They passed in front of him, the flagellants, his private symbol for what the Starbridges had made out of the world.

They were naked to the waist, their hair and beards were long, their faces stony hard. Their whips were knotted with nails and fragments of shell, and the blood ran down their backs. They scourged themselves to a rhythm of stamping, over their shoulders, alternating sides, the thongs licking their armpits and the tender flesh under their arms. With every breath they struck, and with every exhalation they stamped another metal step, their ankles chained together. In the interstices between the rhythmic crash and stamp rose up the voices of a boys’ choir, like wild reeds growing through an iron grate; they walked between the men, dressed in white surplices, nursing candles, singing hymns, their sweet wild voices poking up high.

The doctor turned away. Coming up from the railway yard, he had already seen horrible sights. After they had left the prince, he and the antinomial had climbed the barricade and walked along it looking for a place to cross. In the mouths of narrow streets above the yard, crowds had gathered, throwing stones and firebombs. Here and there, groups of soldiers made more organized assaults. For a while, they had got nowhere, for the antinomials had blocked them, fighting like lunatics with no discipline or order. For a while, strength and courage had prevailed against numbers. The crowd fell back before a single furious giant wielding a length of four-by-eight, batting gasoline bombs out of the air so that they burst around him in a burning rain. Other antinomials stood around or squatted, watching, until for no apparent reason they too found themselves filled up with the same spasmodic rage and would leap down from the barricade, screaming like demons, throwing huge chunks of masonry down into the crowd. Flailing two machetes, a woman jumped down twenty feet into a mass of soldiers.

Watching from a protected spot, Thanakar had put his hands up to his face. The antinomials were magnificent—their pride, their power like a force of nature. One man was storming through the mob, his head and chest and shoulders looming far above their heads, smashing them down with a hammer in each hand. Another lifted a soldier up above his head, one hand in his crotch and the other round his neck, bending the backbone like a bow until it snapped.

It couldn’t last. Thanakar saw some soldiers of the purge, in black and silver uniforms, hanging back to organize their fire. One carried a sharpshooter’s rifle; he lifted it, and an antinomial fell to her knees, stumbling and roaring, shot through the eye. And then, one by one, the rest went down and sank into a surge of bodies. The crowd broke through.

From their place of safety on a deserted stretch of wall, Thanakar’s antinomial had watched with expressionless eyes. He turned and pointed down a quiet slope of refuse and barbed wire. “That way,”