A great hissing cuts me short. He shrinks back into his robe, chanting the Maker’s Prayer and crossing a hand about his chest and hips in the Maker’s sign. ‘Curse me not!’ he cries, and goes back into his shop like he never meant to leave.

There’s eyes on my back, but when I turn around to look, shutters clap closed. The lane’s become empty. More than empty. An empty lane still feels alive. This one’s become dead.

Inside me too. I’ve often been empty over the years. Empty, like alone. But now there’s something worse in me. A deadness creeping into my heart. I look up at the sky. It’s a high, white sort of sky that doesn’t care two pennies about me. I don’t know what to do.

Da’s voice comes up from my guts. Things just want to work right.

I breathe in his voice. I breathe it out. I twist his ring on my finger. I am on the lane of apothecaries.

What kind of lane would a sin eater be found on? I ask a stone on the road.

One worse than the lane of apothecaries, it answers.

Who are more unfortunate than the apothecaries? I ask a beetle next to the stone.

Beggars, dung men, it lists. Woad dyers.

I remember there’s a bend in the river known as Dungsbrook. The river widens and slows, and you can smell the rotting parts from the pig men who dump their offal there and the shit from the dung men who dump the town’s shit there, all to be swept away by the river water. The land near the river bend is called Dungsbrook too. The rakers who collect the town’s rubbish burn it in an open field there. And it’s where the woad dyers must live too. Their work stinks so foully they’re forced to live a certain distance from the castle. Dungsbrook is where all the worst smells in the world get gathered and dumped together. No place is as unfortunate as Dungsbrook. So I think I know where the sin eater lives.

It’s not hard to find once I put my nose to it. The slaughterhouse and rubbish field come first. Then I pass the dung dump and the lane to the woad dyers. I even pass the old Domus Conversorum, a big, stone dwelling crumbling like a biscuit where Jews were made to live by the old king while they converted to the new faith. It’s no surprise to find it’s in Dungsbrook too.