“That’ll keep them from coming around, then, won’t it?” Eshe pulled on his hat and pushed toward the door.

“Godless heathen,” Angelique muttered.

“I know all about God,” Eshe said. “These men don’t. Or did you forget what they did to Corinne?”

“It’s just… you Nasheenians—”

“Nasheenians don’t murder their own people for being born shifters. They don’t kill their own babies. And they sure as fuck don’t—”

“Shut it, Eshe,” a man at the end of the bar said. Eshe had seen him around, but couldn’t place him. Angelique’s hired muscle, ever since the Madame de Fourré started using the place for meetings for her rebel shape shifters. Angelique’s son was a member of the Fourré, but it didn’t mean they liked Eshe’s half-breed face. Sometimes he wondered if his heritage was more offensive to them than his ability to change into a raven.

Eshe bristled. “Sorry about the mess,” he said to Angelique. “It won’t happen here again.”

He would find a new tavern.

Outside, the Ras Tiegan night was cool. It was a rare clear night in the city of Inoublie during the rainy season. He could already smell the promise of more rain on the wind, mingling with the scent of curry and dog shit. As he hustled through the narrow streets, swarms of mayflies and cockroaches choked his path. A ragged, mewling desert cat in a cage whined at him from a high balcony.

Along the edges of the horizon, just visible through the occasional break in the buildings, was the swampy jungle—a dark, ragged stain. Odd hoots and cries and drones muttered at the edge of the city, barely muffled by the spotty filter that kept out the worst of it. What Ras Tieg had managed to build out here had been hacked out of contaminated jungle—a jungle that ate cities nearly as quickly as the Ras Tiegans could put them up. He passed the hulking wreck of a former church, now a recreation hall. Old, twisted slabs of metal protruded from the exterior—corroded, half-eaten. Metal was not known to last long on Umayma, but the Ras Tiegans had been entrenched there only twelve hundred years or so. Even their poorly put-together, non-organic ship skins took a while to break down.

He climbed up into the clotted, ramshackle district tenement he called home; swung down into the guts of his apartment. It was a tight little room: raised bed, mud-brick oven. Most of the important stuff he kept in the walls or in the pockets he’d burrowed out in the floor.