The little girl beside him kicked her legs. Her upper lip was covered with a small moustache of snot. She stroked it with her forefinger.

Thanakar got to his feet. It was night by the time he reached home. A policeman had come by when he was out, but the antinomial had killed him and dragged his body into the princess’s room, where he sat perched on the man’s buttocks, playing his glass flute. The princess lay listening on her stomach on the bed. The little notes penetrated the walls, and Mrs. Cassimer put her fingers in her ears. “I couldn’t keep the servants,” she said. “They left. They’re gone. Oh, sir, you can’t leave me here with them. Promise me. The chauffeur had a pet fish. They ate it.”

Smiling, he promised, and then he broke his promise almost instantly, for when the purge came back in force that night, Thanakar let himself be taken. He met the soldiers outside in the corridor, where the music of the flute was less. They didn’t search the house.

The soldiers weren’t authorized to touch him, but they had brought a young curate with them, who tied a silken rope around his wrists. Thanakar’s neighbor, a retired brigadier, stood in his doorway in shirtsleeves, his hands on his hips. “What’s this?” he asked.

“I’m being arrested.”

“Filthy pigs. What’s the charge?”

“Adultery.”

“Lucky dog,” said the brigadier. “Sign of the times. Never would have happened in my time. Just as well.

What’s the news from the front?”

They chatted about relatives until the priest pulled Thanakar away.

* * *

At nightfall, violence overtook the day’s chaos in the streets, and gangs of armed men clashed at the street corners, under a light rain. The sky burned red, as if beyond every horizon the city was consumed.

It was an illusion still; the houses were too wet to burn except where the fire had first started. That day the bishop’s council had imposed a curfew, and every shrine had announced the news that the church would confiscate the families of rioters, looters, drunks, or absentees. Nevertheless, east, west, and south the highways were choked with runaways, running nowhere and taking their families with them. In most cases they went prematurely, fire and flood still miles from their houses. But their minds were prey to rumors from their great-grandfather’s time, and his great-grandfather’s, and every spring since the birth of Angkhdt. Every spring, fire and water had destroyed the city. Panic was in the smoky air. Strange sights and miracles were reported. As the purge hurried Thanakar along the street, he saw an adventist preacher in the middle of a seething crowd, announcing some new and catastrophic portent of the second coming. Beside him stood a flagellant, naked to the waist, whipping himself till the blood ran down his shoulders. The torches shone on his dull, stupid face. All around, factions of heretics struggled in the mud: rebel angels, adventists, deserters, sodomites, spies. Beating great drums, dupes and agents of King Argon Starbridge marched under an effigy of the dog-headed prince. That at least would bring out the purge, thought Thanakar, but there was not even a policeman watching. His own guards hid their badges in their cloaks and kept to the shadows and the smaller alleyways.