Thanakar waited for the part he knew would come, the sweet, despairing leitmotif of love, a dozen notes, and when he heard them, he memorized them. He waited, and when the song was interrupted by some last coughing grunts, he took it up himself, note by careful note. Memorized symbols in an unknown language, and doubtless his pronunciation was poor, because he had to repeat it twice before the antinomial opened his eyes and looked at him with an expression so miserable and sad, it made him stumble into silence. But for this moment, Thanakar had retrieved the silver bracelet from the floor, and he pushed it into the man’s palm, lying open on the coverlet. His fingers curled around its rim. For several long minutes, his face held a look as if he were making a decision, and when he had made it, his mouth contorted in a snarl of anger. He had been bitten and betrayed. His eyes filled up with water, and Thanakar slunk away. But as early as the next evening, the patient was taking solid food.

* * *

These two antinomials kept company, not speaking, but playing music to each other. They kept apart from the others, out of a kind of delicacy, Thanakar fancied. He put them in a tent next to his own because he liked to hear them play late at night, an assortment of instruments at first, but after a while they had rejected all but two, a glass flute and a wooden one. When the doctor lay unsleeping on his cot, his mind racing through images of failed surgery, or of Charity or Abu Starbridge, or of Micum Starbridge repeating some simple action over and over, then it soothed him to hear those soft dissonances come seeping through the canvas walls, the glass flute and the wooden one, the music as evocative as speech. They played music all the time.

But after talking to Aspe, Thanakar took a horse and went, left his hospital and rode up out of the valley back towards Charn, through lines of soggy tents. The images of Charity Starbridge had speeded up into a kind of frenzy. But once that night as he dismounted on the muddy track to stand in a shelter of a wall out of the rain, to rest his leg and watch the city burning like a candle far away over the hills, he heard the splash of horses’ feet. The two antinomials sat majestic on their horses in the rain, looking down at him.

They didn’t speak; neither did he, and after a little while he climbed into his saddle again. They followed him all the way, riding slightly behind.