The safe house was a second-floor apartment in a Falcrest-style house-of-eight. It had no plumbing or heat except for a central firepit and a waste pipe. Graffiti scrawled in grand fish-oil sweeps, a gorgeous rendering of a masked and garishly piss-colored Falcrest “shielding” a pillared island with an enormous golden coin. Beneath the island, piles of dead boys, rendered as tiny shapes wrapped in rope.

Aminata knocked on the door of resurfaced driftwood. It opened at once. “Hello,” said a very tired-looking Stakhi woman. “Come in. We’ve been expecting you.”

Aminata had read up on Baru’s known associates in Aurdwynn. “Ake Sentiamut? I’m Lieutenant Commander Aminata isiSegu, off RNS Ascentatic—”

“I know you,” Ake said. “You helped Her Majesty audit the Fiat Bank. I was Bel Latheman’s secretary. Are you with the mutiny now?”

“What mutiny?” Aminata asked, heartsick with dread. Please, please, if she would name anyone but Juris Ormsment …

“Province Admiral Ormsment on Sulane. Are you with her?”

Behind her, the crowded apartment held a peering crowd of Aurdwynni faces: a golden brown Maia woman with an otterlike figure, a cynical crossbreed woman of some age, a handsome tanned Stakhi man guarding a pimple-faced youth.

“Nitu,” the cynical-looking woman called. “Nitu, are you with them? She’s not with them. Navy mam, have you found Nitu?”

When the situation begins to escalate out of your understanding, you do not chase after it. You impose order. You step back to the last moment you understood, and proceed from there.

“What do you mean,” she demanded, “you were expecting me?”

“The duchess said you’d come to us,” Ake Sentiamut said.

“The duchess?”

“Yes, our Lady Grace Tain Hu. You’re the faithful friend Baru spoke about. The one whose loss she regretted most. Isn’t that why you’re here? Didn’t you get Tain Hu’s letter?”

Interlude: The Mansion Hussacht

INTERLUDE

THE MANSION HUSSACHT

NO one south of Vultjag knew how high the Wintercrests might climb. On some days the snowy peaks could be seen from the harbor at Treatymont, in spite of the vast northward distance, which should have put them over the horizon: some said this was an illusion of optics, and others said the Wintercrests just climbed up and up and up, fourteen or seventeen or twenty miles tall at their crest, and that this was why white mountains loomed over seaside Treatymont on certain days. Though the Incrastic geologists called them mad.