“What is it?” he yells. “Stop shooting!”

The corporal empties his gun, oblivious.

Thrushchurl is leaning against a tree. He catches Silichieh’s eye without unleaning his head from the trunk.

“Oh, let him shoot, if it makes him feel better,” Thrushchurl lowers his eyes. “It won’t do any harm.”

The corporal stands panting and glaring in the silence his shots made. Nothing has changed, except that some bullets are gone.

“You can shoot birds but not soldiers?” Silichieh asks suddenly. The smile that scales my cheekbones has to strain against my creaking muscles.

Thrushchurl answers him calmly, “It’s not the same thing a bit. You don’t shoot where your form and the Predicate’s form correspond. It doesn’t go through.”

And I add, “If they model themselves on you then—injure the image, injure the original.”

Silichieh looks from me to Thrushchurl and back again. I see plainly he has his own struggling understanding, and for some reason I feel abashed as though I’d just pulled a trick on him.

Seeing his confusion, suddenly I stop trusting this knowing, collected feeling; I stop forgetting the danger we’re in.

Seventh Chapter

Through sparser tree tops towering, irregular spars, impossibly high mounds, crossways are dim blue grey against slate sky. We’ve stopped, and a cart wheel is being repaired; I lie down on my side facing away from everyone and gingerly draw the charm from my pocket. This fragile thing is my life. I don’t dare even hold it, and my hands shake. So I slide it along the ground up to my face. The figure inside points unerringly in a single direction, toward the high silhouettes. Tatters of sky are reflected in its glass, grow blurry, now I see a sort of a gateway, a rubble road by a titanic pinwheel-shaped building sprouting hoses, and the cemetery beyond. Has this thing all along been thinking pictures silently to itself in my pocket?

Soon I am pointing the way again, Jil Punkinflake glowering at me over Saskia’s shoulder. He should thank me for the opportunity to feel something different.

*

Solitary buildings among the trees; no matter what the light, their insides are always completely dark, and the flaking rust walls are radiant with dark. Enormous trees erupt out of a few of them, transforming them into shapeless skirts for tree trunks.

Vast shapes of light shine at us, through the trees ahead. Our emergence from the woods is sudden; there before us is a smooth wall, bellied out like a sail, that looms and spans. The surface is chipped enamel, buff streaked with rust. There’s a regular series of tapering, protruding openings, like the wide ends of funnels, high above.