Every night, when the sun set, he would rouse himself. Safe from daylight’s rays he would climb the Uroc ’s baroque mast- towers. He would reach out from the slit windows and caress the tines and scales that draped from the irregular crossbars. With fingertips of suprahuman sensitivity, he could feel the little pulses of power below those slats of thin metal and ceramic and wood, like blood through capillaries. He knew that the Uroc could still sail, if need be.

It had been built before his ab-death or his first birth. It had been constructed thousands of miles away, somewhere that no one alive in Armada had ever seen. It had been generations since the floating city had visited that place, and the Brucolac hoped passionately that it would never return.

The Uroc was a moonship. It tacked and sailed on gusts of lunar light.

Weird decks jutted like land formations on the vessel’s body. The intricate segments of its multilayered bridge, the chasm that was constructed in the center of its body, the twisted architecture of its portholes and chambers marked it out. Spires broke its wide body, some doubling as masts, some tapering randomly into nothing. Like the Grand Easterly, the Uroc was not built upon at all, despite the crowded brick rookeries on the vessels to either side. But where the Grand Easterly was kept pristine as a matter of policy, no one had ever suggested building on the moonship. Its topography would not allow it.

By day it looked bleached and sickly. It was not pleasant to see. But as the light failed its surface would shimmer with a subtle nacre, as if it were haunted by ghost-colors. It became awesome then. That was when the Brucolac would walk its decks.

Sometimes he held meetings in its unsettling chambers. He would summon his ab-dead lieutenants to discuss riding business like the goretax, Dry Fall’s tithing. It is what makes us unique, he would tell them. It is what gives us our strength and makes our citizens loyal.

That night, while Tanner Sack and the others inducted into Garwater’s scheme slept, or reflected on what they would have to do, the Brucolac welcomed visitors aboard the Uroc: a delegation from the Curhouse Council, naÏve enough to believe that they traveled and met in secret (the Brucolac had no such illusions: he picked one set of footsteps out of the palimpsest he could hear on the surrounding boats, and idly attributed them to a Garwater spy).