“We pay others to do that kind of work,” said Abu. “I’m too conspicuous to be a spy.”

“Exactly,” said the woman. “It’s what I told them. One man wanted to kill you.”

“One man tried to.”

“It would have been a waste,” muttered her husband, fluttering his eyelids to amuse the child.

Many people in Beggar’s Medicine seemed to have no age. Too sour to be children, too small and bent for men, too supple for old age, they seemed a race of nocturnal gnomes—smooth, hairless, yellow, as if even their faces had taken on the official urine-colored hue of poverty. Their skins seemed fragile and too small for them, and perhaps that was why they stooped and hunched their shoulders. Perhaps if they had straightened out their knees and necks, their skin might have split along the spine.

But the Darkhearts were a different kind, and so was Spider Abject. He stood up straight in the doorway, the aspirin in one hand, a glass of water in the other. There was strength in him, not just resilience.

“Spider wants you to get his father for him,” said Darkheart as the boy came in. “That would be easy enough for you, wouldn’t it?”

Abject’s eyes filled up with tears. He seemed prone to crying, but Abu liked him for it, because he never seemed to weep at blows or curses or abuse. He bore them sullenly, and sometimes he even smiled. But when he sat with his own thoughts or when he heard some words of kindness, then sometimes he would start to cry. And when Mrs. Darkheart reached to comfort him, to smooth the hair back from his forehead, he pulled away as if from a blow.

* * *

That night, as the prince and Spider Abject left the house, the wind blew accumulated sugar around them in a powdery mist which whitened their faces and made it difficult to talk. It was a dangerous time, for when the weather was like this—sugar in the air with no rain to keep it wet—the mist could easily ignite.

Inside their houses, people blew out their candles and sat shivering in the dark. They spoke softly to one another, for superstitious folk thought curses and obscenity gave off a kind of spark.

The prison was a small one, but it was bright with floodlights. From the four corners of the building stone towers rose up into the mist, and from their battlements huge search lamps swung in circles. At night they shone for half a mile, strands of blue light which beat down rhythmically upon the cringing streets, like the scourging of some whip. And in the fog the prison seemed to glow, and rise to many times its height, the light caught in a swirling prison of its own.