Children of the Shadows

Casca's Brand of Sacrifice lures spirits along the riverbank, which seize the corpses of refugees felled by hunger and disease. From across the water an unseen creature watches the scene with unease, then startles as a tiny figure forms in the grass between the women and the dead: the Demon Child. With a single look it stills the spirits and silently bids them abandon the bodies they have taken, dropping them back into lifeless heaps. The Demon Child glances toward Casca, its mother, before fading away.

Casca drifts toward the spot, but Nina catches her arm and warns her not to stray. The watcher observes the pair carry their water back to camp, then turns its attention toward the Tower of Conviction.

Within the Tower, Farnese cannot eat as visions of the dying refugees crowd her mind. Across the hall, knights including Jerome grumble that guarding Mozgus is their only real duty, with Jerome sneering that Farnese is merely angling for the inquisitor's favor. Before she can react, Serpico upends a bowl of soup across their table and slips out, prompting the knights to scoff that he never deserved his rank.

Descending the Tower, Farnese and Serpico find the disciples known as the Twins gently feeding meat to crows, an innocence that unsettles her. The crow-masked disciple escorts them upward and, sensing her revulsion, insists all of Mozgus' followers are kind souls cast out for their looks. He lifts his own handsome face into a sunbeam to show the blisters that erupt, the skin ailment and frailty that saw him abandoned as a sickly child until Mozgus shielded him from the light. Mozgus, he explains, taught them that no scripture damns either their forms or their darker feelings, and that both are willed by God. Climbing on toward a rhythmic pounding, the crow-man opens the great doors to reveal Mozgus at worship, kneeling before the Holy See's idol and hurling his whole body face-first against the stone floor in fervent prayer.

The chapter runs nineteen pages within the Conviction Arc and first appeared in Young Animal issue 6 on March 12, 1999. It gives the origin of Mozgus' disciples and marks another sighting of the being linked to the Egg of the Perfect World.