* * *

Because he was ashamed, Thanakar packed his bag and set out for the mountain.

He took an elevator up to the topmost roof of his wing of the palace, and from there the way led up dozens of flights of steep stone steps. It took almost an hour to climb. The way was unguarded; it was never used, for most traffic drove along the roadway and up through the fifteen gates along the other side.

Thanakar didn’t want to cross that many barriers. Even in his car it would have taken longer, for at each gate they would have found ways to delay him, though in the end they would have had to let him pass.

On foot, the path was difficult for him, and he took time to rest whenever the stairs broadened past a deserted blockhouse or abandoned barbican. The bishop no longer had the men to guard all the entrances up into the prison. Even at the top, the gate was unguarded. Out of breath, Thanakar stood under the gigantic arch, letting his gaze pass idly over the inscriptions: justifications for the prison’s existence, six-foot letters in a language nobody could read. Behind him, far below, the city stretched away into the hills. Far in the distance, he could see the towers of the bishop’s palace, the Temple of Kindness and Repair, glinting in the afternoon sun. The air was rich and quiet. Sparrows quarreled at his feet.

He passed in underneath the arch and stood squinting across a stone parade ground, one of four, almost a mile across. Flies buzzed, and here too the air seemed still and drowsy. The mountain, so big that even from here you could only see a part of it, rising up layer by layer, circle after circle of black battlements, filling the sky, disappearing into the clouds—even the mountain had a drowsy aspect, as if the crimes committed there were so ancient and bulky, so much an indissoluble part of the rock, that they had lost their urgency. They had no voice. The air was perfectly still. The building slouched on its foundations like a bloated old dictator peacefully sleeping in his chair.

A company of soldiers came out through a postern gate on the far side of the parade ground. Their needlelike footsteps, the click of their boots, the officer’s sharp cries seemed blunted at first by distance and the heavy atmosphere. The doctor picked up his bag and shuffled towards them, and as he did so, the sounds regained their edge—the steelshod boots, the metallic clash of their weapons—until he came near and they wheeled to face him, saluting in formation, smashing their rifle butts to the stones. Then everything was quiet once again as they waited for him to cross along their front, but it was a different kind of silence, tense with embarrassment and broken by a noise the doctor had not noticed before, the ragged patter of his limp.