‘Do you mind going inside those things?’ I asked.

‘Mind?’ A smile split his beard. ‘It’s what I live for, girlie. Everything else – all this chaff about sailing from one bauble to another – that’s the rubbish I put up with!’

‘Captain Rackamore says Adrana and I won’t ever go into a bauble.’

‘His imperial cleverness knows which side his bread’s buttered. Other than the sails – and maybe the skull itself – you two are about the most valuable items on this ship.’ He touched a finger to his stub of a nose. Every part of Mattice was rounded, worn down, like a very old rock that had seen aeons of time and weather. ‘You’re safe. You’ll earn your quoins fair and square, and if anyone resents you for it, you can tell them Mattice fancies a word.’

But my finger had stopped on one of Mattice’s pages. There was a drawing of a circular object with a long narrow section cutting all the way into it from the outside. Notes and details crowded the diagram. They were in the recent hand, Mattice’s.

And a name:

The Fang.

‘That’s the place,’ I said quietly. ‘Something went wrong there, didn’t it?’

‘Aye,’ Mattice said, his voice as low as my own. ‘That it did.’

5

5

The photon winds had taken us twenty million leagues beyond the Congregation by the time we dropped sail. I suppose the bauble ought to have been the thing that most caught my eye, but it wasn’t like that. Baubles aren’t much to look at, generally – it’s what’s inside them that puts a fever on the brow. But I’d never seen the Congregation from outside, and that was something worth a gawp or two. It was one thing to know that we were far from home; quite another to see and feel it.

If I tried to put it into nice and pretty words, all proper and ladylike, the way I was taught by Paladin, I’d say that it was a hazy circle of shimmering, scintillating light, with the Old Sun at its focus, masked and gauzed by all the intervening worlds, so that the Old Sun’s weary light was filtered by its passage through the skyshells of sphereworlds, the glassy windows of tubeworlds, the photon-shifting fields of baubles themselves, sometimes pushing that light from red to blue, sometimes from blue to red. And I’d go on to say that the cumulative effect of all those worlds floating between us and the Old Sun was to create a constant twinkling granularity, an unending dance of glints, from ruby-red to white, from white to indigo, and an almost impossibly deep purple-blue.