They suddenly passed a gate, into a large square, before those who flung stares, not stones; and those were better behaved, but more chilling.

After that they came through a second gate, into the shadow of inner walls, and the reek of asphalt and oil. Steam went up here in rolling clouds. Rumor was true. Such was the wealth of the holy city that they had fuel to spare for furnaces, and gates moved by steam and not the strength of men or beasts. He had heard of it but never seen it.

He bore up the wife, who staggered against him. “Please,” she said, “let me rest. Let me rest.”

“Soon,” he said. He could wish she had died quietly ,as the old man had died. She was a gentle soul. She had no imagining of the possibilities in this place.

“What is that sound?” she asked when the gates groaned and gave a tortured sound, iron on iron.

“Machines,” he said. “The machines of the Beykaskh.”

She seemed not to understand him. Perhaps she had never heard how the Beykaskh made gates of iron and boiled water to make them move, or how the Ila, displeased, flung deposed ministers into the works of those machines. The wife from Tarsa wavered in her steps, and looked numb, exhausted as they passed through the last gates, through the heart of the machines.

They were within the inner sanctum, the heart of the holy city. He had come where his father’s armies had only hoped to come.

“This is the one,” the captain of the Ila’s men said suddenly, and seized Marak’s arm, and drew him and the wife apart.

The wife fell to her knees, crying out for his help, and for someone named Lelie. No one noticed. She lay on the pavings and the besha that bore the dead old man walked sedately past her defenseless arm, scarcely missing her, stepping delicately over her. Marak saw it, held his breath, but walked obediently where the men bade him go.

This is the one, they said of him, but even now they accounted him no threat.

He would not lose his one chance for the sake of a gesture. He had fixed on one mad act as of some value to his father, as some way in which his father might say, and that the villages might say, Perhaps he was Tain’s, after all.

If he was Tain’s, if he was Tain’s, then his mother was no whore, and his sister’s honor was safe.

He had one chance. One chance. One chance. He had to be meek and tolerate everything until he found it.

Then the mad would have a name, as far as they told the story. Every name would be remembered, and his father would say, He was not so mad as the rest, was he?

Chapter Two

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