Nawirnushu bolted from his seat, his head whoozy from drink but hot-blooded in anger. He barked at Nabi-Utu: "By Nungal, Damn You! who do you think you are to jeer such wicked satire to your king!"

But at the end of his recital, without remarking upon the king's outrage, Nabi-Utu tucked his left arm behind his back, and presented the crowd to Nawirnushu with his other arm outstretched with an open palm. The classic pose of a minister.

As Nawirnushu eyes began to wander from the tips of Nabi-Utu's fingers his gaze became entranced by a disturbing scene out in the center of the garden.

Before him, in the torch and moonlight, spun a ring of dancers, revolving round and round like the unfurling of a cylinder seal upon wet clay. They circled at a lolly pace, taking one another by the palm and exchanging parallel partners in courtly fashion, turning to and fro, but the characters of these dancers was anything but civilized. Their bodies writhed alternately fat and slender and covered in thick hair, more akin to the flesh of bulls and goats and donkeys than of men. With each movement of their dance the whole garden seemed to shake and stir at the clopping of their hoofs upon the tiles. Atop their heads pricked crescent horns and leaf-like ears, and up to the sky they bleated in shrill cries and braying, proclaiming some sentiment which the king could not discern between wails of mourning or of jubiliation. Above them in a halo seemed to hover birds with black wings and long talons that Nawirnushu could only barely trace in the moonlight.

Nawirnushu could not look any longer upon this surreal and horrifying spectacle. He averted his eyes to the audience to seek relief from the uncanniness, and that is when he noticed a face in the crowd that bore the very personage of Nugal Itud. It was by his angular face and enormous eyes that Nawirnushu recognized him, identical to the ancient king's likeness which rests in the palace crypt. Itud, it is said, was the man who set the foundation of the first city walls of Kharani. 'What must he think of what had become of that culdesac of huts he lay on a swamp?' Nawirnushu wondered, his attention now mercifully seized by such seemingly innocuous curiosity.

Nawirnushu's gaze dug deeper into the periphery of his vision to see a crowd of lords and ladies wrapt in the audience of a flamboyant woman dressed in a wine-red gown, from which were draped peacock feathers. On her head she was crowned in a golden tiara. She was the very image of Nugal Pakinana, the most infamous of the Silver Age queens who dressed to impersonate her patroness, the goddess Ninanna.

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Sitting at the table down from the lady and her admirers was an enormous man, his mask's bearded face and heavy brow unmistakable as that of Kharani's conqueror of the Akkadu age, the ensi, Sharrukan. The features of his severe face played menacing shadows in the flickering firelight, though the dramatic humility of the scene of Kharani's great warrior in all his prowess quietly sipping a straw by the fire was almost comical.

The king desperately stuffed his ghoulish vouyerism further down the drinking straw and noticed the chubby visage of Esha Kisrisulupi staring at him from across the table with a big grin on his hairless round face. Kisrisulupi was Kharani's famous Hatti merchant-king, and though it was Sarri-Kusuh who restored to Kharani its rule of law, and Kupanta-Hapantali who restored to Kharani its dignity, it was Kisrisulupi who returned the condition of abundance to Kharani. The fat man tipped his silver tankard to Nawirnushu graciously.

Then there emerged before Nawirnushu a familiar figure who walked to his table and sat beside him. It took only a moment to recognize his masked visitor as his father, and a moment more to hold-fast his racing heart. For it could not have been his true father, yet the visitor sat with the same tall and broad stature of the man Nawirnushu so loved. The man who seemed to pose as Shakkunakku Imeirilu wore a shocking facsimile of his death mask, his weathered cheeks still as Nawirnushu remembered them from boyhood. Without speaking to his son, he reached his arm out and gripped his shoulder, as though to support his foundation.

In that moment such utterances welled to burst forth from Nawirnushu's heart! There were so many words he wanted to tell his father. So many things he wanted to ask him. "How did you rule? What was it that made you a good king? Am I a good king? How bears your heart in the decisions that you made when you bore the crown as I now do?" The time before their sharing had been severed was but such a brief moment, and Nawirnushu had been so young when the yoke of fate was thrust upon his shoulders.

Yet beyond his father's gaze, Nawirnushu peered past his shoulders and met the eyes of that villain, Mullil-Bel-Abli. A great anxiety lurched in his stomach. Nawirnushu shielded his father with his arm and reached to draw his sword from his hip as he braced himself for the strike of the usurper's blade. He resolved that he would rather die than to lose his father to such a villain's cruelty a second time!