The man gave him a long hungry look through slitted eyes. And then suddenly, as momentary sunlight tore through a rag of cloud above them, his expression cleared. He smiled up at the sky. Then, reaching out his immense hand, he put two fingers underneath Thanakar’s chin, and forced his chin up in a playful gesture of encouragement, and slapped him playfully across the cheek, knocking him off balance. Then he was gone without a word, slogging up the street, his coat pulled up around his face. But at the fork, where the road led straight up to the mountain’s base, he leaped forward and started to run, singing like a boy.

That was the last time Thanakar saw him. The time would come when a man could travel all through the northern provinces and all through the slums of Charn without seeing a single antinomial. They were a transient people, and soon they were all gone. Foreseeing it, standing in the mud, Thanakar chose that moment for his own. In later times, when men would ask him what the antinomials were like, he would remember not the violence, not the savagery, not the smell of roasting meat, but that moment: a man running away up to a turning in the road, running joyfully to his own death, chasing, without thinking, something that could never be.

The other stayed behind. He stood next to Thanakar, wiping his shaved forehead with his scarf. They were close to the Starbridge palaces. The streets were almost empty. A motorcar sped past, spewing them with mud.

* * *

Thanakar went home. But first, slinking through the corridors and up the marble stairs, his pale companion following, he stopped at the commissar’s apartments. The door swung open onto empty rooms. The church had already repossessed the furniture. In the hallway a man was busy repainting; he was an idiot. When he made the gestures of respect, he kept his paintbrush in his hand, so that when he was finished his nose and hair were daubed with green.

The room smelled of antiseptic and incense. In Prince Abu’s bedroom, a printed notice was pasted to one wall. It said an epidemic of immorality had broken out here, and it had already killed two people—God have mercy. The document was an official one, and pinned to the bottom corner was a snapshot of an official execution. Someone had jiggled the camera, and the faces were impossible to make out.

He walked down to his own apartment. He expected to find soldiers, but the hall was empty. His housekeeper met him at the threshold—“Oh, sir,” she stammered. “Thank heaven you’ve come back.

Your mother, sir. Your mother’s woke up. She killed a man.” Thanakar took off his coat and hung it up.

Then he went past her through the library towards his parents’ bedroom, leaving her gaping up into the antinomial’s white face. “Oh, sir,” continued Mrs. Cassimer. “You can’t go in there. She’s dangerous.

She’s killed a man. Who’s this you brought home, sir?”