In the Capital, City of Eternal Starlight, night rules at all hours. The great bowl of stars shimmers over the ambassadorial quarter, a tiered oval lobe topped with acrylplex, where eighteen ziggurats form a curved row on the top tier. Eighteen embassies for the eighteen duchies. Hedge-lined gardens sprawl from the stoops of each one, and the droopy crowns of unknown trees line the horizon. The stone path takes Misery through the embassy’s front garden, where shrubs burst with color and scent and flasklights hover between trees, pooling gold in the shadows. Everywhere she looks, there are more silent white saints: tending to garden machinery, chaperoning nobility in flowing capes, or simply standing around. Waiting. Every now and then one detaches from hir post and heads for destinations unknown. Ruin was right about their ubiquity. Her fingers tingle with unease.

Misery’s brisk stride takes her to the edge of the ambassadorial tier, a border of woven metal and holy obsidian that projects an aegis so big and thin it’s invisible. It’s layers all the way down, cunningly overlapped so each one gets a sliver of starscape. A blaze of lights and activity marks the shops tier. Below it is a bank of contemplative silence, a brush of green. “Saint Ono’s Park,” Ruin offers.

She likes the potential of dark and overgrown corridors. Maybe it won’t be crawling with cursed clones. On the map Saint Ono’s Park stretches from her current location in the Venus quarter to the halfway point of the next (Sagittarius). It’s a big chunk of the journey she needs to make. A good chunk. “Let’s go,” she says.

The Apisian embassy shares an elevator bank with two others. Between the walls of glass and glossy deadmarble stands a pair of dignitaries in Apisian colors, gossiping. Misery recognizes them the vague way one does celebrity: House of Banter and House of Ehi, minor nobility in the duchy. Saints, both of them, their sandy hair tinted with iridescence. The target of their opprobrium is another couple Misery can’t place, likely nobility from another duchy, with a child in tow. The child, barely three or four, nestles in the arms of a silent white saint. Its parents chatter in a language Misery cannot parse—perhaps high Piscean—but she doesn’t need to. Their faces tell everything. They’re talking about the war, worried that the Heretics’ sawing away at territorial borders, plus the new siege they’ve laid, is fraying the Truce of Logan to uselessness. The child sucks at its thumb, staring blankly, almost curiously at Misery.

The Apisians tut in their home dialect. “It’s a travesty,” sniffs the man (Banter Croquette, he/him). “Hiring a nanny like that to turn the child. Spitting in the face of the Larex Forge.”