A sharp cry. Saskia turns the ship quickly to port. We’ve narrowly missed running up on a huge, submerged stone. The alarm began with Nardac in the prow, her long arm extended remains pointing unerringly at a cubical black stone under the surface only a dozen or so yards from us. Makemin consults with Saskia, showing her with his finger how the coast is forested with mammoth stone blocks, strewn down from the land and protruding everywhere in the water, some visible, some low in the water, and certainly more of them completely submerged. Ahead of us, the land folds in on itself in long, low sweeps, like two arms dragging in the water, one bent in within the curl of the other. That place is evidently where we are bound.

Grape-colored dusk gathers around us as they talk together in low voices. We will anchor here, to wait for the sun’s light to steer by.

*

From here, it’s possible to see some way inland. The bare slopes alternate away from me, back and forth from left to right, and ascending toward invisible mountains, now that even the clouds have bled out their light. Only a few glowering scars here and there in puffed blackness fuming overhead. The water ruffles by with no strong current. The land is beautiful; I want to admire it, but the wind sucks the breath out of my lungs, making them ache, and I just can’t catch or keep my breath. I’m drying out like a salted fish, and I have to make my way to the mess. The inside of my head feels like it’s been scoured with sand.

Silichieh is there at one of the tables, his head on his fist, emptily stirring tea in a tin cup, and Tabliq Quibli is on the floor up against the wall with his head on the insides of his elbows and his forearms on his bent knees. A bandage under his turban. I get some hot water and sit. I’m so dried out I’d upend myself into a rain barrel if there was one handy. Silichieh keeps rubbing his red eyes and I know he feels it too—he’s not smoking. Looking out at an all but undetectably rising and falling shoreline in the dark, the steely phosphorescent blue night, the layered slopes left to right like slabs of silver fat, the dry air stealing in to scrub the corners. The mess is a bladder of orange light in a world of blue and the only place on the ship we didn’t all look like ghosts or statues of blue lead.

I’m trying to collect my thoughts, but I can’t compose my mind at all, my face is smarting and my eyes rasp in their sockets as though they’d rusted there. I turn away from the door for relief, splash water in my hand and squeeze it into my eyes. I feel that unaccountable feverishness again.