The edifice was complete—the signatures, secret teachings, and sacrificial victims locked in stone, the jewelry, linens, and banners of the vanquished hung from the parapets—when a great wind swept through the city.

o

The walls and towers glistened with salt spray; a sheet of music sailed down the street, toward the harbor, where the last fishing trawler was in flames; the door to the lighthouse swung open; no one entered or left.

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The harbor was protected by a natural lagoon, beyond which sailed a fleet of warships, of indeterminate origin, awaiting the order to attack.

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An order which would be delivered from on high, said the trusted courtiers.

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Pearl divers, purse seiners, silk traders, coffee merchants, vendors, vintners, customs officers, carvers of casks, gunrunners, sawyers, salt collectors, street cleaners, appraisers and collectors, surveyors and adjusters—all fled with their families.

o

The city they built in the desert grew concentrically, adding rings of houses and roads that reached into the mountains, where a band of anchorites had settled to await the end of time, keeping vigil through the day and night.

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Do not be foolish in your petitions, one monk advised his brethren, lest you dishonor God by your ignorance—and still they begged for more: miracles and visions and glory.

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Of Whom they knew nothing, for all their certainty about the intricacies of His design.

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The same certainty that governed the spread of the city to the edge of the known world.

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Beyond the border, refugees from the flood plain huddled around fires fed by the timbers of the boats swamped in the storm that washed their huts and horses away.

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The faithful watched this spectacle as if from a vast distance, conscious of the fact that disaster is always near at hand.

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Praying to be spared: Lord, have mercy…