All sight of the procession was gone; the cries of "the veil" were hopelessly distant.

I folded it, tight, and turned and ran.

I didn't know where Memnoch was; I didn't know where I was going. I ran down the narrow street and through another and another and another, people streaming by me, indifferent to me, on the way to the crucifixion, or simply trudging their accustomed path.

My chest burnt from my running, my feet were bruised and torn, I tasted His blood again and saw the Light in a blinding flash. Unable to see, I clutched the cloth. I lifted it and shoved it inside my robe and clutched it tight there. No one would get it. No one.

A terrible wailing came from my lips. I looked upwards. The sky shifted; the blue sky over Jerusalem, the sand-filled air shifted; the whirlwind had mercifully surrounded me, and the Blood of Christ sank into my chest and my heart, circling my heart, the Light filling my eyes, both my hands pressed tight to the folded veil.

The whirlwind carried me in silence and stillness. With all my will I forced myself to look down, to reach inside my robe, which was not my robe now, but my coat and my shirt—the suit I'd worn in the snows of New York, and under the cloth of my vest, next to my shirt, I felt the folded veil! It seemed the wind would tear off my clothes! It would rip the hair from my head. But I clutched tight to the folded cloth that lay safe against my heart.

Smoke rose from the earth. Cries and screams again. Were they more terrible than the cries surrounding Christ on the road to Calvary?

With a hard, shattering blow, I struck a wall and a floor. Horses went by, the hooves barely missing my head, sparks flying from the stones. A woman lay bleeding and dying before me, her neck obviously broken, blood pouring out of her nose and ears.

People fled in all directions. Again the smell of excrement mixed with blood.

It was a city at war, the soldiers looting and dragging the innocents from out of archways, screams echoing as if off endless ceilings, the flames coming so close they singed my hair.

"The veil, the veil!" I said, and felt it with my hand, secure, still tucked between my vest and shirt. A soldier's foot came up and kicked the side of my face hard. And I went sprawling on the stones.

I looked up. I wasn't in a street at all. I was in a huge domed church, with gallery upon gallery of Roman arches and columns. All around me, against the glitter of gold mosaics, men and women were being cut down. Horses were trampling them. The body of a child struck the wall above me, the skull crushed and the tiny limbs dropping like debris at my feet. Horsemen slashed at those fleeing, with broadswords hacking through shoulders and arms. A violent explosion of flames made it as light as midday. Through the portals men and women fled. But the soldiers went after them.