But he trailed off, his skin goose-pimpled from a sudden chill. Layeville, Flay, Stern, Thaw, and Krug had all gone mad or died under the onslaught of green, the rain and the dysentery, and the savages with their poison arrows. Only he had crawled to safety, the mush of the jungle floor beneath his chest a-murmur with leeches and dung bugs and “molly twelve-step” centipedes. A trek into and out of hell, and he could not even now remember it all, or wanted to remember it all.

“Paugh! Dying of fever is easy. The jungle is easy, Dradin. I could survive, frail as I am. It’s the city that’s hard. If you’d only bother to observe, you’d see the air is overripe with missionaries. You can’t defecate out a window without fouling a brace of them. The city bursts with them. They think that the Festival signals opportunity, but the opportunity is not for them! No, we need a cook, and you cannot cook.”

Dradin’s palms slickened with sweat, his hands shaking as he examined them. What now? What to do? His thoughts circled and circled around the same unanswerable question: How could he survive on the coins he had yet on his person and still woo the woman in the window? And he must woo her; he did not feel his heart could withstand the blow of not pursuing her.

“I am a good missionary,” Dradin repeated, looking at the ground. “What happened in the jungle was not my fault. We went out looking for converts and when I came back the compound was overrun.”

Dradin’s breaths came quick and shallow and his head felt light. Suffocating. He was suffocating under the weight of jungle leaves closing over his nose and mouth.

Cadimon sighed and shook his head. In a soft voice he said, “I am not unsympathetic,” and held out his hands to Dradin. “How can I explain myself? Maybe I cannot, but let me try. Perhaps this way: Have you converted the Flying Squirrel People of the western hydras? Have you braved the frozen wastes of Lascia to convert the ice cube–like Skamoo?”

“No.”

“What did you say?”

“No!”

“Then we can’t use you. At least not now.”

Dradin’s throat ached and his jaw tightened. Would he have to beg, then? Would he have to become a mendicant himself? On the catafalque, the Living Saint had begun to stir, mumbling in his half sleep.

Cadimon rose and put his hand on Dradin’s shoulder. “If it is any consolation, you were never really a missionary, not even at the religious academy. And you are definitely not a missionary now. You are … something else. Extraordinary, really, that I can’t put my finger on it.”

“You insult me,” Dradin said, as if he were the gaudy figurehead on some pompous yacht sailing languid on the Moth.

“That is not my intent, my dear. Not at all.”

“Perhaps you could give me money. I could repay you.”