We get ready—why not? I’m asking everyone in sight what’s going on until out of it all dimly emerges the suspicion that Saskia and Makemin have conspired to steal a boat and get us out of the Port.

We packed. We fly through the streets, all in confusion. We can’t stay together. We are separated, flying along the streets and all around us now there are cries and shouts, horns, banging insonorous gongs. We dart around a corner a huge tongue of ruby-dark fire stops us, bellowing a tall point high over our heads and seizing furiously on the buildings flanking it. Ghuards are rioting in the flames, I see one right in the fire, his armor blackened and smoke seeping from within, through the eye holes, and he howls a high wailing raucous joy note of wildness and rage with nothing of pain in it, reeling drunk in the flames until he broils to death, and the others are crashing through the town on all sides of us now, rending it all out of shape and upset it everywhere in flames. Screams, alarms, dark shapes flit against fire, we are part of a general flight now toward the water.

Jil Punkinflake’s dog leads us there. I see lamps rolling calmly on inky darkness ahead, interrupted by the dark regularity of a pier thrust out from the land. Piers here, and we are alone on this route. I can see the lights of ships pulling out to sea, but I can’t see the Redeemer or the Alak fleet anywhere.

A shriek like ripping burlap and there’s a Ghuard behind us, tearing loose from a blob of smoke, his scorched armor still smoking.

The Ghuard lopes toward us like a stricken giant; then he pauses as though lost in thought, and I notice a copious, dark juice flowing from his helmet’s left eye. The enormous hands pat an invisible pillow and smooth a vast phantom bed, and the Ghuard falls on it on his face. Makemin struts purposefully forward from the margin of the road, and there is a sharp tching! as he snaps his visor-goggles back up into his helmet, snap of the bolt and the satisfied little ring of the shell casing as it springs from the breach. He waves us on, his arm crossing his chest as he points to the boat, which stands lit up at the end of this pier over here. We are among the last to board.

Makemin gives the order to cast off.

“Saskia’s not aboard—!”

And I can’t find Silichieh anywhere.