Tenshy Diminute poled his skiff toward the burning wreck. “Haul them up!” he called. “No one gets left! Watch round the—”

Baru saw the dripping fist that rose from the swamp water, grabbed his pole, and yanked. He went face-first flailing into the marsh and stopped on a spear. A bloom of hot blood spattered into pollen-thick water. Frogs drummed in panic.

“There’s someone in the water,” Baru hissed to Apparitor, her mind running back through the explosion: someone had put a grenade into the skiff from below. “There’s someone underneath us!”

An armswoman cast her spear into the muck and hit a fleeing black shape. The otter came up wailing, curled on its impalement. Mace-grass exploded with a sound like low chuckling. Baru tried to get back in rhythm with Iraji’s pole, and gagged at the sight of charred dead chicks bobbing on the tide.

“Svir,” Yawa said. “It’s her.”

“You don’t know that!”

“Who’s her?” Baru snarled. She was sure she had to flee, and flee now, or die. When men trained to kill came upon the untrained they did not fail. Nothing would stop a soldier except another soldier. There would be no crossbow bolts humming harmlessly past, no counterattacks.

“My niece,” Yawa said.

“It can’t be her!” Apparitor wailed. “She went into the jungle! She never came back!”

The master-at-arm’s skiffmates tried to pull Tenshy off the spear while he thrashed and bubbled blood. Something hit their skiff from the far side. It tipped, lifted from below, and spilled its three sailors yelling into the muck.

From the burning rushes rose a single red-masked Masquerade marine.

A faceless and dripping figure with a heavy crossbow. Water beaded on the oils of her equipment. Knives glimmered in sheathes of wax. Behind her mask her eyes were a crow-feather shine.

She raised a finger that gleamed with steel knucklebraces.

She pointed to Baru.

The smoke grenade in her fist burped and gushed chemical mist. With the ease of a drunken dockworker embracing a buddy at the bar she took the nearest sailor in her arms and slashed his throat and left the grenade stuffed in his collar to float with his corpse. The second man in her reach screamed and pulled a dive knife. She shot him in the face with her wet storm crossbow, as casually as a cat biting off a bird’s bright-feathered head. He fell like a comic, his feet walking on out from under him, his broken skull snapped back.

“Iraji,” Apparitor said, very swiftly, very levelly. “It’s her. Give me my files.”

Baru watched, hypnotized. The third sailor off the skiff was big and brawny. He reached for the red-masked woman to grapple her and throw her down. She met his grasping hands with a knife, she moved loose-wristed, cutting, disengaging, cutting again. The man fell against the capsized skiff and his own weight pumped a gush of blood through his slashed wrists.