At dawn they came up to the city’s gates. Thanakar had feared he might be expected. But all was pandemonium, a cursing stream of men with burdens, men on bicycles, women pushing handcarts. There was no guard. People stood in the road with no place to go, the mud up to their knees, their households on their backs.

Inside the city it was worse, the streets clogged with people shouting and struggling in the rain. The fire wouldn’t spread this way for months, for here the wood was too wet to burn. Yet everywhere banks and businesses and schools were closed, the buildings empty and the streets full, the shrines jampacked with cursing worshipers. Thanakar and the antinomials abandoned their horses and continued on foot. They walked on for hours until, where two streets ran together and the houses fell away on either side, they could see the first tiers of the Mountain of Redemption rising to the sky, circles of stone battlements bulging through the mist. Thanakar felt a hand on his wrist.

“That’s where she is,” said the antinomial.

“Yes,” answered Thanakar.

“Where?”

“It’s called the Tower of Silence. There’s a section for heretics. You can’t see it from here.”

“Can you take me?” asked the antinomial.

“No.”

The man squinted, and his grip tightened on the doctor’s arm.

“I can’t do it,” said Thanakar. “I’ve got my own things to do.”

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.