He hurried through the streets until he came upon the causeway to the Stadium of Life. The night patrols recognized him but had not heard he was a public enemy. Thinking him the favored aide of the august Public Prosecutor and Urbis’ royal sculptor, they let him pass. He wound his way to the ramps that led to the arena floor and there gilded in moonlight stood the great statue that he had made in one long year of toil.

He thought about the weeks it took to shape the unicorn’s great lifted leg, then drew his hammer back and heaved it in an arc of power. The stone leg shattered into silver shards ignited into sparks by moonlight.

He remembered how the great white flanks had yielded in the passing of the months to the urging of his chisel. Now with brutality he swung the hammer and a ton of stone came crashing down. As the body of the great horse fell, the head of Sarkon struck the paving and rolled free.

The patrols rushed in when they heard the raucous clatter of the statue in disintegration. Praxis raised his hammer once again and brought it down on the severed head of Sarkon. The god-like jaw split. The heavy forehead shattered.

Praxis was arrested in the marble wreckage of the unicorn. Even as the guards held the sculptor fast, he looked up at the empty stands. The veins of his neck stood out. He sang with power.

“And now the great reduction is begun:

Earthmaker and his Troubadour are one.”

The stands of the great stadium were silent in the starlight.

XXIV

The day of one’s death is a good day to be really alive.

The sunlight was blinding as the Life Games began. Anthem and Praxis were the main event and thus released to die at once. They issued under guard from the darkened passageway that led from underneath the lower stands. The grate lifted and closed behind them.

Blinking in the dazzling light, Anthem saw the grinning Sarkon in the royal box with the Poet King himself. But Anthem had grown weary with the ancient struggle. His mind went back to the wall where first he met the World Hater, now the gloating Sarkon, Public Prosecutor. Not many years had gone, but his eyes had beheld all the human savagery that he could tolerate. The letting of his own blood he knew to be the grim necessity for opening the last grand gate of life.

Anthem and Praxis advanced to the center of the ring and knelt. The grating on the west flew open and the giant Tasman jackals leapt into the sun.

Urbis in the passing of the years became the lair of wolverines. And in the crawling centuries her temples crumbled. Terra waited for her final fate. In a day that none could know the Singer triumphed and the mountain gods were all forgotten.

But Sarkon lived and changed his face and promises for every generation. And centuries ran down like wax into some lost abyss.