The Night of the Swarm

4 Halar 942

263rd day from Etherhorde

‘What happens if they separate?’

Felthrup glanced up from the Merchant’s Polylex. Marila’s voice was trembling, although her face, as usual, remained impassive. She had paused with a Masalym fig halfway to her mouth.

‘Separate, my dear?’

They were both on Thasha’s bed, Marila with her feet up, shoulders propped against the wall. Amber evening light fell on her round face and dark, salt-brittle hair. She bit down on the fruit and it ruptured with a squeak.

‘They’re all right together,’ she said as she chewed. ‘Pazel has his fits, but the others protect him until they’re over. Thasha goes blank, like she’s sleepwalking, or very far away — but Pazel and Neeps coax her out of it. Neeps-’ she drew a sharp breath ‘-is a fool, of course, but the others can keep him from exploding. Sometimes. What if they get separated, though? Who will look after them?’

Felthrup could smell the fear on her skin. Humans could not detect that smell, did not know they produced it; but rats knew. Many a colony owed its life to that particular scent. Humans had warning bells, drums, criers who ran through the streets. Rats had their noses. When enough humans began to exude the smell of fear, rats ceased their scavenging and dashed for the warren, and did not move until it faded.

Marila shook her head. ‘Forget it,’ she said. ‘I just can’t seem to quit imagining things. Blary waste of time.’

This is how she asks for comfort, he thought.

‘It was a great company that set out from Masalym,’ he said. ‘Humans, dlomu, ixchel, horses, dogs. We must have faith in them, as they did in one another.’

Marila turned her gaze to the window. They had left the Sparrows Islands behind and were skirting the edge of a bigger land mass called Vilgur or Vulgir — ‘Peaceful’ was the translation the dlomu had offered, and that was accurate enough. A broken black mound rising whale-like from the glaucous sea. Cubes and polygons, wave-tortured, algae-crowned. Yes, it was peaceful in its lifelessness.

‘I don’t want to visit Oggosk,’ said Marila.

‘The duchess is peculiar,’ said Felthrup, ‘and I will never trust her fully — certainly to the ixchel she is a merciless foe. But she is equally a foe of Arunis — or was, if he is truly dead. And she has taken a strong interest in Thasha from the start.’

‘A nasty interest. She threatened to punish Pazel terribly if he didn’t stop loving Thasha. She might as well have ordered him to stop eating, breathing. Having a heart.’

‘That is why we must go and see her,’ said Felthrup. He tapped the Polylex. ‘She wishes to consult this book. She wishes for it with unspeakable intensity, though she tries to hide the fact. We are in a position to name our price, my dear Marila. And we may begin by demanding that she tell us everything she knows about Lady Thasha.’

‘Mr Fiffengurt dreamed he saw Lord Talag.’

‘How you do jump from thought to thought,’ said Felthrup admiringly. ‘Some of us only creep, meandering, myopic, dragging our bellies in the dust. You leap with the freedom of a gazelle.’

She gave him an odd look. ‘My belly will be dragging soon enough.’

Should he laugh, should he sympathise? What if the child had the father’s temper, the mother’s gift for stuffing feelings in a closet, leaning hard against the door?

‘Listen to what I’ve found in the Polylex,’ he said, playing it safe. He cocked an eye at the tiny print. ‘“Within the cave all was ice-sheathed, and the corpses were as figures under glass. But when she reached the chamber where Droth’s Eye had fallen it was warm as a summer’s eve, and a light that was not her torchlight shone about her, pale and deathly.” ’

‘You’ve found it!’ said Marila. ‘Erithusme’s story! So that old Mother Prohibitor told the truth, it is written down! But we’ve searched and searched, Felthrup. Where was it hidden?’

‘Under Raptors.’

‘Raptors?’

‘Birds of prey, my dear. The great hunters of the air. Eagles, falcons, hawks, marapets, osprey, kunalars, the rare nocturnal-’

‘All right!’ said Marila. ‘Raptors, naturally. It makes no sense at all.’

‘On the contrary, it makes perfect sense, if your goal is to conceal forbidden histories in wild thickets of words.’

‘I suppose Droth’s Eye is the Nilstone,’ said Marila, ‘since that’s what she’s supposed to have found in the ice cave. Go on, read me the rest.’

Felthrup found his place and continued:

All about her lay death’s monuments, testimony to the killing power of the Orb. Yet Erithusme did not fear, and that was ever her salvation. She went straight to the Eye and clasped it in her hand, and felt only a little prick, as of a dull needle scraping. The Eye was far too heavy for its size, and the girl thought at first that she would never lift it. At last, with both hands, she raised it to her chest, and thereupon her very desire to bear its weight did change her, strengthening her body, and that was the first deed of magic the great wizardess ever performed. And the second was to shape the ice into stairs and level passages for her return to the surface. Little control did she have of this sudden power: the ice melted and soaked her, and the stairs were cracked, and once the very mountain shook, and rocks fell crashing about her. She never quailed, however, and came at last into the daylight again.

There in the plain below waited the King of Nohirin in his pavilion, surrounded by the eight hundred soldiers who dared not enter where the young girl had gone alone. When Erithusme descended, the king praised her, then roughly demanded the Orb, saying, ‘This tool would never profit a peasant’s daughter. Give it to me! It belongs in royal hands.’ But the girl drew back, and reminded him of his promise. ‘One falcon of my choice from your covey did you swear to give me, O King,’ she said. ‘And my choice is there on your huntsman’s arm.’

The king was angry, for she had chosen his favourite. ‘I will send a suitable bird to your father’s homestead,’ he told her. ‘Now give me Droth’s Eye.’

Still Erithusme did not yield. The king shouted to his guard, and they moved to seize her. And not knowing what she did. Erithusme raised the Orb before her with a cry, and the king and his eight hundred were swept away in a whirlwind of terrible force, and found later throughout the countryside, crushed against cliffs, impaled on trees and steeples. But the bird flew to her arm and became her companion, and journeyed with her far over Alifros aboard her ship.

When fresh carrion is plentiful the raptor may not bother to hunt, though it will rarely pass up the incautious mouse or field rat-

‘Oh, I say.’ Felthrup shook himself, and looked up from the Polylex. ‘It’s all birds from that point on,’ he said. ‘Nothing more about Erithusme, under Raptors at least. Not so useful, was it? We knew the outline of the story already.’

Marila gazed down at the book. ‘It does tell us one thing. Erithusme could use the Nilstone from the moment she touched it. And not just for simple tricks. If the book’s telling the truth, she had huge powers from the start. And all because she lacked fear. That’s strange too. What sort of person lacks fear entirely?’

‘But she did not,’ said Felthrup. ‘That at least is how Thasha heard the story from the Mother Prohibitor. That little needle-prick became a slight burning, then a stronger pain, and each year she kept the stone it grew worse. And when Erithusme consulted the High Priestess on Rapopalni, she was told no mortal being can ever be wholly emptied of fear — and that consequently the stone would kill her in time. And Thasha believed the same would happen to her, only faster.’

‘Much faster,’ said Marila, nodding. ‘We talked about the Nilstone, once. During that week when the boys weren’t speaking to us. She thought it would take the stone about three minutes to kill her, if she was rested and could put up a good fight.’

‘Three minutes!’ said Felthrup. ‘Then I hope she never touches it at all.’

‘But even three minutes makes her — different,’ said Marila. ‘Everyone else who touches that blary thing dies before they can scream.’

‘Unless they’ve drunk of the wine of Agaroth,’ said Felthrup. Marila looked at him blankly. ‘Ah, but you weren’t there, were you? It was in the Straits of Simja, just after the Shaggat Ness was turned to stone. Ramachni spoke of an enchanted wine from the twilight kingdom, used by the Fell Princes when the Stone was in their possession, long eons ago. The wine made them fearless enough to survive the touch of the Stone. Though I doubt it helped their judgement when they used it.’

‘What happened to that wine?’

Felthrup’s nose twitched. ‘What do you think, my dear? They drank it up. You can find it in the Polylex under the heading Incontinence, Sins of.’

Marila laid a hand on the delicate paper of the book. ‘We know Erithusme and Thasha are connected. Thasha knows that herself. When we were locked up in the Conservatory, there was even talk that Erithusme could be her mother. Thasha went sort of crazy once, and began talking in someone else’s voice. Maybe that voice was Erithusme’s. Neeps thought so.’

Marila fell abruptly silent. Then she rose to her feet, startling rat and dogs alike.

‘I don’t know what we think we’re accomplishing. What does all this matter, if we never see them again? No, that’s not what I’m trying to say. It matters, they matter. But we don’t.’

She touched her belly, unconsciously. The rat wished for human arms, for limbs that could embrace and protect. Fear was so easy to smell, so terribly difficult to lessen.

I must return to the River of Shadows, he thought. I must find Orfuin and beg for aid. Somehow we must reach them, if they yet live. Or free ourselves from hope if they do not.

‘I can’t stand thinking of him,’ Marila whispered, as if ashamed of the admission.

‘You must,’ said Felthrup. ‘Not thinking of him is a human sort of trick, and not a very clever one, my dear. Some pain it is folly to avoid. Think of him, ache for him. Let that longing bring you the strength to do what he would wish you to do.’

Marila blinked at him. ‘How did you learn to think that way?’

Felthrup tilted his head as though to say he had no idea. He could not bring himself to admit that he was quoting from a volume of melodramas Admiral Isiq had left in his cabin, under the pillow.

Marila closed the Polylex and stepped to the wall. Running her fingers along the rough planks, she found the spot she wanted and pushed. There was a click, and Felthrup saw the outline of the hidden cabinet where they stored the irreplaceable book. Marila clawed it open and slipped the Polylex inside.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s see if we can get something out of the witch.’

They left the stateroom, Thasha’s mastiffs leading the way. In truth, Felthrup had his doubts about their errand as well. Lady Oggosk (with that certainty of obedience she always displayed) had simply ordered him to produce the Polylex. ‘I’m not Arunis, I won’t steal it from you,’ she had declared. But she had turned from him as she spoke the words, as though afraid of what her face might reveal. Inwardly, Felthrup had panicked, matched her evasion with one of his own. He would have to speak to Marila, he’d said, for he could hardly fulfil her wishes alone. Priceless and forbidden books were not to be dragged about in sackcloth, were they?

Convince her! Lady Oggosk had replied, adding that the very survival of the Chathrand was at stake. After that she’d shut her mouth, waiting for him to go. It was not for rats to question the Duchess of Tiroshi.

He did not like to cross the witch, despite her curious transformation into his protector and confidant (if such a word could ever apply to one so crafty and calculating). And yet the book was in his trust, his and Marila’s. And so he had questioned further.

‘Forgive me, lady, but you had best make a stronger argument. Recall if you will that the Mother Prohibitor herself told Thasha to share the book with no one.’

Lady Oggosk had thrown a hairbrush at him. ‘The Mother Prohibitor!’ she shrieked. ‘Is she aboard? Did she ever do anything for Thasha Isiq, save imprison her, and teach her how to snare a man with hips and eyelashes? Did she ever raise a finger against the sorcerer, or the excesses of the Secret Fist? I am the one who sacrificed! That woman stayed in Etherhorde to raise catfish.’

Felthrup shuddered. He knew his favour with the witch could vanish as quickly at it had appeared. He had no idea why she considered him important. Before Masalym she had hardly spared him a glance. Now for some reason she had let it be known that he was under her wing — that the man who laid a finger on the Chathrand’s sole surviving rat⁸ would answer to her. In her cabin she regaled him with stories of her first excursions with Captain Rose, her low opinions of certain crewmembers (most crewmembers), her hatred of Mzithrinis, her delight in the harm done to them by the Shaggat cult.

Most disturbing were her hints about the Swarm of Night, which she said was growing like an invisible tumour. ‘It is here, in Alifros,’ she would tell him. ‘Some monster has brought it back — Arunis, possibly, before he fell. I can feel it, the way Rose feels the distribution of cargo in the hold. I can feel the Swarm unbalancing the world.’

They passed through the invisible wall. ‘Not that way,’ said Marila, as Felthrup started up the Silver Stair. ‘I don’t want the whole ship to see us heading for her door. Let’s cross the lower gun deck. Nothing much happening there.’

They descended, and set out across the deck. Light poured in through the glass planks in the ceiling, making the floorboards gleam. Beside the open gunports, black cannon waited, like coffins at the doors of some vast crematorium. It was very quiet: Felthrup could hear the island’s shore birds, smell the flat nickel-smell of the rocks. The few sailors at work here tried, as always, not to stare. ‘Evening, Mrs Undrabust,’ some murmured, while others considered them coldly. Felthrup was grateful for Jorl and Suzyt. Opinions about the four youths (Marila stood for all of them, now) ran from wary affection to hatred. Some blamed them for all the disasters of the voyage; others said that they were the only reason the ship was still afloat.

The dogs’ mouths watered when they passed the galley. Felthrup knew the cause, for he could smell it too, however faintly: the Red River hog. Mr Fiffengurt had promised to save an ounce of its fat for each mastiff, but the gift had never come. When Felthrup had mentioned it, the quartermaster had looked rather ill and changed the subject.

Suddenly the noses of both animals dropped to the floorboards, as though pulled by strings. Felthrup and Marila stared. The dogs’ great bodies quivered. ‘They’ve picked up a scent,’ said Marila, ‘but it’s nothing in the galley, is it? Look, they’re following it away.’

The dogs padded forward, entranced. Felthrup rushed after them, trying to rid his nostrils of their sweat and breath and dander. He sniffed, sneezed, sniffed again. Then he looked up at Marila, amazed.

‘Ixchel,’ he said.

Marila’s eyes went wide. ‘Two of them, probably,’ said Felthrup, ‘and not more than an hour ago.’

‘Ixchel!’ said Marila. ‘But they haven’t been seen in weeks! Are you sure?’

‘I spent a month sniffing them out when I first boarded the Chathrand, my dear. I hunted for them ceaselessly; I thought we might be friends. You know what became of that endeavour. Still I could no more mistake the smell of ixchel than I could the shape of my paw.’

The dogs had turned the corner at the cross-passage. When Felthrup and Marila caught up they found the animals whining and scratching at a rather decrepit length of floorboard. They were not unheard of, these points of decay. In Masalym the crew had been absorbed with major repairs; only now could they be spared for such smaller jobs, and Mr Fiffengurt’s checklist was immense. The plank before them had a two-inch gap at one corroded corner: more than enough room for an ixchel to pass through.

Felthrup tasted the air above the gap. ‘They passed through here, between the floorboards and the ceiling of the orlop deck, and then to portside.’ He looked up at the girl again, suddenly excited. ‘And I must follow! Quickly, while no one’s about! Raise that plank a little! Help me squeeze through!’

‘Squeeze through? Are you joking?’ said Marila.

‘Decidedly not! This is great good fortune! It could be weeks, months before we catch their scent again. Even now it is fading. I might have missed it without the aid of the dogs.’

‘You can’t just go down that hole.’

‘My dear, you know nothing of the art of the squirm! There have been studies, we rats can pass through any hole wider than our heads, as measured at the lower mandible-’

‘Felthrup-’

‘That is all one need verify, the mandibular axis, the yaw of the jaw-’

Felthrup jumped. Marila had just stamped her foot down over the gap.

‘Take a look at your foot, you silly ass.’

Felthrup swallowed. Marila had a point: his left forepaw had never recovered from his first encounter with the ixchel. Lord Talag and his men had sealed him in a bilge pipe. Only at the last second, by jamming his paw between the pipe and its lid, had he escaped suffocation.

‘Yes, yes, I fell into their trap,’ he admitted, ‘but Marila, you did not know the Chathrand in those days. Everything was different. We had not met Diadrelu, or heard of Arunis or the Nilstone, or guessed that we would all be fighting together to survive. When Lord Talag caught me he did not even believe I was a woken rat. But in time he came to respect me — even thanked me for my courage, and offered me the services of his cook. They have no reason to hate me now.’

‘Talag didn’t have a reason to start with.’

‘But he knows me; they all do. Diadrelu called me her beloved friend.’

‘They killed her too.’

Swift and certain logic. But Felthrup was not about to be turned. ‘Remove your foot!’ he hissed. ‘Someone is coming! Sweet friend, we must know how many ixchel are left alive, and reason with them, before they try something atrocious at Stath Balfyr.’

‘Something atrocious — you see? Not everything has changed.’

A man was coming; he could feel the thump of footfalls in the boards. ‘Oh dearest girl! Fond, caring, maternal Marila-’

‘Don’t call me that.’

No reaching her, no use! Felthrup spun in a circle. He could taste it, the burn of breaking faith, the horrid knowledge that even with loved ones, speech could be impotent, language something less than grace. ‘Why are you crying?’ said Marila, and then Felthrup bit her through the boot.

She screamed and danced away. The dogs howled. Mr Coote appeared at the corner, shouting, ‘What’s wrong, Miss Marila? The little baby? Is it time?’

‘No! Pitfire!’ She pointed, but it was too late already. Tufts of black fur edged the gap in the planks. Felthrup had done it; he was gone.

He was in darkness now, in the six-inch crawlspace between the floor of the lower gun deck and the ceiling of the orlop. The scent led straight to portside. He struggled to crawl in perfect silence, unscrambling the message from his nostrils, alert to the least movement of the air.

He ploughed forward through the velvety dust. When the scent trail reached the inner hull it veered right. Another scurry, his mind awash with thoughts of how to greet them, what he should say. Talag had ideas of honour: strange ideas, but no less powerful for their strangeness. The key was to access those ideas. We are comrades in arms, Lord Talag, never mind the arm you mangled, why kill me before we chat a little, why kill me period, spear in haste regret at leisure, my enemy’s enemy is my friend, and by obverse induction my friendly enemy is a, is-

He stopped, nostrils flaring. They had stood here, the ixchel, not thirty minutes before. And then they had disappeared.

Rin’s eyes, not again.

Felthrup circled, listening, feeling, tasting the air. The scent was gone; it led to this spot and vanished without a trace. When it came to hiding, rats were experts, but the ixchel were master magicians. He rolled over, pressed an ear to the boards. Nothing but men’s distant footfalls, and the slosh of the sea. He hissed: ‘Come out! It’s only Felthrup! I’m a friend, today and evermore!’ No sound, not even an echo.

‘Don’t do this! Suspicious ninnies! I won’t betray your hiding place!’

The silence mocked him. They could be somewhere close at hand, smiling. Even fondling their spear-tips, circling, tightening the noose.

He blew one nostril and then another, inhaled deeply, struggling for even the most distant ghost of a scent. Nothing. He pressed his mangled paw against the boards, drew the tender flesh back and forth. What was he thinking? That he would find a hinge, a hairline crack, the outline of an ixchel door? But such doors were never found. What a dreamer he was. Rose had torn the ship apart and found nothing. The ixchel would be seen again when they wished to be, and not before.

‘We’re stronger together,’ he told the darkness. ‘We have to stand together, with the humans as well, mind you. Or we’re doomed.’

Felthrup put his head down on his paws. He was lying to himself. He didn’t fear the ixchel closing in silently to spear him. No, what he dreaded was their absence, their refusal of his peace overtures, their continued loathing for the giants and anyone tainted by their favour. He was not much thinking about where that loathing could lead. He was only feeling the waste: the colossal, shameful waste. You were right, Marila. You can love language and its promise of a straight sunny boulevard, a common currency of the heart. But that’s your faith only, and it moves not mountains. They’re not listening, those mountains. They’re happy where they stand.

He blinked.

Something had happened. A finger of cold had touched his stubby tail. He turned about, feeling: there was a large droplet on the plank. He touched his tongue to the water. It was salty — and what was far stranger, clean. This was no seepage, no condensation. This was a splash of fresh seawater, fallen from above, and yet somehow deep in the bowels of the Chathrand.

He turned away, crawled a few feet, stopped to think again. He touched the board six inches overhead. Then he turned and nosed his way back to where the trail disappeared. The wet spot was still there. He reached up again. This time his paw met with nothing.

Felthrup stared upwards. There was clearly another hole, larger than the one he’d squeezed through. By why was there no light from the gun deck, with all those open ports? Nervously, he rose on his haunches. There! He felt the edge of the opening, ran his paws about its perimeter. It was about ten inches square.

He rose higher — and light stabbed his eyes. By sheer instinct he ducked down again, and the light turned once more to blackness. Felthrup was shaken. It had been no lamp, but sunlight: the bright, cold glow of the sun through mist. And what else? The wind: he’d heard a moaning wind, and something that sounded very much like surf.

He stood mystified. Then, with a gasp, he saw the whole thing, what had become of the ixchel, why Rose had never found a trace.

‘Felthrup?’

Marila’s voice, faint and distant. She was still waiting for him. But no, he couldn’t go back to her, now. He stood on his hind legs again, and the sunlight poured over him, and the wind and surf resumed. He pulled himself through the gap, onto chilly boards. He looked around. He was right where he expected to be, upon the lower gun deck, some fifty yards from where he’d left Marila. And at the same time he was somewhere utterly alien. Somewhere he had never hoped to see.

The deck was severely tilted, as if the ship stood almost on her beam-ends. And it was still, perfectly still; and not a soul was to be seen. The cold sunlight flooded in through the gunports, and further off, the tonnage shaft, which was cluttered with hanging debris. Felthrup climbed for the gunports, shining above him like skylights. Afraid that his body would betray him, that he might panic and run, dive for the square hole behind him. And even more afraid that if he did so, he would find that the hole had disappeared.

This is not a dream. Not a night journey from which I will wake safe and sound in my hatbox. So why does it draw me like a dream?

As he neared the gunports the surf grew louder. The cannon and their carriages were gone — no, there they lay below him, in a heap against the starboard hull. Some of the gunport doors lay with them; others dangled from their hinges, rusted and cracked. And there was another sound, a low, violent booming, reverberating in the planks beneath his feet.

He felt a cold sea-spray. He was almost blinded by the sun. Not a dream, he thought again, and crawled out through the port.

The wind swallowed his cry of horror. This was the Chathrand, all right — but only her carcass, beached and broken, utterly destroyed. She lay half-embedded in sand, and waves the height of houses were thrashing against her. Below, her keel was split, her frame-timbers shattered. A good third of her hull was simply lost, devoured by the sea.

Felthrup turned in place. Her mainmast still stood, absurdly proud, jabbing at the scudding clouds. The other masts were gone. Likewise the bowsprit, the forecastle house, and every trace of rigging save a few blackened strands still knotted to the rusted cleats. Her bell was gone; her paint was gone. The deck cannon were filled with twigs and seaweed. Bird nests. This Chathrand had been here for decades.

But where was here? An island. A low and empty place, not more than a mile long, and tortured by those thundering rollers. Beach grasses, terns and plovers, white bleached shells. No trees, unless those growths at the island’s centre were stunted trees. And no other land, anywhere. The Chathrand had died quite alone.

A feeling like intoxication boiled up in the rat. He knew the legends about magical doorways on the Great Ship, and the ‘vanishing compartments’ they led to. Marila and Thasha had stumbled through one such door themselves, and ended up on a Chathrand from long ago, crewed by barbarous men. But he, Felthrup — he was seeing the future, obviously. Decades or centuries from now, this would be the Great Ship’s end: beached and ruined on this nothing of an island, lost in the Ruling Sea. The ixchel had hidden not in space, but in time.

Then Felthrup saw the burial yard.

It stood above the beach, where the grasses were thick and the land looked almost stable, almost safe from being washed away in a storm. Rock cairns, the marooned sailors’ grave markers, surrounded by the rotted posts of what had once been a fence, a wall against the wind and sand.

Felthrup thought his heart would burst. At least some of the crew of this other Chathrand had made it ashore, and lived here for a time, and perished. Who were they? In his own time the Great Ship was six hundred years old, and had changed hands, owners, nations, countless times. How many more had she known, before this lonely end?

‘You can still read the inscriptions,’ said a voice above him.

He jumped — and nearly became the next one to die. The hull was wet and slick with algae. He tore at it, digging in with his claws, jabbing with his incisors, and just managed to regain his balance. Above him, on the broken topdeck rail, crouched an ixchel he had never seen before. He had a broad face and small bright eyes, a black sash around his upper arm, a spear crossed over his knees. The man was smiling, but Felthrup did not much like the smile.

‘Three inscriptions, anyway, etched in stone. The others are gone, or unreadable. Come up now, rat.’

‘Cousin!’ cried Felthrup. ‘I must assure you that I am not here to spy out your secrets.’

‘You’ve done that already.’

‘My purpose is to give knowledge, not extract it.’

‘Climb. You’re not safe where you are.’

At that moment half a dozen ixchel appeared on either side of the man with the sash. They were armed and muscular, with shaved heads, and they looked down at Felthrup with the hungry eyes of hawks. Felthrup recognised their faces, but he did not know their names. He doubted that they were concerned for his safety.

‘I know what you mean to do,’ he shrilled. ‘You would wait for us to reach your homeland, and then swarm back through that hole and attack.’

‘Roast me, lads, he’s seen right through us,’ said the man, as those around him laughed. ‘We give up a good home in Etherhorde. Fight giants and rats, storms and starvation, lose a fifth of our clan. And then, just as we near Stath Balfyr, we attack. Sinking the ship, maybe, in typical crawly fashion. Or whispering a bad heading into Rose’s ear. So that we can all drown together within sight of dear old Sanctuary-Beyond-the-Sea.’

He made an impatient gesture. ‘I won’t waste a weapon on you, beastie. If you will not climb, we will throw refuse down until we knock you into the waves.’

Felthrup turned to leap back through the gunport — but of course, they had closed in behind him, five more shaven-headed spearmen. They did not want him returning just yet.

You dug this burrow, Felthrup. Stop squirming and dig your way out.

He climbed. It was not as slippery as he feared: the curve of the hull worked in his favour. He reached the rail, and the ixchel roughly pulled him up. Oh, the wasteland of the topdeck! Holes, cracks, chasms. Splinters, rotting spars, rusted chains. Felthrup struggled to contain his tears.

‘Well,’ said their leader, ‘we’re not dead yet. Now you know.’

‘You won’t believe me, sirs, but I am glad of it — overjoyed.’

‘You’re damned right I don’t. I am Saturyk, His Lordship’s chief counsel.’

A twitch passed over Felthrup, one he hoped the man could not read. Saturyk. He’d heard the name many times; Ensyl had called him ‘the one whose hands go everywhere’. After the ixchels’ seizure of the Chathrand most of the little people had come out into the open, some gloating, some quiet and thoughtful. Not Saturyk: he had remained in the shadows, rarely seen, never lured into conversation. Felthrup studied the man, and felt himself studied in return, with cold exactitude. I know who you are, he told the man silently. You’re their Sandor Ott.

‘I wish to speak to Lord Talag,’ he said.

‘No doubt,’ said Saturyk, ‘but your wishes hold no currency with His Lordship. You’ve shown us who your friends are. One of them likes to dine on our brethren.’

‘You mean Sniraga? I am no friend of that cat! She is merely the familiar of Lady Oggosk.’

‘Aye,’ said Saturyk, ‘and you’re another. For your sake, I hope she doesn’t try to use you against us. We keep a fine edge on our spears.’

Felthrup was confused, frightened, exasperated with himself and them. ‘We are wasting time,’ he said.

‘There’s a bit of truth at last. You came to talk, you claim? Talk, then, we’re listening. For the moment.’

‘Talag and I are better acquainted.’

Once again Saturyk’s mouth formed that unpleasant smile. ‘Only because you’re not giving me a chance,’ he said.

‘Master Saturyk,’ said Felthrup, ‘I would kindly ask you not to favour me with a display of wit, or irony, or your rudimentary teeth. You have no order to kill me, or you should have done so already. You are presumably required to defer to your commander in anything so unlikely as a visit from the other ship. I will speak to Talag, none other. And put away your pricking tools. Only a fool points out that spears are sharp.’

He was shaking as he spoke, but he forced himself to look Saturyk in the face. The guards were enraged. ‘He mocks you,’ hissed one, passing his spear to another and drawing a knife. ‘Give the word, and I will take another inch off his tail.’

Saturyk gazed at Felthrup, expressionless, his eyes like two copper nail-heads in the sun. ‘Put the knife away,’ he told his man at last. Then he turned and started across the topdeck, one hand beckoning Felthrup to follow.

They walked a practised path through the jagged timbers, the drifted sand. Felthrup’s gaze slid down into the chasm of the tonnage shaft. There was light in the ship’s depths: sidelong light from the hull breach; and the waves moved through her, pulsing, as through the chambers of a heart.

At the starboard rail, a thin rope had been fastened to a cleat. It ran inland, taut above the surf, to a point some thirty yards up the beach. ‘Can you walk a rope, Mr Stargraven?’ asked Saturyk.

‘Hmph,’ said Felthrup. He had been walking ropes since he was weaned. Indeed he was swifter than the ixchel, as they made their way ashore. Sometimes it was good to be a belly-dragger.

But the blowing sand became a torment as they descended, and by the time they reached the ground it was almost intolerable. Saturyk urged him quickly forward, and Felthrup saw that they were making for a narrow tunnel. Soon they were all inside: a buried length of bilge-pipe, leading uphill towards the vegetation at the island’s centre.

‘You placed this here?’ said Felthrup, amazed. ‘Such industry! How long have your people been passing through that door?’

No one answered. They crawled, single file. When the pipe ended they dashed again through the blowing sand and dived into another. This one was longer, narrower. At length it brought them to the very edge of the brush. There were trees, after all: tortured and shrunken, but still a bulwark against the howling wind.

They were marching on a footpath, now. Looking left and right, Felthrup saw other ixchel moving with them, half-hidden, gliding through the patchwork of light and shadow. He knew many by sight, a few by name. He thought of the three hours’ peace in Masalym, when the dlomu had lavished food on them all. How different it could have been. And perhaps it can be yet. Watch your words, my dear Felthrup, watch your manners.

They had not walked five minutes when the brush opened into a clearing, framed by half a dozen crumbling, human-sized buildings. As Felthrup watched, the clan came out into the open, soundlessly. And it was the full clan: still hundreds strong. Never before had he seen ixchel children, wide-eyed, thoughtful; or the greatly aged, skinny and round-shouldered, but never bent like human elders.

How careworn they all were! It shocked Felthrup profoundly, this defeated look: they might have been castaways themselves. And they were angry, too: furiously angry. They stared at him as though unable to quite believe that he had come here, and Felthrup turned in a circle, meeting their eyes. No, they were not all furious. Some looked at him with fear, or simple bewilderment, and a very few with hope.

The buildings were mere shacks. They listed, nearly ready to topple. Every one of them built, of course, with salvage from the Chathrand. Here was a bench from the officer’s mess. Here a wheelblock mounted on a post: one end of a laundry line, perhaps. And Rin’s eyes! There was the ship’s bell, set upon a great flat stone like a monument in a village square.

But this had never been a village. Only three of the buildings looked as if they had ever been suitable for living in. Another might have served as a barn, the last a storehouse. There was a well, a rusty anvil, the ghost of a fence. ‘They brought a great deal ashore,’ said Saturyk. ‘At low tide the Chathrand is fully beached, and you can simply walk aboard.’

Felthrup could not find his voice. He knew these things. He knew the people who had touched them. Or at least their doubles, their shadow-selves.

They must have dreamed of rescue. Even here they did not give up. He looked at the bell: it would have taken eight men to carry it inland. Even here they fought for dignity.

Saturyk led him to the least dilapidated of the houses. The human door was shut fast, but at its foot the ixchel had carved one of their own. Saturyk gestured to one of his men, who opened the door and slipped inside.

‘How long?’ Felthrup asked.

‘Since the wreck, you mean?’ said Saturyk. ‘Thirty-four years, if you trust the giants’ memory.’

‘You found written records?’

‘Among other things.’

They waited. It was almost warm, here at midday and out of the wind. Almost. Felthrup tried to keep himself from imagining the island in a typhoon.

A sudden noise came from the woods, or beyond them perhaps. Felthrup turned in amazement. It was the lowing of a cow.

Saturyk gestured, and a number of the ixchel darted off in the direction of the noise. ‘There are not many,’ he told Felthrup. ‘They must have been brought ashore and released.’

‘And bred?’ said Felthrup. ‘Or is that the voice of a thirty-four-year-old cow?’

Saturyk looked at him with vague hostility. Neither, thought Felthrup. That is one of the beasts that disappeared on the Nelluroq. They came here, those cows and goats and other creatures. There’s another doorway on the ship!

The man returned from within the shack and whispered in his leader’s ear. Saturyk, clearly surprised, looked at Felthrup in annoyance. ‘You’re to be admitted,’ he said. ‘Follow me, and ask no questions.’

Inside it was dim rather than dark, for there were windows. The shack’s single room was clean and ixchel-orderly: tiny crates lined up along one wall, dried foodstuffs hanging in garlands overhead. Along the opposite wall stood racks of weapons. Most of the chamber, however, resembled a military drill yard. There were lines chalked on the floor, and tightropes, net ladders, high jumps, a cat-shaped archery dummy bristling with arrows.

They never rest, thought Felthrup.

‘Stop gaping,’ growled Saturyk. Then he lowered his voice and added, ‘His Lordship has a long list of worries, see? A great deal on his mind. So none of your chatter when you’re in his presence. That’s a friendly suggestion, believe it or not.’

‘I shall be on my best behaviour,’ said Felthrup.

Saturyk frowned; he was not reassured. Then he raised his eyes. Above them was a storage loft, its interior concealed by a tattered curtain. There was no ladder, but the ixchel had made a kind of staircase from a taut rope with many knots. Up they went, leaping and scrabbling. When they stood at last on the edge of the loft, Saturyk told him once more to wait. He slipped inside, and Felthrup stood staring at the ancient curtain. It had once been blue. And hand embroidered: leaf designs of some sort. And from the hem dangled a few limp threads, the remains of some decorative tassel.

Felthrup’s nose twitched. Something was very wrong. He squirmed away from the curtain. Turned his back to it. Turned to face it again. ‘No,’ he said aloud, shaking his head human-fashion. He put out his paw and touched the material, drew it up against his cheek.

It was Thasha’s blanket.

He squealed, horrified, and ran blind along the edge of the loft. It was hers, unquestionably: the very blanket he and Marila had been sitting on not two hours before. The wreck was not some alien Chathrand from hundreds of years ago, manned by long-forgotten strangers. It was his ship, his people. They were the ones who had been marooned here, who had lived out their lives on this fingernail of sand.

‘Aya Rin! There are no Gods! Only cruelty and agony, endless suffering for all people, a mass of pointless woe!’

The curtain flew back, and Felthrup squealed again. Diadrelu’s brother, Lord Talag, stood before him, a hand on the pommel of his sword.

He looked as strong and fit as Felthrup remembered him at their first encounter; he had recovered entirely from his imprisonment by the rats. Yet he was changed, and not for the better. There was a raggedness about his hair and clothing. Deep lines creased his face, and his eyes were spectral. Felthrup had the impression that Talag was both studying him closely and somehow not seeing him at all.

‘Come here,’ he murmured.

Talag turned his back and walked away. The loft was nearly empty. There was a single chair, ixchel-sized, beneath the unglazed window; and a shape wrapped in oilskins about the size of a human’s toolbox against one wall, and nothing more. Talag went to the chair and looked at it in silence. His back was to Felthrup; his hands were in fists.

‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘that blasted magic wall is still intact? The whole ship is falling to pieces, washing out into the Nelluroq, and yet we still cannot enter the stateroom. My sister knew a way in, but I have not been able to find it. There could be bodies in that chamber for all we know.’

‘My lord-’

‘You are not vile, Master Felthrup. I know this. But you have come here for naught, and to your own misfortune.’

‘I have come with a warning,’ said Felthrup.

‘How benevolent of you,’ said Talag.

‘You may jest, my lord,’ continued Felthrup, ‘but I fear my warning is dire.’

‘Do you imagine we have abandoned all vigilance? We fled the Chathrand to avoid extermination, but some of us are always aboard. We know how she fares. How her crew’s hopes are drying to dust. We know too that she is hunted, and that if it comes to open battle, she will lose. I went aloft when the armada passed in the gulf. I saw the devilships of Bali Adro. If you think to inform me that our lives are yet in Rose’s bloodstained hands, do not bother. I know it all too well.’

‘Your people see what is before their eyes, Lord Talag,’ said Felthrup. ‘But the greatest peril is not aboard the Chathrand at all. Nor has it been, since Arunis took the Nilstone ashore.’

‘Your witch would have us believe that Arunis is dead.’

‘Dead he may be, yet the Nilstone remains. And you who had a hand in its finding: you too must bear a part of the burden, and help to cast the Stone out of Alifros.’

‘I played no part whatsoever in the finding of the Stone.’

Felthrup took a deep breath. He had forgotten how Talag lied.

‘You passed Ott forgeries that made this whole journey seem possible. Dri told us, my lord. Those chart headings, from Stath Balfyr to Gurishal: you invented them. Without you Ott might still be conspiring in Castle Maag, and the Stone might yet be hidden in that iron wolf at the bottom of the sea. And if the Stone is now taken by Macadra then we shall never get it back, for she will enfortress herself in the heart of Bali Adro as she works to unlock its maleficent-’

‘Felthrup, be still,’ said Talag, startling the rat with the plainness of his speech. ‘You will not persuade me, you know. We should never have paid attention to the squabbling of giants, their wars and sorceries and deceits. We use them, manipulate them. We are artists in that way. But we do not take sides in their intrigues. The ixchel know better, as a race, and have known for centuries. You should let me recount some of our legends, one day. They are nobler than anything you will find in giants’ books. And they warn us, rat: never collaborate, never lower your guard. If you do so, the giants will step on you. Every time.’

‘This is a new day, my lord. Ancient tales cannot show us the way forward. We must seek it ourselves.’

‘You want me to intervene, do you not? To force the ship about, oblige Rose to sail back and look for your allies on the Bali Adro mainland?’

Lord Rin above! thought Felthrup. Is he saying that he could?

Talag raised his eyes to the window. ‘I do not hate your Pazel Pathkendle, your Thasha Isiq,’ he said. ‘They saved twenty of my people from their own, on the day of slaughter in Masalym. But we are nearing Stath Balfyr at long last. I will not sacrifice the dream of our clan for their sake — even if there were hope of finding them alive. My sister became a partisan in their factional wars, and the results were catastrophic.’

Felthrup squirmed. Impatience was making him short of breath. ‘The catastrophe was brewing already,’ he said. ‘The choices of your noble sister prevented it from becoming absolute.’

‘My escape from captivity prevented that.’

Lies, always lies. And worst of all, lies told to persuade no one but the man himself. Turn and look at me! he felt like screaming. Stop talking to yourself! But all he managed to say was, ‘The Nilstone, the Nilstone is the danger.’

‘We are not a superstitious lot,’ said Talag, as if Felthrup had not spoken. ‘We do not worship idols, or gather in temples to praise beings none can see. And yet we are a people of faith. It is our faith that has kept us alive.’

‘Faith?’ cried the rat. ‘Gracious lord, what could possibly be more dangerous than faith? Did you not see enough of faith when you were held by Master Mugstur? Faith is for his kind, for the Shaggats and Sandor Otts of this world. Faith will kill you, if you let it.’

‘The word means something else to us.’

‘No, it does not,’ said Felthrup. ‘It means turning from what is plain to see. It means preferring stories to evidence — and this voyage has spread a banquet of evidence before you. I did not come to beg your aid for my friends’ sake, Talag! I came because we must help their cause or be killed. The Nilstone-’

‘Do not speak to me of the Nilstone!’ roared Talag, spinning on his heel. ‘I know its history as well as you! Giants use it to kill giants! And they will go on doing so, with or without it, as they have done through all the carrion-heap of their history! But there is a place in Alifros where they do not rule, and have not despoiled, and I am sworn to take my people there!’

‘Then proceed!’ squeaked Felthrup, hopping in place. ‘Carry on, advance! Be firm and exalted!’

‘Quit my presence, filth.’

‘But Stath Balfyr will be no refuge! There is no lasting refuge, here or anywhere. And we are filth, all of us, even you. You’re living filth!’

‘Saturyk!’

‘That is how they think of us — the powers who set Arunis and Macadra to work on this world! Can’t you see anything? Alifros is to be scrubbed! Sterilised like a ward before surgery! Aya!’

He leaped, and something whizzed past his head. Saturyk had flown through the curtain, wielding a heavy chain. Felthrup began to run, hysterical, and the ixchel man sprinted behind him. They made a wide circle around the room. Talag stood impassive by his chair.

‘Great Talag!’ shrilled Felthrup. ‘Such a wise, brave lordship! The true leader of his clan!’

More ixchel surged into the loft, shouting in their sibilant tongue. Felthrup leaped over one spearpoint and sprinted past another — why didn’t they just skewer him, a voice inside him wondered — and then the chair itself attacked him, or seemed to. He flipped over it, striking his head on the floor. He came to rest with his bad leg under him, agonisingly twisted.

Talag himself had thrown the chair. His foot was on Felthrup’s neck, and the tip of his sword was pricking the tender flesh of the rat’s inner ear. He leaned low, elbow bent for a downward thrust.

‘I choose to yield,’ said Felthrup.

‘Choose!’ said Saturyk. ‘You mad little squealer! You’ve got no more choice than a fly on a frog’s tongue!’

‘Silence!’ cried Talag. He bent his head close to Felthrup, nearly whispering. ‘A leader, you call me? Witless animal. Look where I have led them. To ruin, to exile on this sand hill, or a hopeless return to a ship full of murderers. I pushed my son until he snapped and took on the role of a messiah. A role in which he killed my sister, and came close to killing everyone aboard, and fled at last into a living death himself. I drove him to those acts of despair, and then condemned him for his choices. A leader! You are preaching to a dead man, Master Felthrup. But this dead man will kill you all the same.’

Saturyk and the others closed in, swords and spears lowered in a deadly ring. Felthrup squeezed his eyes shut. How had he failed to understand? Talag was the one in despair. The man was too wise to deny the truth for ever; now it had caught up to him with crushing weight. But in one thing at least, Talag was still gravely mistaken.

‘Your son has not given up the struggle,’ Felthrup said. ‘Nor did he go ashore in Masalym to die.’

A new fury contorted Talag’s features. ‘You know something of Taliktrum? Tell me. But breathe a false word and I will puncture your skull.’

‘Will you let me return to the Chathrand?’

‘No bargaining. Speak.’

‘I do not bargain, I was merely curious,’ said Felthrup. ‘And anxious, I might add, in the spirit of full confession. Anxious that you not puncture my skull, Lord Talag, nor indeed my eardrum, which is more imminent, . but never mind, I digress. The fact is that your son has taken sides, Lord. Indeed he saved the life of Prince Olik in the Masalym shipyard, and that act has made all the difference. For it was Olik who then took the throne of Masalym, however briefly, and dispatched the expedition to slay Arunis and recover the Stone.’

‘You know it was Taliktrum?’

‘Unless there was another ixchel with a swallow-suit on the Masalym docks. Hercol was there; he witnessed it. Taliktrum swept down and slew the assassins before they could slit the prince’s throat.’

Talag’s eyes filled with wonder. ‘My son. He saved the Bali Adro prince?’

‘Far more than that. He stopped Arunis that night; he stopped the triumph of the death-force Arunis serves. Not for the sake of humans or dlomu or even ixchel. He did it for Alifros, my lord.’

Felthrup did not add that Sandor Ott had been present as well, nor that Taliktrum had vanished before the fight was through. Let him think the best of his son. For all I know it might even be true.

‘Your noble sister,’ he said carefully, ‘used to speak of idrolos, the courage to see. That is what will keep your people alive. Nothing else will do, I think.’

Talag did not move for several seconds. Then he straightened, withdrawing the sword from Felthrup’s ear, the foot from his neck. Felthrup rolled onto his feet, still encircled by weaponry. Talag gestured to Saturyk.

‘Assist me.’

Together the two men walked to the square shape against the far wall, and tugged the oilskin aside. Beneath it were two stacks of human-sized books. All were battered, and most had water-damage. With great care Talag and Saturyk removed one from the stack and carried it nearer the window. It was a thin, attractive leather volume. Talag opened it and began turning pages almost the length of his body. Finding the desired page at last, he stepped up gingerly onto the book, knelt, and read aloud:

‘It is just as well Ratty left us, after tasting the blood of the keel. He did not want to, of course. We had to convince him he was doing it for us — that he might find a way to send a ship here, a rescue party. But he was doing it for us, anyway, by all the Gods. Someone has to remember all this. Someone has to heal. And why should it not be Felthrup, who loves reading more than any human I have ever known?’

He looked across the room at Felthrup. ‘You can guess who wrote those words, can you not?’

Felthrup nodded, weeping inside. Only one person had ever called him Ratty, and that was Fiffengurt. The quartermaster himself had written these lines. In the future.

No, he thought furiously, in one future. Someone else’s. This end is not inevitable. It cannot be.

‘He was still alive when we first passed through the doorway and found the wreck,’ said Talag, ‘but he did not live long. He had been alone for three years already. The others had perished one by one.’

‘But what is he talking about?’ Felthrup whispered. ‘How, how did I leave? And the blood of the keel?’

Talag shrugged. ‘A mystery, that. Where the wreck’s keel is split you can see the heartwood, and it is indeed a rich, dark red — but we have not ventured to taste it. But as for how you left, that is easy. You used the clock, of course. You crawled through it to safety in another world.’

‘It is here? Thasha’s magic clock is here?

Talag nodded. ‘And today it is but an ordinary clock. We forced opened the hinged face, and saw only gears. Your escape seems to have exhausted its power at last.’ Talag closed the book. ‘You may earn the right to read any of these, Felthrup, with time and good behaviour.’

‘My lord, I do not know when I shall have such a luxury.’

Saturyk smiled, but hid it quickly when his leader frowned. Talag glanced at Felthrup again.

‘You tried to warn us of the Shaggat, and later of the sorcerer. I doubted you then, but time has shown which of us was in the right.’

Felthrup bowed his head.

‘All the same, you have tried to keep faith with too many. You have tried to pick and choose, allying yourself with these giants and not others; these ixchel rather than those. Such efforts were doomed from the start. You have ended up on no one’s side.’

‘No one’s mindlessly, Lord Talag. Of that fault I am happy to be accused.’

‘I cannot permit you to return to the Chathrand,’ said Talag. ‘You are incautious by nature, and might well reveal our secret doorway to the giants. If they should ever find it we will be trapped here, marooned. I’m afraid you must be our guest until the end.’

Felthrup had foreseen this, and had readied half a dozen arguments. But the resolve in Talag’s voice made him suddenly quail. He was about to gush nonsense. He bit his own foot, holding it in. Babble not! Babble won’t do, darling Felthrup. You must reach him some other way.

Talag, no doubt shocked by Felthrup’s silence, came forward and placed his hand on the rat’s bowed forehead. ‘ “Unhappy the man must ever be who confuseth love and loyalty,” ’ he said, clearly reciting from memory. ‘That is from one of our greatest poems.’

‘In whose translation?’

‘Mine,’ said Talag. ‘Come, rat; I have a last thing to show you.’

Ordering his guards to follow, he led Felthrup down from the loft and out of the building. There he paused and spoke to the clan in the ixchel tongue. The crowd began to disperse, studying Felthrup as they went. Talag marched through them, leading Felthrup back among the trees.

They started off in the direction of the wreck, but at a certain point Talag left the trail and began to climb a steep ridge. Felthrup climbed easily enough, but the ixchel struggled, for there was as much loose sand as soil underfoot, and the wind grew stronger at each step.

As they neared the crest of the ridge, Talag glanced back over his shoulder. ‘The expedition was never heard from again,’ he said. ‘On that point Fiffengurt’s journals are quite clear. Pathkendle, Thasha Isiq and the others never rejoined the crew, and thus were saved the horror of the wreck.’

‘Why do you tell me this?’ asked Felthrup.

Talag was silent. But a moment later Felthrup saw the beginnings of an answer. They had reached the edge of the trees, and before them lay the burial yard.

It had been laid out so neatly: thirty or forty graves marked with little rock cairns, each with a square ballast brick at its foot. And there were not one but two walls against the wind: the failed wooden fence and a lower rock wall, still standing but half-buried in sand. The graves too were vanishing: some of the cairns barely poked above the drifts.

With his heart in his mouth, Felthrup crept into the yard. He did not want to be here. These deaths were not his shipmates’. This Alifros was not his own. When he departed it would close behind him like an evil eye, and he would not remember it — not think of it — not let it live in memory.

‘That’s old Druffle, straight ahead,’ said Saturyk.

DOLLYWILLIAMS DRUFFLE. Felthrup could just read the letters carved in the soft stone of the ballast brick. Felthrup made the sign of the Tree, then shuffled quickly away. The ixchel, he saw, had not entered the burial yard: Talag was directing them to take up position around the perimeter. Death rites mattered enormously to the ixchel. Talag must have assumed that Felthrup would wish to pay his respects without delay. It was an honour, he supposed, that Talag had brought him here in person.

At long last he treats me as a woken soul.

Felthrup moved among the cairns. He could read few of the inscriptions: three decades of exposure to the elements had blurred most of the letters beyond recognition. But some were clear enough. SWIFT DALE, a tarboy — and yes, that was his brother Saroo’s grave beside him. BANAR LEEF, the main-top man. JERVIK LANK, the tarboy who had bullied Pazel cruelly, but in the end proved brave enough to change. Felthrup was not surprised by the words that ran beneath Jervik’s name: A MAN TO TRUST.

Then Saturyk caught his eye and beckoned. He was standing upon the stone wall, along the side of the yard facing the sea. Nervously, Felthrup leaped up upon the wall himself and began to approach. The ruined Chathrand sprawled below them, the single rope still stretched taut between the beach and the topdeck rail. But Saturyk was pointing to the grave at his feet.

‘I’ve swept it clean for you,’ he shouted over the wind.

The cairn was tucked right into the corner of the yard. The brick was disappearing under sand again already: Saturyk’s efforts were being undone. Felthrup bent low and read:

PAZEL UNDRABUST

He looked at Saturyk, then back at the marker. The name was clearly carved. ‘What — who?’ he shouted, frightened and confused.

‘Marila’s child,’ said Saturyk. ‘Born at sea, died on this sand heap. It’s all in that journal, how she and Neeps chose names together, on their wedding night. Pazel, for a boy, and if it had been a girl-’

‘Don’t tell, don’t tell me please! No more!’ Felthrup cast himself down, giving way to his misery. Her child!

Saturyk stood awkwardly above him. ‘Oh, buck up, now,’ he said. ‘That’s no way to honour the fallen — see here, I didn’t mean-’

From across the burial yard, Talag shouted what could only have been a reprimand. Saturyk protested loudly, pointing at the grave, making sweeping motions with his hands. Felthrup could almost feel the little body, so close to him, floating face up beneath him in the sand. Pazel Undrabust. A miracle, snuffed out.

Then Felthrup gasped. He was hearing it, small and imperious: the voice of the dead. Run, was all the child told him. And Felthrup obeyed.

He was twenty feet down the dune-face before he heard Saturyk’s cry of rage. Then a hiss: the blurred shape of a spear bit the sand beside his paw. He ran as he had not done since the maiming of his paw, rolling when he fell, leaping when he recovered. Speed was everything, speed his one chance. He was faster than the little people on sand, on rope. But not on the deck, not ever. And two of the guards carried bows.

The wind brought snatches of their cries. He did not look back. Another spear flew past him, so close he had to swerve around it when it struck. Then he reached the broken anchor and began to scramble up the rope.

The first gust of wind nearly threw him down. He flailed with claws and teeth, and just managed to scramble back atop the twisted cord. The ixchel were close behind him, the archers taking aim. Felthrup scrambled up the rope in a frenzy.

A hand closed on his hind leg. Saturyk had leaped, six times his own height or more. Felthrup was pulled upside down. He whirled and bit, tasting ixchel blood, and Saturyk fell cursing to the sand.

He climbed faster. Beneath him, sand gave way to breakers, seething around the Great Ship. A fall now would be lethal. But the wind that had nearly killed him was now saving his life: the archers’ shots were hopelessly astray.

He was falling! They had cut the rope from below! Screaming, Felthrup plummeted towards the sea. For an instant he seemed to be racing above the surf, like a skimmer about to catch a fish. Then the black shape of the hull blocked out the sky. He struck: red agony. The waves boiled over him, and he cried out defiance of death.

When the wave-surge passed he was against the hull, still gripping the rope, still in command of his limbs. He climbed. Nothing was broken, and even the pain was a distant thing. New shouts from ixchel: they had thought him dead for certain. Arrows fell around him, none too close.

Saturyk was screaming at his archers, abusing them. Felthrup was forty feet above the water, then sixty, then over the rail.

He looked back. The ixchel were milling at the surf’s edge, racing back when the foam advanced, trying for impossible shots. Only Talag remained on the hilltop, motionless on the rock wall, watching.

‘You see, Mr Saturyk, there are always choices,’ shouted Felthrup.

‘Palluskudge! Bastard!’ Saturyk howled. ‘You’re mucking dead!’

‘Not in this world,’ Felthrup shouted back. Then he turned and ran for home.