‘Last heard, he was out at the Sargassum.’

‘Who’s going out there?’

Ron grinned at her. ‘The turbul’s good out there this season,’ he said.

Much of the rest of the evening was a blur to Janer. He remembered Keech joining in a conversation about Jay Hoop, the ancient piratical founder of Spatterjay after whom the planet was named, and he remembered later finding himself lying under a table. There was also a vague memory of being slung over Ron’s shoulder, a long walk through darkness, then puking over a wooden rail into an oily sea. Then blackness.

3

In emerald depths the frog whelk, crippled by the leech that had wormed inside its shell to feed upon it, had lost all its survival instincts as it crawled painfully along the stony bottom, through forests of sea-cane and prill-peppered waters. Said instinct being the minimum requirement for plain existence in this savage sea, it did not last long, of course. Crawling into what it thought was a flock of its fellows, it sank down like a weary pensioner and uncoiled its eye-stalks. Only when it observed the patterns of those shells surrounding it, and sensed the vibration thrumming through the seabed, did it realize its fatal mistake: the whelks surrounding it were hammer whelks. Panicking, it thrust down its foot and tried to leap away, but such was the damage done to it by the leech that all it managed to do was tip itself over. The hammer whelks closed in on this unexpected bounty extruding feet like brick-hammers to pound their victim’s shell. Soon the water clouded with chyme, small fragments of flesh, nacreous glitters of shell and one slowly turning eye-stalk, like a discarded match - which was snapped up by a passing turbul.