He shuffled forward, almost tripping on a seraph that had curled its rubbery body around his ankle. At the temple doorway he hesitated again, but the smell was stronger here. He shuffled through the doorway and along the corridor, and pushed through heavy curtains into the shrine itself. He summoned all his powers of perception—it was here. His blind eyes caught the image of a boy sitting naked on the bishop’s bed. The bishop herself was asleep, her mass of curls falling over the stranger’s thigh.

Trembling, the old man reached out his arms, as if in supplication. “Unclean,” he whispered, so as not to wake her. Triumphant, miserable, mad, he opened up his hands. His was the loneliest office in the world, the hardest duty. How sweet she seemed, lying asleep, and he could hear the softness of her breathing and see the blackness of her eyebrows. “Unclean,” he whispered. From underneath his skirts, demons and cherubs uncurled and somersaulted slowly over the floor towards where the stranger sat, stroking a golden cat, his blue eyes curious.

* * *

That same night, Abu Starbridge was sitting in the taproom of a tavern in a vicious section of the city, a tangle of alleyways and rotting houses called the Beggar’s Medicine. Around the walls of an episcopal prison and the gallows there, the streets seethed like worms. In those days, the sugar rain just starting, the sewers and gutters overflowed and filled the streets with caustic mud. It slopped into the first floors of the houses and bit at their foundations. Already some facades had crumbled away, exposing ruined interiors and holes for the rats to play in, uncounted thousands of them, up from the docks, fleeing the rising water.

It was against the law to harm them or even to frighten them, and so they ran everywhere, over men and women sleeping in their beds, gnawing corpses in their coffins, biting the ankles of the customers in the tavern where Prince Abu sat.

Though it was not yet dark, the lamps were lit. The windows were opaque with grime, though they let in the rain. It soaked the tattered wallpaper and made it shine with the beginnings of a dull phosphorescence. Later in the season, there would be no need for lamps.

The company huddled around a coal stove, and Prince Abu sat apart, drinking, wrapped in a flannel cloak. He was listening to their voices, the high, sharp accent that the law required from the absolutely poor. It was an ugly sound, and the men and women who gathered there were ugly too—pickpockets, housebreakers, gamblers, unlicensed prostitutes, musicians, drunks. They lived outside the law, but even so, some laws still bound them when all the rest were broken, the so-called “character laws,” which had made them what they were. It was against the law for them to talk, except about themselves, their business, or their belongings. It was against the law for them to use any word describing or referring to an idea. It was against the law for them to practice courtesy or politeness, except to social superiors. It was against the law to speak kindly, except to their own children.