If you looked through the opposite window to one that was facing the Congregation, then the bauble took up the same amount of sky as all the worlds, but the difference was it was only a few leagues away. It was a sphere, about as wide as Mazarile, and it glowed all sullen and red. Pressed on that radiance, and shifting all the time, were patterns: complicated geometric forms, like carvings or embroidery. The patterns flickered from one form to the next, and now and then you caught a squint of something lurking underneath them.

‘Do we know what’s inside?’ I asked, trying to sound like a member of the crew.

‘Loftling’s account’s still the best we have,’ Mattice said. ‘It’s a rocky world, and there’s a swallower, which is why we’re in orbit. Gravity gets through the field, you see, even if nothing else does. Once it opens for us, there are doors on the surface. We have Loftling’s maps, and they’re pretty detailed. The doors, and the countermeasures, go back to the late Fifth, and we’ve enough experience of those times not to run into anything we can’t handle.’

‘The Commonwealth of the Throne of Ice,’ Jusquerel said. ‘A brutal dictatorship, by all accounts. They say the screams of their victims echoed for a hundred thousand years.’ She rubbed her hands. ‘But they left some glorious loot.’

Little needs to be said about the next fifty hours. We went through the usual watches, did our time in the bone room, cooked for the crew. Adrana and I slept as best we could. One late hour, when Garval’s screaming seemed to cut through the whole ship like a cold cruel wind, I untangled myself from my hammock and went to her room. The door was unlocked, as it had been before. Rackamore must have reckoned his crew a tolerant lot, I thought, or else it had never occurred to him that someone might wish to smother Garval for the sake of a quiet night’s sleep.

I had no intention of smothering her, but I won’t pretend that my thoughts were entirely charitable. I suppose I’d been thinking of shaking her out of her phantasms, forcing her to stop acting like a mewling child.

But once I was at her side, my anger dissolved.

‘Oh, Garval,’ I said, softly as if I whispered a lullaby. ‘You can’t help this, can you?’

Within the limits imposed by her restraints, Garval thrashed and convulsed. Her head snapped from side to side, the strap that should have bound her having worked loose. Her hands were fists, the nails digging into her palms, the tendons standing out like ridges. She moaned out a torrent of agonies.