Captain Darkheart had picked up some literacy somewhere, and he had made the inscriptions as a present to his wife. He didn’t share her heresy.

“Politically it’s not productive,” he explained hours later, towards dawn, sitting at the bottom of Abu’s bed with coffee in a styrofoam cup. “People just sit around waiting for something to happen. They say God will only come again when things are at their worst, so they greet each new catastrophe with glee—famine, starvation, rain. They’ll submit to anything. They hold the solutions in their own hands, but still they find it easier to sit and wait. It’s tragic. There are so many of us, so few of you.”

His wife came in with a baby on her hip. His eyes followed her around the room. “It’s different for her,”

he said.

In her, he thought, because of the superior qualities of her mind, religion has been reduced to its purest form—a way of seeing justice in the world when there is none. He watched her lovingly as she lit a fire in the grate, burning trash and cardboard and splinters of lath.

Abu sat up in bed. He said, “But there are rumors of the advent. Now. Argon Starbridge’s son. The Prince of Caladon.”

“It is a lie,” responded Mrs. Darkheart without pausing in her work. “There are always rumors. A Starbridge prince—how is that possible? Can our salvation come out of a race of tyrants? Angkhdt, Angkhdt Himself was a poor man.”

“It’s a trick,” continued her husband. “A way of using us to fight their wars. Look.” He pulled out from his pocket a medallion on a chain, a painted miniature of a human baby in a golden crib. But its face was covered with hair, and its jaw stuck out almost like a dog’s muzzle. “King Argon has his spies out,” he said. “One of them gave me this. It’s Argon’s son. The chain is supposed to make a man invulnerable in battle, if he fights for truth.”

Abu took the amulet into his hands. “Is this . . . accurate?” he asked.

“The man swore so. He had seen him.”

“Poor child,” said the prince. “He must be pitifully deformed.”

“Like all gods.”

“You’re an atheist?”

Captain Darkheart looked offended. “No,” he said. “I’m an educated man.”