“Yes.” She'd forgotten how sharp Beko could be.

He nodded slowly, looking at her over the top of his mug.

What did I tell him about Ramus and me? She could not remember. They had spent many nights eating around campfires, and their discovery of Ventgorian airbacco had turned much of the voyage hazy and indistinct.

“He's a remarkable man,” she said. “He reads, and not just the modern Noreelan languages. He's read old books too. He knows so much, and for this voyage—”

“So it is a voyage. You were being a bit evasive, Nomi. It's not like you.”

“True. But with this one, there's nothing defined or known.”

Beko leaned forward and placed his mug on the table. “The very soul of voyaging.”

“Are you interested?”

“I'm intrigued,” he said. “Which for me amounts to the same thing. I've been here for almost half a year without a voyage. And the last one was with that fool Geary, a tiresome stomp down the Western Shores. We found nothing but sand and dead fish.”

“I'll want you as captain.”

He frowned. “How many more Serians do you need?”

“Can you find five more who'll do private work?”

He nodded. “Of course. But what do I tell them?”

“Nothing for now.” She looked down at Beko's trial table again, and the shifting candlelight made the seethe-gator move. “Only promise them the voyage of a lifetime.”

“Well,” Beko said, picking up his mug and drinking more wine. “I'm more intrigued than ever.”

Nomi caught him staring at her when she looked up.

“This needs to be kept quiet, Beko. I mean it.”

“I'm sure.” He smiled. “But as captain, I think I deserve something to spur me on. Don't you?”

“Something . . . ?” Not for the first time, Nomi felt uncomfortable in Beko's presence. He was a big man, intimidating when he wanted to be, yet gentle and caring when the mood took him. A man of contradictions; a lover of poetry who slept in an armory.

“Tell me where we're going, Nomi.”

“That's your price?”

“I won't breathe a word.”

Nomi relaxed back into the chair. “We're going to the Great Divide.”

The soldier's face did not change, but his eyes grew dark.

“The voyage of voyages, Beko! Perhaps the one to end them all.”

“What's down there?”

She looked away. “We don't know yet.”

“You're lying.”

“I don't lie, Beko. We don't know what's down there. That's why we're going.”

He stood and walked behind her, a heavy shadow in the shady basement. In the tavern above them a piece of furniture scraped across the floor. Someone muttered, and somebody else laughed. “Opening time soon,” Beko said. “More drinking in the day, singing in the evening and fighting in the night. More wine dripping between the floorboards. More puking drunks.”

“We could be drinking around a campfire two nights from now.”

“I'll come, of course,” Beko said. “I made up my mind when I showed you my trial table.”

“You did?”