“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.

But the volcano’s erupted gore splashed into the sea and made the kypra, a maze of atolls, reefs, and islands. In time life returned. The Jellyfish Eaters had passed into history, and the kypra became Kyprananoke.

“Too bad about the school,” Baru said, with true regret. “If we had their library, we could know some of how the world lived before Incrasticism.” She could test the truth of claims about the Jellyfish Eaters’s downfall: could it be blamed on their way of life, their unsanitary practices?

“Oh, the library survived,” Apparitor said, looking at her with that cunning baited smile. “Four of the Liturges fled before the eruption, warned by the jellyfish. They stole as much of the library as they could. Afterwards they made a deal with the gray-haired Scyphu families to reestablish Tiatro Tsun. Kyprananoke kept its archives and great school until not sixty years ago.”

“What then?”

“Incrasticism came upon them, of course,” Apparitor said, “and the scholars and archives were taken to Falcrest to be joined with our Faculties. Far too precious to be left out here on the little islands, we judged. In exchange we destroyed the compost pits they used to grow their traditional and rather toxic roots, consolidated their freshwater aquifers under government control instead of family rule, and moved them all over to coconut and arrowroot and imported foods. These islands are too young for much good soil, so Falcrest says agriculture must be rationalized. Gave them all horrible tooth problems, the sugar did. Lucky we had dentists, hm?”

“Bastards,” Baru muttered, recklessly.

“As ever,” Apparitor agreed. “But we were discussing your brain.”