He lied to me. He lied a long weepy lie about his broken heart, his burning passion, his fear for his lover Lindon Satamine. How could he survive the loss of his only comfort, dear Iraji? Hadn’t I heard their frantic grappling these past nights?

I listened to him and did not believe one word. Their burst of carnal appetite was not desperation but the product of Apparitor’s meddling with vidhara, a remarkable aphrodisiac: he and Iraji had been very careful preparing Baru’s dose, which required some experimentation.

But at the end of his performance I assured him I would delay the attack.

“Tonight?” Execarne murmured, as I came up onto the quarterdeck.

“Tonight.” He was deep into his drugs, red-eyed and slow of tongue. “Will you be sober for it?”

“Not if I can help it,” he said. He’d explained to me that he saw the world as a construct produced by the locus of human perceptions. By drugging himself into calm, he claimed, he was smoothing out the world around him, preventing the intrusion of misfortune and chaos. In that respect I thought he was very Oriati, and he certainly did seem to get along well with Prince Tau-indi. “Are there any complications?”

“Nothing of significance.”

“I don’t like this place,” Faham said, and I followed his gaze over the rail, across the bright blue shallows, through a copse of masts to the sprawl of the kypra. I’d never been this far south before. The wind had died with the evening, and in the west the plague-flags hung like snot from the empty houses of the quarantine.

I could read the doom of this place in its law-books. All power here flowed from the single precious aquifer beneath el-Tsunuqba’s stony base. The junta of Kyprist governors held that aquifer, and the easterly ports; I thought it very convenient that plague had struck the west, where the Canaat movement thrived in the fishing villages and cricket ranches and the shallow farms that eked out cassava and yam and pepper and saltwater rice and bok choi in sea-slime fertilizer and preparations of their own shit.

Their cisterns would run out soon. They would need to come out, through the quarantine, to get more.

And in reply the Kyprists would do exactly what Hasran Cattlson and old Duke Lachta would have done. They would use force to quell the uprising. They would not have enough.

So they would ask the two Masquerade warships at their port to use the Burn.

“I don’t like the water situation,” I said, as a gentle prompt to make him share his fear.

“I don’t like…” He sighed heavily. “There’s something I oughtn’t tell you about. But it is wearing a hole in me, Yawa. Maybe soon I’ll need to share it.”

“I’ll be ready to listen,” I promised.