town and the hotel where he had spent the
night.

“Let me see. You left Charn on October forty-seventh. I don’t think so much travel can be salutary for
children of that kind. Such children need a stable home. Is that what you hope to provide for them, in
K----?”

Thanakar said nothing, only stared at the unraveler and rubbed his knee. Angkhdt save us, a philosopher!
he thought.

The unraveler looked at him steadily over the top of his papers, and then he laid them down. In his left
hand he held the jar of whiskey, and he tilted it so that the amber fluid hesitated just inside the brim.
“Answer my questions, please,” he said. “It says here that one of your children suffers from neurophrenia,
and the other has adulterated blood. Is that correct?”

“No. Neurophrenia—it is the language of documents. How could it be correct?”

“Ah,” said the unraveler, staring at his whiskey. His voice was melancholic: “Perhaps you can explain for
me this difference.”

Outside it had started raining, and the rain was beating on the window beside Thanakar’s chair. He felt a
disadvantage that he couldn’t name. He shook his head. “My daughter,” he said, “is suffering from an
overdose of a hallucinogenic drug. But I feel that’s not the source of her condition. I don’t know.
Sometimes I feel she is not sick at all. Is it sickness when her visions are the truth?”

“Interesting,” said the unraveler. “But what difference does it make?”

“What do you mean? The difference is obvious. In one case the drug is everything, and all my effort must
be aimed towards understanding it. In the other case the drug has simply aggravated something else,
some other sorrow.”

“You don’t understand,” said the unraveler. “I mean, what is the difference in her treatment? Perhaps that
is the only thing that matters. For example, I have no idea whether your knee is congenitally crippled, or
whether you have injured it. You are a doctor, no doubt you have a theory. But there is something you
don’t seem to know: In either case, the worst thing that you could do to it is to ride a bicycle twenty miles
over these roads.”

Once again Thanakar felt a rush of anger and frustration. Once again he felt he was losing a game whose
rules he didn’t know. “What do you mean?” he said. “This drug is compounded of an insect, which, in
mutated form, seems to be connected to the outbreak of a terrible illness in this region. Surely you’d
agree it is a link that we must trace.”
The unraveler looked at him steadily, and then he shrugged. “Mutations,” he said, shifting his attention to
the window, where the rain was beating on the glass. “Sugar births, mutations. Life changes as the
weather changes—is that not the center of all science? No doubt last spring also there was some illness
like the one you mention. Yet here we are. And the only thing we’ve learned is that men and women
can’t try to bear these burdens by themselves. They need a context. They need a shield against the
world.”

Thanakar cast his eyes around the bare, disheveled room. “Yes,” said the unraveler. “I live here by
myself. That’s how I know.” He picked up Thanakar’s passport again, stared at it, and laid it down. “Do
you understand what I mean?” he asked. “Children need parents more than doctors. And they need a
home.”

With a sigh, the unraveler replaced his jar of whiskey on his desk. He picked up a pencil, and made a
small notation in the margin of the doctor’s passport; then he erased it. “Now, I know it has been
difficult,” he said. “But it looks to me as if you’ve spent a month and a half in hotels and refugee camps.
We are in a war zone here. It is not a place to leave two handicapped children in a hotel by themselves.”

“I don’t understand the purpose of these questions,” said Thanakar after a pause.

“Don’t you? I am contemplating releasing into your custody a female refugee from Charn with no means
of support. It is my job to determine what is best for her.”

Thanakar held his breath and then released it slowly. “Can I see her?” he asked.

“No. The decision rests with me. Her wishes are of no importance. Neither are yours. Once again, I
stress she is in Caladon unlawfully, with no documents of any kind. Though I admit, your name is one that
she has mentioned once or twice.”

Thanakar said nothing. He leaned backwards in his seat.

“That being the case,” continued the unraveler, “for the sake of your children, and in lieu of any good
alternative, I am inclined to grant you this request. Only I must reassure myself about the kind of life you
plan to lead. It says here, in your own country, you were once an army officer. That is not auspicious.
Nothing in these papers is auspicious. In your favor, only this: You have been granted an employment,
and a house in K----. I have been there. It is beautiful. There is a lake.”

The unraveler shook his head and then went on. “In your favor, only this: What does this woman mean to
you? You have stated an intention to be married. It is a question of paperwork. As your wife, she would
be free to go. I would not be able to prevent her.”

Thanakar sat without speaking, conscious for the first time of a relaxation spreading through his body. His
knee hurt less; his fingers felt less tight. “You are probably not aware,” said the unraveler, “that as
customs officer for the Whisper District, I have the power to perform marriages. It is a power I have
never used. The region is depopulated.”

Again Thanakar said nothing. With a sigh the unraveler took a single sheet of paper from an open drawer
by his left hand and placed it on the desk. It was a printed form.

He pushed it across the desk towards Thanakar. “Fill it out,” he said, “and I will witness it. There is a
space for your signature and for hers, without which it is invalid. A problem,” he continued, as Thanakar
drew out his fountain pen. “Lack of proper identification. Does this worry you?”

Thanakar did not reply for a few moments. He smiled. “Perhaps you’d better fetch her down,” he said.
“This might come as a surprise to her.”

“No,” said the unraveler. With his forefinger he stroked the lip of the jar of whiskey on his desk,
producing a small sound. “This may help,” he said. “She has a silver rose tattooed on her right palm. Also
a mole under her right ear. She is a lovely woman. I have no wish to look at her again.”

At his words Thanakar felt hope inside his heart, expanding like a shining gas, making him lightheaded,
making his fingers tremble as he uncapped his pen. The words of the certificate seemed to blur before his
eyes. His normally precise signature was sloppy and unkempt.

“Please understand,” continued the unraveler. “I’m giving you a chance to make things right. I spent last
night down here. Sleeping in this chair. At least—I did not sleep. But once I went upstairs to check on
her. To look at her—you understand. All I have done is contrary to regulations. I do not want to look at
her again.”

The marriage form was very short. Thanakar signed it and pushed it across the desk, his trepidation
changing to astonishment as the man witnessed the paper without reading it, and stamped it with the
endless knot. He dated the paper and pushed it back. His head sank low upon his chest. “Second door
on the left side,” he murmured. “You can go up now. In five minutes I will go out to make my rounds.
There is a break in the fence I must repair. It will take about an hour. When I come back, you will have
gone.”

Following the direction of the creature’s eyes, Thanakar noticed a small key among the papers on the
desk. He rose and came forward. “Thank you . . .” he began, but then he stopped. The unraveler had
winced as if he had been slapped.

Thanakar picked up the key, along with his passport and safe-conduct. Through an open door behind the
office, he found a small, steep flight of stairs. At the top a narrow corridor spanned the width of the
house. Through an open door he caught a glimpse of an empty room, low-ceilinged, with checked
linoleum on the floor. Blue-flowered wallpaper was peeling from the walls. Thanakar put his hand out and
leaned against the jamb. He could not bend his knee, it was so stiff.

Farther down the hall, he unlocked a door and stepped inside. It led to a dark room with a strange, hot,
pungent odor, like a place where an animal has slept. The blinds were drawn over the window. He stood
inside the door, listening to the rhythmic sound of breathing from the bed. Tears started to his eyes, from
what cause he couldn’t tell.

After a moment he limped over to the bed and sat down by Charity’s side. He put out his hand to wake
her and then hesitated. She was lying on her back with her mouth open, her face streaked with sugar and
with dirt. How she had changed! He frowned. Perhaps his memory was wrong. But no, when he last saw
her, she had been a prisoner, a princess of proud Charn. And now? World traveler, survivor, her cheeks
worn rough and raw, her hair cut short.

Her eyes were open. “Who are you?” she asked, her voice still full of sleep.

“Don’t you recognize me?”

She frowned. “I recognize your voice.” She pulled herself awake, and up onto one elbow. “Cousin,” she
said. She, too, put her hand out and then pulled it back. Then she laughed. “I felt sure that you were
dead.”

He could not meet her eyes. “I also,” he said. “I heard that you had taken poison.”
That was all. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. She was staring at his face, smiling, her eyes
bright. He fiddled with the papers on his lap. He looked into her eyes for a moment, smiled nervously,
and looked away.

Her shoulder and her arm were naked, though she had pulled the sheet up tight around her throat. “Abu
is dead,” she said.

“I’d heard.”

Thanakar chafed their marriage certificate between his fingers and stared down at his knee. Then he said,
“The customs officer has released you. There’s no question of your going back. Here,” he said. “Here is
the form.”

In the dim light she had to squint to read it. She held it up close to the blind. First she smiled, and then she
laughed aloud.

“It’s a formality,” said Thanakar. “Otherwise he wouldn’t let you go. Just until you get a visa.”

But she was smiling, still, and he was smiling too. “Not at all.” She sat up in bed and wrapped the sheet
around her. “I’m happy just to see someone I know.”

Part Nine:
Thanakar In K----

A t dawn on January 1st of the ninth phase of spring, Colonel Aspe crossed the Moldau River into
Caladon with an army of eleven thousand men. He waded his horse into the shallows of the ford and
raised his metal fist. On the Caladonian side a company of rangers watched him from the hill.
The lieutenant lowered his binoculars. He ripped a page out of his notebook. Turning away, he scrawled
a message on the page—a single line. Then he took from his belt a silver cannister and unscrewed the lid.
Spindling the paper in his fingers, he thrust it into the cannister and sealed it with a strip of orange wax,
which he took from a container at his wrist. Orange was the color of his regiment.

He screwed the silver cap back on the cannister and pressed the wax down over it. He marked it with
the signet of his ring, leaving a clear impression on the wax: his initial and, underneath, a tiger’s eye. Then
he turned back without looking and held out his hand.

The courier was there, a short, squat man. He wore a black plastic helmet and a suit of plastic steel,
surmounted by a black cloth vest. He raised the message to his forehead, then slipped it underneath his
glove. A hole had been gouged out of the flesh of his forearm, especially to contain it.

The courier strode down the hill, his high boots awkward on the rock. His horse was waiting in a copse
of broken trees, out of sight of the river, a huge, fierce creature, with a coat of rufous gray. As he
approached, his grooms were busy with the horse, stripping off its mask, tightening its girths, giving it a
last injection. The courier did not break his stride. When he reached them, they were finished, scattering
away as he seized hold of the great curled gilded horn and swung himself into the saddle. The beast gave
a cry, an airless whistle through the slits of its beak. It seemed to be resisting every step, as the rider
kicked it down the hill and out into the road. Its pointed ears lay flat against its skull.

A fresh wind rose up from the valley. The rider paused for an instant and lowered his visor. He chafed his
whip against his boot as the wind moved over him, stirring the rows of pennants on his back. From rings
in his armor two bamboo rods protruded past his head. One was sewn with orange flags, and one with
pennants of the arms of Caladon, a red pig on a field of white. They rustled softly in the wind. When he
was at full speed they made an urgent, beating sound, audible for half a mile.

He cried out once and the horse was gone, pounding down the road. They did not stop that day. In way
stations and villages, townspeople pulled their children from the mud, out of range of the pounding
hooves and slashing claws of the great beast. Refugees stood aside upon the road, open-mouthed and
fearful.

Near nightfall on the Kodasch Road, the courier finally drew rein. In the courtyard of the king’s
posthouse, when he came limping in the gate, another messenger waited in silence, his horse restive and
kicking at the mud. He saluted as the first rider came up, and held his hand out for the silver cannister.
Then he was off, not stopping till he crossed the Argon Bridge and stood before the gates of Caladon. In
the early morning under a small rain, he stripped off his helmet in the mazelike streets near the cathedral.
His horse slipped on the cobblestones; he leaped from the saddle and continued on foot through dirty
alleyways, until the building stood before him. He hurried up the steps, up through the unguarded portals
of the cathedral. Snatching a lighted taper from the wall, he ran down the first of countless corridors.
Sometimes he caught glimpses of pilgrims along the way, lost among the chapels and the shrines, their
faces pale and bewildered. He was a courier of the king. He knew the way, and when they saw him they
cried out and tried to follow him, but he was faster than they were. He pushed through crowds of
frightened people, turning always to the left, following a streak of turquoise in the gold mozaic of the
floor. He followed traces of turquoise in the eyes and jewelry of the saints who lined the frescos on the
walls, traces of indigo, traces of blue, which led him on through galleries of tapestries. He was searching
for a single blue thread, and then a door with opal in its knob, which led him into rooms of icons, libraries
of books. Exhausted, still he muscled forward, turning to the left and to the left. In the libraries he
searched for clues among the titles of the books:Black Bread and Lapis Lazuli. Another, farther on:The
Man with the Sapphire Hand. A third:Hills Like a Row of Plums. He smiled and reached up to touch
its spine.

He paused between a double row of pillars, each carved into a likeness of Beloved Angkhdt, one of the
thirty-four true incarnations. Beyond and to the left, the hall was crowded with false incarnations, carved
in bloodstone, marble, and obsidian. Some held in their hands stone globes of alternate, false worlds.
One beckoned with a jeweled finger, and pointed farther on into the labyrinth.

Finally, as the bells struck evensong, the courier made his way through the last portal, and staggered out
into the sanctuary. There he was approached by black-robed ushers, who searched him for weapons
and assigned him a place among the supplicants. Wearily he took a seat in the rotunda, along the outer
tier. He sat back and closed his eyes, lulled by the chanting on the floor.

Craton Starbridge saw him enter. He leaned forward in the darkness and touched Prince Mantikor upon
the arm. He whispered in the prince’s ear, then rose and walked back up the southern aisle, signaling to
certain spectators along the way. General Lakshman Starbridge stood up in his seat, watching the heavy
shoulders of his cousin disappear into the dark. Then he turned back to the service.

The round floor of the sanctuary was ablaze with light, from candles and from candelabra, and from a line
of votive lamps around the wheel of the altar. In the center of everything a great four-headed statue of
Immortal Angkhdt scowled up into the house, along the four directions of the compass. In a circle around
him, acolytes greased the sacred reliquaries on the altar while the choir sang the antiphon. It was the hour
of the second evening offertory. On his golden throne, surrounded by courtiers, Argon Starbridge
changed his clothes, doffing orange robes for gray ones. Lord Bartek Multiflex was proffering a candy,
his painted face shining with sweat.

In the house among the outer seats, Craton Starbridge knelt beside the messenger. He took the silver
cannister into his hand and broke the seal.

“Light,” he said. One of the ushers behind him held a torch. The seventh minister for agriculture seized it,
and by its light he read the message. Then he was up, moving through the ranks of worshipers, stopping
from time to time to touch one on the shoulder.

General Lakshman Starbridge was the first to leave, muttering and pulling on his gloves. Others followed
him. In five minutes half the hall was empty, and a strange wavering had come into the voices of the
choristers as they watched their audience depart.

“How long is Your penis?” chanted the choir. “Surely it has pleased men and women without
number. . . .”

It was too much. Samson Mantikor jumped to his feet, his face dark with frustration. “Father,” he cried.
“There is a messenger from Moldau Ford.”

The chanting dwindled into silence. Stunned courtiers held their breaths. Then, almost imperceptibly,
King Argon Starbridge nodded his masked head. The choir started up again, raggedly, unsurely, but then
stopped abruptly as the prince came forward out of the first pews of worshipers, into the sanctuary light.
“Father,” he cried again. “There is a messenger.”

King Argon made a tiny gesture with his hand. His courtiers moved away from him down off the dais,
leaving him alone. Then, with effort, he stood up, supporting his weight upon the arms of his chair. He
turned his head towards Samson Mantikor. But at that moment Craton Starbridge raised his hand,
shouting from the back of the rotunda: “My lord, it’s true. Aspe has crossed the Moldau, with fifteen
thousand men.”

Bewildered, the king turned to face this strange new voice. In the interval, Bartek Multiflex, standing by
the altar, gestured to be heard. “This outbreak is unseemly,” he protested. “We have the situation well in
hand. As we speak, our own courier is riding south to propose a conference.”

“Conference!” shouted Samson Mantikor. “He is across the river. You would talk until he reached the
city walls.”

He turned and hurried up the southern aisle. He did not see his father raise his hand or hear his father’s
soft, sweet voice—“Wretched boy. Because of you, we cannot win this fight. We have lost the people’s
love, because of you.”

The king was right. When the prince’s armies were assembled, they numbered fewer than ten thousand
men, and most of those were Starbridge officers. The desertion rate was high among the other ranks.
Many Starbridges from Charn had joined the prince, but that did nothing for morale. When they saw the
Starbridge flags unroll over the plain of Caladon, many of the common soldiers turned aside and spat,
remembering dead comrades. Too recently those same flags had been arrayed against them.

But it was more than that. Samson Mantikor’s appeal for power had hurt his family’s authority. At the
battlefield of Charonea seven companies deserted, refusing at the last to fight for him. Without the infant
prince the monarchy had lost its heart. Of the three of them—the father and two sons—it was the child
who had caught the public mind. He was the innocent one, the long-awaited king, the seed of Blessed
Angkhdt. And while the other two were sunk in bickering and accusations, the voices of the common
people rose in outrage and despair. In those days, every day at noon, the cathedral steps were crowded
with mute protesters, wearing shirts that had been printed with a single question mark. In restaurants and
taverns the proprietors posted a tally on the bar, a record of the days since the infant prince had last been
seen.

“It was a mistake,” said Craton Starbridge. “It was a bad mistake,” he said, as the night rain beat upon
the canvas by his head. “We should have brought him back and put him in a temple of our own.”

“No,” said Mantikor. He lay back upon his couch, propped up on pillows, plucking idly at the strings of
a small guitar. “No,” he repeated. “They would have murdered him. My own men would have murdered
him, to make my claim more safe. A little boy, Craton—I could not have stopped them. A little, crippled
boy, crippled in his mind. I would be ashamed to use him in this fight.”

“You are softhearted,” grunted Craton Starbridge.

“I am not. Besides, why think of it? It’s too late now.”

Mantikor lay back. Out of random notes his fingers formed a song, a wistful melody. “It’s best to sleep,”
he said. “And yet, if we are to die tomorrow, it is a shame to waste the time.”

With a grunt, Craton Starbridge paced the length of the tent—five steps—and then he stood in the open
doorway looking out into the rain. The darkness below him was pricked with soldiers’ fires, a reassuring
sight, somewhat. His hands were restless. He rubbed them on his pants.

Behind him the young prince started to sing. His voice was supple without being strong, yet had an
earnestness that made it pleasing. He sang,
Science can grasp
The stars in the night,
But her love is without measure.
“It’s all right for you,” interrupted Craton Starbridge from the door. “But I am just another soldier.”

Mantikor put down his instrument. “Is that what’s bothering you?” he asked. “Craton, I am sorry. I was
thoughtless. Don’t worry, I will keep you by me.”

“I’m not afraid,” grunted the older man. “But I’m restless. That is natural. I have staked my life upon this
throw.”

“So have I.” Mantikor bit his lips. His handsome face was twisted to a frown, but then it cleared. He
clasped his hands. “I know,” he said. “We’ll throw the cards. Then we’ll sleep.”

“It’s atrocious luck,” said Craton Starbridge, scowling down over the valley. In the distance on the hill of
Charonea, he could see the bonfires of the enemy.

“It’s atrocious luck,” he murmured. In front of him the prince’s standard hung down listless from its pole.
There was no wind.

But Samson Mantikor had taken a pack of cards out of his kit. They were wound in a silk scarf. He
untied it, and laid them out upon the bed. He made them into piles, discarding all but the face cards and
the Starbridge suit; these he shuffled together and then reshuffled. “I will draw three times,” he said.
“Once for Caladon, once for myself, and once for you.”

He laid the twenty-seven cards before him in a line, face down. Then he touched each one in turn,
hesitating at the third and fifteenth cards. He put his fingers to his lips. Then, with a sudden movement, he
reversed the third card from the end. It was the Tower. From the clouds, dog-faced Angkhdt frowned
down upon a castle of black stones. In his hand he held the thunderbolt.

Mantikor closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them. He put his hand down on the card, hiding
it beneath his palm. Then he turned over the fifteenth card.

“It is the Garden,” he said when he could speak. “Craton, look—it is the Garden.”

In the doorway Craton Starbridge didn’t turn around. Mantikor gathered up the cards, reshuffled them,
and laid them out again. “This is for me,” he said, turning over the ninth card. It was the Dead Man.

Again he laid his hand over the card. “It is the Chair,” he said, tears in his eyes. “Craton, look—some
would say it is a throne, but I don’t think so. To me it looks more like an old man’s garden chair. What
do you think? Will you come to see me when I am a grandfather?”

He swept the cards into a pile. Craton Starbridge turned around. “Once more,” he said.

“No,” protested Samson Mantikor. “No, you’re right—it’s awful luck. Besides, I’m tired.”

But when the man came to stand beside him, he relented and laid out the cards. Carelessly Craton
Starbridge took the last one from his hands and flipped it over. It was Paradise, shining red and gold and
amber, rising above the bitter hills of Earth.

With a grunt, Craton Starbridge dropped it on the others. “There,” he said. “You see?”

He turned and walked out of the tent and down the hill. Prince Mantikor lay awake after he left. He lay
awake until the morning. “God grant it never comes,” he prayed, but it did come. And when it came it
brought a trick of nature. The rain had stopped during the night, and the ground was covered with a layer
of mist. On the field it drifted to the height of a man’s chest, and gave a spectral look to the assembled
soldiers.

From the heights it seemed as if the armies fought the sea, the men up to their chests in foam. Samson
Mantikor looked out from his tent and saw Aspe’s army like a host of shadows. Only their flags were
clearly visible, black and midnight blue, snapping crisply in the higher air.

Below him on the slopes of the small hill, the footsoldiers of Caladon stood with rifles in their hands,
dressed in purple, yellow, blue, and all the colors of the morning. Scarlet banners fluttered from their
pikes. Elsewhere the great standards of the Starbridge clans rose through the mist, figured in gold, silver,
and green. Under them the horses swayed and blundered, and Mantikor could see the helmets of the
captains: Antrim Starbridge, Lakshman Starbridge, Strontium Starbridge and his sons.

Towards seven in the morning, Aspe’s standard on the Charonea Ridge started to move. Supported by
its corners from four poles, it bellied like a sail, a great square of solid black moving slowly down the hill.
Shortly afterwards, standing by his tent, Mantikor heard the first sounds of the battle: gunshots and
explosions, men shouting, and the screaming of the horses. Yet through some trick of the mist, the noise
was muffled and unclear, seeming more distant than it was, and full of nauseating echoes. Mantikor bit his
lips and found a taste of copper in his mouth. He looked for reassurance in the faces of the men around
him, and the boys too young to fight.

Above him fragments of mist tugged at the sun and seemed to harry it across the sky. Samson Mantikor
climbed the hill. He looked out from a flat place of rock; he watched the battle for a long time. He
listened to its hundred voices, until they all resolved into one voice.

It was a distant crashing like the crashing of the sea. And the mist seemed to suck men under to their
deaths. Once a man was down, he disappeared, and the mist closed over him. Sometimes the prince
would see a man throw up his hands and disappear, but then he looked away, following the Starbridge
banners as they swept across the field. One of the boys called to him and pointed. He smiled and called
back. The scarlet crab of Castle Blaylock nodded proudly in the wind, halfway to the Charonea Ridge.

But there was another banner, too, that seemed unstoppable. Already it had covered half the distance to
the prince’s hill. It was the largest on the field. It seemed to tower above the rest. Elsewhere, other,
smaller flags of black contended in the mist, moving back and forth, and some broke and went down and
were sucked under.

Above him on the hilltop his own flag caught the breeze—wild birds upon a sky of blue. Watching it,
suddenly dizzy, the prince felt terribly alone. He knew what was happening. Around him people moved
away. They were embarrassed, saddened, grieved. As for him, grief and fear were like a hunger in his
guts, for there below him on the field, the golden lilies of Iskandar Starbridge fluttered down, the pole
broken and the cloth in rags. Nearby, the great sea dragon of Lord Mara Starbridge, Prince of Charn,
jerked back and forth and then was snapped off short.

Time seemed to stop upon the little hill. Smiling foolishly, Mantikor looked around him. He put his hands
over his eyes, then took them away. The silver leopard of Mercator Starbridge had gone down. With him
had ridden Lakshman Starbridge and the high constable of Charn. Now only remnants of their force
remained: single flags of animals or birds of prey, surrounded and hemmed in by hosts of black. But the
dark flags were fewer too—the great black standard of the colonel stood alone, now three-quarters of
the way across the field. From the prince’s hilltop, men pointed and gesticulated. Someone shouted
something that he didn’t understand, and then he saw Craton Starbridge lurch out of the mist, coming up
from below. He was with his brother and his sister’s son, and they were dressed for fighting.

He climbed up to where the prince was standing, and saluted. “Sir,” he said. “I see a way. There’s no
one between him and us; look at him.” And he thrust into the prince’s hands a pair of field glasses.

“Look,” he said, and the prince looked. He saw the black flag looming towards him, out of focus, and he
twisted the screw. Tendrils of mist coiled around the flagpoles; he moved the glasses down and then he
saw him stagger into range, a tall black rider on a giant horse. His hair was gray, wild around his head,
and his raised fist was made of metal.

“Request denied,” said Samson Mantikor. But he spoke softly, biting his lips, staring through the glasses,
listening to the sounds around him, the jingle of the saddles as men swung themselves onto their horses,
the whirr of the sharpshooters’ rifles near his ear.

And when he lowered the binoculars, the hillside was deserted, save for his own orderlies and guards.
Below him, down the slope, he heard the hooves of many horses scattering on the rocks, and that was
all. Then he saw a single horseman jump over a ridge of earth, carrying the flag of Craton Starbridge and
his family, a white ship under sail upon a sea of mist.

Other horsemen followed him. Mantikor turned his face away. The sharpshooters were putting down
their guns. They were staring open-mouthed, and he was watching in the mirror of their faces how that
crazy little boat drove on, drove on, shuddered and drove on, and then subsided under that black storm.

Then the men were all around him, tugging at him, pulling him away. “Sir, you cannot stay,” they
whispered, pulling at his arms. And he suffered them to lead him, for he was thinking of a poem, and he
was mumbling a final poem as he went along. Later it was to become famous, and was engraved along
the arch of a stone gate, later, much later, when the sweet summer grass of Charonea made the work a
joy. Then workmen brought their families from Caladon, and while their wives and children picnicked in
the grass, the men erected a great marble gate, to commemorate the place where the Starbridges went
down. And along the arch they carved these words, meaningless to all but one or two:
My heart went out to where that boat
Broke on that silver sea.
Above it on the clumsy wind,
Wild birds are scattering.
But in the days after the battle, the news of Charonea spread over the diocese and came at last to that
small village in the mountains, where Thanakar had made his home. Early in the morning of the twelfth of
January, when the light was fresh upon the windows, he sat up in bed. Then slowly, so as not to wake
her, he rose up and dressed himself. Something felt different to him, and perhaps it was just the passing of
a dream. He took his hat and cane. He stepped across the room. Carefully, so as not to make a noise, he
opened the door and walked out onto the veranda.

The courtyard of his house was empty. He squinted up into the sun. Turning his head, he saw a gleam of
artificial light from Jenny’s room, through the slats of wooden shutters on the second floor. He frowned,
then smiled, and imagined her asleep upon her desk, her forehead cradled in her arms, her pen still in her
hand.

There was a bird in the courtyard, picking at the moss with its long bill.

He passed out through the gate and out onto the boardwalk by the lake. There he strolled along the
fronts of the deserted villas, admiring the day. They had had no rain in half a week. The sun shone clear
and calm over the shoulder of Mount Rigel. On the other side, the entire range of the Caryatids stretched
away, visible for miles. There was no sugar to distort the air.

Thanakar raised his hand against the light. In front of him the boardwalk ended on a beach of sand. There
a small crowd had gathered near a man on horseback.

As he watched, the man dismounted wearily. Someone held a sack of water, and he drank from it and
splashed it on his face. His horse was pulling on its bridle, eager to get down to the lake.

Thanakar walked faster, and he switched his cane to his left hand. He soon met people coming back the
other way. One was a technician in the tuberculosis sanatorium where he worked.

Thanakar raised his hat. The woman strayed from her companions. “We’re having breakfast at the
hospital,” she said. “You care to come?” She extended her gloved hand. Thanakar touched it with his
own.

“What news?” he asked, turning back the way he’d come.

The woman shrugged. “Events,” she said. “Samson Mantikor is dead at Charonea. Strangled by his own
guard—that’s what they say. Argon Starbridge is deposed. Aspe sits in his tent outside the walls of
Caladon. The governor has asked him in, but he won’t go.”

“You don’t seem concerned.”

The woman smiled worriedly and shook her head. “What help is it to be concerned? What can I do?
These things are far away. Now I don’t know—my husband’s here. We’ll keep our heads down. With
any luck we can escape their notice.”

They were passing Thanakar’s house. Nodding and smiling, he slowed to rest his leg, letting them go on
ahead. Then he turned aside, entering the wicker gate, walking through the hall and through the
courtyard. The light in Jenny’s window had burned out. Across the way, by the fountain, Mrs. Cassimer
held the baby in her arms. She was rocking him and playing, but pretended not to see the doctor. They
had had an argument the day before.

He limped up onto the veranda, and opened the door of his own room. It was still in shadow. The slats
of the shutters drew thick lines on the floor.

He hooked his cane over a chair, removed his hat, his gloves, his jacket, and his shoes. He was fumbling
with the buttons of his trousers as he stood above the bed. Charity pushed the sheets away and rolled
onto her side. Her eyes were closed, her face softened by sleep. He sat down on the bed and touched
her hair, and she came awake under his fingers, turning up to kiss his thumb. “What?” she said. “What is
it?” and he smiled. Nothing of importance. No. Nothing that can’t wait forever. He took off his trousers
and lay down. Charity opened up her arms, still half asleep, still lingering in a countryside of dreams. But
part of her was there with him, her body soft and strong, her skin tasting of sweat, her breath slightly foul
as he found her mouth.

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