‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I’m not an expert in matters religious. Doesn’t seem to have affected Stormy ... apart from the healing. I didn’t know Fener granted such boons.’

‘He doesn’t,’ the ex-priest muttered, eyes clouding as he looked back at the two marines. ‘Not without a price, anyway.’

Felisin sat apart from the others, her closest company the pyramid of staring heads. They didn’t bother her much, since their attention remained on Gesler, on the man with the siren whistle of bone dangling on his chest. She thought back to the round in Unta, to the priest of flies. That had been the first time sorcery had been visited upon her. For all the stories of magic and wild wizards, of sorcerous conflagrations engulfing cities in wars at the very edges of the Empire, Felisin had never before witnessed such forces. It was never as common as the tales purported it to be. And the witnessing of magic left scars, a feeling of overwhelming vulnerability in the face of something beyond one’s control. It made the world suddenly fey, deadly, frightening and bleak. That day in Unta had shifted her place in the world, or at least her sense of it. And she’d felt off-balance ever since.

But maybe it wasn’t that. Not that at all. Maybe it was what I lived through on the march to the galleys, maybe it was that sea of faces, the storm of hate and mindless fury, of the freedom and hunger to deliver pain writ so plain in all those so very normal faces. Maybe it was the people that sent me reeling.

She looked over at the severed heads. The eyes did not blink. They were drying, crackling like egg white splashed on hot cobblestones. Like mine. Too much has been seen. Far too much. If demons rose out of the waters around them right now she would feel no shock, only a wonder that they had taken so long to appear and could you be swift in ending it all, now? Please.

Like a long-limbed ape, Truth came scrambling down from the rigging, landing lightly on the deck and pausing close to her as he brushed dusty rope fibres from his clothes. He had a couple of years on her, yet looked much younger to her eyes. Unpocked, smooth skin. The wisps of beard, all too clear eyes. No gallons of wine, no clouds of durhang smoke, no weighty bodies taking turns to push inside, into a place that had started out vulnerable yet was soon walled off from anything real, anything that mattered. I only gave them the illusion of getting inside me, a dead’ end pocket. Can you grasp what I’m talking about, Truth?

He noted her attention, gave her a shy smile. ‘He’s in the clouds,’ he said, his voice hoarse with adolescence.

‘Who is?’