“She won’t dare attack you,” Shao Lune said, “if you’re under an Oriati diplomatic seal. I guarantee it.”

*   *   *

THE target would be the clipper Cheetah. “Tau-indi Bosoka owns her,” Baru explained, “she was sighted at moor in the Llosydanes. Right now Cheetah is somewhere north of us, headed home as fast as she can with news of that debacle at Moem. She’ll go into the Kraken Still to reach the Mbo. But first she’ll stop on Kyprananoke to take in water.”

Apparitor boggled at her: “You say that like it’s a stroll to the pharmacist! Don’t you know what’s down in the middle of the Ashen Sea?”

“Pleasantly unconquered islanders, happily canoeing about?”

“No, you lapsarian lunk, it’s a dead sea full of ghost ships and rotten crews! The currents conspire, the winds are inconstant, there is rock and maelstrom! They’d be mad to go in there!”

“But the Oriati know a way to cross the Still,” Yawa said.

“Since when are you an expert navigator?” Apparitor poked her in the breastbone. “You’ve never led an expedition further than Cattlson’s rectum!”

“I policed smuggling, didn’t I? Smugglers have to come up through the Kraken Still to get past the navy on the trade ring.” She nodded grudgingly to Baru. “Baru’s right. We can intercept Cheetah on its way to Kyprananoke. Baru and Iraji can go aboard, Baru to negotiate, Iraji to see after the cultural particularities.”

Baru had not, of course, mentioned to anyone that Tau-indi Bosoka thought she was infected by an apocalyptic spiritual disease.

Now she sat under her hammock in the arsenal and marked her vodka bottle with a grease pencil. She would allow herself not more than one dose per watch. A little more if her fingers really hurt.

The void said, in a young man’s voice, “I need to cast a spell of protection over you.”

“The left side!” Baru snarled at Iraji. “I said approach from my left!”

“But then you’d see me coming, and scuttle off.” In his fine fingers Iraji held out a wooden tile about the size of a playing card, engraved, beneath the much-worn varnish, with the face of a woman in a collared coat. “Will you help me cast this spell?”

Baru blinked up at him. He wore a pair of canvas shorts and nothing else, his delicate strength so pleasant, so graceful, trained to ornament. How compliant he could be: and yet now she never forgot that beneath that compliance he was his own bright mind.

“A spell? I thought you were a good Incrastic citizen.”