Embedded in the tail end of that tumor was a grinning human skull. Its lower jaw subsumed into the flesh. Its eyes filled with furry, swollen bone.

The whale blew a gout of water through its blowhole and the blow whistled like no living whale should ever whistle, like thunder piped down a thigh-bone flute, like the mad shriek of an archon folded into the world.

Baru had found the Cancrioth.

Eternal

ETERNAL

TAIN Shir shoots the maelstrom in the rowboat she took from the men she killed.

The ocean crashes up against the ruin of el-Tsunuqba, the corpse of the old mountain. Jutting obsidian half-smoothed by the sea shatters and bares fresh edges. Craters and crevasses climb skyward to a ruptured, tilted crater. The slope is sheared along flat planes where ancient and devastating forces cracked the stone. It is a landscape indifferent to humanity and if all the shaheens and suzerains of ancient days had carved their works into the flanks an eon ago not one trace would now remain.

She rows the sea below those slopes, where the waves have cut a phantasmagoria of sucking cave mouths and belching geysers. Narrow slit passes open between walls of flood basalt. Whirlpools roar in the labyrinth of debris and through one of these whirlpools Shir makes her transit to the interior of the corpse.

Earlier in the day she leaves Sulane at the edge of the kypra and she hails a fishing ketch to make her way south into the settled islands. The fisherman’s old Psubim name is Haga el-Anagi and he has not taken an Aphalone name for he speaks to no one but the fish. Shir enjoys his company. If all the works of humanity were exiled from the face of the sea, his life would go on unchanged. He is uncontingent and unmastered.

She goes into the kypra and hunts an Oriati agent to learn where his masters nest. He will not break even when she loops his arm in a wire tourniquet pulleyed to a bucket and lets that bucket fill drip by drip with water from the solar. He dies. She finds the Termite station by inspecting sewer records for a warehouse or shop that produces too much shit.

She parleys with the spymaster there. Freely she admits her purpose which is to locate one Unuxekome Ra. The Oriati spymaster says she will trade Ra’s location for information on the Falcresti ships and their intentions. Are they here to prevent the uprising? Are more ships on the way?

No, Shir says. We came for one woman. Ra will lead me to her.

Ra is in el-Tsunuqba, the spymaster says. She goes out there in a little felucca.

Thank you, Tain Shir says.

After she leaves she climbs up to the chimney and gasses the spies.