She throws herself from the bowsprit. Impact is a black star and a cold concrete slap. She plunges down. The frigate comes at her, over her, a titan of wood and rope hurled against the waves at sixteen miles an hour. The copper jacket is heavy as blood in the dark light. Barnacles jut like sharp hooves to trample her.

Tain Shir dives into the warship. Under it. Hand over hand she pulls herself beneath and along the fatal hull.

When she climbs the stern and hauls herself onto the ratlines with the ocean streaming off her shoulders and her breath hard in her chest she will speak into the awed silence. She will order Juris Ormsment to send Scylpetaire south to Taranoke and claim Baru’s parents.

If the woman wants to spend those who love her for power, then Shir will help her spend.

Interlude: Admiralty War Plot

INTERLUDE

ADMIRALTY WAR PLOT

IT was thundering in Falcrest, the City of Sails, Old King Poison, and the fire brigades were out in full array, waiting in their boats beneath the veranda of the canal on the Nehr ab-Gamine for a lightning strike to start the bells and the bidding. Lindon Satamine, the Empire Admiral, watched them as his own open-topped skiff slipped past, and, impetuously, because he had burnt himself terribly in the lightning-struck expedition camp and so (he supposed) he was also someone who went into fire, he saluted the brigade captain.

She looked straight back at him across the stippled canal water, saw his uniform and insignia, and mouthed, Coward.

Well, Lindon thought dryly, though the rain pounded his sealskin drape and dripped down his long face to caress the burn scars down his throat, there’s me taught to be polite.

The city wanted war. The nation wanted war. And virtue help Lindon if he had to provide one, for he and Svir would not survive.

White light split the sky. A carillon of thunder. Lindon closed his eyes and imagined the bolt carrying him away, into the east, down the jagged quicksilver sky. “Landed up on the Suettaring, I should think,” Brilinda Vain, the Censorate Admiral riding in his skiff, judged, “and with any luck it’ll burn down the whole Slaughterhouse.”

“Tut-tut, Admiral,” Lindon said, mindful of the Parliamentary agents who infested his staff. But the idea did tug a little grin up under his mask. The Slaughterhouse markets were betting hard on war, and on a brutal purge of the Navy’s officers before that war, including he himself. Which was not to say Brilinda Vain herself was loyal, probably Province Admiral Croftare had already turned her, but Lindon found his comfort where he could. Even in the invented sympathy of his betrayers.

He looked up into the rain and the lightning and he thought, Svir, where are you? When will it be time for us to go? For I am afraid, love, that we are running short.