Bitterlich knew the story behind this exchange secondhand, having heard it from Isabelle. Quill had been a seeker before he became a sagax. He had come across a young man with sorcerous powers of healing. Quill had seen a miracle, but Czensos had seen an abomination. The quaestor and his carnifexes had slain the boy, his parents, his sibling, and the man whose broken bones the boy had healed, declaring the fruits of evil to be just as corrupting as evil itself.

Czensos looked ready to spend another hour berating Quill, but with an effort he gathered himself. His clockwork hand clenched and unclenched in a series of well-oiled clicks. “I expect you to remain available for further questioning should the need arise.”

“I understand,” Quill said, which surprised Bitterlich. Did Quill intend to ignore this command or abandon the expedition? Then again, Quill hadn’t actually agreed to obey the edict.

They exchanged a few more unpleasantries, but when Czensos could not get Quill to jump for bait, he finally turned and took himself out.

Quill watched him go. His metallic footsteps echoed down the tunnel. The outer door slammed shut. Quill’s body twitched as he turned to his sky trunk and began filling it with books, paper, and other instruments of scholarship. He moved with the slow deliberation of the impaired, resting when the tremors in his limbs became too great to continue, but never relenting.

He had been a seeker once, a position that demanded considerable physical and mental endurance. Had this strange palsy driven him to give up life in the rough, or had he moved to escape being under Czensos’s direct supervision?

Physical infirmity or no, he struck Bitterlich as a man not to be underestimated.

Isabelle, her officers, and the Old Hands stood around the table in the Thunderclap’s chartroom, double-checking lists of stores, discussing Jean-Claude’s report of the Skaladin Fleet, handing out last-minute duties, and nailing flat every other procedural board that had popped loose in the night. Everything was accounted for, down to the ship’s cats. The only thing that stopped her counting rats and fleas was that she hadn’t any idea how many they’d started with.

There was rap at the door. A skyman was admitted. “Capitaine, passengers aboard. Your handmaid says she wants to see you, and she’s brought a child.”

“Not right now,” said Lieutenant Vrain, her second-in-command. He was due to be made capitaine when this voyage was over.

Beware the man who usurps your authority. The decision is yours to make, her ancestral chorus droned like a swarm of gnats inside her skull. She’d taken her draught on time last night, but her nerves before the loft made the voices stronger, or at least harder to ignore.

“Send them in immediately,” Isabelle said. That was what she would have said even if the chorus hadn’t interrupted, wasn’t it?