See, Father? I am not that mad. I am not that useless. I lied. All my life was a lie, but it was a rational lie.

What pretenses do the sane make?

What did you pretend, Mother, knowing from my birth that I was not like the rest of you?

And what did you pretend to yourself, Tain Trin Tain, when time after time you believed my lies? You kept asking, but you took all the lies. Why now are you angry?

The sun sank as they walked. The walls of the holy city, slanted and crested with imbedded shards of glass, caught the sunlight and sent light knifing into the eyes as if all the walls were hedged with divine fire. The dome of the Beykaskh, the dome of the Ila’s Grace, was wholly tiled with glass, and it blazed like the sun itself. A man could no more look at it by noon than at the burning Eye of Heaven itself.

The mad and the guards alike began to walk with heads lowered, not from shame, but to protect their eyes from the glory of the city.

Birds flew thick about the walls, black spots in the glare. The southern wall was where the gallows were: the city gave the birds its unwanted, its malefactors, and its garbage.

In its wealth it threw out in a day, men said, what whole villages could thrive on for a year. A pool of water stood by the gates, rimmed in stone and overflowing into the sand a good ways out: and out across the sand, on a bed of sandstone, a green-rimmed pond stood always filled.

There vermin of every sort came to water, and to serve as sport for the Ila’s archers and her riflemen. That spillage, that pond, was the most profligate consumption of resource possible, and the mad wondered at it, and called that reed-rimmed pool a mirage.

But a pipe ran beside the road, and whereas villages measured and sold every drop, whereas they pressed moisture out of every bit of waste and distilled it in huge stills, it was not the way things were done in Oburan. They sent it out to the pool, to draw vermin.

And as they came up under the shadow of Oburan, they met that rumored wonder greater than the blazing dome and the glass-edged walls. Beside the gate, that fountain known as the Mercy of the Ila gushed from stonework mouths and ran out so profligately that it splashed from the fountain bowl to the troughs and some onto the stones of the street, to be trampled underfoot.

There travelers and traders were free to drink, while the remnant continually overflowed and ran from the trough through tiles until, Marak knew, it reached that distant, reed-rimmed pond.