Rackamore worked the levers on the console and I felt the pressure of the chair ease against my bones. The rumble of the rockets became a murmur, like a dinner party going on next door.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘We have the speed we need to match the Monetta’s Mourn. It won’t be long now.’

Soon we were weightless, the rockets silent. Adrana and I were still strapped into our seats, but I felt the missing weight in my belly, like the endless plummeting fall of a bad dream. Rackamore said we’d be better off not undoing our buckles for now. We’d need time to adjust to weightlessness, and there’d be plenty of that later.

Mazarile had shrunk to a two-horned ball. The cities of night still glowed, but now Hadramaw was turning to the Old Sun and it was Bacramal’s turn to slide into purple twilight.

‘Here she is,’ Rackamore announced, making the rockets fire again, but this time with less ferocity.

Adrana strained to peer through her window. ‘It’s tiny!’

‘Everything looks small in space,’ Rackamore said. ‘It’s just the way of things. No lungstuff to fuzzy up the view.’

‘Lungstuff’s got nothing to do with it,’ Adrana countered. ‘That ship’s just small.’

The launch veered, bringing the orbiting Monetta to my side of the windows. Adrana hadn’t been exaggerating. It did look tiny. Worse, we’d be putting our lives in the care of that fragile-seeming thing. The thought put an extra twist in my belly.

What we were looking at was just the hull of the ship, as the sails and rigging hadn’t yet been run out. It was just a dark little husk, pointy at one end, flared at the other, lodged against the twinkly background of the Congregation like a paper cut-out in a lantern show.

Put a crossbow to my head and force me into describing it, and I’d say Rackamore’s ship was fish-shaped. The hull was longer than it was wide, and all curvy along its length, with hardly any angles in the thing at all. There were ridges and flanges all along it, just as if it had been made from planks, curved and joined neat as you could ask. But like a fish – like some bony, poisonous, bad-tempered fish – it also had all manner of fins and barbs and stingers and spines jutting out this way and that. Some of them I could guess had something to do with her rigging. And like a fish, it had a big gapey jaw at one end, and a pair of bulgy eyes near the jaw – they were big windows – and at the other end of the hull was a thing like a lady’s fan, stiffened with ribs, that couldn’t help but look like a tail.