‘There’s a good bar a league or two down the spindle. I know you’re itchy to be on your way, but you’ll need the right connections for that and there’s a man I know can help you. You still stuck on this notion of going after her?’

‘What would you do?’

‘In your shoes? Take that bag of quoins, hop a ship back to Mazarile – which won’t cost you half of your earnings – and then spend the rest of my life never once looking at the sky. Ain’t you anxious to see your father?’

‘When I’ve got reason to see him. Which won’t be until Adrana’s with me.’

Prozor shook her head. ‘I was hopin’ it was just a phase, all that talk about crossing orbits with Fura Ness. Not that I didn’t believe you at the time, but I was countin’ on you seeing sense by now. And Jastrabarsk’s right: you can’t go around with the glowy in you like it’s something you’ve earned.’

‘Why not? I did earn it, didn’t I?’

If there was some kind of immigration procedure, we ghosted through it without formality. No papers were checked, no questions were asked of us, no payment was demanded. Perhaps it was Prozor, her reputation pushing ahead of us like a ram. Or me, with the glow under my skin and a look in my eyes that challenged anyone to stand in my way. Slowly we fought our way through the thinning bustle to a quieter district of the docks, and then we were out into a warren of gaudy little alleys lined with shops and boutiques that all offered one disreputable service or another. Prozor knew her way, and we threaded this maze down the gentle decline of the spindle’s interior, our weight gradually increasing as we moved further and further from the port.

Natural light pushed into Trevenza Reach through the long tapering windows, but since we were further from the Old Sun it was dimmer than Mazarile’s day. To augment the effect, a garland of lights had been strung from one end of the spindle to another, along all ten leagues of that distance. The garland was made up of dozens of hot blue sparks, but there were many gaps where they had stopped working properly. Around the inside surface, where there were not already windows, streets, houses and taller buildings festered in a clash of grids and whorls, chaos and order balanced in some uneasy civic stalemate. No city on Mazarile was more than a league across, but the spindle could have swallowed Hadramaw and Incer dozens of times over.

‘Where does one bit end and another start?’

‘They don’t,’ Prozor said. ‘It’s all just one thing. There are districts and quarters, s’posedly. But no one can agree on ’em and it’d be pointless putting up signs.’

‘Which are the oldest parts?’