“You won’t have the capacity for regret if you seize again.”

“Why is that.”

“Because I’ll be forced to perform an emergency transorbital.”

Baru flinched and dropped the stone. Phantom steel grated in her eye socket—groped up into her brain—her first instinct was to look around, wildly, for the lobotomy pick, and throw it overboard. But just then Xate Yawa swept in, fully masked in purple-black ceramic and a blood-spattered surgical gown. “One of the wounded from Cheetah died,” she told the surgeon. “I cut him open to try to get at the bleeding, but he was too far gone. The patient in bed six.”

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.