Anna looks at Himerius: his big eyeballs, his knobby knees, his duck-feet; he looks like an amalgam of seven different creatures. She hears the voice of the tall scribe: The sultan has new war engines that can bring down walls as though they were air.

“You mean the Hungarian does not care to what purposes his engines are put?”

“There are many people in this world,” Himerius says, “who do not care to what purposes their engines are put. So long as they are paid.”

They reach the wall; up she goes, a dancer; the world thins, and there is only the movement of her body, and the memory of finger- and footholds. Finally the crawl through the mouth of the lion, the relief of solidity beneath her feet.

In the ruined library she spends longer than usual pawing through the doorless cupboards from which she has already pillaged most everything of promise. She gathers some worm-eaten rolls of paper—bills of sale, she guesses—moving halfheartedly and without expectation through the gloom. In the back, behind several waterlogged stacks of parchment, she finds a small stained brown codex, bound in what feels like goat leather, lifts it out, and tucks it into the sack.

The fog thickens and the quality of the moonlight dims. Pigeons coo somewhere above the broken roof. She whispers a prayer to Saint Koralia, ties the sack, hauls it down the stairs, crawls through the scupper, down-climbs the wall, and drops into the boat without a word. Gaunt and shivering, Himerius rows them back to the harbor, and the charcoal in the brazier burns out, and the icy fog seems to cinch down around them like a trap. Beneath the archway into the Venetian quarter, there are no men-at-arms, and when they reach the house of the Italians, everything is dark. In the courtyard the fig tree stands glazed with ice, the geese nowhere to be seen. Boy and girl shiver against the wall and Anna wills the sun to rise.

Eventually Himerius tries the door and finds it unlatched. Inside the workshop, all the tables stand empty. The hearth is cold. Himerius pushes open the shutters and the room fills with flat, glacial light. The looking glass is gone, as is the terra-cotta centaur, and the board of pinned butterflies, the rolls of parchment, the scrapers and awls and penknives. The servants dismissed, the geese gone or cooked. A few chopped quills are scattered across the tiles; spills of ink stain the floor; the room is a vault stripped bare.

Himerius drops the sack. For a moment in the dawn light he looks hunched and gray, the old man he won’t live long enough to become. Somewhere else in the quarter a man yells, “You know what I hate?” and a rooster crows and a woman starts to cry. The world in its final days. Anna remembers something Chryse once said: The houses of the rich burn quick as any other.