Zealot

As Mozgus hurls himself against the floor over and over, the crow-masked disciple explains it is an act of pure faith: a daily thousand-fold slamming of his face in prayer, unbroken for a decade, which has left his features eerily flat and smooth. When the rite ends, Farnese sees his knees bleeding from the stone, and while the disciple binds them, Mozgus recounts how a thousand years ago King Gaiseric jailed a sage in this very Tower, and how the sage denounced the king's sins until an angel was sent down. He calls his own pain precious, insisting his office demands he enforce God's law however much it wounds others or isolates him.

Farnese has climbed the Tower to voice her unease, unable to see how caging and torturing refugees saves them and fearing the knights are losing the people's favor. Mozgus answers with a parable of a selfless woman who comforted the dying so none would pass alone, until one man pushed her away, for a life spent in solitude would be undone by company at its end. Quoting scripture, he declares that whatever suffering they inflict, unwavering devotion to God must come first. As the group departs, Farnese glances back at the Holy See's hawk emblem, still unsettled, none of them aware that the strange creature spying through the ceiling's opening scurries off across the roof.

In the camps, Nina hands half her earnings to neighbors as Luca directed while Casca plays in the mud with children. A young man named Joachim seeks Nina out, insisting he comes from concern rather than to buy her, but she disbelieves him and provokes him to take her. Drawing stares from the crowd, she instead tells him to meet her at the river at midnight, then retreats to her tent and buries her face in a pillow.

Joachim keeps the appointment. Nina throws herself into his arms and asks if he loves her, whether he would lie with her, die with her, and fall to Hell alongside her, and he hesitantly agrees. Kissing him and calling it a free gift, she pulls him toward the end of the world, a place with no fearsome god. Neither notices the worried Luca shadowing them, nor Casca trailing Luca out of curiosity and drawing spirits in her wake. Nina leads Joachim to a wide cleft between cliffs, at the base of which cloaked figures file into a deep cave.

The chapter runs twenty pages within the Conviction Arc and first appeared in Young Animal issue 7 on March 26, 1999. The watcher on the roof is the being later connected to the Egg of the Perfect World.