killed for words he cannot make; freed into every tongue — "soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and…" · S2

The figurant's death is the theme's cruelest literalization: the A.F.R. demand words Lucien physically cannot produce, and he is executed — the beloved broom driven down his throat — for the failure to speak, his mouth moving after a language it never had. And then the book grants in death exactly what it withheld in life: the freed Lucien sounds an alarm "in all the world's well-known tongues," the voiceless man become, at the instant he stops being a body, universally articulate. Communication arrives only once there is no longer anyone to reach with it.