As they passed out into sunlight she’d tried to squint through the wash of water and resolve the animal’s form. But all she’d seen was a human skull receding before her. And its jaws were stuffed with bone as thick and spongy as marrow.

Osa and Tau treaded water, arms linked, heads together: the Prince was reassuring her of something. Baru spun her blindness round and found a boat waiting: Shao Lune had just popped up gasping at the stern, as if she’d taken the time to swim underneath and inspect the hull. Baru reached up to the boatwale to haul herself up.

Someone seized her hand. The stumps of her missing fingers crushed against wood and she screamed aloud. The hand pressed down, as if to milk the bone from the wounds, and Baru howled, howled.

“Ba-ru!” A face appeared over the boatwale: a grin full of silver and porcelain and lead and the teeth of dead men. “There you fucking are, you shit-stuffed umbilical, you dreg. Come here.” Strong hands grabbed her by her lapels and lifted her up to meet a knife, a sharpened hook, a curve that would pierce her throat and seize her arteries and windpipe and pull them out through the wound. The voice was a woman’s, heavy Urun accent in the Aphalone, and familiar, so familiar—a storyteller’s voice, thick with salt and pitch.

She sounded like her son, minus the joy.

Unuxekome Ra threw Baru down into the bottom of the boat. Her boot came down on Baru’s breast and pushed: Baru’s breath went out like a bellows.

“Save yourself,” Ra said. She let her boot up so Baru could draw a breath, tensed, and pushed. “Lie and save yourself!”

“I have a file—” The boot came up, she drew a breath, spat on Ra’s next stomp. “—of your son’s deepest secrets!”

“I don’t care. Try something else.”

“I can give you—Xate Yawa!”

Her broad brown face with the sun behind it, noble face of a duchess, weathered face of a pirate and a grieving exile. When had she learned of her son’s death? How fresh was the wound?

“I’ll get to Yawa when I get to Yawa.” Ra’s knife glinted as she stooped. “Anything else?”

Duke Unuxekome had no children. Duke Unuxekome had no siblings. “I’m carrying your son’s heir,” Baru cried. “I have his child!”

Ra recoiled as if struck physically by the power of blood. Baru got a leg up and kicked her in the cunt. She fell away, knife up, growling—and then Shao Lune tackled Ra, dripping wet and shouting, “That’s my pardon!”

“Stop it!”

It was the shadow ambassador. She stood in the prow of the boat, wrapped in a dry khanga, her eyepatch dripping briny tears down her cheek. “Ra,” she called. “We need them alive. Don’t you hurt her.”