She swiveled to Baru. “Ah,” she said. “Have you been informed of your medical arrest? I see you have. Very good. Never fear, my dear! We’ll see to matters on Kyprananoke.”

Baru had been outmaneuvered. She had no riposte ready.

She snarled at Yawa and went in search of weapons.

*   *   *

“ALL the ships are moored on the east side.” Apparitor chewed his lip. “Why east? Why’s no one taken the westward berths?”

“What the fuck did you put in my vodka?” Baru demanded.

“A special preparation of ergot. Oh, fuck me. Do you see what I see?” He offered Baru his spyglass—they were up on Helbride’s hummingbird prow, balanced on the fan of ropes.

“Ergot?” Baru snatched the spyglass. “You gave me cow poison?”

Ergot was a wheat fungus. Cows would eat ergot sometimes, and go mad—or so Cairdine Farrier said. But now Baru remembered a line in the Manual of the Somatic Mind about a drug called ergotic theogen: a fungus grown on the right kind of wheat and then chemically transmuted. It caused various hallucinations, convulsions, psychosis, and (in large doses) gangrene.

“Hesychast uses it to break down resistance in mental patients.” Apparitor touched the spyglass and steered her toward the trouble. He seemed almost solicitous; not sorry, but at least sincere. “I added a little vidhara, too. My personal mix! There, look … oh, will you look at that?”

The Islands of Obsidian Dreams stretched out before them like the bone shards of a crushed skull. On the southern horizon loomed the ruptured ruin of el-Tsunuqba, the riven god-mountain of the Jellyfish Eaters. Only in ancient art could you see the volcano in its forgotten wholeness, Mount Tsunuq, the Big Tit, a green and gentle cone with fertile slopes and a steaming peak—like a younger and less weathered Taranoke. In those days the houseboats sprawled out from Tsunuq like game tiles scattered across the sea. And at night the jellyfish farms filled the ocean with the green light of a million shining bells.

“There was a school here, in those days,” Apparitor said, Baru powerless to hide her interest, though she knew he was distracting her. She had never been taught about Kyprananoke. “The Tiatro Tsun, God’s Theater. Her library had books from across the Camou. The Liturges kept their houses there, each with nine secrets carved inside nine wooden rings, and the tenth finger bare, for the secret yet unknown. And the gray-haired Scyphu who ruled the Jellyfish Eaters came to consult them with teas of exum and subum from the jellies of the royal blooms; and all the world admired their wisdom. Or so it was recorded.”

On the Day of Thunder Capes, after portentous decades of quakes and smoke, Mount Tsunuq’s north face exploded with a blast they heard in Aurdwynn and Segu. The detonation blew the mountain’s bowels out across the sea. Imagine a drunken man bent over, belching up his innards: when he comes up all that’s left is a sunken starving frame. All that survived of Mount Tsunuq was the southern face, a blackened lip jutting up from the ocean, three thousand nine hundred feet tall. Today they called it el-Tsunuqba.