Remkou wakes before dawn. He has the shivers, the cold deep in his bones, even though it’s high spring and the air is mild.

He levers himself upright with his good arm. The dead hand – clawed, numb, useless – hangs at his side as he rises from the mould-blackened mattress. The alley walls tower above him, the back of a derelict textile mill to his right, a fire-gutted warehouse to the left. His cover from last night’s downpour was an old tarpaulin he found beneath the R-201 overpass and propped up with scrap timber. It bulges full overhead, collected rainwater slopping over the sides.

His belly burns with hunger. He hasn’t eaten in three days. Although it isn’t food that he really craves.

It’s time for him to move on. He’s spent long enough in this alley. He already knows where he will go next. In his mind’s eye, the route is mapped out as if on a road atlas, every turn and rise and descent marked bright and clear. It will be a long walk today, around the smoky margins of the industrial quarter. His skin itches under his filthy woollen shirt, his muscles stiff and knotted and aching. He ignores it all. Discomfort is an old friend of his.

He takes a few minutes to gather his strength, then sets off, leaving his decaying nest for the next wanderer. The cobbles are rain-wet and slippery under his battered leather boots. With only one good hand, it’s sometimes a struggle to keep his balance, so he takes his time. There’s no great need to hurry.

He cuts through the burned-out warehouse. The fire was long ago, by the looks of it, but there’s still a lingering whiff of smoke in the place. Broken glass and splinters of charred wood crunch under his boots as he picks his way across the wide, barren floor. Roosting pigeons mutter in the crumbling rafters overhead. He can see the brightening sky through the upper windows and the molten-edged rents in the corrugated iron roof.

There are signs others have been here – discarded bottles and syringes, scattered food wrappers, a fresher burn-mark on the floor that must have been a recent cookfire. Nobody’s here now, though. His slow footsteps echo.

In the pockets of his stained and stinking corduroys, he can feel the precious bundle of dreamcane, and the little glass vials of tranq in their neat cloth wraps. He has more delights tucked into his boots. Cocaine, methoxetamine, painkillers he stole from an all-night pharmacy in Sixth Watch. He wants nothing more than to huddle up in a sheltered corner of the warehouse and take it all, blot everything out for a few happy hours. The craving comes and goes like an irregular tide. He bunches his good hand into a fist and waits for it to pass. He knows he has to resist. There will be satisfaction at the end of his journey.

Beyond the warehouse, a maze of narrow alleys snakes between the old mills and factories, blocked off in places by collapsed walls or tangled razorwire fences. Remkou follows the route that shines so clearly in his mind. He avoids the wide-open derelict lots with their forests of weeds, keeping to the shadows wherever he can. He pauses sometimes to listen for voices or footsteps. When he has to cross an open road, he does so only when there are no cars in sight. That’s easy enough, at this time of day, in this forgotten stretch of the city.

The moons are still high in the early morning sky. They follow him through the alleys, two pale blind eyes looking down on the stirring world.

He peers up at them, and his god looks out of his eyes.

It’s been silent so far today. That doesn’t bother him. The god speaks when it needs to speak. It warns him when he’s walking into danger. If it is quiet, then that means all is well, relatively speaking.

He continues his steady, purposeful progress. He forces down his hunger, for food and for other things, and concentrates on the path ahead.

He knows the places the watchmen don’t patrol. He served close to fourteen years in Seventh Watch, and he remembers the alleyways he learned to avoid, the streets the other precincts muttered about. The corners of the city too dilapidated for even the rubble gangs to bother with. Since the Inspectorate flying machines started showing up, he’s studied their flight paths, keeping well away from the places they shine their baleful searchlights.

He knows, too, where the vagrants like to congregate, the transient camps under the rail bridges and the lean-to shanties hidden on abandoned factory floors. He’s learned to keep away from those, as well. There’s always someone ready to pick a fight, over food or drink or the last clean needle, and you never know when you might wake to find your things pilfered. He was never much of a brawler, even back when he had two good hands. There is no reward for bravery in the dark places of Indeleon.

The safe places change week by week, day by day. He never sleeps in one place more than a few nights. When he moves on to the next bolthole, he takes his time, following well-trodden routes through derelict buildings and overgrown storm culverts to keep out of the light. He carries what he needs with him, bundled on his back or stuffed in his pockets, and finds a use for whatever he can scrounge.

And always, always, his god goes with him.

*

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It’s been months since it showed up. It wasn’t a gradual thing, a whisper becoming a murmur becoming a voice. One night, in the not-quite-silence of a west side alleyway, it simply started talking to him.

Remkou was no stranger to hearing voices by that point. He lived with a jabbering chorus of them. They whispered to him when he was drifting on the dreamcane, and bubbled up from the sewer grates while he shuddered through his withdrawals. Some of them were mimics, assuming the voices of the half-remembered living and the unforgotten dead. They laughed and sobbed and cursed and sneered. Often, they told him to do things; things he wanted to do, things he didn’t. Snort that. Drink that. Steal that. Crawl under there. Kill yourself.

But the god was different. It didn’t come and go with his peaks and comedowns. It didn’t echo and throb and howl nonsense like the other voices. It didn’t impersonate people he once knew. It spoke with its own clear, cold, toneless voice, deep inside his head. And it spoke with purpose.

“There are more like me. Find them. We can help you.”

At first, he ignored it, the way he’d learned to ignore the other voices. But it kept coming back, calm yet insistent. Nothing drowned it out, not booze, not tranqs, not even dreamcane. Whenever he woke up, it was there, muttering inside his mind.

So he tried talking to it. He asked it what it was, where it had come from, why it was in his head.

“I am a friend,” it told him. “There are more like me, somewhere in this city. Find them.”

It had little else to say. It could not tell him where to find these others like itself. It explained that it could see through his eyes, and guide him where it could, but that it needed him to carry it through the streets.

“Can you fix my hand?” he asked it, holding up his numb, contorted fingers for its inspection.

“I’m sorry,” was the god’s reply. “My power is limited. I will assist you however I can. But you must find more like me.”

He didn’t hesitate. Not caring that he was talking to the thin air, a madman to any who saw him, he promised it that he would.

Remkou was raised in the same faith as every other boy and girl in Greater Kauln. His mother always told him that the eyes of the Almighty were upon the faithful, every moment of every day, and that nothing was impossible for His divine hand. The schoolhouse chaplains spoke of His miracles and the glory awaiting His faithful in the world to come.

The whispering god is something else. Lesser, yet also more. Remkou doesn’t know if it can offer him miracles, or an afterlife. But the Almighty never spoke to him as it does. It is his god. And he is its sole priest and prophet, its congregation of one.

*

Remkou knows the city well, but it is the god that has kept him alive.

It spots things that his bleary eyes miss. It hears things that he cannot, subsonic warning signs and far-off footsteps. It has redirected him away from lurking muggers who might have taken all he has left, and night-prowling gangs who might have beaten him to death for sport. It has smelled poison laced into the powders he was about to snort, and smouldering fires about to erupt into a lethal backdraft. Once, it urgently guided him away from a safe-seeming factory shed, which turned out to be hosting an Inspectorate vice team on stakeout.

He gives thanks to it each time it saves his life. He knows that it does not need his gratitude. He gives it anyway, as a worshipper should.

The god knows the city, too. It has learned from him, and forgotten nothing. Even when he sleeps, it is watching, studying, scrying. It projects street maps and floor plans and eerily precise weather forecasts into his mind, ensuring he is never lost, never taken by surprise. It has a dozen contingencies in place for every situation, backup safehouses with escape routes radiating from them in all directions.

He only wishes it could have come to him long ago, when he was still a watchman. How different his life could have been.

The city is still waking up, the morning traffic not yet thickened into rush hour, when he reaches the southwest corner of Estyr Park. He crosses the street, keeping far away from the handful of other pedestrians. None of them spare him a glance. One of the benefits of being homeless is that it renders you all but invisible.

The park fence is twelve feet high and topped with angled spikes. Shivering and huddling his arms around himself, he walks along the puddled pavement for half a mile until he reaches the gap he knows so well. It’s concealed in the thick bushes near Catalpa Street, a break in the steel fencing just big enough for a man to crawl through on his belly.

Remkou has long since stopped caring about getting dirty. He slithers through the gap and emerges into the green quiet of the park, his shirtfront covered with soil and leaf litter.

He used to love Estyr Park. He and his wife, Tchaiya, would go for walks here in the summertime, holding hands, buying ice cream from the vendors, sitting together beside the grand ornamental fountains and listening to the birdsong. Saying nothing, just happy in each other’s company.

He grits his teeth, and shakes the memory away before it can dig its hooks in. He still has a long way to go today. His shivers are getting worse. So is the hunger. And the voices are coming back, indistinct for now, but growing louder. He wishes they would leave him alone with his god.

After the damp stink of the alleyways, the park air is sweet and refreshing. He walks a long, slow, roundabout path, staying in the shade of the young maples that line the fence. There’s nobody else about; the park won’t open until eighth hour, and none of the groundsmen are here yet. All the same, he avoids the light. There are eyes everywhere in Indeleon.

In his mind’s eye, he sees the switchbacking route he must follow on the far side of the park. Under the R-36, into the backstreets of Ninth Watch, all the way to Blackwater Avenue. He doesn’t know why the god is guiding him there, so close to the hypocentre, where the rubble gangs skulk. He doesn’t question it. He has learned to trust it. It would not guide him anywhere unless there is safety to be found. He can withstand the cold and the hunger and the cravings a little longer.

On he goes, circling a sunken garden near the park’s south gate, where a tall statue of the king looks down from a red marble plinth. Remkou glances up at the calm stone face that rules the world. He remembers swearing his oath to the crown when he joined Seventh Watch, saluting a portrait of that same face. By the grace of the Almighty, I shall serve my king and my countrymen.

His king and his countrymen got their fair share of service out of him. They chewed him up like plug tobacco and spat him into the gutter. He feels nothing for them now; for anyone. His parents are dead and he hasn’t seen his brothers in a decade. Tchaiya walked out on him two years ago, a month before the precinct dismissed him, three months before the Mercantile Bank of Indeleon repossessed his apartment. He never had children. He no longer believes in the Almighty.

All he has left is his god. And he will serve it, without question or complaint, for the rest of his life.