LOSE A HAND, LOSE A FRIEND. OF THE TWO THE HAND IS EASIER TO DEAL WITH. ON EARLIER OCCASIONS DEPARTURES HAVE BEEN FILLED WITH EXCITEMENT AND HOPE. NOT THIS ONE. THEY LEAVE SIKURO LATE AT NIGHT, THE DARKNESS IS NEAR COMPLETE, THE MOON AND STARS ARE COVERED BY A THICK LAYER OF CLOUDS; THOUGH THE STORM THAT THREATENS HOLDS OFF UNTIL THEY ARE OUT FROM UNDER IT, THE WIND IS HOWLING MOURNFULLY BEHIND THEM, SHOVING THEM AWAY FROM THE CHARRED FRAGMENTS OF DOMI’S PYRE. THE AGGITJ HAD GATHERED THE BONE FRAGMENTS AND ASH AND GIVEN THEM TO TIMKA WHO FLEW THEM INTO THE HILLS AWAY FROM THE CITY, OUT WHERE THINGS WERE WILD AND FREE AND RELEASED WHAT WAS LEFT OF DOMI TO THE WINDS AND THE GREEN EARTH AND THE GRAY OF EARTHBONES. APPROPRIATE SEND-OFF, THE EARTH AND SHY AND SEA WEARING BLACK MOURNING GARB.

THREE DAYS LATER, THEY EMERGE INTO THE HALIJARA SEA ON A BRILLIANT DAY, THE SKY SHIMMERING LIKE THE INSIDE OF A SAPPHIRE, THE WATER GLITTERING LIKE BROKEN GLASS. THE AGGITJ HAVE LOST THEIR CHEERFUL EBULLIENCE, BUT THEY DON’T FLAUNT THEIR GRIEF; THEY ARE SIMPLY MUCH QUIETER THAN THEY WERE BEFORE AND KEEP TO THEMSELVES MORE. IN A VERY REAL SENSE, THEY ADOPT THE BOY AS A KIND OF SURROGATE FOR DOMI. HE’S THE ONE WHO QUIETS DERS NOW WHEN THE AGGITJ BOY’S EMOTIONS THREATEN TO GET OUT OF HAND, AND HE’S THE ONE WHO PROVES TO HAVE MUCH THE SAME ACERBIC GOOD SENSE. HE BRINGS HART OUT OF HIS DOUR SILENCES AND PUNCTURES HAL’S HIGHFLIGHTS WHEN HE STARTS TAKING HIS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE OTHER THREE TOO SERIOUSLY.

AH, WELL, THESE THINGS HAPPEN EVEN IN THE MOST MAGICAL OF QUESTS. THE GOOD DIE, THEIR PURPOSES UNFULFILLED. LOSE A HAND, LOSE A FRIEND. OF THE TWO, THE HAND IS EASIER TO PART WITH.

Supper in Maggí’s cabin. Skeen, Timka and Pegwai are there. Rannah, the Boy and Chulji are eating with that portion of the crew off-duty for the moment. The Aggitj are still in their mourning fast, taking only a little bread and a few mouthfuls of water.

“It would be faster,” Skeen said stubbornly, “and we wouldn’t run into the traps and trouble bound to be waiting along our backtrail. If you’re worried about your profits, well, name your price. Peg’s maps say the ocean west of the Halijara is reasonably narrow a degree or so above the equator. We could come at the Gate through the Backlands. Chances are we’d miss Telka and her Holavish completely; they wouldn’t expect us to come that way.”

Maggí sighed. “If it were only so simple. Everything you say is true and everything you say is impossible. Think about this, have you heard of anyone crossing Okits Okeano?”

Skeen ran her fingers delicately along the stem of her glass; she thought about the stories she’d heard in the past few days. “No,” she said. “Doesn’t mean a whole lot, but no.”

“I thought not. There are a lot of liars around but none who’d expect you to believe they crossed the Okits and lived to tell the story. Consider this, you came along the Spray with several Shipmasters. Did any of them leave the island shallows and cut across deep water?”

“You’ve made your point. What’s out there?”

“Sea Min and their pets. Stick the shadow of a mast in what they call their waters and they’ll take ship as well as shadow.”

Skeen turned to Timka, raised her brows.

Timka spread her hands. “Don’t ask me. I know there are Min who live their lives out there, but they don’t like Land Min all that much either. We meet maybe once a purple moon. And I only know that because I’m one of the few who talked with the travelers stopping with my aunt Carema. Fifteen, twenty years ago that was.” She frowned at her hands as she searched dim memories. “Seems to me I heard there were factions growing in them too, one group wanting a limited trade with Nemin as long as the Nemin kept off their waters, another wanting to slaughter any Nemin who came within sniffing range; and the biggest lot of them wanting the other two lots to back off and leave them alone. I have to agree with Maggí, Skeen. Cross into their waters and they’ll forget their factions. Sorry. It was a good idea, but it just won’t work.”

“Eh, Peg,” Skeen tapped his shoulder, waited till he turned round, “give me a hand, will you?” She chuckled at his groan. “Seriously, I need a sparring partner who’s good enough so that I don’t have to worry about him.”

He hitched a hip on the rail and examined her. “You’re going to try switching your style left-handed?”

“Try’s the word.” She held her hand out, wriggled the fingers. “I’ve got strength enough in this, that’s no problem, but it’s about as functional as one of Timka’s cat paws. Means knocks for me and my partner,” she gave him a half grin, “mostly me, I expect.”

“Staff or hand first?”

“Staff. My feet have got to learn a new balance. I can work on fine manipulations later.” She rubbed her stump down the front of her tunic, looked at it. “I can use this to help control the staff. I think.”

“We’ll have to see, won’t we. You talked to Maggí about practice space?” He looked round the busy deck. “No room down here. You’d give lumps to half the crew and more of the passengers.”

“She says the quarterdeck’s ours as long as we don’t swat her. I put the staffs over there by the stairs.”

The Goum Kiskar skipped along the coast of Rood Saekol, flitting from port to port, none of them near the size or richness of Sikuro. Every day Skeen worked with an intensity that startled Timka to regain her one-time fighting skills, practicing feints, wheels, thrusts, every conceivable move and combination of moves with the staff, and when she was tired of that or had done as much of it as she thought her body could absorb for the day, she changed to the sort of exercises Timka had watched dancers doing as they got ready to perform for the Poet. They had that trick of repeating movements over and over until they were temporarily satisfied with how they did it.

With hard work and discipline Skeen quickly reacquired a degree of competence—first with the staff, then the openhand drills she practiced with Pegwai or under his eye, but even Timka could see how labored her movements were, how different from the easy flow before she lost the hand. Skeen plateaued at a place where she could do most of what she wanted but none of it as well as she wanted. Timka watched, fascinated, as she began defining where her greatest weaknesses lay, then used her long experience at surviving to work out ways of compensating for those weaknesses. That hard-edged discipline and those long hours of exploration threw new light on parts of the Skeen-dreams Timka had thought distorted, projections of Skeen’s wishthink.

Most of the lump of material she’d sucked in from Skeen’s mind was digested now, part of her conscious and unconscious self. She seldom dreamed that sort of dream these nights, only the old anxiety ones: she shifted to smoke and was torn apart by the wind no matter how she struggled to reassemble herself, she ran and ran from some shapeless danger, her legs melting from under her; she was caught in a universal Choriyn shifting endlessly, unable to stop.…

One night when witchfires danced along the masts and the wake was a phosphor furrow, she found Skeen leaning on the rail watching dolphins dance in the white fire. “You’ve been working hard.”

Skeen chuckled, echoes of the fire dancing in her eyes. “Didn’t think I could, did you?”

“To say truth, no.”

Skeen smiled at her and went back to watching the dolphins and the flying seabeasts who’d come to join them, bits of iridescent shimmer shapeless except for the rayed fans they glided on. The ship grumbled and chattered about them, the wind blew cold drops against them. Skeen’s hair glittered with the droplets caught there that trapped and refracted the light from the waxing moon. Off to Timka’s right, Saekol was a low black line on the horizon. The night air was so clear she could see the flicker of the surf breaking on the rocky shore. Skeen stirred beside her. “Someone taught me once,” she said, “get it right tight and solid in the beginning and you won’t have to mess with it later.”

Old Harmon, Timka thought, but said nothing about that. She felt vaguely guilty about knowing so much Skeen most likely wouldn’t want anyone to know about her; at the same time she couldn’t help enjoying her secret understanding. “I see,” she said.

“You’ve been busy too.” There was a lazy curiosity in Skeen’s voice, an invitation to confide if she wanted, be silent if she didn’t.

Timka leaned into the rail, feeling the movement of the ship deep in her muscles, feeling a quiet pleasure in the tranquility of the night. Up and down the ship went with a soothing periodicity, up and down in a harmonic web of sound, merging seamlessly with the flow of the night. “Old lessons,” she murmured. “Trying to remember things I’ve let slide a long time. Too long. Too too too long. Ahhhh.”

Skeen rubbed her body against the rail. “I know.” She shook her head sharply, scattering the mist clinging to her hair, sucked in a long breath and let it trickle out. “I was in a lovely velvet rut when all this started happening. I suppose Mala Fortuna couldn’t help sticking her long nose in. She won’t leave anyone comfortable for too long.”

Timka watched cold fire slip along the side of a dolphin leaping through a cluster of shimmering fliers. “Velvet rut. Are you going back to that once this business is finished?”

There was a long silence. Timka remembered then the glimpses she’d got of a sore Skeen couldn’t keep from tonguing like an aching cavity in a back tooth. The shadowy little man who meant what? lover? friend? betrayer? Flickering images of something never seen clearly that had to be Picarefy the ship, an eerie amalgam of woman and machine. Man and ship wreathed about with pain and painful questioning. She wondered if Skeen was thinking about those two. She couldn’t ask.

“This business. Sometimes I think I’ll never be rid of it.” The sleeve of the shortened arm had come unrolled and was dangling. Skeen rolled it back as neatly as she could with one hand. Stroking two fingers over the gray film, she gazed up at the moon’s fattening crescent. “Depends on what I find when I get back.” A long sigh. She shook her head again, pushed strands of damp hair off her face. “Time to worry when I get there.”

Maggí paced the quarterdeck, volcanic energy barely controlled, eyes darting without cessation from sailor to sailor scurrying about taking care not to call down the Captain’s wrath and flaying tongue on themselves, moving from these to the deck passengers settling in for the crossing, a worried speculation in her gaze as she examined each of them.

Skeen and Pegwai came up to watch the departure, took one look at Maggí and the swirling chaos on the deck and found a back corner where they’d be out of the way. Skeen brought her head close to Pegwai’s. “Our Captain’s been like a bear with a sore foot since she came back. I didn’t smell anything over there,” she nodded at the cluster of buildings that made up Efli Baq, “to explain it. You?”

“No … not exactly.” Pegwai frowned. “A cousin of mine is tied up a couple of ships down.”

“Djabo’s hairy gonads, Peg, how many cousins do you have?”

“It’s not that there are so many of us, it’s just that we get around a lot.”

“So, your cousin said.…”

“Nothing direct. He wanted me to transfer to his ship. He didn’t give any reasons for it, but he kept on at me to switch. The only thing he’d say when I pushed him was that the Min had vanished, gone to ground in the hills, he thought. When I asked him what difference that made, he said if I wanted to be a fool that was my business. Wouldn’t say a word more, just hoofed me off his ship.”

“Hm. Ti said something about a faction of Sea Min that wanted to trade … no!” A snort of laughter. “Peg, no, not trade, the good old fashioned pay-off scam. Look, I’m operating on a barrel of guess to a drop of fact, but I’d say this is an enterprising bunch of Sea Min. They made a deal with their dry cousins to sell the dirty Nemin safe passages across the Halijara.” She giggled. “Djabo’s greedy gullet, I wonder how old that racket is. Do you understand? You pay their fee and they see you get across with no holes in your hull. How long has your cousin been … never mind, it doesn’t matter. Maggí’s been sailing these waters for more than twenty years.” She sobered. “Of all the fuckin’ times, Peg; you know what your cousin was telling you?”

“I very much fear I do.”

“That … Telka, I’d like to feed her inch by inch to the Ever-Hunger.”

“You think her reach is this long?”

“I think she either bought them off or scared them shitless. I think somewhere in the middle of this bright blue sea we’re going to get thumped.”

“Tell Maggí?”

“Think we need to?”

“Skeen!”

“I didn’t mean it like that. What I meant was, she knows. Look at her.”

Pegwai watched the Aggitj woman stride about, listened to her shout orders, a growl like a hungry cat in her deep voice. “We’d better wait until she’s not so busy.”

Skeen chuckled. “Better.”

“Your sister’s been busy.” The cook and his helper had cleared the table, leaving behind stemmed crystal and a cut glass decanter filled with rich ruby wine. The meal had been an uneasy one, none of them wanting to bring up the subject haunting them, at least those who knew and cared what was happening. The Aggitj and the Boy sat together around the foot of the table, the Aggitj still drifting, uncertain about where they were going, the Boy curious, interested, annoyed because he couldn’t read the undercurrents he could feel swirling about the table. Chulji crouched beside him, subdued; he’d eaten his greens and soup with a listlessness foreign to him. His antennas quivered when Maggí broke the silence, he folded his forearms tight against his body and waited for her to go on. Timka dropped her hands into her lap, raised her brows, but said nothing. Lipitero watched, withdrawn, waiting. Skeen and Pegwai exchanged glances.

“Twenty years I’ve crossed here,” Maggí said. “The only trouble I’ve had was jitsibays raising the fees. Twice a year every stinking year my Goum Kiskar noses out of here, dues paid, and goes sweetly across the Halijara without a smell of trouble other than the storms that shag down on you all the time out there. Twenty years and it’s never happened that I go slipping into Stira’s Court and find the shuping place empty. Not a jit there, just a few tinks trying to sell old metal. And they look at me like I’m crazy when I ask them about Kyalay and Lavan and half a dozen others. Gone home, I get told. Home? Where’s that I ask. I get a shrug and an eyeroll. I go hunting for Captains whose ships I see tied out here either side of mine. Idiko Dih. Ximinarallan. Zehlen Papayesa. They don’t know or won’t say more than one day in middle of some dickering a jit came around and gathered up all the jitsibays and went off with them Lifefire knows where. Ordinarily this isn’t something I’d mention and, my friends, I’d be obliged if you didn’t say anything about it outside this room, not even to each other. Pegwai Dih, forget you’re a Lumat Scholar and don’t pass this on. It gets out, you’ll mess up a lot of lives.” She looked round at their faces, spent a bit longer examining Skeen and Pegwai. “Hai Lifefire, it looks to me like my fire’s drawn already. Never mind, call it a favor to me, don’t talk. Jitsibays are Min go-betweens. The Sea Min clans who live in these waters aren’t such bad sorts, you can do a deal with them as long as you don’t make a noise about it. Been profitable on both sides. We get weather news and a clear passage, they get … well, what they want. No point in talking about that. I certainly wouldn’t mind doing some more direct trading with the Fish, but they don’t dare be that open. It would get them fried in their own grease. They’ve got nasty neighbors down there. I repeat, every jit in Efli Baq has vanished. Ti, that sister of yours has got to them some way. I doubt if our Fish will be in on the attack, they’re too slippy for that; they’ll disappear down there like the jits did up here. No, she’s done a deal with the sharks alongside and let our Fish know they’ll have to back off, join the sharks or get stomped. Lifefire send her rootrot and rheumatism, if she keeps those shtupyens stirred up, she’s going to make my life one stinking mess.”

Skeen fiddled with her napkin. “You could avoid these waters until things settle down.”

“I could.”

“And you could dump us. That would make a smaller mess.”

“I could.” For a moment Maggí’s face was stern, but there was a touch of warmth and humor there. She broke the mask with a laugh. “I won’t. Know why?”

Skeen lifted her glass in a silent salute. She sipped at the wine, set the glass down. “One,” she said, “if you can send those sharks running, you’ll have the local Fish in your debt. I doubt you’d put much weight on gratitude, but a little fear’s a healthy seasoning to any deal. The next time you negotiate your passage fees, you’ll have that good will and fear working for you. Two. If ever you had a chance of fighting off a Sea Min attack, it’s now with Ti and Chul to fly watch, with Petro and me on board,” she grinned. “Not that we’re so much in our persons, it’s what we bring with us. So you’re throwing the dice and hoping they come up winners.”

“Well?”

“I’d say it depended on how many come at us. Unless you’ve got sources you haven’t mentioned, I can’t see that we have any way of knowing that. So it’s play or leave the table. You’ve got the most to lose, it’s your choice.”

Maggí nodded. “Ti, what about you? Can you add anything to that? Or you, Chul?”

They both started talking; Timka broke off, signed Chulji to finish what he was saying. His antennas flattened out and back as he ducked his head, embarrassed. “It’s nothing much, just what I can remember about some stories I heard when I was a nidling. One of the nurses was an unmated female. Min Skirrik but you’d never know it by the way she acted, except when she was telling my sisters and me about the places she’d been. She’d been everywhere,” his squeaky voice went even higher on the last word. “She told us about the gunja and the Pochiparn.” He looked round at the uncomprehending faces. “None of you ever heard of those? Not even you, Ti?”

Timka closed her eyes, dug into her memory. “No, Chul. Neither one.”

“Triffakezaram said the gunja were like the great, great, great grandsons of tattolits.”

‘Ah. Those I know about.” Timka swung round to face Maggí and Skeen. “In the elder days before the Gate was opened, Min were collected in nokaffari which were loose groupings of clans; the clans were loose groupings of families who shared kinship and were usually neighbors.” She laughed at Pegwai’s eager face. “No need to take notes, Scholar, I’ll go over this with you later when we’ve got the time.”

Pegwai nodded. “I’ll hold you to that, Ti.”

“Patience, Skeen, this does have a purpose. You’ve got to have a little background to understand about Tatts. Nokaffari were almost always fighting about something; we were a contentious folk, bound to take offense at fleabites. But if we wanted a reasonably good life for our children and other dependents, we had to trade. So there were the truce fairs in early autumn and there were the zecolletros. These, what shall I call them, these aggregations of Min, these guilds, they reached beyond family, clan and nokarif. If your family or clan or nokarif was warring with some other group and one of the enemy made a zecolletro sign at you and it was your zecolletro, it was a call to truce. You couldn’t ignore it. Both sides in the war would turn on you.” She cleared her throat. “Which meant unless your group was too poor, you hired your fighting done. That way you didn’t have those embarrassing halts to the bloody business. You went to a different sort of zecolletro, the Tatt-Habor. You hired a cell of tattolits to do your fighting. These Tatts were where we shoved our bad boys, the ones that were more trouble than clan or family could handle. The ones who liked hurting, the ones who got sexual pleasure from setting fires, the oversized who seemed born to be bullies, the undersized who wanted vengeance on the world for their lack of inches, the rebels, the too bright, the disrupters. And there were the boys who went on their own for who knows what reasons to the training halls of the Tatt-Habor. Once they were Tatt, they had no family, no clan, no nokarif. Their whole world was their particular cell, their only loyalty was to that cell, the cell’s only loyalty was to its employer. There were no rules for tattolits. No. I’m wrong. There was one rule. Win. However you could. Whatever you had to do.” She gave Lipitero a quick twist of her lips, a parody of a smile. “One thing the Ykx did for us when they made the Gate and came through, they killed off the tattolits. Had to.” She sighed. “End of lecture. Almost. One last thing. Something the Poet thought.” She had a softer smile, a raised hand for Pegwai. “He knew a lot he wouldn’t talk about to anyone but his family. Most everyone thought he was a fool. He wasn’t. He had the tact not to question me,” dry laugh, “he wouldn’t have got much. I knew less than half he did about my own people. As long as I kept out of sight and didn’t interfere, he let me listen while he talked with his … his informants. One thing Telka and the Holavish are doing—they’re trying to put together a new Tatt-Habor. So far, it keeps falling apart on them.” She leaned across the table toward Chulji. “You’re saying the Sea Min have a Tatt-Habor?”

Chulji worked his mouthparts, his antennas drooped. “I don’t know, Ti. It’s only old stories I don’t remember all that much of. Let me think.” Under the table his feet and feet-hands did a clattering dance on the floorboards. “Aaah, Triffakezaram said she didn’t stay long under the water, she wasn’t all that welcome there. And she didn’t like them much either, except for their poets—she was a bit daft on poets.” He opened and closed his dactyls, twitched all over. “I remember this. Gunja have practice matches. Triff told us about one … aaah … how did it go? Like a kind of lethal dance, she said. Closing and fleeing, weaving about each other, one against one, one against three, one against more and more until one dies the play death. And then the dance is over. One of the few times they weren’t terribly boring she said. Most of the time they sit around playing with their weapons and talking fight with other gunja. You can understand one word in ten, she said, and that’s not because they speak a kind of Min that’s very different from Land Min, though they do. That’s because nine words out of the ten are terms they’ve got for some fancy way of holding a hand or a tentacle or whatever, that sort of thing. Very, very boring, she said. Other times, they’re not so bad. They have poetry contests, she said, when the prize goes to the one who can improvise the finest couplet on some topic someone throws at them. The more couplets, the better they are, the higher the esteem given the speaker. She went on and on about that till I stopped listening. Verrry boring.” He twitched his mouthparts in a Skirrik grin and stopped talking.

Timka rubbed at her forehead. “Not so bad as it might be, I see what Triff meant; if what she told you is accurate, they’re related to the tattolins all right, but not nearly so murderous. Bad enough, though.” She faced Maggí. “There it is. With Telka trying to set up a Tatt-Habor in the mountains, it’s not odd she heard of Sea Min gunja and she’s probably been exchanging messengers with them for some time now. No problem, then, setting up an ambush for us. Most likely the gunja were delighted to go after a real enemy for once. Reminds me, Chul, did Triff give you any notion how many fighters in a gunja cell?”

His crimson tripartite eyes flickered as he searched his memories. “She said they were supposed to have two score to each cell … aaah … she said the rest of the Sea Min liked them only a little better than they did her; that was why she spent more time with the gunja than she did with the others, that and their shuping poetry contests. She said they were having a hard time getting boys to join them. Thing is, Ti, I heard this more than ten years ago and Triffakezaram was telling things that happened to her more than fifty before that. What it’s like down there now.…” He shook his head, antennas twitching. “I haven’t a guess.”

Maggí made an impatient sound. “Two score,” she said. “Better than I hoped what’s a Pochiparn?”

“Sorry, I forgot.” Chulji pulled himself into a more compact form, shivered all over. “Gunja pets, sort of. They use them to attack ships or … or forts, things like that. Triff said that was part of novice training. They were supposed to go out and get a baby Poch for their cadre. Yes, yes, I know, what’s it like? Aaah … sort of like a combination between a rabid wolf and a wounded shark with a dozen arms, each one of them longer than this ship. Once it’s turned loose it eats or pulls apart everything it can get its suckers on. Triff said the older and bigger it got, the nastier its temper got. Not something you’d want to face on a calm sea where you can’t run for the horizon. It’s pretty fast, Triff said, but a ship with a good following wind can lose it. So they come at you when it’s calm or quartering the wind and swimming down deep where you can’t see them. Aaah, a Pochiparn’s an air breather, it has to surface every half hour or so. You couldn’t see the blow from a ship, even the mainmast, but Timka and me flying watch, we’re bound to spot it. We’ll most likely be able to give you at least a ten minute warning—they wouldn’t blow closer than that to the ship—and the direction it’s coming from.”

“Lovely,” Maggí said. “Skeen, Petro, any ideas?”

“Submarine warfare.” Skeen grimaced. “Give us a while to talk things out and see what we have to work with.”

Lipitero tapped a fingerclaw against the bowl of her glass, a sharp little sound that pulled eyes around to her. “How long are we likely to have for getting ready?”

“They’ll want deep water,” Maggí said thoughtfully. “One day, a day and a half at most, though that might be stretching it some.”

“Not very long.”

“No. Ti, you and Chul take a look at the deck passengers, will you? I want to know how much I should worry about them. Hal, stay with me a moment, I want to talk to you about what you’ll be doing in this melee to come. All of you, I’m rolling the dice and counting on you to weight the throw in my favor.”

Skeen set the darter on the table, laid the little cutter beside it. “And a pair of boot knives.” She was talking to herself, the cabin was empty; Lipitero was down in the forward hold digging among her gear for whatever it was she had there; she’d been mute since they left Maggí. She touched the darter, sighed. “I suppose I’d better let Pegwai use you. Left-handed I can’t hit a horse more than a bodylength off. Wrong sighting eye, and I can’t seem to change or compensate. Mala Fortuna, you owe me.” She kicked a chair away from the table, sat and waited.

Lipitero came in with a long leather case, set it beside the second chair and settled herself at the little table under the window. “The Mate and some of the crew are breaking out crossbows and enough bolts to thistle a dozen cells of gunja.” She reached out, touched the darter. “An interesting weapon. Does it work on Min? They throw off poisons so easily.”

“You keep darting them until they’re too dazed to shift.” Skeen nudged the cutter with her forefinger. “And a pair of boot knives,” she repeated, this time to a hearer other than the walls. She pushed the metal cylinder about some more, glancing at Lipitero and away.

Lipitero tapped a clawnail against her chest. Through the silk of her robe came a faint tink of metal. “The hover field’s batteries are powered up; I’ve got an hour’s lift without glide, five hours with. I have a short-range, short time stunner, you remember, the one I used on Angelsin. Not much use in these circumstances because the range can’t be increased. There’s a short-range cutter too, mounted on a swivel; reach—one body length.” She flattened her hands on the table, the claws out like crystal scimitars, delicately drawn against the dark wood. “We’re talkers and evaders, we Ykx,” she murmured. “We watch and we tease apart the strands of motive and we jerk on them to our advantage. We only fight when we can’t run; we’ve surprised more than a few who pushed us into corners. Used to be that seldom happened, here or on the other side. Coraish Gather went lazy and careless. Coraish Gather is dead and Sydo Gather is facing extinction. It’s this world, I think. There’s something about it that perverts our energies.…” She drew her claws along the table top, cutting fine grooves in the tough wood. “That interferes with our fertility. Not just ours. You’ve seen how empty Mistommerk is; it should have folk three deep by now with all the Waves trying to outbreed and annihilate each other. But that hasn’t happened. I was talking to Chulji a while back, one of those days when he came in to keep me company.” Her eyes flickered about the room, opening and closing, shifting right to left; it made Skeert dizzy to watch her. “The last hatching in his Skirrik family, seven out of the ten eggs didn’t.” She made a soft sad little sound, half a sigh, half a moan. “He said the Old Ones have been working at it. They think it’s something subtle, probably a complicated synergism.” She laced her fingers and rested her hands under the spring of her ribs. “If you want to know why I’m blathering like this, I might be an anomaly but I’m enough like the rest to find this …” her lips curled into a tight smile, “… to feel a twist in my gut, when I contemplate what I’m going to be doing with this.” She bent to the side, caught hold of the leather case she’d brought with her. Long, narrow, heavy from the way she handled it. She set it on the table, traced a complex curve on a square set in the side; when it cracked open, she lifted the lid. Skeen came round the table to look over her shoulder. In the case was a black cube whose sides were so smooth they made dark mirrors, night itself compressed into six squares. A cylinder machined to a like perfection projected from one side, a little longer than Skeen’s forearm; pewter gray lines curved through the black, might have been elegant decoration or powerlines; with Ykx artifacts it was hard to tell which was art and what artifice.

“Impressive,” she said. “What does it do?”

“It eats mountains.”

“Huh, tell me another.”

“Seriously. You’ve seen Coraish. Ask yourself how we made it.” Lipitero pushed her chair back, got to her feet, twisting aside to avoid Skeen. When she spoke again, her voice had a gentle remoteness that lifted the hairs along Skeen’s spine; it was too much like the voice of the Mala. “You can set the beam any length you want up to a hundred meters. You can change the shape of the beam, make it a broad blade and slice out blocks of stone, you can narrow it and carve fine detail, you can bend the end into a scoop and stir it around, churning stone into a fine slurry. Visualize it, Skeen, see what this thing will do when you use it against flesh instead of stone.” She shivered. “You want a closer look?”

Skeen touched a side of the cube. It felt soft like fine silk. “I won’t trigger it by accident?”

“No.”

Slipping her single hand under the cube, Skeen tried lifting it. The weight astonished her. “You can’t glide with this.”

“No. I can manage about ten meters at full press of the hover field.” Skeen turned her head; Lipitero’s voice was chill, expressionless, her scarred face full of misery. “I have been thinking,” Lipitero said. “When Ti or Chulji spots the Pochiparn, I will manage it to that observation platform on the mainmast. As soon as the beast gets close enough, I can cut it into collops before it knows it’s dead.” She closed her eyes. “And most likely slice a few Sea Min with it.” She shuddered, opened her eyes, a forced smile tightening her mouth. “Discourage them, don’t you think?”

“They have objections, they should mind their own business.” Skeen tried once again to lift the excavator. “With two hands, maybe.” She moved away from the table, stood cuddling her stump. “You’re stronger than you look.”

“I have to be, don’t I.”

Day on day on day the ship crept across a seething sea, a sea that hummed and hissed against the sides, an empty sea; horizon to horizon beneath a coppery sky shimmering with heat, but for the ship nothing stirred, nothing, neither dolphin nor flier, not even a cloud. Day on day on day, they waited, ready for an attack which did not come.

On the ship each waited in his own way.

The passengers in the deckwell honed the edges of the halberds Maggí passed out to them, practiced throwing the short-hafted spears, loosening arm and body without releasing the wood. Grim but cheerful, they waited, talking about this and that, mostly shared memories; the women with children (especially older boys) patiently repeated old arguments; the children were to go below when the warning was given, shut but not locked into the forward hold; those older boys had their own bobtail spears and were to defend the younger ones if things went badly on deck. They wanted to stay where the excitement was, where the glory was, but their parents saw no glory in the slaughter of children and refused to hear their pleas.

Day on day on day of tension-filled fruitless watch and wait.

The Aggitj prowled along the rails, staring down into the cuprous blue-green, willing the Sea Min to appear, urgently needing release for the energy pent up in them. The Boy took little note of the passage of time or the jitters of the others on the ship, his full attention was required to soothe Ders and keep him to some semblance of sanity. The youngest of the Aggitj was a bomb waiting to explode. The Boy kept him as far away from passengers and crew as he could; Hal and Hart helped him and in this sharing were themselves helped to endure that hot endless wait.

The sky was coppery with the heat, the air sultry, thick as gelatin, thick as the tension on board the ship.

Lipitero sat quietly on the quarterdeck, her robe pulled close about her, the cased excavator by her knee. Now and then Skeen walked past her on her restless prowls about the ship. The Ykx’s face was hidden by the robe’s cowl, the silver fur on the back of her hands was blotched dark with sweat, patches of dampness spread under her arms and along her spine where the silk of her robe clung to her body, but she never moved. After a while, Skeen began to wonder if she’d turned to stone there, but she didn’t break the Ykx’s concentration to ask.

Skeen and Pegwai practiced against each other with staffs on the first day. On the second, Skeen fit the darter’s holster and the lanyard to a leather strap that Pegwai could wear as a shoulder sling, then watched him practice with the darter using ice darts without the drug. Pick them off one at a time, she told him, you’re good enough. You’ll get more that way and the reservoir will last longer. She cut a slot in the end of her staff and set the limber resin knife into it, the deadly watercolor waterclear blade able to cut a thought in half. When it was bound in place she did no more practicing with that staff; it was too dangerous now, nothing would stop that blade, not leather, wood or even light mail. Let them come, let the bastards come, Lipitero will slice them with the excavator, I’ll slice them with my bladed staff. Let them come and learn the stupidity of facing fighters they have scorned out of their ignorance, their willful ignorance. Come, Djabo curse you with warts and boils, come will you before I chew my nails off up to my elbows.

The sun rose on the fifth day, swimming in heat haze; the wind dropped until it was barely strong enough to give the ship steering way. Chulji-sea eagle labored up to soar in wide circles above the laboring ship. Timka-sea eagle spiraled wearily down, blurred into cat-weasel and loped along to the cabin she shared with Skeen and Lipitero.

Skeen sat at the window, staring out at the endless unchanging empty sea. She looked around when Timka came in, naked Pallah now, having shed her fur for Pallah hands. “Nothing yet?”

“Nothing.” Timka yawned, pulled herself into one of the top bunks and stretched out to sleep.

Skeen listened to the quiet breathing, punctuated by an occasional squeaky snore, until it became a rasp grinding her nerves raw. She went out and walked along the rail, eyes narrowed against the glare, staring at the same emptiness she’d seen from her window, until she noticed she was very much in the way as the crew labored to nurse forward speed from the fitful wind. She climbed to the quarterdeck, settled beside Lipitero and Pegwai, watching Maggí pace, read the flutter of reef points, take in the thousand implications in the condition of the ship and call out a steady stream of invective and orders, her deep voice hoarse with the exercise.

Even up here where what wind there was had a free flow, the heat was punishing. Sweat lay on her skin and rotted there, collected in her head hair and slid in streams down her face and neck. Pegwai’s breathing was slow and even; he didn’t sweat all that much, his folk were adapted to this sort of climate, they’d developed alternative body states to cope with changing temperatures. It slowed them down, but they stayed comfortable. She gazed at him with envy and irritation. Since she and Lipitero were drenched and miserable, it seemed decidedly unfair he should suffer so little. She scraped her hands across her face, gloomed at the oily muck she collected. “Salt water baths are an abomination.”

Pegwai chuckled.

“Hah! Any more of that, I bite.”

The morning steamed on. Subdued voices from the deck passengers. The shouts from the crew and their work chants seemed muted, lifeless. The wind dropped yet more, the sails began to wrinkle and sag. The cook’s helper brought a bucket of fresh water to Maggí. She continued her driven pacing, slopping water on her face and arms, dabbing at her not-hair. The silvery filaments writhed and crackled with small explosions of cold fire, otherwise lay flat against her skull.

Afternoon. Idling in the water. Crew lounging about, half asleep, drained by the heat and the morning’s labors. Deck passengers soddenly asleep, most of them. Alertness at its lowest ebb since Efli Baq. Those few awake breathing through their mouths. The air had little virtue. Unless they took in great gulps of it, they felt they were suffocating.

Timka came out of the shadows below and stood blinking in the reddish hazy light. Her light robe sagged about her; under it her flesh shifted and rippled as if the breathless heat made it uncertain of any form. Heavy eyed and slow footed, she climbed the stairs. Maggí glanced at her, went back to staring at the sails, grimly silent, waiting with the same exhausted sag for something to happen. Anything.

The lassitude broke apart.

With a wild scream, Chulji plummeted through the rigging, snapped out, shifted to Skirrik the moment he touched down. Still tottering, he waved an arm about forty-five degrees east of the ship’s bowsprit. “There,” he squeaked, “The blow, the blow, about five, six stads off.”

The crew jolted to life, ran for the crossbow chest, snatched up bundles of bolts and scrambled into the shrouds; they were at their posts before they were fully awake.

The quiet, drowsing deckwell got suddenly busy, some passengers chasing down children and herding them to the hold prepared for them, others on their feet, flexing arms, doing kneebends, swinging spears and halberds; a chaos but an orderly one, each individual movement fitting neatly into a defensive whole.

Lipitero stripped off her sweaty robe, clicked open the case and lifted out the excavator. She danced claw tips over the top of the cube and it deformed, extruding handgrips, dropping the main weight into a teardrop hanging off the shooting tube. The hover field glowed a rich orange about her; with a straining wavering whine, slowly at first then more quickly, it carried her to the top of the mainmast. She stepped onto the small circular platform there, eased herself down onto it, wrapped her legs about the mast, rested the weapon on her thigh. Tense and filled with a heavy distaste for what she had to do, she waited.

Timka cast off her robe, shifted to sea eagle and went winging away. Chulji followed her.

Maggí leaned on the forerail of the quarterdeck, eyes moving constantly. She’d worked out her tactics during the tedious wait for this moment and given her orders. Now she watched to see if there was slippage between theory and practice.

Skeen pushed a last time at the damp hair straggling into her eyes and got to her feet. She stood waiting for Pegwai. “Five, six stads. How much time does that give us before this mess starts?”

He grunted, shook out the skirts of his scholar’s habit. “Given a good wind, the Kiskar would make that in ten minutes. Swimming?” He shrugged. “No point your coming down too. I’ll meet you on deck with your Min slicer.”

The sea eagles came screaming back, circled round Lipitero, pointed the line for her. She eased around until she was facing between them, steadied the excavator, called a warning to them, touched on a blade of light that was a meter wide and a hundred meters long; a deep harsh humming filled the emptiness between sea and sky. She played the beam through the water. Steam sprayed up and out, a hissing that screamed around the thrum of the excavator; the water boiled and shivered, turned pink with the blood of the Pochiparn, foamed and blanched with the colorless colloid that ran through Min flesh. When she saw the shadows of the Min swimmers flicker and disappear, diving deep, she shut down the beam and began working on the fairly complex problem of changing the form, length and properties of the light blade.

Tentacled shapes came shooting from the water like squameri seeds pinched between thumb and forefinger; they swarmed up and over the rail with a lithe, undulating movement, shifting in mid-leap to their land-fighting forms—bipedal, hairless, translucent cyanic flesh more slippery than oiled porcelain and far tougher. They were clumsy out of water, but terribly hard to kill, trained to shift to an alternate form whenever their prey managed a damaging cut or got a shaft in a dangerous place. With the shift, the bolt would drop away, the wound would close over. A second shift and they were more dangerous than before. They went after the defenders, tentacles flailing, caught them and squeezed, a slow crushing death. Those of high rank carried cutting weapons adapted to their tentacles; none had projectile weapons of any sort, their eyesight out of the water wasn’t all that good. The fighting ground being limited to the ship’s decks and the shrouds, they had only to press and press until they cornered crew, passengers, and the renegade Min they’d been bought to kill, to slash and squeeze them till only gunja were left alive.

In the shrouds and on the decks, crew shot and reloaded, a rain of bolts that managed some damage in spite of the fluid shifts of the gunja; most of these flickered through the double change and lost the bolts without losing a step. Kneeling behind the forerail of the quarterdeck, Pegwai chose his targets, put a handful of darts in each, overloading their systems with the drug before they could shift it away. As they got among crew and passengers, he had to be more careful, the darts wouldn’t kill, but the Fish would if a fighter collapsed before one of them. The Aggitj raced along the rail, working with saber and spear, agile and serious for once, doing a dance they’d learned from birth on the dueling grounds of the ancient holds. Boy and Beast scooted about after them, keeping low, spitting their poison at Min legs, tentacles, whatever they could reach without damaging defenders; they spat and Min melted into a sticky slime. As soon as Lipitero shut the blade off, Timka plummeted to the quarterdeck, shifted to the cat-weasel the instant her feet touched wood. She loped to the maindeck and wriggled through the fighting to Skeen’s side; the Pass-Through was striding about, using her bladed staff with deadly effect, cutting the attackers to such small pieces she got the S’yer more often than not, though when she missed, the undead gobbets of flesh oozed together, forming a new gunj. Ti-cat took care of those, slashing through the S’yers with a fierce satisfaction. Each one down was one less to come at her again; unlike Lipitero she wasn’t bothered by the killing; the dead had passed beyond pain and anger, she hadn’t. More Min came. And more. When she had a moment to think, Timka knew it had to be more than one cell attacking. Min and more Min, swarming over the rails. Pegwai refilled the reservoir of the darter and went on taking out as many as he could hit. Beside him Houms and the best shots among the crew picked off more, distracting those they didn’t manage to kill so the Aggitj, Maggí, the crew, the deck passengers, Skeen and Timka—whoever happened to be nearest—could finish the job. Poison exhausted, the Boy found one of the jagged stone Sea Min knives and scurried about, slashing at Min legs with it. He was kicked and grabbed at, but he was old in surviving and wriggled away before the tentacle could get a firm hold on him. Fluids from the dead and dissolving Min turned the deck into a mud slide, the Min sliding in the leavings of their flesh as badly as the Nemin did. Cursing, grunting, panting, screaming hate and pain, hissing, thuds, wild shrieks from both sides, the struggle went on and on, neither side gaining an edge.…

Until Lipitero up above finally finished her adjustments on the excavator, shortening the beam so she wouldn’t punch holes in the ship, refining it until it was a rod of light a hair thick; she set it on millisecond bursts, eased out to the edge of the platform, hooked her feet into the ropes to steady herself and began picking off Sea Min, working around the edges of the struggle, triggering the burst only when she had a clear shot. Each Min she hit exploded like a tuber a cook had forgotten to prick.

One. Two. Five.

They were gunja drilled to blood and sacrifice; they endured and ignored all death, even the agony as Chalarosh poison dissolved their still living bodies, but when hot dripping bits of their brothers splattered over them, they faltered. The death struck and struck. They saw nothing, heard nothing. They died.

Nine.

They began to mill, moaning with fear and indecision. Their leaders were down, they moved in the residue of their own; invisible death came from nowhere, one cell had lost two thirds of its members, the other, half. Another exploded.

Eleven.

They broke and went overside into the sea.

The deck stilled.

Maggí rubbed at a weal on one arm where a Min tentacle had caught her. She nudged the comatose body of a darted Min with her bare toe, spat with disgust. “Houms,” she called. Her not-hair writhed about her head, lines of weariness dragged down the corners of her mouth. She swung around. “Baliard, Tritz, Ishal, Za Grann.…” Her crew—one by one she named them. Battered and bloody they gathered around her, those that could walk.

Ti-cat watched for a moment, disturbed by the smell of the blood (that was the cat speaking in her); she glanced up. Chulji was aloft again, watching to make sure the decimated cells didn’t reform and return. He glided in slow circles, wings outstretched. She could feel his weariness in her own bones. She wasn’t so tired right now (that was the cat too, she was always surprised by the amount of energy the cat had), but she would be the moment she shifted. She ran up to the quarterdeck, swished her tail at Pegwai. He was refilling the darter’s reservoir again from the bucket of fresh water Maggí had provided; he stopped what he was doing and watched her shift through several forms, losing cuts, bruises, Min fluids and splotches of blood somewhere in the transformation. She finished as Pallah, pulled her robe on and jerked the belt tight. She was clean, almost cool, as neat as if she’d just come from a long thorough bath.

Pegwai chuckled. “Don’t get too close to Skeen, Ti. She’s not going to appreciate the contrast.” He sighed, “I’ve never really envied Min before.”

She smiled at him, too weary to respond with more than a nod. She went down to find Skeen.

Three of the crew were dead; others were carrying the last of these up to the quarterdeck where they’d be out of the muck. Maggí was standing over the cook’s helper, a Pallah boy barely past puberty; his arm was out of its socket. Maggí put it back in, the boy screamed and fainted. She stepped aside and let two sailors take him below. The cook was in sickbay receiving the injured; he’d see, to the boy. She looked after the bearers, saw Timka, beckoned her over. She scraped her hand across her face, looked down at herself, then examined Timka clean and cool. “Min,” she said, exasperation in her voice. Then she shook herself, “Ti, I could use some help in sickbay. Up to you.” She swung her arm to take in the deck. “I’ve got to do something about this mess.”

“Yes, of course. I’ll fetch Skeen.”

“Skeen? Ah, yes. If she will.”

Skeen had her hip hitched on the rail; she was leaning into the shrouds staring at the sluggish water brushing slowly past, her eyes were heavy and she looked as exhausted as any of the rest. She was covered with blood and Min fluids, there was a small cut up near her hairline, an angry abrasion on the back of her hand, small round scabs like bloody freckles scattered across it. The staff with the knife embedded in the end lay rocking slowly against the rail, smeared with colloid and blood for half its length.

“Skeen?”

Skeen yawned, moved slightly so she could see Timka. “Min,” she said, exasperation in her voice.

“That’s three of you. No imagination, you Nemin.” Timka stopped talking, lifted her head, startled. “Am I dreaming, or was that a breath of wind?”

Skeen slid off the rail, looked up. “Hai, Petro,” she yelled. “It blowing up there?”

The Ykx’s voice came drifting down to them. “Yessss, better by the minute.”

“You coming down?”

“In a little. I like it up here. Cool.”

“Hah. If I had two hands, I’d be up there too.” Skeen yawned again. “You wanting something, Ti?”

“Maggí needs help in sickbay, I’m going. You?”

Skeen looked at her hand and the handless arm, she plucked absently at the eddersil tunic. “Me and my clothes need a bath. You go down, I’ll wash.” She looked at her sleeves and sighed. “And borrow one of Petro’s robes. This sort of thing keeps up, I’m going to need a change of clothes.”

The children were out of the hold, helping tend the wounded among the passengers, fetching buckets of sea water so their elders could scrub the muck off the wounded and out of the well.

The ropes were creaking as the winds strengthened, the sails booming out. Houms was bellowing orders to the weary crew; half of them were working the ship, the other half were rolling the darted Sea Min overside and scrubbing the residue off the deck planks.

Maggí inspected all that with satisfaction, nodded as she saw Skeen and Timka go below. She crossed to the well. “Indu Annaji, any dead?”

A hefty Balayar woman looked up from the head she was bandaging; she was a series of soft squares, square head, square body, arms and legs jointed rectangular solids. “Lifefire’s blessing, no,” she boomed. Her laughter was as large and solid as her body, as infectious as measles. “Ykx’s blessing, I should say, say it loud and clear. Pop pop spit, like boiling mush.” She laughed again, sobered. “We’ll take care of our wounds, Captain, but when you’re not so busy, some tea and hot broth would go down easy.”

“I hear you, Annaji. When I can spare the cook from the wounded, you’ll get that and more.”

As the sun dropped lower and lower in the western sky and the wind continued to freshen, the ship was purged of its filth and corpses (not the crew dead, they were sewn into canvas and waited in a corner of the quarterdeck for the proper time and the proper distance from the Min dead; they waited until the decks were clean and Maggí had time and energy to give them a proper send-off, though with the heat being what it was and dead flesh being what it was, they couldn’t wait too long). Skeen had about exhausted her meager supply of antibiotics on the worst of the wounded, Timka and Pegwai had cut and sewn and bandaged until their eyes were crossing with weariness. The cook went back to his galley when Pegwai came down; he got busy with his pots and fires. The galley was a hell all its own in that heat, but he was used to it and glad to get away from the miseries of the sickbay.

Up at the masthead, Lipitero stirred, stretched, moving with some care. As the wind blew stronger, the sway of the mast was increasing, and she was getting dizzy. She adjusted the hover field to let her down slowly, she got a good grip on the excavator, slipped off the platform and drifted to the quarterdeck.

She glanced at the canvas bundles, sighed, and turned her back on them. She resorbed the handgrips and reformed the cube, tucked the excavator into its case and clicked the lid home. She reached down, scooped up the robe and squatted looking at it. In the bustle of the battle, the crew had tramped across it, it was still damp with her sweat, a filthy rag. She draped it over her arm, caught hold of the case and rose to her feet. She moved to the forerail, rested the case on it, and looked out over the ship. A scratch crew was working the ship, the others, she presumed, either wounded or getting some rest. In the deckwell the passengers were gathered about several lanterns eating a hot meal, talking (she couldn’t make out individual words, but the tone made her smile a little, she heard fatigue and satisfaction mixed), children laughing and excited, indulged by their parents in a way they seldom enjoyed, enjoying it as fully as they could because they knew how brief the license would be. She lingered watching the strange children play—only a few children—five or six, a leaven in the adult loaf like the children in Sydo Gather. The whole inside of her ached as she watched; she hungered for her own then, she needed them around her, the smells and sounds, the warmth of other Ykx, Ykx voices, Ykx laughter, Ykx … well … vibrations. She was alone and it was like death; for the first time she truly understood those Ykx penned alone by the Chalarosh, she understood their willing themselves to die; the pain of that total separation from her kind struck so deep, only the hope of finally ending that pain made it endurable. She reminded herself of her reasons for being here, shook off the malaise and went below.

From being becalmed, the Goum Kiskar blew into a ferocious storm and blew out again in less than an hour, then settled to a fitful progress across the remaining stretch of the Halijara. After the storm, more cleaning up. Work on sails and rigging, pump out the deckwell. Bumps and bruises among the passengers, one broken leg, several broken heads. By the day after the storm, the lightly wounded were back on their feet thanks to Skeen’s drugs and Pegwai’s needles and Timka’s tending, able to do some of the lighter work and let some of their fellows snatch a little rest. And the badly hurt were resting comfortably without the fever that killed more than the original wounds. Maggí came down several times to visit the sickbay; she walked from one pallet to another, kneeling beside each to tease the man gently, to pat him a little, rising to move to the next. She nodded to Timka as she left, and went to find Lipitero.

Quarterdeck. Early afternoon. Hot and steamy, a brisk wind, Goum Kiskar slicing through glittering water. Lipitero standing unrobed, the wind playing through her crimped silver-gray fur, her heavily metaled harness glowing richly gold in the sunlight filtering through the sails and shrouds.

MAGGÍ: You’re opening the Gate for Skeen.

LIPITERO: Yes. Or why would I be here.

MAGGÍ: That’s a question I’ve wondered about.

LIPITERO: No doubt.

MAGGÍ: There aren’t many Ykx left on Mistommerk.

LIPITERO: We don’t make ourselves obtrusive.

MAGGÍ: That’s no answer. Ah, forget that, if you wanted to answer you would have. Skeen isn’t talking either, so I have to guess. There’s something on the far side the Ykx want. Or need. It’s my guess you’re passing through to get it and coming back with it. You’ll need transport?”

LIPITERO: It’s not something I want to talk about.

MAGGÍ: I suppose your reasons don’t matter all that much. There’s something I want you to do for me.

LIPITERO: I’ll listen, Maggí. I owe you.

MAGGÍ: I was in sickbay just now. Petro, three years ago the pirates round Tail End were hungrier than usual and hitting anything that floated past. We had a bad time with them, I had six crew wounded in that fight. One in the belly; you know this world, you know what that meant. He was begging us to kill him by the time we made the next port. Houms offered, but I couldn’t let him do my job. Two others died from the fever. Of the three that lived, two are still with me, one never got well enough to work again, he’s living in Karolsey. I go to see him most times I’m there. He was cook’s help, Petro, a baby. He’s not twenty yet, and he’s an old man. I’m always expecting to find him dead each time I drop anchor there. I think about that, then I think about Skeen and her hand, how close she was to dying and how fast she recovered once she used her own medicines. I think about that other time and I go down and see the wounded from this fight. I feel cool heads, I see clean wounds, I see a man hurt worse than Tefote was already up and mending sail. And what’s the difference, Petro, what’s the whole difference? Skeen’s pharmacopoeia. Petro, I want those drugs. Not just a stock, but a continuing supply. I don’t want to do Lifefire’s grace on more of my friends, I don’t want to see another boy go from puberty to senility with nothing between.

LIPITERO: Shouldn’t you be talking with Skeen about that? What do I know about the far side?

MAGGÍ: I like Skeen, but I know Skeen. She’s impulsive, generous. If I was in a tight place, I can think of few others I’d rather have at my back. But I wouldn’t want to depend on her, not for something that meant she’d have to meet a schedule, not for something that was supposed to continue for a long time. Oh, I could probably get her to agree to be my supplier, and she’d come through once, maybe twice, then she’d slide away. She’d have the best excuses, but the end would be the same. No, if it can be done, you’re the one to do it, Petra. Get Skeen’s help if you want, but remember what I said. Don’t do it for me, do it for the Ykx. Think of the market for these drugs. Me, but I’m only one. There are hundreds—no thousands—who would be as eager as I am to have a way to fight the killing fevers. Say nothing now, just think about it.