With a roar, the air caught fire, following the eddies of the fog a thousand feet above their heads. In the square people scattered, but in an instant they were surrounded and engulfed in whirlwinds of flame; it was in the air they breathed. The clouds burst open, and the rain caught fire and fell in torrents on the rooftops. Back in the safety of the church, something fell on Abu from behind and knocked him cold.

Part Six:

Refugees and Pilgrims

A week later, the fire had changed consistency. It still fell unabated on the roofs of Beggar’s Medicine.

But after the first explosion, new rainwater had chilled it to a drizzle of cold, wet, scorching drops. The phenomenon was visible for miles, a rainstorm of light. During the day, circular rainbows formed in the upper atmosphere.

At dusk, Thanakar Starbridge stood among some corpus trees, looking back over the city. Colonel Aspe had pitched his tent among the only vegetation in the valley, and Thanakar wondered whether it was because he liked the smell. The trees bled a nauseating sap from punctures in their soft bark. It smelled like battlefields and operating rooms. Standing looking back at the lightstorm over the city, Thanakar reached for a branch; it seemed to shrink away from under his hand. The leaves rustled mournfully, though the air was still. It wasn’t raining, for the moment, in the barren valley where the army camped.

There had been no fighting, for Aspe still sat sulking in his tent. The soldiers chewed narcotics around the campfires and quarreled with each other in their soft southern whispers. They played endless games of cards, games with obscure rules, cards with unfamiliar markings. They spat and cursed. But Thanakar had been busy restructuring faces, rebuilding limbs. That day he had made a golden eye for a young soldier, with nerves of golden wire, but after hours of surgery the man was still practically blind. He had lain there patiently, though the pain was terrible and the disappointment worse—a young man not six phases old. After eight hours on the table all he could see were geometric patterns of metallic yellow. In the end, Thanakar had been too discouraged to proceed. His fingers were too sore. The wire had cut into his knuckles. It was a new technique.

At the entrance to the colonel’s tent, he stretched out his hand again into the corpus leaves, and again the branches seemed to evade his touch, while a tremor ran through them in the breathless air. It was a melancholy place. Thanakar ducked his head under the folds of canvas. Inside the tent, Aspe sat on a stool, hunched over a table in the shadows, his pencil moving noiselessly over a piece of paper. He drew careful circles and pentagons by the light of an oil lamp, and underneath he played at forming letters, imitations of script, imitations of printing, meaningless even at a distance.

Thanakar stood watching. The colonel took no notice of him. He didn’t even raise his head, but continued his slow scratching. Even in such a childlike occupation there was nothing laughable or weak in him. He glowered at the page as if he hated it, patterns of white scars standing out along his forehead. His neck and forearms, augmented by shadow, formed a tense and menacing arc. All his muscles were taut, his hand flat on the table, the fingers of his other hand cramped around the pencil, as if with one hand he prevented the table from rising in the air, while with the other he bent the rebellious pencil to his will. Left to itself, it might have written anything. It might have formed letters that made sense.