In the weeks that passed before the Games of Karnos hope began to circulate among the prison cells. “The Singer will return and smash the structures of the state. The Poet King and Public Prosecutor will be swallowed by the Canyon of the Damned.” Thus spoke the hope.

On the eighteenth day of the imprisonment a baby died in cell fifteen. The mother tried concealing it but finally slipped it through the rusted iron grate of her cell door. She saw her baby moved along before the shovels which pushed the human residue into the drayage carts. The mother cried to the Singerians in her cell, who were again reminded of the coming Singer and his promises of victory.

On the twenty-second day of the imprisonment a woman became sick in cube eighteen. Her fever sparked attempts at quarantines. Within a week most of the cell was sick. The guards themselves contracted the contagion and the fever spread throughout the camp. The death toll was most severe among the very young.

The victims of disease were burned. And so by day the prisoners could see the smoke columns rise where bodies burned outside the prison yards.

Seven days before the Games of Karnos Everyman sent a small scroll wrapped in a sheath of wax. He gave it to the sentry with a bribe. The guard slipped the scroll into a pail of swill and passed it through the gate in cell sixteen.

A convert finding it, stripped all the wax away. The scroll was dry.

Its title: THE FINALE!

Its subject: Hope!

“Death cannot be to those who know

The Troubadour of Life. He gives

A crown to every man who shows

By dying that the Singer lives.

So give the breath you cannot keep

To gain the life you cannot lose.

Before the Axman never weep,

But sing with Joy the Singer’s truths.

The prince of dragons soon must fall

Before the Prince of Planets.”

The scroll told futuristic tales the prisoners could never fully understand. Its saga brimmed with beasts and armies and cities under siege. Most of them rejoiced at paragraphs they understood. Urbis, tyrant of Terra, was mentioned by her ugly name. She would be destroyed for all her sins, and the Poet King and Prosecutor would be sentenced at the throne of Earthmaker.

The scroll was passed from fevered hand to fevered hand and the Singerians sang a new hymn, one that spoke of hope. Most felt the Singer would return before the dreadful Games began. And so they sang:

“He comes in power,

Rejoice the hour of jubilee is near.

Lift up the cry

Before we die, our Singer will appear.”

Sarkon made the Builder his chief aide to organize mass execution of all Singerians. Three days before the long-awaited Games were scheduled to begin, the Public Prosecutor announced a special mandate to the wardens of the prisons: “All children in the cells below the age of seven summers must be taken from their parents.”