Tanner swims around the edges of the anophelii island. He feels anemones and urchins and realizes with sudden sadness that this is the first time he has swum close enough to the seabed to sense its life, and it is almost certainly the last, and it is too dark to see. He can only imagine the gnarls of sand and stone over which he swims, the spurs of rock and dead wood that must look furry with weed, the rich colors that light would reveal.

Minutes of urgent swimming pass. This coastal sea tastes different from the open ocean around Armada. These waters are a thicker stew. The taste of tiny life and death suffuses him.

And then very suddenly the taste of rust.

Machinery Beachthinks Tanner. He has swum around a convolution in the island’s outline, into the bay. His suckers caress new things: decomposing iron, engines scabbed by the sea. The water above this bed of iron is awash with metal salts and tastes to him of blood.

At the moon-glittering surface above him are three big shapes, the Samheri ships, occluding what little light there is. Their stubby chains taut in the water, their anchors at rest amid the bones of much older metal artifacts.

Tanner angles up, rising, feeling the water expand. He raises his hands, still clutching the package. The shade of the biggest ship is directly in his path.

The cactacae from Dreer Samher bluster at the sight of him, mimicking anger, threatening him with upraised fists and spined forearms, but they are dissembling. They are puzzled by this bedraggled Remade man who has scaled their chains to stand dripping on their deck, looking nervously at the sky, waiting for the sailors to take him below.

"Let me talk to the captain, lads," he says to them in Salt again and again, fearful but determined. And after their threats do not deter him, they bring him into the ship’s candlelit darkness.

They lead him past the treasury, where the spoils of their trade and their battles are stored. The kitchen where the smell of rotting vegetation and stew is strong. They take him through corridors of cages where angry chimpanzees scream and rattle their bars. The cactacae are too heavy and their thick digits too imprecise to scuttle the rigging. The primates are trained from birth to obey whistled and shouted commands, capable of unfurling and tying and hanging sails like experts, without ever knowing what it is they do.

The bored apes are hidden here from the hunger of the mosquito-women.

Sengka sits quietly in his cabin, making Tanner Sack stand drying his face and hands nervously with a rag. With his huge green arms resting on his desk, his hands clasped, Sengka looks unnervingly like a human bureaucrat. The same suspicious patience.