Thanakar and Abu looked around them at the different faces. Defeated old women sat back on their heels and whispered it, defiant young men spat it out as if they hated every word. But they did recite it, all of them, whether with anger and disgust, whether with tears and broken hearts, whether they mouthed the words only or spoke them from their souls. It was proof of the enduring power of the myth, of its effect on every life, the power of the risen Paradise, the planet that could melt the snow and pull the tides three hundred feet in a single night. People knelt with outstretched hands, praying to its bright surface, as if in its shadows and its mountains they could see the palaces and the bright castles of the blessed, perhaps even the windows where they once had lived, the faces of the loving friends that they had left behind when they were born.

“Never. Never. Never. But. But oh my God, accept my life as payment towards the debt I owe, and help me to bear what is to come.” The psalm ended. Under the bleak light, Abu and Thanakar looked towards the deserted dais, the empty arena, the black uniforms of the bishop’s purge, hundreds of them, materialized from nowhere: stiff black uniforms and the silver dog’s head insignia; in those days their mere presence was enough to disperse the thickest crowd. They weren’t even armed, but already people were getting to their feet, dazed, their wits scattered, clearing away down side streets and through the mass of trucks. In those days it was enough for the spiritual police just to stand there, relaxed and even smiling, and in a little while the packing yards were empty, the war veterans hastily paraded away somewhere, down to the festival grounds.

The cousins barely noticed their departure. They stood alone in an empty, widening circle, in the middle of the draining crowd, looking upward, entranced, for they were Starbridges, and the purge meant nothing to them, and at that moment the festival had begun, in a frenzy of fireworks and light. First the guns on the Mountain of Redemption fired an evil, sulphurous salute, and laid down a pall of smoke over the whole city. It extinguished the sky, the face of Paradise, and people put their hands over their ears.

Then there was quiet, and as the smoke thinned away, people could see emerging out of it the lights of the Temple of the Holy Song, far away above the mountaintop, glistening among the delicate threads of steel like drops of water in a spider’s web.

The silence was broken from the other side, beyond the eastern gate, by a single muffled report, and the first rockets burst over the fairgrounds in a tangled spray of silver and lime green. With interruptions, the fireworks would continue the entire night. The separate provinces of the empire were holding a competition, and a man could see the different character of different areas in their choice of colors and forms. Squat, stone-headed Southerners preferred only noise, huge rhythmic spatterings of explosions.