He is staring ahead, through the glass—not at me, but out to sea, through the distant aperture above the bow. Now I am him, staring down from his place as the prow rams a toy warship, and I remotely hear the crash as its hull cracks, the explosion as its engines blow up, splintering the aft half of the boat. A warship is crushed and sunk in a moment, but up here there isn’t so much as a vibration. You could sleep through it. Bonant just does this, ploughing along through the waves, rolling over ships and sending hundreds and hundreds of men sinking to the bottom.

I am on the deck of a doomed ship—I see the implacable prow bearing down on us, Bonant towering over like a mountain—with a deafening blast the ship is struck, the deck flips and everything flies in all directions with terrifying abruptness, men and gear and pieces of strong bulkheads ... the ship is flattened almost at once into the sea, borne down below Bonant’s keel, men and trash sucked down with the mass to drown under Bonant’s keel that closes its coffin lid over men, ship, and all, in an instant, flattening warships like a foot flattens grass. Up here, perhaps that hand moves to adjust a brass tab, and some small matter of light changes on the glass, nothing else.

As I tell all this, Thrushchurl is sitting with his back to the wall and his face in darkness. I can make out the slender glitters of light on his teeth.

“I had a dream!” he says, as though he’d not ever thought so until now. “I saw a warship.”

“Ours or theirs?” Silichieh asks conversationally.

“Nobody’s,” he says.

He sketches it hastily and hands me drawing after drawing, as soon as he finishes them. With a cold spatter of rising hair all over me I recognize it.

“I stood on the deck and I watched it,” his shoulders raised and lowered in a sigh. “I knew that it was older than the Limiters. I simply knew it. It has watched over this sea for thousands of years. And when it first embarked, there was land, and an important city, near here. This was the coast. All under water now though. Just empty waves now.”

He smiles for an instant.

“That ship kills with its light. It can’t be seen. The light is invisible.”

Silichieh looks over my shoulder at the drawings, takes them in his hands and switches aghast one to another. In astonishment, he says, “That was Bonant.”

Thrushchurl stares intently at him.

“Don’t you know its name? You must have heard about it somewhere.”

Thrushchurl shakes his head a little, more in confusion than negation.

“Well, ‘banaut’ is Wiczu for ‘enemy,’ or ‘monster’ ...” I say.

Silichieh shrugs expressively.

“It’s all forgotten sooner or later, anyway.”

He thinks for a moment.

“You didn’t see its captain?” he asks after a moment.

Thrushchurl’s face kindles with memory. “Yes I did!”