‘No,’ I said, startled that she’d consider such a thing. ‘He’s snidey and I don’t like his face, and if he starts poking around too much . . . but no, not that.’ But now that the thought was out there, it was hard to push it out of my mind. ‘There’d have to be another way, Proz.’

‘It’s a ship. Tends to narrow your options for keepin’ coves quiet.’ She paused. ‘Still, we couldn’t off ’im even if we wanted to, could we? He’s Trusko’s Assessor. And Trusko wouldn’t go into a bauble without his Assessor.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not unless he had another one.’

We reached the second bauble, hauled in sail, trimmed our orbit. The routine was the same as the first, the window just as generous. Trusko’s party went down in the launch, while Drozna, Tindouf, Surt, Prozor and I twiddled our thumbs on the ship, stuffing our faces with beer and bread, filling the long hours with the kind of aimless, meandering conversation that sailors get very good at. I didn’t doubt that we were going over ground that had already been trod down a thousand times just in the career of the Queenie, but the point of it wasn’t to arrive anywhere, it was to stop having to think about quoins or bankruptcy or bad auguries or the hungry old vacuum that pressed against our windows, salivating at the thought of what it could do to us.

‘The way I heard it,’ Tindouf was saying, as he tamped down the material in the end of his pipe, ‘we’s all come out of a ship, a big ship, that’s came back from the Swirly.’

‘Back from the Swirly,’ Surt repeated, just so we were clear on what he’d said. ‘That’s what you really believe, Tindouf? That a ship could make it across all that shivery distance, and back again?’

‘The alienses came across it, didn’t they?’

‘And they ain’t monkey, or anything like it,’ Surt said. ‘We can’t do what they do now, so what makes you think we ever could?’

He looked pained. ‘We got to have come from somewhere, ain’t we? T’aint proper otherwise.’

She leaned in, sucking in her cheeks. ‘So what happened to this fabled ship? How come no one’s ever found it, or remembered it? How come it’s not in any of the history books? I’ve read those books. They go all the way back to the start. No mention of no ship.’

‘Someone said it was Trevenza Reach,’ Drozna said.

‘Someone said it came out of their arse,’ said Surt. ‘Doesn’t make it any more likely.’