Apparitor pawed overhead, knocked over a bundle of maps in bone cylinders, and, pouncing on one, revealed a schema of the Ashen Sea. “That won’t work, though, see?” He stabbed, roughly, at Falcrest, and missed, indicating instead the middle of the Mother of Storms. “Falcrest is the heart of the Ashen Sea trade circle. It pumps the blood.”

“That’s exactly why bankruptcy would work—stop the trade, stop the money—”

“Listen, listen.” He waved his fingers. “Say Falcrest can’t buy any more shit. No more great merchant fleets. No more trade ring. Take away that trade and you, uh, you get a lot of war, because if people can’t get what they need, they try to take it—”

“A ut li-en,” Iraji whispered, to Baru’s horror.

“—and then”—Apparitor flourished over the map, behold—“over the course of forty or fifty years, that’s how it happened with the Cheetah Palaces at least, those wars and raids lead to the destruction of most major cities. That’s, uh, that’s how it goes in a world where people take what they need, instead of trading for it. Then I’d expect plague, as refugees flee the violence, smallpox, measles, buboes, the Kettling. Then isolationism to hold back the plague, and five hundred years of chaos. The Palatine Collapse wiped out all complex interconnected civilization. I mean, it’s remarkable, it’s brilliant—” He belched articulately. “—in Falcrest we’ve got the entire known world hostage to our own economy. If we go down, so do they.”

“People got along fine without Falcrest’s trade,” Baru said, skittering around thoughts of Taranoke and her parents. She hurt. The glass cut she’d suffered on Cheetah was stitched up with silk through her cheek, her missing fingers still ached and curled, and her period was due to start in a few days: meaning a dull awful heaviness in her stomach.

She drank some more.

“They got along fine on their own,” Apparitor said, “but now they’re connected, like the Llosydanes, remember the fucking Llosydanes? Stars help them if the trade stops. They’ll all die. Everyone will die if the trade stops. Because everyone’s connected.”

“Quitter.” Baru waved her bottle at him. “How would you destroy Falcrest without ruining the rest of the world?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t.” He belched again. “I fully expect this fucking war to spiral out of anyone’s control and kill us all.”

“How nihilistic.”

“Not if you read your history, eh? Seeing as civilizations always collapse, all of them”—his hands moving rapidly left and right, to Falcrest, to the Camou, to the far eastern continent, to the unknown west, left and right—“the Jellyfish Eaters and the Cheetah Palaces and everyone else, and I think it’s our turn now: I just want to go. I want to go away.”

Baru stared at him. “Go where?”