Thrushchurl arranges her, puts her arms on her breast, and smoothes her hair with the reverent attentiveness I knew from the Embalmer’s College. He throws a glance at Jil Punkinflake, whose attention is drawn at once, but who clings instead to his dog, his eyes widening, staring. A Ministerial Ghuard has silently loomed out from a street abutting this one.

In a stride he snatches the body up by the arm and flings it jauntily over his shoulder. He reaches up one massive hand and flicks her head with his finger, causing it to flap on the limp neck. Jil Punkinflake gasps and cringes down trying to vanish into his dog, and even from this distance I can hear the hairs bristle on Thrushchurl’s head. I open my mouth to remonstrate with him but his face is shuddering and his pupils fixed on the Ghuard’s mask have closed to pinholes—he opens his mouth and the yellow teeth visibly yellow to polluted gold and from between them erupts a scalding effusion of curses that makes me clap my hands to my head. Jil Punkinflake’s dog whines and cringes, and Thrushchurl chatters out each bitter syllable clear as a bell. Rotten, clotted blood black as ink forms in his jaws and streaks his chin, hanging in ribbons from his lips; these are curses that only a mouth that had moiled itself in foulest rottenness could utter. The Ghuard reels back and the body slips down his arm to the ground. He staggers against the wall of a house; I grab Thrushchurl and Jil Punkinflake and we run.

*

“Wake up! You must get out! They will come for you now!”

The voice croaks at me through mental slush, beating me awake from a distance. And something else—there’s a bad smell.

I sit up blinking, and there are lights streaking by the front of the tent, and broadcast commotion, and Silichieh is sitting up too, rubbing his head.

“The Ghuards! Get to the piers!”

I go to wake Jil Punkinflake, whose upturned face is crossed by a beam of faint light from somewhere, and see he is shouting in his dream: this alien voice that is not his bursts from his lips and tongue without breath, without throat, splattering his coiled-up mouth and cheeks with ink brack, black decay ink like ink made from black sea-bottom muck, tarry bog ichor that stinks. His eyes flick open and he bolts up nearly striking his face against mine, begins gagging and making sounds of disgust in his usual voice. I hear him washing out his mouth, dangling his torso over the edge of the cot—but everywhere there is franticness. I stick my head out the tent and I see Makemin directing the others, packing up, some of the camp is already gone. Squares where tents had been. No sign of violence, but much fear. And I see something white in the waves, just opposite the camp, wallowing there side to side. As I pause to look at it, it drops its head in and is gone, a momentary white motion under the foam.