Some told of leopards near the throne. Some thought the Poet King had access to a gilded door that opened on a magic flyway to the mountain of the gods. Most in lower Urbis did agree that the Poet King was mad. Some said he was a cannibal who glutted every night on the flesh of infants kidnapped from the cradles of the lower city. There were other rumors more bizarre, but Anthem listened long enough to know he’d listened long enough.

Upper Urbis was a sea of great white buildings that dazzled every visitor. The temples and the senates and the fountains were a sunlit demonstration that those who lived in upper Urbis were Terra’s greatest souls.

Fear stalked both cities. Lower Urbis feared upper Urbis for its wealth and power. Upper Urbis feared the tunnel dwellers for the sheer weight of numbers.

Those in upper Urbis had their dreams of horror, and in those dreams the holes that led down to the lower city swarmed with human insects coming blind and powerful into light—the vermin of the night who lusted for the wealth above them.

Those who roamed the lower labyrinths had long since given up their worship of the mountain gods, The white temples were the altars only for the cultured and the rich. The upper-world elite maintained the shrines, for they had bread. The lower city worshiped only bread and had no gods, nor wanted them.

Therefore when the Star-Song came from eastern immigrants a year before, it met the hapless lives of outcasts in boroughs of the lower city. They long had hungered for a god who could stomach all their sunless miseries and found such a deity in the Singer and his Song.

Thus Everyman and Anthem sang within the dripping caverns of the underground, and multitudes of lower Urbis were unchained. Sometimes the knighted class above would hear their songs coming full and free from the passageways beneath.

Before a year had passed the Singerians heard tales that in the East their brothers paid for melodies in blood, and it seemed that only time could forestall the coming storm in Urbis, too.

When the Singerian Festival of Life was past and celebration slept, Anthem saw a sign written in the language of the West and posted near all temples in the upper city.

ATHEISM IS A CRIME

PUNISHABLE BY DEATH.

He knew what theologians in the upper city meant by atheism: Atheism was disbelief in the mountain gods. He feared the signs the more because he knew that most of his brothers in the boroughs could not read them.

For a while the signs meant nothing. The Singer’s bands stayed clustered in the tunnels where even the police of upper Urbis feared to go. And the Song passed from passageway to passageway while seasons in the upper lands tumbled over one another. More and more of the tunnel dwellers cried to be unchained.

Each new Singerian received the Stigmon in the dim light of lower Urbis. And when the earth fell from their foreheads and their hands, the words of the rite echoed through the caverns: