‘No telling with Bosa. I did it the way you said: didn’t try and encourage her or anything. Just put it out there, and let Bosa get the scent of blood. She isn’t interested in the Queen Crimson and she doesn’t think much of Trusko’s chances of pulling anything juicy out of that bauble. But she’ll give him time, anyway. No skin off her nose, to let him go in and out once or twice. That skull of yours isn’t going anywhere, and that’s the prize she’s most interested in.’

‘Has she asked about the Queenie’s Bone Reader?’

‘I’ve told her you aren’t anything special. But when she sees you, Fura, and sees how much you look like me . . .’

‘She won’t,’ I said. ‘Not until it’s too late.’

‘I know why you chose the Fang, Fura. It’s not just because of what happened to Githlow, and the place sticking in your mind. It’s what they found down in that vault. You think it’ll give you the edge over Bosa, let you take her.’

‘Not take her,’ I answered. ‘Destroy her. End her, and end the Nightjammer.’

‘You think you’ve seen the cruelty she’s capable of,’ Adrana said. ‘But you haven’t. Not yet. Not until you see Garval. She’s dead, Fura. Finally stopped breathing, the mercy of it. But that was only the start of it for Bosa. She took her jammed-up corpse and fixed it on that bowsprit spike, and she took the one that was there before and tossed it into the Empty . . .’

‘She didn’t invent cruelty,’ I said, something tingling in my tin fingers. ‘And no one made her the queen of it.’

I heard about Surt’s accident when I came out of the bone room. She had been outside, clomping her way around the hull on magnetic boots, ferrying equipment from the Queenie’s cargo lock, around the hull, and then lashing it onto the launch, which was stationed next to the main ship. There had been a problem with the lungstuff-supply on Drozna’s suit, the kind of commonplace fault that was to be expected on old, battered equipment. Prozor had taken over his share of the work while Drozna came back inside so Tindouf could make a repair to the suit.