“He pauses for a moment, looks up. All around him the air is alive with the flight of birds. A thousand wings beat patterns into his rising Smoke. Little vortexes forming; sculptures of shadow, writ on the air. A moment, that’s all: the double thud of his heart. Then he takes aim at the second horse and shoots it through the neck.

“There: he has done it. The horses are down, his mission is completed. But already he’s pushed back the bolt, put another bullet in the rifle’s chamber. He is not himself, you see. He is wearing a new face.

“The telescopic sight finds the coachman. He is the young man’s servant, his confidant, his surrogate father. It may be said that the young man loves him. And yet the word beats in his ears. Father. How close have they been; how many years has the older man protected him; how many times has he offered him comfort, how many tears wiped away?

“How many humiliations has he witnessed?

“Father. A poor surrogate this: stupid, coarse, clumsy like a fool. A caricature bought to mock him; kept in service as an admonition, as a joke. The thought thickens the Smoke in his mask, flavours it with childhood. Our friend’s an orphan, you see, or something very like. His parents were a picture frame on the table by his boyhood bed. ‘This one’s a snake,’ his grandfather explained, ‘and that one was a sissy. It’s a wonder he sired you at all.’ No good-night kisses, just the heavy touch of the old man’s hand. A boy not bred for weakness. Crosshairs drawn on his father’s chest. A curl of the finger. The smoke of the gun swallowed by the billows of his personal pyre.

“Parricide. You might think it’d be enough, the wages paid, the mask satisfied. But the lad has already worked the bolt. He sights another target; a young man standing in the open door of the coach. The telescope brings him ever so close. Fun-house mirror: like a twin born to different loins. Gawking, not yet in fear; the mouth an arching O. Three shots. The third one hits him, right in the head. The whiplash of impact. By rights he should be dead.

“Then the coach tilts and is swallowed by a hole. Our prince does not understand it, thinks the earth has opened for his prey. Birds in the sky. The chamber empty; the hammer falling useless; fingers too Soot-slick to reload.

“By now the mask owns him, has grown into his skin. It is also suffocating him. It’s in his struggle for air that he manages to rip it off. Dry heaves and tears: the wind has turned, his own Smoke is stinging in his eyes. On the floor, the barrel of his rifle trips up his feet.