he whispered to his cousin. Abu turned towards him, smiling patiently, but as the doctor looked at him he saw his brows contract, and at the same moment he heard gunfire, so that his first impression when the shooting started was that his cousin, too, could make sound out of movement. He had confused cause and effect. Abu pointed to a stream of light.

It flowed over the bridge from the dark shore opposite—men with torches, shooting as they came. Over there, the city was disused and boarded up, but people lived ratlike in the cellars. The road from the bridge led down to the municipal gallows at the city limits. The stream of torches came from there.

Now Thanakar could hear singing too, religious anthems, bigoted old war songs from the antinomial crusades, and Abu and Thanakar struggled to their feet. Around them, the crowd barely reacted. Some sat glumly, sucking their knees, others turned contemptuous backs. But the dancers had stopped, and stood motionless on stage. And in a little while the crowd started to disperse in different directions.

People stalked away to get their weapons or their musical instruments. Thanakar grabbed Abu by the shoulder. “Let’s get out of here!” he shouted. Men with torches were streaming down the access ramps, not far away, and occasionally a bullet whined close.

The cousins turned away and hurried back the way they had come. The doctor found it hard to run. He tripped and fell full length, hurting his shin. Abu crouched by him, and they rested in the shadow of a boxcar to let an armed party of antinomials run past the opposite way. The prince was out of breath. He sank down wearily to the ground and put his face into his hands. Thanakar stood up and leaned his back against the boxcar. He could see the bridge ablaze with light, and new fire burning by the docks. Where they were, it was dark and strangely quiet.

Abu whimpered at his feet. Under stress, sometimes the prince’s thoughts became disjointed, a running mix of questions and answers. “Oh God,” he said, “Why is it like this? How can it be like this? How can I do . . . Think. Think of what to do. What are the obligations of your name? One: courage. Two: duty to your . . . class. Three: courage. Four, four—how can they do it, every time? How can they ruin it?” He sat back against the doctor’s leg, and Thanakar reached down to touch his hair.

“Hush,” he said. “It’ll be all right.”

“Who are they?”

“The purge, I guess. I don’t know. There was a hanging tonight. Forty heretics, in honor of the festival.

Didn’t you get an invitation? It must have gotten out of hand.”

“The purge. The purge, the purge, the purge, the purge. How can they? It is not my will.”

“I don’t think so,” said a voice near to hand. An enormous shadow stepped out of the dark between two cars, and then a man came out of it, walking towards them. He stooped to pick up Abu’s bottle from where he had dropped it, and he threw it into the prince’s lap with a contemptuous snap of his wrist.