The two chuckled their appreciation. ‘That’s for damned certain,’ Blues agreed, and he peered up nervously through the open hatch to the black churning mass of clouds above.

The next day the storm passed to the north and Mael’s Greetings, sails tattered and seams leaking, limped under oar to the south-east. Havvin was aiming for an island he had sketched into his personal rudder from descriptions and stories he’d heard over the years in sailors’ taverns in Delanss, Strike, and the Isle of Malaz.

Ghelath and K’azz ordered head-counts and were relieved to find that no one had been lost during the four days and nights of the storm. All the Avowed and ship’s crew not rowing were then pressed into labouring at the pumps and buckets in a continuous struggle to keep Mael from delivering his final greetings to his namesake. Shimmer was too busy to return to questioning K’azz regarding their destination. Indeed, she welcomed the distraction of exhausting physical work and threw herself to the task; she found ocean crossings, when not terrifying, damnably boring.

Three days later the call went out from the crow’s nest: land to the south-east. At first no one else could see it as what had been glimpsed were the merest tops of what proved to be tall mountains that seemed to rise straight out of the sea.

Havvin nodded as if expecting this and explained that such were the accounts he’d heard: an island of mountains nearly free of any land a person could stand upon. It was therefore often referred to as the Pillars. He skirted the island’s coast, circling to the north-east. Soon a narrow ribbon of beach, or strand, came into view and he threw over the tiller. Approaching, they saw numerous plumes of smoke, and presently spotted the long dark shapes of four oceangoing vessels anchored close to the shore. Their cut was unfamiliar to Shimmer. They appeared to be broad-beamed merchant ships adapted into war-vessels, with archers’ platforms added fore and aft.

‘Do you know those ships?’ she asked Ghelath, who shook his nearly bald head.

‘K’azz?’ she asked her commander, who was standing with Ghelath. He also shook a negative.

Bars came climbing the short stairs to the quarterdeck and joined them; he looked unaccountably grim. ‘I know them,’ he said. ‘And I wish I didn’t. They’re Letherii.’

Shimmer was impressed. Lether? She’d heard much of them but had never met any. ‘Accomplished merchants and businessmen and women, I hear.’

Bars gave her a strange look, then muttered beneath his breath: ‘That’s one thing you can say about them.’

‘Four vessels armed for war …’ Ghelath pointed out.

‘We have no choice,’ K’azz said flatly. ‘Put in and we’ll go ashore to see about repairs.’ Another might have taken offence at K’azz’s now belatedly stepping in to give commands, but all Shimmer could think was: about damned time.