The Lover and Tintinnabulum sat in on all sessions, beside Bellis Coldwine. She must be exhausted, Tanner thought with pity. Her writing hand was cramped and covered in ink, but she never complained or asked for a break. She only passed the questions and answers through herself endlessly, scrawling on innumerable reams of paper, translating Aum’s written replies into Salt.

At the end of each day came a short, fearful time as the humans, hotchi, and khepri ran in small groups to wherever they had been lodged. None had to spend more than thirty seconds in the open air, but still they were watched over by rivebow-wielding cactacae and male anophelii protecting their guests from their deadly females with sticks and rocks and klaxons.

There was another engineer already quartered in Tanner’s chambers, a woman in the further room. Tanner lay awake for a while.

"There’s another one to come," said a cactus voice from outside his window, making them start. "Don’t bolt the door."

Tanner blew out his candle and slept. But when, much later, Bellis Coldwine was escorted through the vestibule by a cactus guard, and crept in and bolted the door and stumbled, more exhausted than she had ever been before, through Tanner’s dark room into the one beyond, he woke and saw her.

Even in such a hot and strange a place as this, amid all the blood and the threat of violence, even so far from home, routine was powerful.

It took a day, no more, before the Armadans had their routine. The cactacae guards foraged and fished and escorted their fellow crew members, and hauled the Armadans’ rubbish, as the anophelii did, to the gorge at the rear of the village, onto the rock shelf and then into the sea.

Every morning Aum and his constantly shifting anophelii hangers-on debated and lectured Armada’s scientists, and every afternoon the same with the engineers. It was draining: intensely hot, ceaseless work. Bellis became semiconscious. She became a writing syntactical machine, existing only to parse and translate and scribble questions and read out answers.

For the most part, the meaning she imparted was opaque to her. On rare occasions she had to refer to the glossary in her own High Kettai monograph. She kept it hidden from the anophelii. She did not want to be responsible for them learning another language, breaking out of their prison.

There was no systematicity or coherence to the island’s library. Most of the works available were the most abstract theory. The authorities in Kohnid and Dreer Samher kept from their subjects any works they deemed dangerous. There was almost nothing that related the anophelii to the world outside. To find those, the anophelii had to search the ruins of their ancestors’ habitations on the other side of the island.

And sometimes they found fables, like the story of the man who raised the avanc.