A very fat, very greasy, very familiar gull settled on the rail near Faham. “Aw, hello,” he clucked, and patted himself for some salt pork. “Do you know who trained this little monster? Apparitor told me.”

“Who?”

“One of the prisoners who traveled on this ship. A duchess.” Faham fed the creature a crumb from his purse. “She studied birds on her last voyage.”

*   *   *

BARU rowed into Hara-Vijay down a broad shallow canal carved out of the coral by the weight of monolithic stones. In the years before the Masquerade thousands of Kyprananoki had worked together to drag those stones, greasing them in fat and kelp to get them sliding, hauling the whale-gut lines, wearing the way smooth by sheer persistence. At low tide the canal could be waded on foot, if you wore tall boots and went slowly. At high tide it flooded with glowing jellies longer than a man, and the birds descended to feed on the jellies, and the jellies devoured each other, and turtles crept from the coral to snap the jellies in their beaks.

“Oh,” Osa said, in disgusted fascination. “Look at that!”

She pointed astern to a golden jelly, an obscenely huge flesh-bulb with arms a hundred feet—a hundred feet?—yes, Baru checked their length against the mile markers, a hundred feet long. A white petrel had come hovering too low to the water, as petrels did, and the jelly snared it. The shrieking bird disappeared in a slow coil of tentacles as fine as hair.

“You should avert your eyes,” Tau said, reproachfully.

“Why?” Baru was queasily fascinated.

“What if you see a cormorant devoured?”

“Will it be an omen?” Shao Lune said, tauntingly. “Will it be a sign of her Excellence’s doom?”

Baru felt moved to defend the Prince. “I like cormorants. They dive so well.”

“They fly like shit, though,” Enact-Colonel Osa said, from the other oar. Baru looked at her in surprise. She shrugged. “I did my finishing study on the flight behaviors of seabirds. Short wings, cormorants. They don’t last too long up there.”

Tau beamed at Baru and Osa. Baru realized Tau had maneuvered them onto a common subject. “Er,” she said, trying, for whatever reason, to please Tau, “perhaps they fold their wings so often, while diving, that the behavior has begun to alter their flesh?”

“That’s the Incrastic account, I suppose,” Osa muttered.

“And what’s yours?”

“Do you care?”

“Osa,” Tau said, reproachfully. “Don’t be rude.” But the moment was gone.

The Oriati embassy compound stood on stilts and pilings in the lagoon, the outbuildings linked by rope bridges and floating walkways, the structures themselves built of concrete and sturdy imported Oriati hardwood fastened together not with metal but black resinous treenails. Great gold-and-jade banners hung flat in the calm. From the open-air pavilions came the delicious smell of hot honey.