She constantly murmured mantras and qualms to herself, but I noticed this whisper in particular because it was hesitant. I’d never seen Iscend hesitate before. What could she be saying?

Her fingers flashed. The needle went in. The fish died.

Iscend’s lips fumbled with a word. What was it? Maia, perhaps? Was she imagining each fish as a person with a gender and a race? Some kind of mnemonic exercise?

Her fingers flashed. The needle went in. The needle came out slick with fish-blood.

Iscend whispered Gaios.

I clutched the rail in a fit of fury. Not this! Not now! Not here before Kyprananoke, where the dangers would be greatest—where the opportunity had been arranged! For a Clarified to utter one of her own words was an Act of Punishment, instilled since childhood. Iscend had been taught that if she ever said Gaios there would be maggots conjured in her bed.

She pierced the fish. The needle glinted in the sun. Gaios.

There was no one here to put maggots in her bed.

I saw the sigh of contentment that swelled her chest.

*   *   *

I FOUND Mister Execarne up on the quarterdeck, slouched in a wicker chair, his long-line trailing into the water and a huge overstuffed cigar blunt clenched in his teeth. “Hello, Yawa,” he puffed. “Care to join me?”

I did care. I wanted to sit down with him and have a long idle conversation about nothing in particular. But I hadn’t the patience with myself.

“I’d care for you to join me in a little work,” I said. “I thought you’d be up and about, scheming to contact your people here. Kyprananoke doesn’t agree with you?”

“There’s a secret buried here which I wish I didn’t know,” he said, smiling up at me: but his eyes went to the distant carcass of el-Tsunuqba, looming against the sky. “You managed your share of outbreaks. You know that the necessary measures can be harsh.”

“I do…” I said, inviting him to go on.

“But here I am, putting my own thoughts before yours. What can I do for you?”

“Iscend’s deprogramming herself.”

“Shit.”

“Quite.”

“I hate Clarified,” he said, matter-of-factly. “I hate your master. I’d see him in the harbor if I could.”

He couldn’t, though. There had been a time when his Morrow Ministry’s secret police had curled Falcrest in their squid arms, every sucker bound to a high minister or a member of Parliament. But that had ended by the Emperor’s will, ended in the clatter of Judiciary printing presses. Raven courts drowned the Morrow Ministry’s elite by the hundred. Urchins in Falcrest’s Caulbasis Down still told stories of gulls with the rolling panicked eyes of long-dead spies, trapped in the animals that ate their flesh.