When the fog had made the city one great livid criminal, the Singer looked through glazed eyes and saw his foe, sitting on an old and rotten beam. He leered above the stretched and dying man before him.

“You give me joy and music you will never hear, Singer. Groan for me. Scream the fire that fills your soul. Spew the venom of your grudge upon the city. Never have I known the triumph of my hate till now.”

He rose and walked across the beam and stepped upon a cable. The added strain drew the manacles into the wrists of the dying Singer.

“Check-mate, Singer!” He howled into the mist and the shrieking of his laughter was absorbed into the opaque air.

The Singer felt the agony of dying, the multiplied pain of a hundred thousand men all dying at one time.

With an agility of delight the Hater danced his way around the armature and strutted on the ropes. He looked into the fog again and shouted, “Your move, Earthmaker!”

The great, gray, unseen walls grabbed the mockery and flung their sonic echoes from stone to stone. And while the reverberations rang throughout the Great Walled City, the Hater in sadistic gaiety ran out upon the ropes, swung around a beam and threw his words outward into the sick sky.

“I have you crying, Earthmaker. You can never glory in your universal riches, for I have made you poor. And there is none to pity you. Everyone you made has retired to eat and drink away their absurd holiday, and when they wake up in the morning their great machine will have done its work. You lie at man’s caprice and wait for him to break your heart … Earthmaker is crying at the mercy of his earth.

“You started crying when they broke his hands. Can it be that the agony which plunges you in grief can wash my soul with joy?

“Look how he dies. Cry, Creator, Cry! This is my day to stand upon the breast of God and claim my victory over love. You lost the gamble. In but an hour your lover will be pulp upon the gallows. Did you tell him when his fingers formed the world, that he would die on Terra, groaning with his hands crushed and whimpering in my great machine?”

He laughed and turned to look again upon the Troubadour.

“Now, who will sing the Father-Spirit’s Song?” he asked the dying man.

The Singer seemed to rally in his suffering. From somewhere far beyond himself he drew a final surge of strength and sang the final verse again.

“And now the great reduction has begun:

Earthmaker and his Troubadour are one.”

He sang. And then his lips fell silently apart and his head slumped forward on his chest.

The Father-Spirit wept.

The fog swirled in bleak and utter numbness.

Existence raved.

The stones bled.

The Shrine of Older Life collapsed in rubble.

And Terra shuddered in her awful crime.