Vo paused, his attention returned to the ships moving placidly in the gentle tides of the bay, tied up alongside the quay like so many great cows in a barn. That one, there, with the lean bow like the snout of a hunting animal: that must be the one he sought. The name painted in sweeping Xixian characters was unfamiliar, but anyone could change a name. It was less easy to hide the shape of a ship as swift as Jeddin’s.

Daikonas Vo approached the gangway and looked up to the nearly empty deck. It could be that Dorza, her captain, was not here. If that was so, he would ask some questions and Dorza would be found. He felt confident that he could get everything else he needed from Axamis Dorza himself. It was an impossibly long coincidence that the captain should sail out from Xis in the disgraced Jeddin’s own ship on the very night of both the Leopard captain’s arrest and the disappearance of Vo’s quarry. Captain Jeddin, despite torments that had impressed even Vo, had denied any involvement with the girl Qinnitan, but his denial seemed suspicious in itself: why would a man watching his own fingers and toes being torn loose from his body protect a girl he barely knew instead of assenting to anything the inquisitors seemed to want to hear? It certainly did not correspond with Vo’s thorough experience of humanity in its final extremes.

He shouldered his bag and walked up the gangplank of the ship that had been the Morning Star of Kirous, whistling an old Perikalese work song his father used to sing while beating him.

Since Dorza had thrown her out, it had taken Qinnitan several days and many inquiries to find this woman, the laundry mistress. In the meantime, she had found herself in a situation she had never imagined in all her life, sleeping rough in the alleys of Hierosol, eating only what the mute boy Pigeon could steal. It could have been worse, but Pigeon had proved surprisingly adept at pilfering. From what Qinnitan could grasp of his story, he had not been fed well in the autarch’s palace and he and the other young slaves had been forced to supplement their meager fare with thievery.

The citadel’s laundry was huge, a vast space that had once perhaps been a trader’s warehouse, but which now was filled not with cedar wood and spices but tubs of steaming water, dozens of them—the room, Qinnitan marveled, must exist in a permanent fog. Every tub had two or three women leaning over it, and scores more women and young boys were carrying buckets from the great cauldron set in the floor at the center of the room, which was kept continually bubbling by a fire in the basement. As Qinnitan watched, one of the girls slopped water over the edge of a bucket onto herself and then collapsed to the ground, shrieking. A woman of middle years, impressively thick-limbed but not fat, came over to examine the hurt girl, then gave her a cuff on the head and sent her off with two other washwomen before directing a third to take the bucket which the injured girl had somehow miraculously not dropped. The big woman stood with her hands on her hips and watched the wounded soldier being helped off the battlefield, her expression that of someone who knows that the gods have no other occupation but to fill her life with petty annoyances.