In the palace, all the servants have been forced to work for no pay. They have no family to turn to, so they enter the palace in order to earn a living. There will be no one to return their bodies, and they will all die miserably. They are all "cripples" now, because of the way the palace is run. The narrator laments the fact that they have been corrupted by the lies and the "obsession with money" they learned in the palace