Ahead of her the slick darkness of the approaching riverwall welled up. Pengefinchess slowed. She hovered in the water and hauled in some slack on the cable, enough to raise it to the surface. Then she hesitated a moment and kicked up. She indicated the male vodyanoi should follow her and she swam up through gloom towards the fractured light that marked out the Tar’s surface, where a thousand rays of sun seeped in all directions through the little waves.

They broke the surface together, and kicked the last few feet into the shadow of the riverwall.

Rusting iron rings were driven into the bricks, creating a rough staircase up to the riverside walk above them. The sound of cabs and pedestrians sank down around them.

Pengefinchess adjusted her bow slightly, making it more comfortable. She looked at the surly male and spoke to him in Lubbock, the polysyllabic guttural language of most of the eastern vodyanoi. He spoke a city dialect, which had been bastardized with human Ragamoll, but they could still understand each other.

“Your companions know to find you here?” Pengefinchess enquired brusquely. He nodded (another human trait the city vodyanoi had adopted). “I am done,” she announced. “You must hold the cable alone. You can wait for them. I am leaving.” He looked at her, still surly, and nodded again, raised his hand in a choppy motion which might have been some kind of salute. Pengefinchess was amused. “Be fecund,” she said. It was a traditional farewell.

She sank under the surface of the Tar and powered herself away.

Pengefinchess swam east, following the course of the river. She was calm, but a rising excitement filled her up. She had no plans, no ties. She wondered, suddenly, what she would do.

The current took her towards Strack Island, where the Tar and Canker met in a confused current and became the Gross Tar. Pengefinchess knew that the submerged base of the Parliament’s island was patrolled by vodyanoi militia, and she kept her distance, branching away from the pull of the water and bearing sharply north-west, swimming upstream, transferring into the Canker.

The current was stronger than the Tar’s, and colder. She was exhilarated, briefly, until she entered a sluice of pollution.

It was the effluent from Brock Marsh, she knew, and she kicked quickly through the murk. Her undine familiar trembled against her skin as she approached certain random patches of water, and she would arc away and pick another route through the fouled river by the magicians’ quarter. She breathed the disgusting liquid shallowly, as if she might avoid contamination that way.

Eventually the water seemed to thin. A mile or so upstream from the rivers’ convergence, the Canker grew suddenly more clear and pure.

Pengefinchess felt something almost like quiet joy.