Omeir smiles. Up on the rostrum men are scrambling around the apparatus again, and a few snow crystals sift down from the sky, and the crowd shifts, restless now, and the cymbals start up a third time, and at the head of the field, where the sultan may or may not be watching, a breeze lifts the hundreds of horsetails strung from his banners. Omeir leans against the bole of the tree, trying to stay warm, and the two men clamber over the bronze cylinder, the one in the red cap peering into its mouth, and just then the huge cannon fires.

It’s as though the finger of God reaches down through the clouds and flicks the planet out of orbit. The thousand-pound stone ball moves too fast to see: there is only the roar of its passage lacerating the air as it screams over the field—but before the sound has even begun to register in Omeir’s consciousness, a tree at the opposite end of the field shatters.

A second tree a quarter mile farther also vaporizes, seemingly simultaneously, and for a heartbeat he wonders if the ball will travel forever, beyond the horizon, smashing through tree after tree, wall after wall, until it flies off the edge of the world.

In the distance, what must be a mile away, rocks and mud spray in all directions, as though an invisible plow rakes a great furrow in the earth, and the report of the detonation reverberates in the marrow of his bones. The cheer that comes up from the gathered crowd is less a cheer of triumph than of stupefaction.

Up on its brace, the mouth of the apparatus leaks smoke. Of the two gunners, one stands with both hands to his ears looking down at what little is left of the man in the red cap.

Wind carries the smoke out over the platform. “Fear of the thing,” Maher murmurs, more to himself than to Omeir, “will be more powerful than the thing itself.”

Anna

She and Maria queue outside the Church of Saint Mary of the Spring with a dozen other penitents. Beneath their wimples the faces of the nuns of the order resemble dried thistles, colorless and brittle: none look younger than a century. One collects Anna’s silver in a bowl and a second takes the bowl and tips it into a fold inside her tunic and a third waves them down a flight of stairs.

Here and there in candlelit reliquaries rest the finger- and toe-bones of saints. At the far end, deep beneath the church, they squeeze past a crude altar crusted a foot deep with candlewax and fumble their way into a grotto.

A well gurgles; the soles of Anna’s and Maria’s slippers slide on the wet stones. An abbess lowers a lead cup into a basin, draws it back up, pours in a significant measure of quicksilver, and gives it a swirl.