Four shots ring out. The man raised at Levin's side goes limp. Blood seeps into the thick gray cloth wrapped around him, drips down into the wooden stage erected to make a spectacle of it all, slips beneath its planks down into sand claimed by a tyrant. Levin tries to glance over at the dead man, and the rope around his neck catches. Four soldiers cycle the bolt on their rifles, and four cartridges hit the sand.

Palazzo Aphayon overflows with spectators. They spill over the estate's balustrades and raised walkways in fine clothes and full bellies, throwing various items into the sand below. Fruits and honeyed cakes scatter the ground. Wine speckles the leaves of the jade bushes like blood. The flash of cameras and muzzles seems to Levin like a strange, half-finished constellation. Somehow, for a moment, like the gap between lightning and thunder, the gleaming lights in the palazzo had drowned out the sounds, and now, his ears still ringing from the last shot, amidst raucous cheers of the crowd, the commands barked by the executioner-general, the click of rifles being readied, the tide crashes back down, leaving Levin's head pounding and his heart racing. The executioner-general snorts; Levin notices the man's resemblance to a boar. He struggles to speak over the crowd.

"—for the murder of a superior officer, for mutineering, for inciting revolution, and for the attempted assassination of the lord regent Aphayon, the traitor Levin Eunomos, by decree of the lord regent—"

The crowd, still restless, continues to shout over the man. A crumpled red-and-white wax-paper wrapper drenched in grease rolls over, thrown from somewhere in the crowd. Levin watches it land at the step up to the wooden stage. Wind continues to buffet the courtyard. The general strains his voice.

"By decree of the lord regent, the traitor Levin Eunomos will here be executed. Have you any last words, traitor?"

The executioner-general turns to look at Levin. Levin cranes his neck down as far as he is able, and looking down over the bridge of his nose, sees the portly, balding man, high collar of his militia uniform pushing up neck fat into sparse facial hairs, the bulbous veins of a faithful drunk. He thinks of the decadence of this place, and of the tyrant who claims it, and of the many indulgences this boar must have had in his tenure under Aphayon. He thinks of the shipments of grain, olives, and fruit that were pilfered by the regent's privateers, of the palatial feasts left to spoil on the tyrant's table while noble sycophants and magnates fellated his ego. The executioner-general's face begins to twist.

"Nothing, then? Hah! Well—"

"If your people are forced to scavenge, then scavengers we will be." The crowd hushes as Levin looks up. "We will not discern between the remains of your cattle and the remains of your generals"—Levin glares at the executioner—"and when your corpulent mockery of a state collapses in on itself, we will be there, feasting with the worms and vultures."

For an instant, the crowd is still, and the boar is stunned. Levin begins to see the moment as though in slow motion: the general turns to the soldiers; four soldiers raise their rifles; from the balcony, seven flashes. All at once, Levin sees the four soldiers crumple to the ground, sees the general's balding head bash into the wood beneath him, feels his rope snap, and from the wooden step down, the wax paper wrapper, folded around something volatile, explodes into a smokescreen. Levin falls from the noose and slams against the stage. It takes a moment before he hears screams of panic rise from the crowd, and inhaling thick, bituminous smoke through the torn terrycloth of the man executed, sprints towards the fallen soldiers' rifles.