Soldiers stood underneath him. The captain unbuckled his revolver. But the voice of the parson, still sitting in his litter at the back of the church, sounded out above the uproar: “Be careful! Be careful of the gas!” It gave Mock his idea. Grinning viciously, he wrapped his chain around his hand. That was the last the soldiers saw—Mock’s teeth shining in the middle of his black beard as he leaned down and smashed the glass bulb with his armored fist.

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.