I would have thought it was a thunderhead sweeping low to the water if I hadn’t seen it before. Through sheets of vapor my eye discerns the faint silhouette of a dome the size of an island, moving in the fog. It is going across our course.

“Call to it ...” Thrushchurl murmurs.

Nikhinoch is in the hatch, his eyes enormous in his glasses.

“It’s veering toward us,” he says flatly.

“Turn,” Makemin says in the same tone in the same instant and Saskia’s turning is simultaneous. The fog before the bow lightens; we are turning out of the bank.

The fog thins. The engines are still pumping all out, though the planks of the decks are smoking. I stare down the length of the ship. A round blackness is there in the fog behind us, and suddenly I’m dizzy ... I have to get back inside, step over the threshold stumbling, nearly falling, but Thrushchurl is there, my arm in his sinewy hand, holding me up. His breath is a little short, his grip slightly trembling, his grin wavering with billows of an overpowering feeling.

A confusion of cannonfire from behind us. We emerge from the fog as the sun is setting, a brilliant silver scar opposite the cloud in our rear. There are no more enemy shots trailing after us. A ragged chuckle escapes slowly from Saskia’s unsmiling lips.

“I told you they were going to die.”

Fourth Chapter

A voice is calling to me. It shouldn’t be so still that I could hear such a soft voice, calling out so quietly, but just at the moment things are truly still. I step onto the deck.

A wall of water is coming. I can hear it absorbing all sound. I turn from it, with no feeling or thought at all.

Halfway on the stairs to the upper decks I am slapped to the bulkhead churned up in darkness I spin and a great sucking indrawing pulls me back—air and light burst about me again as the water sluices away in recoil from our alien boat leaving me where I cling to the twisted handrails, a hacking in my throat like a hand chopping and chopping at my neck.

The ships rocks and shouts out from everywhere. A hissing mass of infuriated water seethes up onto the deck again breaking its teeth against the metal and the deck—Tabliq Quibli’s drawn face flashes by in its suction his hand reaching for one of the railing’s slender posts and fails to grasp it I lunge through the railings and seize a fistful of his jacket yanking him back, watch his frantic hand snap tight on a bar and together we pull him onto the stairs and up toward the bridge as the next wave wells up from the lower deck to engulf us in its weight—we are buoyed up a moment, then hauled down. My body is half in the rails and the rail is cutting me in two. I can’t think for the racing along my head, the icy fingers of water raking my face—Thrushchurl’s long-wristed reach has me as the wave gathers itself in again and he pulls strenuously, helping Tabliq and I up to the bridge deck.