“The Heathen’s Quarter,” Lief supplied caustically. “Oh yes,” he added, at Dion’s stare, “I know Armesion. You’d be surprised at what goes on there. I won’t say Enth will blend in, but there’s a lot of people who make a good living there satisfying needs that the holy and the laudable aren’t supposed to have.”

For a moment Dion was about to argue with him, but then her shoulders sagged. “Probably you’re right. The Light is a lantern forever ready to gutter, if we do not keep it fed with virtue. But it is hard, sometimes.”

“Just a quiet visit, then,” Cyrene pressed.

“Just that, to settle my soul. No fanfare,” Dion promised.

Armesion was a walled city, and one Lief was not overly fond of. Living in lands shielded by the church of Armes was a grand thing, he supposed, given that it kept him generally safe—safer anyway—from the depredations of the Dark, and provided him with a ready source of prosperous merchants and townsfolk to bilk and burgle. On the downside, it did entail a great deal of being looked down on. Those with a mandate from the church—its priests, knights, servants, and any interfering freelancer who decided that they were divinely inspired—did tend to view everyone else with a sort of paternal condescension: children in want of correction. Lief—who had lived a life very much in want of correction up until the point that they caught him and corrected him by fobbing him off on Dion—looked at the walls of Armesion with a sense of general resigned gloom. Even a flying visit to allow Dion to take the weight off her moral bladder would be a constant round of patronizing and do-goodery that would set his teeth on edge.

For a city, it was a compact place, he recalled: the houses were clustered together as though in terror of an unscheduled appearance by the Dark Lord of the moment. As the strength of the church grew, the walls had become less a defense against the Dark and more an architectural corset, hemming in growth and strangling change. The streets within were all narrow and overshadowed by outward-leaning upper stories—not that this didn’t offer advantages for the light-footed larcenist—save for the grand central avenue that led to the High Temple, seat of the Potentate of Armes. That was the sight that greeted most visitors to Armesion, when the huge bronze-clad gates were finally opened to allow them in: the white-flagged boulevard of the Holy City running straight to the opalescent spires of the heart of the Light.