The door creaked and I flinched around. Suddenly I was back on the Monetta when Garval came to rescue me, and I realised then that I hadn’t asked after her when I had the chance, and then I thought about what Adrana had said, about seeing the real cruelty Bosa had in her. I hoped Garval hadn’t been the focus of that nastiness.

The door creaked again. Some cove was trying to get in.

There wasn’t any point delaying the inevitable. They’d get through the door sooner or later, and I’d look just as bad when they did as I did now. I put the bridge back where it belonged and opened the door from the inside. I could have bet quoins on whose face I’d see and I wasn’t wrong. Quindar, with that ghouly grin, like a man who just found a lost quoin in his pocket. Behind him, looking more puzzled than cross, was a couple of the ship’s crew, including the cove I recognised as the usual Bone Reader.

‘Winkle ’er out,’ Quindar said.

12

12

That was the end of my liberty on the clipper. While it was against rules to keep me locked up in my room, that was only applicable to ladies and gentlemen who hadn’t broken the common regulations of shipboard behaviour. Tampering with the bones was an extra heinous crime because the bones might be the one thing that got the ship out of a sticky situation. There wasn’t any use arguing that I’d probably treated the bones more gingerly than the regular Reader ever did, or that if they ever did run into trouble, they’d get a damned sight more use out of me than they would out of him.

Anyway, after that I was tied to Quindar like a balloon on a string. The only saving grace was that he wasn’t any happier with my company than I was with his, so whenever there was an opportunity he’d lock me into my cabin with a library book, thinking in his stupid way that leaving someone alone with only a book was a very clever and cruel punishment.

Now and then, as I was dragged to and from meals, I got a glance through a porthole. For weeks and weeks we hardly moved at all. Then came a day when the Congregation was visibly larger than the day before, and then it was as if we fell into it with a sort of indecent haste. What had been an indistinct purple-white shimmer resolved into a dance of worlds, fifty million tiny bodies, and at length one of them grew more distinct than the rest, becoming a little barbed sphere, and I knew that it was Mazarile. I was glad to see my home, of course, but sad too because I’d always counted on Adrana being with me when we returned.