Just like his father. Temperamental. Damned rain.” He was very worried. His eyes avoided the doctor’s, and he sucked nervously on a sourball. The rain was cracking the slates, flooding the terraces.

The doctor asked him about Spanion Locke.

“Can’t help you there,” said the old man. “Like to. Can’t. That’s the purge up there. But the chaplain’s deaf and blind; he might not notice. I’m the regular police. Not our jurisdiction. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Would you? Thanks.”

“Stupid fools. Both of you. I’ll see what I can do. Nothing, probably.”

“Thank you.”

The commissar went off muttering, and Thanakar was left alone. Thinking about Locke, he felt less patience for his cousin. The prince had suffered from morbidity ever since he was a child. Once he had tried to cut his wrists. “Imagine him as an adult,” the commissar had grumbled then. In fact, a young Starbridge had nothing to complain of: nothing but parties and dancing lessons and indulgent schoolteachers trying to recompense their students for long lives of marriage, or short lives at the battlefront. Abu’s morbidity had exempted him from the services. “Doesn’t make any sense,” remarked the commissar. “Suicides are what they need, especially among officers.”

Abu and the doctor had both been left behind, and sometimes it was depressing when relatives came back, wounded or decorated, and sometimes Thanakar wondered whether that was the only thing that had drawn them together, the cripple and the fool. Outside Abu’s room, he sat sketching furiously on an envelope—dragons, gangsters, the commissar with his piglike face. The pencil lead ripped through the paper.

Near where he sat at a desk in the hallway, a casement window blew open. He rose to close it, but it slipped from between his fingers as the wind caught it like a wing and beat it back against the wall. The window broke, so that even when he had forced it closed and bolted it, the day still spat at him through lips of broken glass. It was raining hard. He caught some water on his tongue and tasted it experimentally, even though he knew it was too early yet for the sweet rain, the sugar rain that changed the climate. Still, this was the start of it, and even though there was nothing in books or family histories but stories of disaster from this phase of spring, even so he was disappointed by the rain’s thin texture, its insipid taste, and he looked forward to new weather. Then the rain would fall for months on end, and flood the city, and wash all dirt and beggary down into the swollen sea, and kill what crops there were, and cover the hills with seed, the semen of Beloved Angkhdt piled ten feet deep. And then the summer jungles, the tiger and the black adder, the gorilla and the pregnant orchid, all the myths of his childhood would sprout up into life, watered by the rain.

Disappointed, he turned back into the hall. Abu’s closed door enraged him. He pounded on it and grabbed the handle as if to force it, but it wasn’t locked. It opened suddenly into the prince’s bedroom.