Smell that? Now, no offense, sir, but we’ve heard some rumors about you too. I’d be careful, sir.”

The clouds looked bruised and swollen over a light rain. In the street, mud reached over the ankles. It was quiet here, the fire far away, the streets deserted. Thanakar sat down on a projecting beam while the policeman walked around. Near his hand, a bird huddled disconsolately among some bricks, ruffling its green feathers.

When the man had gone, Thanakar asked among the neighbors. They told him nothing, in many cringing and resentful ways. They were interested in money. They hated him. One old woman with blue teeth said,

“No good ever came from your kind. Not for poor folk. Nothing but trouble . . . sir,” and she cocked her head in the direction of the burned house.

But he found a little girl who told him. She was dressed in yellow rags. Sitting beside him on her porch, kicking her feet, wiping her nose along her arm, she told him how she had crept out that night to watch the house burn down, and how she saw the officers of the purge, in black boots and black uniforms, standing silhouetted by the flames, their horses stamping and tossing their heads. The roof had given way in an avalanche of sparks, and one of the horses had kicked back on its hind legs and pulled its bridle free. Standing on the ground, its rider had raised his whip and cursed.

“But the family?” interrupted Thanakar gently. It was starting to get dark. On the horizon, the sun had dropped below the clouds, and it glinted on the brass roofs of the pagodas and, just visible atop its pillar, the statue of Mara Starbridge wrestling the hierophant. Some women picked miserably through the mud, down towards one of the shrines at the bottom of the street, tolling hand bells.

The little girl swung and kicked her legs. Seriously, without a trace of fear, she told how she had seen a man and a woman handcuffed, gagged, led away. “Ama came to find me,” she said. “She told me to get back inside. But I saw them through the window.”

“There was a little girl about your age. A little younger.”

She wiped her nose along her arm. “I know. Jenny Pentecost. The freak. I called her that because she had a mark right here.” The girl gestured towards her cheek. “A devil mark. Ama says she should have painted her face.”

“Did you see her?”

“No. Ama says it isn’t right. She says it brings ’spicions down on everyone. She never went to prayer school. She never went outside.”

“You didn’t see her—that night?”

“No. I just told you.”

His leg hurt. He turned his face into the sun, where it showed in a cleft between two hills. It would have been restful, he thought, to live in an antinomial country, where the laws of cause and effect had been repealed, where actions had no consequences. Here, he felt chained to many deaths—Charity Starbridge, the Pentecosts. Without his attention to distinguish them, they would have escaped notice. He thought: there is a disease in my hands which pollutes everything I touch.