“Baru. Baru.” Ra kicked free of Shao, grunting, narrow-eyed. She pulled herself up by the boat’s tiller, false teeth clicking, and she was laughing low and hateful. “My son wrote me a letter about you. He said he wanted to be your husband. He was my only child, did you know that? He was the last Unuxekome.”

Baru blindsided her to gain a moment’s distance. The boat was a little felucca, two crew aboard beyond Ra. One of them, a Kyprananoki man with his lips slashed off, helped Osa pull Tau-indi aboard. “I need someone to take up strangling me during sex,” Tau groaned, “and then I can maybe enjoy all these drownings.”

“Ah,” the shadow ambassador said, and sighed. “Prince Bosoka. I’m glad you’re safely aboard. I am afraid you can go no further as you are, Your Federal Highness. The bonds you bear do not belong here. They must be cut, lest they strangle you.”

Tau-indi’s head rose. Their eyes fixed on the shadow ambassador. For the first time Baru could remember, there was not the littlest hope in their eyes. Only dread.

“No,” they said. “Oh no.”

*   *   *

EXECARNE touched my shoulder. “I need to tell you something, Yawa.”

The deeper we’d traveled into the kypra’s channels the tenser he’d grown. I almost wished he would light another joint, because his twitches and growls of dismay (as if his thoughts were nipping at him) chafed at my own tension.“Now?” I snapped. Our boat had just butted up against Baru’s rented houseboat, and Iscend was poised to leap aboard. “Can it wait?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s still here. I don’t know if it’d work.”

“I can’t follow you, Faham.”

He locked eyes with me, though I wore the quarantine mask. He was a strong man, a man of energy and charm, and it horrified me to see him hollow with worry. He said, very precisely, very rapidly, “A contingency was put in place when we occupied Kyprananoke. A way to deny the islands to the Oriati. Or to contain a pandemic disease … in the expectation that a plague crossing the Ashen Sea would first be detected here.”

“Does this contingency matter right now? At this very instant?”

Now he seemed to stare past me. Later I would realize he was looking at el-Tsunuqba, the ruined mountain with its perilous stone shelves and heaps of ash and obsidian debris teetering above the open arms of the ruptured crater, like a cup with its broken side aimed towards Kyprananoke.

Later, when I knew about the thousands of blasting charges implanted in that mountain face, I would understand what he feared.

He was the Morrow Minister, master of spies. I was the Jurispotence of Aurdwynn, and sanitation and hygiene were my dominion, especially the containment of plague. No wonder he wanted my advice. The choice he faced was appalling.