Past the hanging bodies and burning buildings and flamed out motored vehicles, only to see … stilt men carrying severed heads, which they threw to the waiting crowds, who kicked and tossed them … a man disemboweled, his intestines streaming out into the gutter as his attackers continued to hack him apart and he clutched at their legs … a woman assaulted against a brick wall by ten men who held her down as they cut and raped her … fountains full of floating, bloated bodies, the waters turned red-black with blood … glimpses of the bonfires, bodies stacked for burning in the dozens … a man and woman decapitated, still caught in an embrace, on their knees in the murk of rising mist … the unearthly screams, the taste of blood rising in the air, the smell of fire and burning flesh … and the female riders on their wooden horses, riding over the bodies of the dead, their eyes still turned inward, that they might not know the horrors of the night.

Oh, that he could rip his own eyes from his sockets! He did not wish to see and yet could not help but see if he wished to live. In the face of such carnage, his killing of Dvorak became the gentlest of mercies. Bile rose in his throat and, sick with grief and horror, he vomited beside an abandoned horse buggy. When the sickness had passed, he gathered his wits, found a landmark he recognized, and by passing through lesser alleys and climbing over the rooftops of one-story houses set close together, came once again to his hostel.

The hostel was empty and silent. Dradin crept, limping from glass in his foot and the ache in his muscles, up to the second floor and his room. Once inside, he did not even try to wash off the blood, the dirt, the filth, did not put on clothes, but stumbled to his belongings and stuffed his pictures, The Refraction of Light in a Prison, and his certificate from the religious college into the knapsack. He stood in the center of the room, knapsack over his left shoulder, the machete held in his right hand, breathing heavily, trying to remember who he might be and where he might be and what he should do next. He shuffled over to the window and looked down on the valley. What he saw made him laugh, a high-pitched sound so repugnant to him that he closed his mouth immediately.

The valley lay under a darkness broken by soft, warm lights. No bonfires raged in the valley below. No one hung from scaffolding, tongues blue and purpling. No one bathed in the blood of the dead.