Was that really what Temuel wanted? It didn’t matter, because that was what he was going to get. We never know what a gesture or a word will lead to, do we?

“God loves you!” I called. It was what we angels say to the recently deceased. I was pretty sure none of these folks had heard it since then, and some of them like Riprash had probably never heard it at all.

“Bobby!” Walter leaned over the rail, and would have fallen when a cannonball landed close enough to rock the ship, but Gob caught at his legs and kept him from tumbling. “I just thought of something. The voice! I remember the voice!”

“What voice?” I could barely hear him over the wind and the barking of the Headless Widow’s guns.

“The voice that asked me about you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“I’m not sure either, but I think it’s important. It was a child’s voice. A sweet, child’s voice . . . !”

My boat splashed hard into the water, and for the next moments I was busy trying not to fall into the river. The waves beaten up by the wind had seemed much smaller from on board the Bitch than in the little dinghy. I could hear Riprash bellowing for the rowers to start pulling, and the slave ship began to move away from me. I think the sight of my boat being put into the water had confused Niloch and his crew. The Widow’s guns fell silent, though the black bulk of the ship continued to bear down on me.

I’m sure the commissar and his crew expected me to start rowing, but in fact I hadn’t bothered to bring any oars—no point to it, as you’ll see. I watched Nagging Bitch pull away, and for the first time I felt how truly alone I was.

Niloch and his crew obviously suspected some kind of bomb or other trap, so when they were thirty or forty yards away from me they disengaged their engines and let the ship drift with the same current pushing my little boat. Many sailors and soldiers looked down through the clouds of steam that drifted from the Widow’s smokestacks.

Seen this close, Niloch looked even less pleasant than I remembered. A lot of his bone tendrils had simply burned away or broken off, and for the first time I could see that his skeletal head was more like a bird’s than a horse’s.

“You!” he screeched, “Snakestaff, you miserable turdling! Why do you look so puffed up? Whatever armor you’re wearing under that won’t save you from me. You destroyed my home.”

“Gosh,” I called back, “maybe because you were going to torture me and then turn me over to your superiors?”