Mock seemed not to hear it. He brought the gun down so that it pointed at the prince’s head, but before he could shoot, the other thief had grabbed him by the wrist, and the boy stepped forward too, to restrain him. The knocking grew louder, and there were several voices shouting in the street. The landlady opened a door back into the house, and she and the other woman vanished through it. Abu staggered to his feet, and as the front window shattered from the blow of a stick, and as the two thieves struggled and swore over the gun, he and the boy followed the women back through the house and out the back door into an alleyway between two buildings, where the mud slopped almost to their knees. In a moment their clothes were coated with sweet rain, and Abu opened his mouth to let some in. His throat was dry.

They climbed up out of the mud onto the gutter’s rim, and the boy took his hand and led him into a maze of narrow streets, where the evening was not punctured by a single lantern or a single lighted window.

They ran quickly over the uneven stones, as quickly as they could, for there were sounds of pursuit behind them, and voices shouting in the dark. Someone blew a whistle, and from time to time around them whistles answered, some far away, some not so far. Episcopal patrols were talking to each other in their strident language, and they ran until they couldn’t hear it anymore.

Two high houses had collapsed against each other out over the street, forming a kind of arch. In the partial shelter of one wall, the boy stopped to listen. Abu listened too, but could hear nothing but his own coarse breath, and there was no light anywhere, except the phosphorescent rain. The city seemed as empty as an empty field, yet Abu knew that all the houses here were stuffed with abject life, though it made no noise, lit no lantern.

Then suddenly from a tower high above them came the sound of someone laughing. It was an eerie chattering noise, out of place because laughter, though not actually forbidden, was circumscribed in Beggar’s Medicine, this close to the prison. Yet even the fiercest soldier of the purge, even the most conscientious magistrate couldn’t have made a case against this laughter, unless perhaps for simple disturbance of the peace, because the ratio of noise to mirth or joy or gaiety was so high. It had the form of laughter, but not the content.

Yet even so, perhaps there was still some echo of subversion in it, because the boy started to smile.

“Now I know where we are,” he said. He plunged back into the mud, under the arch. And at a juncture in the road, where the brickfront of the houses was kept from falling by long wooden poles jammed in the opposite gutters, the boy paused. Under a triangular tunnel of scaffolding there was a crack in one wall, wide enough to admit them. But first the boy pulled a brick loose from the mortar and threw it inside.