With her left hand, the child’s taboo hand, the shadow ambassador of Hara-Vijay touched the baby-sized tumor that filled her womb. With her right she pointed to Tau-indi Bosoka.

“No,” Tau gasped, “no, no no no, please don’t—”

“I cut you,” the shadow ambassador intoned. “I cut you out of trim. Na u vo ai e has ah ath Undionash. I call this power to cut you. Alone you will serve us, Tau-indi Bosoka, alone we will be your masters, to save the nations we both love. Ayamma. A ut li-en.”

“STOP!” Osa roared.

“Ayamma,” the shadow ambassador repeated. “A ut li-en. It is done.”

Tau fell weeping onto their knees. Had their hands been cut from their body, Baru would not have pitied them more, or wanted to go to them more terribly.

The shadow ambassador lowered her hand. “Well,” she said, shivering now, “that’s over with. Ra, take the boat west. We’ll lose our tails in the kypra and then go home to Eternal. I’ll signal our return on the uranium lamp.”

“Incredible,” Shao Lune breathed, staring at the Oriati. “They think they’re doing magic.…”

Ra laughed as she unstayed the boat’s tiller. “You stupid little girl. You think it’s all theater? Because you can’t understand it, it’s not real?”

“It’s just superstition.”

“Is it?” Ra pointed past her. “Is it just theater? Is that theater, you wretched Falcrest cuge? Is that theater?”

A school of ghostly white jellies had surfaced behind them, thousands of them drifting together, their feeding tentacles intermingled—and through that jelly raft there came a blade like the moon.

It was a fin. A tall black dorsal fin, slightly backswept, and on the leading edge it was fitted with a steel cutting surface. And as the creature turned, as Baru realized this same beast had towed her under the reef, the whale’s long body breached the surface for a moment.

Behind the fin, a bony tumor ruptured the creature’s back. The growth ran down along its spine halfway to the tail. At first Baru thought it was a huge barnacle, or an infection, but no barnacle gleamed that unnatural bone-white color, sun-bleached and sterile: no infection could be so solid. The tumor had erupted from within the beast. A tumor of bone. And although the tumor knobbed and festered with hideous spines and bulbous growths, it wept no pus, the wound was clean, the skin knotted tight with scar tissue around the extrusion, even the contours of the tumor had been streamlined by the flow of water.…

The creature rolled lazily to bare its passing flank. A tremendous white eye-shape, blank, empty, gazed on Baru: beneath it was a single black eye, keen, aware. For a moment great teeth glimmered at her in a carnivore yawn.