“He’ll be all right,” said the doctor anxiously. They were approaching the end of the Keyhole. Through a break in the rocks up ahead, they could see the towers of St. Serpentine, high on the hillside, still in sunlight. They turned a corner and the valley opened up in front of them, ringed with sharp hills. Where the road started to climb up towards the monastery, half a mile in front of them, several hundred soldiers blocked the way.

“If this is an ambush,” murmured the commissar, “it’s the most foolish one I’ve ever seen. Unless those troops are bait.”

Aspe grunted. “Argon Starbridge has guns,” he said. “That I know. There.” He pointed up the road, up past the soldiers, up the hillside to where it disappeared into a tunnel below the monastery gate. A series of terraces were cut into the cliff just where the road disappeared. “There,” he said.

“I can’t see. It’s too far,” said the commissar.

“It’s as plain as day. Field howitzers. You can see the crews.”

“I can’t see it. Where?” The commissar was fumbling with his field glasses.

Aspe grunted. “Let’s go,” he said. “Forward. I want to test the range.”

Thanakar prodded their elephant into a walk again, and they shambled down the road. The enemy soldiers were adventists, drawn in three lines across the road. They carried red-and-white banners, and flags of the phoenix and the rising sun. At about four hundred yards they opened fire.

“Steady,” said Aspe, but it was useless. The bullets made a sucking sound as they hit the elephant; it just stopped and refused to go any farther, though Thanakar stood up and goaded it until it bled. It just stood there, and then it knelt down solemnly. It wouldn’t take another step.

“Stay here,” said Aspe. He jumped down from the elephant’s back, his boots ringing on the stones. He walked forward down the road a little distance, and from the pouch at his side he produced a copper bugle. Then he raised his arms and shouted out, as if calling for silence, once, twice, three times, and perhaps it was just a trick of the rocks, but his voice seemed to fill the valley and the gunfire lessened. As he put the bugle to his lips, it almost stopped. He started to play a song, full of low notes and deep melancholy, and Thanakar noticed that some of the adventists in front had dropped their weapons, and some were praying, and some knelt down and put their foreheads to the stones. And the sound of the music seemed to carry a long way, for Thanakar thought he heard an echo from behind them, but then he looked back and saw, sitting on an outcropping of rock far above the river and the road, the white-faced antinomial with sunglasses, the sunset gathering around him, and his long trumpet lifted to the sky. Above him, the clouds had caught on fire.

For a long time the two men played, not the same song, but melodies that seemed to catch each other in a sad, loveless embrace. And underneath the music Thanakar could hear the running river, and then he could hear the sound of hoofbeats and a different kind of singing, and in this new sound he recognized for the first time the war song of the antinomials, and it wasn’t wild or harsh or even loud, but instead it seemed to linger somewhere in the sky, pure, bitter, restrained, almost out of earshot, not one song but a thousand, mixing and searching high above them for harmonies among the clouds.