Makemin shouts again and the lines are cast off. I can see Nardac stationed in the prow. Gathered up into her robe she looks like a vulture. Her black eyes shimmer there against the stars on the horizon. She must have had something to do with finding the ship. The engines chug and we pull away from the pier and out to sea. Now Ghuards are spilling out onto the piers, and I can see missiles splashing around the other fleeing boats, and around ours as well. Running everywhere looking for Silichieh, now I’m on the bridge where Makemin stands by the rail shouting orders down to the deck. Over me a star winks. I look, then clap Makemin hard on the shoulder. He wheels and glares at me. I am pointing, and he with furrowed brow traces my gaze to something grey and small moving across the sky; he yanks down his visor goggles, then waves his hand to Nikhinoch who quickly puts his rifle into it. Makemin lifts sights and shoots—grey form, a little Predicate flying to warn the Redeemer most likely, plops into the ocean. Makemin jerks up his visor again and nods grimly at me.

“Sharp eye.”

After a while looking again I feel clammy nausea at heart and throat as I don’t find Silichieh. But he is there, after all. One moment nothing, the next moment he and Saskia are there on the deck not far from me and he is climbing down off her back. She has those metal cuffs on her legs, she’s Yeseg, and trained, so she can fly along like the blackbirds, too. It transpires they had been all over the Port. It’s a good thing she made it. Saskia is the only experienced sailor among us, and she will be in effect captain of the ship. I watch as she takes the helm from Makemin, who stalks off to his cabin, pressing the heel of his palm to his brow.

From the butt end of the boat, we watch fire devour Port Conget. Even from well out in the darkness the mammoth forms of the Ghuards are visible bounding airily in and out of black and red coils of fire. The reflected flames wave on the still water of the ocean like tall clumps of grass in the wind, upside down. In their sullen glow, a solitary Alak hulk can be seen receding heavily up the coast, oblivious to the destruction. Dark red lifts its bolts of red into black and grey tubes of smoke, gobbled by the hot air below the moon’s thready crescent: buildings slump and crumple inwards spurting embers, whisked away and gulped by the smoke too. There is movement everywhere on the shore, flight.

What about these others who were counting on all those burning boats to make their escapes?

A Ghuard all in blackened, sizzling armor reels into an empty street.

“STOP!”