I set off flying over Epsilon’s savanna toward Vista Marchan and the old Insect bridge. Hundreds of meters below, Tarragon’s gold car left the edge of the market and followed, accelerating until it was directly below me. The car kept pace, a tiny shining rectangle on the immense plains, leaving a straight dark green track as it flattened the grass. I could see Tarragon in her short red dress glancing up at me.
I slowed, let the car race ahead and then swooped down, speeding faster as I lost height, and catching up with it from behind. I swept over it, lifting my legs so my dangling feet didn’t hit the headrest, and then lowered my pointed boot toes onto the front seat next to Tarragon. She looked ahead, keeping the car speeding straight. I crouched and pulled my wings in unevenly, wiggled to sit down. I pointed at the gray Insect bridge. “Go!”
Tarragon clenched the wheel, rocked her body forward and slammed her foot to the floor.
The towers of Vista Marchan shimmered and cohabited the space where only the flourishing grassland was supposed to be. A warm wind blew directly from them, drying my eyes. Nowhere in the Fourlands has such a parched, relentless wind. Tarragon glanced at me, complaining, “I’ve been looking everywhere. What’s happening, Jant? I swam into harbor and saw stones falling through the water around the hull of your boat.”
“We’re under attack. The other ship’s throwing them. Rayne’s on the Petrel-and so am I.”
Tarragon gnashed her Shark’s teeth angrily. Her shape flickered violently between being a prissy lady and a vicious fish. “What a waste of scholarship! I will flip their boat into flotsam!”
“It’s even worse: the library’s on fire-one thousand years of wisdom lost forever. We’ll never know what essential works are gone for good. Mist Ata’s dead. Oh-was that gargantuan shark you?”
“Yes. I followed a schooner that I sent to sail alongside your ship on a Shift sea. You asked me for help so I chartered it as a guard.”
“God, Tarragon; you’re big.”
“Big-ish. Do you want me to bite your enemies’ keel out from under them?”
“Even if you do, the pirates ashore will keep fighting and they’re killing the islanders. The Trisians will still resist the Castle after this. No amount of talking will bring them around because after Gio’s lies they’re never going to believe any Fourlander again. We can’t win. The only way I can think to take control of this riot is to stage a spectacle so incredible that both sides forget their differences. Sea kraits live far from land, don’t they?”
Tarragon said, “Yes. They wouldn’t eat humans, not worth the energy. They live in the deep ocean; when they slough their skins they scratch themselves on the continent’s roots shelving up from the abyss.”
“Well, I want a sea krait.”
“You want to save them! Are you sure?”
“Only if they agree to the deal. The stinguish told me their ocean dried up, and you said they needed a safe haven. Kraits can come to live in the Fourlands’ sea on the condition that they obey me.”
I braced myself as we rushed onto the wide bridge. Our wheels hummed as they sped over the irregular surface. I could see the striations where individual Insects had added their masticated wood pulp. The bridge’s stringy supports of hardened spit whooshed by on both sides. Looking between them I saw the savanna drop below us as we labored up to the apex.
We crested the summit buffeted by Vista’s breeze that blows across worlds, and for one glorious moment I could see the whole of the sprawling market.
Then it had gone; we were in the world of Vista. The wind howled through the top of the bridge. Below us, it blew the top layer of flaking sand across the wasteland as fine crystal dust, drifting onto high dunes against the base of the sea wall.
Many white tracks converged on Vista Marchan city; from up here they resembled the rays of a star. Its cluster of pale blocky towers appeared suspended in mirages and pooled in bent light across the entire wasteland.
I had not seen any place like this before. We descended past the towers that I realized were higher than the Throne Room spire. I was overawed and shaking as we rolled to a halt on top of Vista’s great sea wall. On either side of us were empty, sand-choked dockyards and piers with long, dry barnacled ladders that stopped short of the ground.
I looked out over the salt flats, to see Epsilon as a translucent illusion, a lush plain and thriving market lying at forty-five degrees through the white wasteland.
Tarragon said, “Aren’t Insects fascinating creatures? That’s the Vista desert. It used to be the ocean floor.” Her car’s wheels pulled the grit into tracks as we drove along the top of the immense wall. The salt-bleached streets were devoid of movement. The only living things in Vista were myself and Tarragon; her fin annoyingly brushed my thigh as she operated the controls. Paper Insect cells meshed between and hung like gray lace around the worn concrete buildings.
“I’m sorry to bring you so far,” she added. “Your trip home will cause you substantial distress.”
Rust stains ran down the dock wall from flaking iron rings bolted into the top. Sea-level markers and fading numerals were stenciled in a script twice my height. We stopped and stared out at the vanished ocean. The white sky and sand stretched away as far as I could see: two parallel planes meeting at the horizon. Occasional patches discolored the dunes’ glaring surface, chemicals and oil seeping up from below. A stagecoach that must have belonged to a recent tourist lay derelict and half-full of sand. The tops of its spoked wheels showed through the surface of a hard-packed ridge.
Behind us was the city, faceless towers and blanched walls abraded with centuries of windblown sand. Spiral steps emerged like spinal columns from their broken shells. Rusted girders jutted out of the fortieth floors-metal thinned to perforated wafers. There was no sound but the breeze skipping salt crystals over the dry ocean floor and concrete promenade. It was completely outside my experience. I said, “It’s not beautiful. It’s…”
“A desert, Jant. Lots of sand.”
“Tarragon,” I said impatiently. “Capharnaum is burning!”
She tutted but moved quickly, taking a gold pocket watch from a box that was part of the car’s fascia. She clicked its glass case open and I saw that it wasn’t a watch at all. Inside was a gold mechanism and a wire gauze that securely held down a fat black fly, twice the size of a bluebottle. It buzzed energetically, sounding as if it was trying to drill through its gold cage. Tarragon said, “It’s amazing what you can purchase from the Tine in Epsilon market if you have enough meat.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a Time Fly. They have a way of avoiding being squashed or eaten. They can jump a split second back in time, up to the point at which they emerged from the pupa. This Time Fly hatched in Vista Marchan and has been imprisoned here ever since. I’m taking you back there; we will turn back time until the tide comes in. Wind it for me, will you?”
I turned the contraption’s little gold key, just like a watch, and the gauze began to put pressure on the trapped insect. It felt threatened and tried its method of escape, but because the mechanism snared it, it carried its threat along. It took us, too, and it went fast. Really fast.
For a few minutes, nothing changed. I twisted around and looked behind at the town. The buildings could be a little less gray, less dilapidated.
There was a blurring at street level around the car, as if I could see colored air swirling. Tarragon said, “They’re city people, in their everyday lives or fighting Insects, moving back in time too fast to see.”
She patted my arm and pointed to the horizon. Prodigious steel ships began to rise from the areas of oily discolored sands. Sand dusted away from them, revealing masts and wheelhouses then unearthed long hulls lying on their sides. The sand’s surface darkened to pale gray and began to glisten. Then shallow blue pools appeared in the lowest linear sand ripples, where I had not noticed hollows before. The long pools swelled and coalesced, turning the summits of the sand ripples into islands and building up around the dunes. Water ran together around them, darker blue as it deepened.
The ripples were all covered, the sea level climbed, the dunes were dispersed islands. Just a few islands left; then the sea covered the final dune. The ocean kept rising, closer to the bottom rungs of the ladders, bearing upright the drab metal ships.
Color poured into the sky. From monochrome it became pale, then bright blue. The automobile’s highly polished gold chassis reflected it. The Time Fly in the watch whined with effort. It was now a young imago, its wings crumpled and damp, as it had been when someone imprisoned it. Its six thin legs scraped against the watch’s shiny inside surface.
Suddenly the Insect bridge vanished. Fresh paper, it disappeared in jerky stages from the foot of the arch to its zenith. Waves hit the harbor wall and climbed its sea-level gauge, higher and higher. The steel ships disappeared instantly; instead the ocean spat out white boats that bobbed at anchor. The rings in the dock wall were glossy; Vista Marchan’s towers were complete and spotless, glass walls reflecting the sun. The buzzing in the watch stopped abruptly, and everything was clear and still. It was a beautiful day. Men and women in orange tabards and yellow helmets went about their business at the docks, blissfully unaware of the annihilation that will happen when the Insects’ bridge crashes through.
Tarragon showed me the watch; it was empty. She said, “In a factory in Vista, the Time Fly’s just been hatched.”
An almighty wave reared from the middle of the ocean and cascaded into harbor, diminishing every second, until it lapped at the wall as a gentle ripple. A vast green-and-blue-striped snake’s head and upper body erupted from the ocean, spattering us with spray and blotting out the sun. Its head was four times bigger than a caravel, the solid muscle trunk of its monstrous body as thick as one of the towers behind me.
The glossy snake lowered its flat, pointed head onto the promenade. The harbor workers seemed annoyed but were too polite to say anything. Tarragon and I climbed out of her car. “God-who-left-us,” I gasped.
“No, it’s just a snake.”
“Shit…How many are there?”
“Sh!” Tarragon chided. “Their population numbers less than a thousand.”
The sea krait’s bulk stretched into the distance. It meandered in colossal hundred-meter curves like the Moren River. A ship steered away from its side, panicking and belching smoke. Around half a kilometer from shore, the krait dipped underwater and the same distance farther away a striped conical island trailed back and forth in the frothing sea-the flattened tip of its tail.
We stood in front of the snake’s slightly domed yellow eye. Its vertical slit pupil was the height and width of my body. Its head was covered in bright scales the size of a table top. Black skin showed between them, looking like stitching around the square scales on its closed lips. A deeply forked black tongue darted out of the tip of its snout and flickered around us. It didn’t touch me but I sensed the motion of the air a centimeter away from my face and I felt its moistness. The snake darted its tongue back into the hole in its top lip, which was big enough for me to have crawled through.
Tarragon said, “Jant, may I introduce you to the king of the sea kraits?” She addressed the beast: “Your Heinouss, this is a messenger from the Emperor of the Fourlands who could soon be your Emperor too, if you agree to his terms…Jant, talk to him; he can hear you with his tongue.”
The snake turned its enormous head on one side like a keeling carrack, and rubbed its closed mouth on the promenade. With the grating of a thousand millstones, it scraped great grooves into the cement and uprooted the iron mooring posts on either side. Its eye moved back and forth, appraising me.
I declared, “Tarragon will show you the direction to the Fourlands’ ocean. You and your people can live there if you promise me three things. First, destroy the ship called Pavonine afloat in the center of the harbor, that Tarragon will show you. Second, after that don’t damage any other vessels or harm any people. Live in the depths and stay away from the shoreline, so you’ll be less likely to cause accidents. Third, our world is threatened by the Insects too; that makes us allies and in the future I might call on you for help again, via Tarragon.”
All the time, the krait’s pennant-tongue flicked in and out of its long colubrine smile, picking up vibrations in the air. It was tasting my words. It twisted its head looking for Tarragon and slithered dangerously close to crushing her car before she ran around in front of its eye. It hissed, and I felt its hot, fishy, miasmic breath blow from the arched hole in its lip.
“What is it saying?” I asked.
Tarragon said, “He wants to know if your sea is of sufficient size. I don’t think the Fourlands’ ocean is roomy enough to hold every one of the sea kraits. I will tell him that there’s only space to allow a few of them through. That way at least some will escape the disaster and their species will survive.”
The snake’s glistening body writhed along its whole visible length. Tarragon gave me an encouraging look. “The King accepts. He is convinced of your honesty; he says he can taste it.”
“How do I know whether to trust a sea snake?”
Tarragon laughed. “You have a Shark’s word that you can.”
The meanders of the krait’s kilometer-long body drew tighter and closer together as it pulled its head back and smoothly submerged under the water. I stared at it, openmouthed.
“You will see him once more,” said the Shark. “Goodbye, Jant. I have to act as their guide and we have rather a long way to swim in this delicious water. Still, we’ve plenty of time.” Her red dress turned gray, and stippled to continuous sharkskin all over her body. She walked to the very edge of the massive wall, hooked her bare toes over and raised her shagreen hands above her head.
“Don’t leave me here!” I cried. I was not only in a completely unknown, alien world, but somewhere in its past.
She turned a shark’s cold eye on me. “Have you not been practicing? You should be able to will your way back by now! I advised you to study and I expected you to learn. Well, this is an excellent opportunity to try.” She leaned forward, gave a little jump, and fell through the air in a perfect dive. She splashed into the crystal-clear water and did not rise again.
I might have to stay here forever, I thought in panic. I might have to live here. Berating myself, I examined the stinking abandoned car but it was already beginning to rot. I kicked it. The dock workers had left when we were talking to the King krait, and I was alone. I sat down and for about an hour, though I had no way of measuring time, I tried to copy the feeling of my return Shifts. I imagined the pull-a plausible path to the Fourlands-growing stronger, solidifying. I grasped it, and dragged myself through.
I lay somewhere that smelled of feathers. Darkness surrounded me. I felt nothing. My body was paralyzed; I couldn’t move. “Because you’re dead,” a heavy voice pronounced in my ear. I screamed with no sound. This is the wrong world; I’ve no body to return to. I struggled and thrashed and forced myself awake.
I came to lying on the worn carpet in Ata’s cabin, by the linenfold paneled walls and brocade bench on which Rayne sat in front of the stern windows. “Well done,” she enthused. “You saved us!” The windows behind her were completely black. “Shame i’ killed you, though.” She smiled and her mouth widened on both sides. She smiled and smiled and smiled. I’m still not home. I’m still not awake!
I squeezed my eyes shut and fought desperately. I then saw a lowering landscape with ruined bridges, fortresses, windmills all benighted backlit with raging fire, vast buildings with stone stairways running in every direction. I did not set down there. Someone’s fingers were on my face, probing like worms in my mouth; they forced my jaw open and rammed down my throat. I simultaneously woke up and vomited helplessly.
I opened my eyelids to two slivers of glazed-green iris but lay otherwise inert. Rayne’s pair of bloodstained pumps and Lightning’s thick-soled buckled boots stood in front of my face. God, I hate it when I wake up lying in the recovery position.
“He’s no’ responding,” said Rayne. I felt her thumb my eyelid.
“I am,” I said, but it came out as a breath.
Lightning’s voice sounded very weak. “Well, bloody make him respond.”
Rayne made a sound like a shrug and slapped my face. “His pupils are so thin they’re like threads. Can you feel t’ Circle working t’ hold him?”
“Yes, damn him.”
Rayne slapped my face again and I gasped and spat.
Lightning said, “Ah, Jant. Everyone fights to survive but you wipe yourself out! You couldn’t poison Gio but you do a bloody good job of poisoning yourself! We need you to fly above and drop missiles on the trebuchet team. I know you prefer to be comatose under heavy bombardment; are you hoping to be revived by the cold water when we sink?”
I rolled into a kneeling position and blinked at him. He half-lay on a chair, still shaking with pain. Instead of his longbow he held a smaller bow with pulleys that could be kept drawn effortlessly.
Rayne said, “Lightning, don’ make him feel bad or you’ll give him an excuse t’ take another dose.”
“The gamin wretch! I’ll-”
I whispered, “You’re wrong. You told me to stop the riot and that’s exactly what I am doing.”
A ripple jolted Petrel hard against the harbor wall, throwing Rayne off balance. The snakes have arrived. I swallowed dryly, then I stumbled to my feet and out of the cabin. Rayne hurried and Lightning struggled after me, up the ladder to the poop deck where I gazed from the rail. The quayside was littered with bodies; its pavement was cracked and the walls of houses demolished where Pavonine’s shot had struck. Our figurehead and forecastle had been smashed into a mass of splintered wood. I took it all in with one glance, not knowing if I had really woken. The sky was dark-was this Fourlands or still Shift?
Looking down to the lower level through an open hatch I saw Wrenn sitting on a rope coil, drinking a canteen of water voraciously. Rayne’s assistant was sewing the gash that was open to the bone in his arm. The sight brought me back to earth. He knew that Eszai can take wounds-although not wounds as serious as that. He must have badly misunderstood what I told him about the Circle.
The Pavonine continued her bombardment. Cinna spun the wheel, keeping the ship’s stern toward us, rudder at full lock. Tirrick commanded the sweating pirates scurrying inside the treadwheels to ratchet the catapult back. They stacked its sling with slimy rocks from the ship’s own ballast.
The Pavonine jolted. An unnatural ripple circled her. The water on either side of her hull began to churn and bubble; waves lapped in every direction. Behind her, between her and the beacon island, a long black ridge surfaced. It was domed like a whale’s back but it rose higher and higher out of the water, passing the height of the Pavonine’s rail. It was the King krait’s top lip.
Lightning and Rayne stared, stunned. The men on the Pavonine ran about in confused terror as the ridge continued to rise. Two curved sharp fangs emerged parallel with the waves. Longer than pikes they projected from the black arch on the far left and right. The sea krait’s jaw showed its green and blue stripes and the water seething as it emerged glowed with phosphorescence.
A hundred meters away from the top lip, in the water between us and the Pavonine, the slick lower lip crested up. Men by the catapult shrieked and pointed; on the main deck they ran from one side to the other, unable to fathom what the arches on either side of them could be. The krait’s open mouth ascended, its teeth curved toward the Pavonine. The ridged black skin of its upper palate faced us, twice the size of the mainsail and glistening like tar. Water sluiced off its smooth bony head.
The smoke-filled sky resonated with the pirates’ screams as far as the town. I had the impression that the whole sea bed was ascending. Water thundered out of both sides of the krait’s open mouth; in the rocketing froth between its upper and lower jaws the Pavonine danced and spun like an eggshell in boiling brine. The cocked catapult went off, hurling shot vertically into the air.
I heard Cinna screeching. The snake’s lance-long teeth reached the height of Pavonine’s foremast, curving above the ship and caging it in. Pavonine canted over so far the crow’s nest on its mainmast slapped the water, now on the port side, now the starboard, throwing off men. The krait’s bottom jaw obscured the ship. Its yellow eye emerged, surrounded with wet black skin, waves battering against it.
For an instant the water inside its mouth was carried higher than the harbor water. The snake reared out of the sea, bearing the Pavonine up. Sailors clung onto the ropes, dropped off with raucous screams.
Foaming brine spurted out both sides. The sea krait closed its mouth, with one sickening crunch.
In the sudden silence, the bitten-off masthead of the Pavonine tumbled to the surf. It floated, no bigger than a matchstick, beside the diamond-shaped snake’s head projecting straight up from the waves. Its body rose to the surface, blocking the harbor entrance, and the length of it extended to the horizon. The King krait lowered its head and turned to look at us.
Lightning scrabbled for an arrow, stammering, “What is that…?” He flexed his bow, aiming directly for its yellow eye.
“No!” I put my jittery hand over the arrowhead and forced it down. “Don’t shoot!”
Lightning gaped at me, striving to understand. “Why not? Its carcass won’t block us in. The sun will rot it. It will rot away.” He yelled at the sea krait, “What are you?”
The snake’s long mouth stayed closed but the black tongue whipped out like a pennant at the summit of its snout, curling down to our railings, licking slickly in front of me. I assumed the krait was tasting the air for my scent. I actually admired its beauty and overwhelming incalculable strength. I waved my arms to it, grinning madly with gratitude. “Thank you! Thank you in the name of the Emperor-now go find a home!”
It tilted its head to the side, but as it sank it scanned the Stormy Petrel’s deck with its great amber eye. The sea rushed back with a noise like rolling boulders, closing over the snake’s eye, upturned mouth, pointed nose; the nostrils last to submerge. An enormous V-shaped ripple formed where, underwater, it began to haul its massive body and retract its head from the harbor.
I swear there was a gust of wind as everybody on the Stormy Petrel exhaled. The quay was silent for a second-it was silent, the fighting had stopped. I heard weapons fall and clanking as bags of loot dropped to the ground.
Pandemonium broke out as, shoulder to shoulder, some soldiers and pirates moved closer to the waterfront to stare at the floating top-mast, the broken pieces of canoes and pontoons where the krait had been. The rest, especially the Trisians, tried to run as far from the sea as possible, back into town. The rioting on the quayside and all the way up the boulevard had completely ceased; everybody was watching the ocean.
“Did…?” Lightning stammered. “In the name of…god’s arse…I can’t believe I just saw that.” He turned on me. “Why do you keep stopping me from shooting monsters?”
“It saved us, Saker; it’s a friend.”
On my other side Rayne spoke calmly. “You were in too deep, Jant, if you reached Vista Marchan.”
I goggled at her, but she simply smiled.
“How did you know that thing was going to appear?” Lightning demanded.
I seated myself on the deck; I was too nauseous to question Rayne. I moaned, “Oh, please let me lie down. They’ve stopped fighting. I halted the riot; we’ve won.”
“We los’ so much, Jant, tha’ I doubt you could call i’ winning.”
Lightning nudged me with his boot. “I see Vendace and the senators approaching the gangway. At the moment I don’t think relations between Capharnaum and the Castle could be any worse. Can you address them?”
Rayne said, “Jant is very disorien’ed; I don’-”
I nodded. “Yes. I will speak for the Castle.”
Scavenger smoke rifled across the sky. The moisture of the sea breeze condensed on the library’s fumes to form a thick cloud descending over the crag; we gradually lost sight of the blackened, burned-out Amarot. The air was filthy and muggy, unfamiliar to the senators. They stood huddled together, coughing. The sea krait had rendered them speechless and their eyes were downcast; they were in mortal fear. Lightning and I walked unsteadily down the gangplank to the corniche which was littered with debris. Vendace’s tunic and unruly gray hair were soot-stained. He looked at the blood on Lightning’s shirt, the puke on mine and the ash on us both. He faltered, “We saw the serpent. Can you communicate with it?”
“I just did,” I said.
They conferred between themselves; they all had a tone of defeat. Vendace said, “This is so much worse than legendary Insects coming to life. We had no idea that such a serpent existed. How did you summon it?”
“What are they asking-?” Lightning began.
“One minute!” I said to him. I gathered my thoughts and addressed the senators. “Yes, I summoned the snake to stop the battle and save your homes. I don’t want to call up any more but the Archer is furious and unmerciful. You heard us arguing on the ship; he wants to show you what we can do. I’m trying to make him agree not to encircle the island with giant snakes.” I turned to Lightning and addressed him gravely in high Awian. “We must look like we’re conferring. I’m bluffing, but the senators will appreciate the Empire after this. Pretend to be angry and speak to me; quote theater or something.”
Lightning was quick to understand. He shook his head and said in a stern tone, “Well, in that case-balsam for lovers.”
I inquired, “Willows for brides?”
“Briars for the maidens,” Lightning retorted. “Look, you will explain this afterward, please?”
I patted his shoulder as if in agreement, “Oh yes, but I’m positive you won’t like it. And to wives we give lilies. Right.” I switched back to Trisian and said, “My friend and I have decided not to summon the snakes, and to let them abide in the deepest ocean where they will be no threat to your country again.” I extended my hand to Vendace. “There are many more wonderful things in the Fourlands. We’re your allies; please join us.”
Vendace and the others seemed doubtful. His lean shoulders were sagging. “If all the trials to face Tris from now on will be this arduous, then we cannot resist them alone. We’ll give you a message for”-he paused and blanched-“for San, now he has done to us what he did to the Pentadrica.”
“What?” I said.
Vendace looked at his associates for support, shrugged. “Everybody knows that centuries ago San let the Pentadrica be destroyed so he could seize power. He deliberately contrived that unfortunate Alyss be slain, and now he’s done the same to us.”
I shook my head. “No, no. San was only an adviser. He would have told Alyss not to visit the Insects’ enclave and she must have ignored him.”
Vendace glanced at the murk covering the Amarot, through which glimpses of the blackened library walls came and went. “That is not what Capelin wrote. I have read the manuscript, many of us have, but now…how do we prove it? It is ash with the rest.”
I didn’t know what to say or who to believe. I searched around for more evidence of our goodwill, took the books from my pockets and gave them to Danio’s successor, who was still choking back sobs. “Here…”
“Oh, thanks,” she said sarcastically, looking at the titles.
“The Castle’s Doctor is here; she’ll help your doctors with the wounded Capharnai. Her knowledge and supplies will be useful. We’ll repair the damage that has been done, as far as we can. If you need grain ships I shall send them. The Circle is at your command; whatever you think about the Emperor’s history and motives, I promise you we will work day and night.”
I thought, we have brought them misrule. Our presence has made Tris grow out of childhood to delinquent adolescence. But scolopendium was still hitting me in waves of sickness and bliss. I was simply glad to be alive, one of the lives remaining.
Our soldiers, seeing Lightning on the quayside, approached him. But he was feverish, so he simply sat down and left me to give the commands while Rayne tended to him. I told the Awndyn Fyrd captain to round up the rebels and put them in the hold. Then came Viridian, Ata’s daughter, who had collected the gory pieces of her mother’s body. She insisted that Mist Ata Dei be buried at sea, with the respect that was due to a famous explorer and the Circle’s Sailor.
I said, “It’s terrible that Mist can never know how Tris turns out.”
Lightning glanced over the broken paving stones, the trebuchet shot and abandoned gold loot on the harbor pavement. His gaze loitered on the sea that splintered the dawn light. He was now as suspicious of the ocean as I used to be, and I loved it because it was not the same sea now the kraits swam in its depths. “Yes, it is, Comet. And I wonder if the Empire will ever regain a vestige of normality.”