To every good man the Ila gave the nature of men, and to every good beast the Ila gave the nature of beasts. The Ila named them and divided them one from the other. She appointed them their use and life under the sun.

But even to the beasts of the desert the Ila’s Mercy continually pours out her abundance.

Even the destroyers the Ila made for her use.

—The Book of Priests

In here,” the ila’s men said, and made Marak duck, shielding his head from a low doorway. He wiped his eyes as his hair fell across his face, and consequently had grit in them, compounded with the sticky filth that clung to his skin and his hair and his clothes.

Blinking tears, then, he prepared himself for soldiers’ rough handling, but saw no authority awaiting him, only four slaves, who stood holding towels and such in a little fountain courtyard dim with twilight.

“The Ila wishes not to be offended,” one of the guards said.

So the Ila had indeed heard the news of Tain’s misfortune in his son, and become, as he hoped, curious. He would have the audience, and with no need for him to seek it, his most extravagant hopes realized.

The officers of the household, armed and watchful, kept their distance from him, but in an act of leaden, ordinary compliance he began to shed the ruined boots, which brought away shreds of old white skin. New skin had grown, daily, to be worn away in blisters; it was his nature. It was the nature of all the mad, he had learned: they all healed well. Only the greatest injuries, like the boy’s, could overwhelm their bodies’ defenses.

The slaves took his filthy rags with disgust. With gestures—they did not speak—they wished him to stand beneath a device that poured down water, and pulled a chain. A flood rushed down on him, a chill rush that made his flesh contract. Between his feet, water that had passed over his body stayed not to bathe him, but flowed out a drain so rapidly the puddle never showed soil.

Perhaps that water flowed from the drain out under the wall, and perhaps it flowed down the streets to carry the waste of the holy city, or perhaps, again, it passed down clay pipes, to join the Mercy of the Ila, the drink of unknowing passersby.

{Marak, Marak, Marak, his voices said, chiding him… or beckoning him to folly: he never knew.}

Meanwhile the slaves washed his body with soft clothes, scrubbing in their ignorance at his tattoos, at the mark he wore, the abjori emblem, in blue above his heart, scrubbed at the killing-marks on his right hand.