Their food came almost entirely from the bay and the ocean beyond—they ate seaweed!—and even wickeril tasted like something scooped from the bottom of a leaky boat. The long-armed Skimmer men wore few clothes above the waist even in cold weather, and although the women generally wore floor-length dresses and scarves wrapped around their heads, Tinwright had heard it was only for modesty—that they were no more susceptible to the cold than were their menfolk. In other circumstances, as with some female travelers he’d seen, even an occasional woman from Xand, bundled in secrecy to the eyeballs, he’d found the mystery quite appealing, but something about Skimmer women was different. He’d heard men boast of their exploits among the lagoon women—tellingly, though, never in front of Skimmer men—but he himself had never been particularly tempted. Even in the bawdy house behind the Firmament Playhouse, the knocking-shop Hewney and Teodoros had liked so much, Matt Tinwright had never found the Skimmer girls particularly interesting. They had cold skin, for one thing, and even bathed and perfumed they had an odor he found disturbing—not fishy, but with a certain undeniable whiff of brine. And even the naked faces of Skimmer girls were disconcerting to him, although he could not actually say why. The shape of their cheekbones, the size and slant of their eyes, the almost complete lack of eyebrows—Tinwright had always found them obscurely shuddersome.

Still, there were worse places to visit than Sealer’s Walk; Tinwright had even been looking forward to seeing it again. It had a vigor unlike any other part of Southmarch, even the exciting bustle of Market Square. When the catch came in each morning just before dawn, or the fishermen who went far out to sea returned at evening, the place was alive with strange songs and exotic sights.

Today, though, the district seemed much more subdued, even for the doldrums of late morning. The people were quiet and fewer were on the street than he would have expected. Most of the men he saw seemed to be gathered at the site of a recent fire, where a row of three or four houses and shops had burned. Half a dozen adults and twice that many children were picking through the blackened rubble; a few turned to look at him as he passed, and for a moment he felt certain that they were staring angrily at him, as though he had done something wrong to them and then returned to gloat.

As he passed a fishmonger’s warehouse, two other Skimmer men gutting fish with long, scallop-backed knives also stopped to stare at him, their heads swiveling slowly as he walked past. It was hard not to imagine something murderous in their cold-eyed, gape-mouthed gazes.

He came at last to narrow Silverhook Row and turned right as Brigid had told him, following its wandering length for a few hundred paces until he found the tiny alley that seemed to match her description. On either side loomed the windowless backs of tall houses, blocking out all but a sliver of the gray sky, but at the end of the short, dark passage stood the narrow front façade of another house, with a few steps leading down to the door.