Tower of Shadows (2)

Farnese and her knights haul a man accused of murdering yet another priest up toward the Tower of Conviction. She promises freedom if his innocence is shown, but he scoffs, since no refugee taken to the Tower has ever walked back down. In the crowd she spots a beggar cradling a fly-covered, nearly dead infant, an echo of the child she once thought to help, before the prisoner drags her attention back by shouting for the onlookers to admit they framed him.

Nearby, Luca watches from her tent while working. A prostitute, she is entertaining Jerome, a Holy Iron Chain Knight who favors her, and she mines his pillow talk for intelligence: most of the knights resent Farnese, put off by her endless talk of faith and duty and her cold, ungrateful manner. Luca, herself a woman commanding a circle of dependents, feels a kinship with her. Their tryst is cut short when the bandaged Casca peeks in and startles Jerome; Luca passes her off as a syphilitic sister named Elaine. Jerome leaves early, pays his fee, and gifts a pearl necklace, offering to take Luca home as his mistress and treat Casca's supposed illness.

Afterward Luca gathers her apprentices, Pepe, Fouquet, Lucie, and the withdrawn Nina, splits the earnings, and breaks the pearl necklace apart to share it out, telling the astonished girls that as women and refugees they must hold one another up. She then tends Casca's slipping bandages, admitting she cannot bring herself to put the mindless woman to work; the wrappings both keep predatory men away and conceal the Brand of Sacrifice that might see her burned as a witch. When another client arrives, she hands Casca and a dose of a doctor's medicine to Nina.

Sent to fetch water, Nina and Casca pass a man pilloried in stocks and pelted with stones, and under the crowd's murderous stares Nina reluctantly casts one herself. They then hear a preacher proclaim a Goddess of Flame who foretells that a falcon will drive off the barbarians and forge a single nation, though bystanders shoo him away for fear of being taken for cultists. At the river, Nina wades in, lifts her dress, and finds blood and pus and a swollen mouth, the reason for Luca's medicine. Speaking more to herself than to Casca, she confesses her sickness will one day rot her mind, and that she is terrified of living on beneath the Tower and the crushing weight of God.

The chapter runs twenty one pages within the Conviction Arc and first appeared in Young Animal issue 4 on February 12, 1999. It centers the refugee prostitutes Luca and Nina, whose roles grow across the arc.