I n the night, the bodies that they found were piled onto rafts. They stiffened and frosted. The flames would unglue them. The mourners gathered in boats and wept, but no words, no tears passed Adelaide’s lips or eyes. She watched as a woman with long grey hair was ferried from raft to raft. The woman drew a line of salt on their foreheads and then she poured oil onto the human pyres.
The mourners threw burning torches through the air. Flames leapt from the oil; embraced the hands and feet and faces of the dead. They wore no shoes. Their shoes had been taken for others to use. Her rescuers said they would not mind.
The fires crackled and spat. She watched the flames unravelling vessels that had held running blood, flickering consciousness; returning matter to the ashes and salt it had once been. The bodies, none of which she had recognized as his, were swarmed by smoke.
Austral lights glimmered overhead. In another week it would be midwinter night. Four boats towed the pyres away. They glided on their final journeys, the cradles of fire dimmer and dimmer, out to the ring-net. She wanted to call out-stop! Don’t take them! Don’t exile them. Just in case he was there. In case he could not get back in.
Now a soft keening filled the air. It was a sound like none Adelaide had heard before, neither crying nor song. The wind was in it, the waves. The ghosts, too.
She imagined Vikram’s ghost was standing beside her, seeing what she saw, hearing what she heard. He asked, “What do you want to do?”
She looked at the tiny lights on the ocean surface.
“I have to get into the Silk Vault. There’s something there that I need to see.”
“And then?”
“I want to disappear.”