Some officer strides up wigging his arms and Makemin without a word points his holdout gun in the man’s face. Thrushchurl’s people are exhilerated by the action and are raving all around us, out in front and on all sides. They gibber and gambol, and the soldiers in the road reel back appalled and avoiding contamination.

And suddenly the sky is interrupted by the arch of the gate passing overhead, and we’re safely inside.

*

No one meets my eyes in the street. Fringes of dread hang in the lower part of the air, roll sluggishly down against the town’s grain. Deserted buildings, houses and stores eviscerated by looters their innards spill from windows and doorways.

Looking around I see a grimy sweat like bitter metal soot on everything, gloom and nauseous headache that makes me wish for something really clean and frightening to happen. I catch myself the object of cowed and smouldering looks from hidden faces; they heat my uniform chemically. I want to escape, but even here there are Edeks. They don’t come from the capital. They don’t have to—they know.

A cry is rising all over the place—“The Redeemer’s coming!”

I blunder along with the other soldiers if only so as not to be knocked down. When I can, I take my chance and slip up a stairway that tops out in a partially covered plaza, street-level with the slope on the far side, a few benches and tables where the town’s old liars could sit drink and play pinochle, so I stagger over and officially commandeer one empty table. From here I can follow the pointing fingers to where something godlike is moving against the horizon.

That’s the Redeemer, the Alak flagship. Even at least a mile away it rises high into the sky, towering over a fleet of massive Alak hulks; its immense, broad prow is shadowed beneath a winged steel colossus, his stern face nearly in the clouds, wings folded back along the lines of the ship, a huge shield in his left hand and his right, brandishing a sword, is raised four hundred feet above the waves. There are guns protruding from hatches in his rippling garment, and his legs are lost in their folds.

The Redeemer is unique, with so many engines and so many guns, all superlative numbers—its battery can, on one side, level a town in minutes. Its grapnels can drag enemy ships on massive steam winches; captured ships may be drawn into bays, or crushed between hydraulic rams in special compartments. Even from this distance, I can see the bristling, smooth-slabbed fortress rising from its midsection, and hear the fury of its engines, sullen and far away. Some of its forward bays are open and emitting barqots, which are not able to escape its shadow for many minutes.

I watch the barqots pull into the harbor and back their drawbridge tail gates to the piers with clamorous reports. Around me, gulls’ wings glint like swords as they circle. In the streets now there are soldiers marching.