Peering through the crate, Jean-Claude saw the drunk lift his gaze and sweep it slowly side to side. He stared at his bottle for a minute, tried it, and found it empty. He bestirred himself and searched his immediate vicinity for another. Jean-Claude espied a bottle in a basket, plucked it, and scooted it onto the crate while the officer was checking between his shoes.

The officer looked up again, saw the new bottle, squinted at it suspiciously, and decided not to look a gift horse in the souse. He pulled the cork and proceeded to embalm himself.

Jean-Claude imagined that somewhere, far away, Ivar was laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe.

Jean-Claude stared up through the ceiling into the great cabin. It had been partitioned off into a master chamber, a small guest room, a chartroom.

In the first room was a knot of Skaladin aeronauts at their ease. In the other much larger chamber, Travers with his oily bloodshadow and metal leg braces stood in conference with Hasdrubal with his curving horns. And there was a third person barely apparent to the clockwork eye. Saints, what he wouldn’t give to be a mouse in that wainscoting.

There came a soft thud and some ragged snoring as the drunken officer passed out again.

Travers, Hasdrubal, and the other stepped out onto the ship’s stern gallery.

Carefully, quietly, Jean-Claude stood up and eased around to the back of the store to get a better view of the goings-on above. Behind a stack of crates stood a bank of windows.

Jean-Claude’s blood rushed with the thrill of a good sneak, the urge to get closer and the fear of being caught. He worked his way around the edge of the crates. It was like squeezing a slab of bacon through a clothes wringer, but there was a crease of space between the boxes and the windows. There was not enough space for him back there, but he got his fingers on the window catch. The window creaked open, loud enough to make his skin shrink, but neither the drunk nor the conspirators on the gallery seemed to notice.

A chill breeze flowed in, carrying with it voices, sounds but not words. Just now he wished he had a clockwork ear to go with his eye, though it was probably unwise to tempt the Breaker with such a request.

He sucked his gut in tighter and pushed his head out the window.

The void opened up below him. The distant Miasma roiled like swarms of gnats to his clockwork eye. He squeezed his eye shut before his dizziness could take him. This had the desired effect, though it occurred to him that his left eye didn’t actually have an eyelid anymore, so in a sense the clockwork eye was just being polite to his wishes.

From the gallery, a conversation drifted down.

Travers’s nasal voice said, “… have the relic, Thirdeye has outlived his usefulness.”