“I’m Enact-Colonel Osa ayaSegu, captain of the Prince-ship Cheetah. Be you all warned, now. If this is a trick to kidnap my Prince, then I’ll make it known that I have six armed naval mines in my hold. If I don’t report that all’s well, they’ll blow both our ships apart.”

“Iraji,” Baru whispered, “didn’t you say your people were a kind people?”

“It’s been a long time since I left the Mbo,” Iraji admitted.

“Enact-Colonel!” Captain Branne shouted back. The sea crashed and sucked between the two hulls. “I’m Captain Branne of the fast courier Helbride. We’re here to rescue all your crew.”

“We doubt that, Captain Branne! We suspect you’re here for the Prince!”

“Two of my passengers are prepared to come over as hostages for our good conduct.”

The enact-colonel scanned Helbride’s deck and rigging. “Send me the pretty boy in the masts.”

The crew laughed up at Apparitor, who sat perched in the ropes, looking more like an ornament than a crew member. He kicked his feet happily and waved. “Can’t!” Branne yelled back. “He’s my cabin boy, I promised his mum he’d come home! We’ll send these two instead.”

Baru took Iraji’s arm with her left hand. Feel him, now. He is alive. Remember this, his hard forearm and slim wrist, so that something will remain when he goes. All that you do has a price.

As they crossed the bridge, Baru looked down, and for a horrifying instant she could see all the depths beneath them. The dark water full of schools of fish and bubbling porpoises, deepening, plunging past great-finned tentacled things and upraised claws of bone, toward fissures in the seafloor where secret fire glimmered.

If you died here your soul would not have the strength to swim.

*   *   *

CHEETAH’S Oriati crew paused in their work, covered in blood and sweaty caked sawdust, to salute them. “Thank you for coming,” many of them repeated, or they touched their clavicles in gratitude. Baru remembered Aminata showing her why the clavicle was the most delicate bone, you may break it with a few pounds of force: so if you were Oriati, part of a people with a long tradition of the martial arts, you touched the clavicle to show your trust.

They followed the enact-colonel below. The attack had blasted the ship open to evening light and the sound of birds. Everything was a wet-paint fresco of gore and hardwood shrapnel. Cannonballs had shattered the bulkheads, splintered them through running bodies, painted the deck in the stink of char and bowels. Iraji covered his mouth. “O principles,” he murmured.

“No principle watched over this,” Osa ayaSegu said, which made Iraji wide-eyed with a fear Baru didn’t understand. “You will await Cheetah’s full evacuation in the aft sunroom.”