“You have no choice.” He bent down and grabbed the bishop by the jaw. “You are very beautiful,” he snarled, as she stared up at him from the floor.

Over the next few days, the colonel’s soldiers started to straggle in along the river road. They were small and ferocious men. They looked as if they had spent their whole lives on horseback, on high arid plateaus under the relentless sun; they were bowlegged and hunchbacked, their skin burned dark and crisp, their hair shaved, their eyebrows plucked, their jaws powerful and always moving, because they chewed some southern narcotic and spat it everywhere. In a few days the city was full of them, and they stabled their horses in the temples and put their tents up in the marketplaces and along the streets, and took what food they wanted from the roadside stalls. Yet they were disciplined too, and didn’t touch the women or break down any doors, just took what they wanted and sat in the rain inside their tents, chewing their drug with rotten teeth and whispering to each other in voiceless southern languages.

The bishop’s council withdrew into the Temple of the Inner Ear, and sent impossible commands out to the captains of the garrison. But when the colonel raised the imperial standard from the top of the post office—a golden dog’s head on a midnight flag so big it seemed to float in slow motion—even the young captains of the purge came down to see him and to hear him speak. The war had continued all their lives, and even though they had all lost fathers, grandfathers, brothers, friends, still the war had seemed mythical and far away. There was never any news. Yet suddenly it had lumbered out of the mists of ignorance like a huge white ship out of a cloud—almost upon them, running them down—because now for the past week they had heard the enemy’s artillery smashing the outlying fortifications as the Starbridge army came reeling back, and the town was full of scoundrels and deserters. So the captains came to listen. And there were rumors of some vast necromancy coming from the temple, and in fact the tower of the Inner Ear had farted out some smelly smoke, but it had dissipated in the rain, it rained so hard.

The colonel was everywhere, talking and yelling, but all day he would squeeze the town for food, and at night he had it taken in wheelbarrows down to the docks, where he was sleeping on a mat in some antinomial cave. There he prepared feasts, and people said they were eating meat down there too. He built soggy bonfires and stood out in the rain, and sang in the language of his own people, his harsh voice drawing pictures in the air, so that in the days that followed, the townspeople saw a sight that filled them with rage and fear—antinomials riding through the city on horseback, laughing and making music, and some were armed. Dogs slunk from the temples to follow them. Younger clergy—shopkeepers and bankers—hid their faces in dark doorways, making impotent gestures of purification.