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‘I haven’t your gift. Why don’t you tell me what’s bothering you?’ Althea called down.

‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Amber complained. ‘No one can.’

‘Try me,’ Althea challenged her.

Amber took a long breath and sighed it out. ‘I’m wondering why you aren’t a nine-fingered slave boy. I’m wondering how Paragon can be both a frightened boy and a cruel-hearted man. I’m wondering if I should be aboard this ship at all, or if I was supposed to stay in Bingtown and watch over Malta.’

‘Malta?’ Althea asked incredulously. ‘What does Malta have to do with any of this?’

‘That,’ Amber pointed out wearily, ‘is exactly what I would love to know.’

‘Something is wrong, Sir! With Divvytown, I mean.’

Gankis stood framed in Kennit’s stateroom door. The old pirate looked more distressed than Kennit had ever seen him. He had taken off his hat and stood wringing it. Kennit felt his stomach turn with a sudden premonition. He didn’t let it show on his face.

He raised one eyebrow queryingly. ‘Gankis, there are many things wrong with Divvytown. Which particular one has brought you to my door?’

‘Brig sent me, sir, to tell you the smell is bad. The smell of Divvytown, that is. Well, it’s always bad, coming into Divvytown, but now it’s real bad. Like wet ashes –’

There. Like an icy finger in the small of his back.

The moment the old hand mentioned it, Kennit was aware of it.

It was faint inside the closed cabin, but there.

It was the old smell of disaster, one he had not scented in a long time.

Odd, how a smell brought memories back sharper than any other prod to the senses.

Screaming in the night, and flowing blood, both slick and sticky.

Flames, lifting to the sky. Nothing quite like the smell of burned houses, mixed with death.

‘Thank you, Gankis. Tell Brig I’ll be up shortly.’

The door shut behind the sailor. He had been very troubled.

Divvytown was as close to a homeport as this crew had.

They all knew what the smell meant, but Gankis hadn’t been able to bring himself to say it.

Divvytown had been raided, probably by slavers.

It was not an unusual event in a pirate town.

Years ago, under the old Satrap, there had been fleets of raiding ships that had cruised these waters just for that purpose.

They had found and wiped out a great many of the old pirate strongholds.

Divvytown had weathered those years, undiscovered.

In the lax years of the old Satrap’s dying reign and Cosgo’s incompetent one, the pirate towns had been undisturbed.

They had learned both carelessness and prosperity.

He had tried to warn them, but no one in Divvytown would listen to him.

‘The circle is closing.’

He glanced down at the charm on his wrist. The be-damned thing was more nuisance than luck-piece anymore.

It only spoke when it suited it, and then it mouthed nothing but threats, warnings and bleak prophecies.

He wished he had never had it created but he could scarcely get rid of it.

There was far too much of himself in it to trust it if it fell into other hands.

Likewise, to destroy a living sculpture of one’s own face must invite a like destruction to himself.

So he continued to tolerate the little wizardwood charm.

Someday, perhaps, it might be useful. Perhaps.

‘I said, the circle closes. Do you not take my meaning? Or are you growing deaf?’

‘I was ignoring you,’ Kennit said pleasantly.

He glanced out the window of his stateroom.

The Divvytown harbour was coming into sight.

Several masts stuck up from the water. Beyond them, the town had burned.

The jungly forest beyond the town showed signs of scorching.

Divvytown’s docks had survived as freestanding platforms that pointed at the shore with charred beams. Kennit felt a pang of regret.

He had come back here, bringing his richest trove ever, in the expectation that Sincure Faldin could dispose of it at a tidy profit.

No doubt, he had had his throat slit and his daughters and wife were dragged off for slaves. It was all damnably inconvenient.

‘The circle,’ the charm went on inexorably, ‘seems to be composed of several elements. A pirate captain. A liveship for the taking. A burned town. A captive boy, family to the ship. Those were the elements of the first cycle. And now, what do we have here? A pirate captain. A liveship for the taking. A captive boy, family to the ship. And a burned town.’

‘Your analogy breaks down, charm. The elements are out of order.’ Kennit moved to his mirror, then leaned on his crutch as he made a final adjustment to the curled ends of his moustache.

‘I still find the coincidence compelling. What other elements could we add? Ah, how about a father held in chains?’

Kennit twisted his wrist so that the charm faced him. ‘Or a woman with her tongue cut out? I could arrange one of those, as well.’

The tiny face narrowed its eyes at him. ‘It goes around, you fool. It goes around. Do you think that, once you have set the grindstone in motion, you can escape your ultimate fate? It was destined for you, years ago, when you chose to follow in Igrot’s footsteps. You will the Igrot’s death.’

He slammed the charm face down on his table. ‘I will not hear that name from you again! Do you understand me?’

He looked at the charm again. It smiled up at him serenely. On the back of his hand, blood spread under the surface of his skin. He tugged on his shirt cuff to conceal both the charm and the bruise with a fall of lace. He left his cabin.

The stench was much stronger on deck. The swampy harbour of Divvytown had always had a stink of its own.

Now the smells of burned homes and death joined it.

An uncommon silence had fallen over his crew.

The Vivacia moved like a ghost ship, pushed slowly by a faint wind over the sluggish water.

No one cried out, nor whispered or even moaned.

The terrible silence of acceptance weighed the ship down.

Even the figurehead was silent. Behind them, in their wake, the Marietta came in a similar pall.

Kennit’s eyes went to Wintrow, standing on the foredeck of the Vivacia. He could almost feel the numbness they shared. Etta was beside him, gripping the rail and leaning forward as if she were the ship’s figurehead. Her face was frozen in a strange grimace of disbelief.

The destruction was uneven. Three walls of a warehouse stood, like hands cupped around the destruction within.

A single wall of Bettel’s elegant bagnio still stood.

Here and there, isolated hovels had failed to catch well enough to burn.

The soggy ground the town was founded on had saved these few places.

‘There’s no point in tying up here,’ Kennit observed to Brig. The young first mate of the Vivacia had drifted up wordlessly to his side. ‘Bring her about and let’s find another port.’

‘Wait, Sir! Look! There’s someone. Look there!’ Gankis raised his voice boldly. The scrawny old man had climbed the rigging, the better to look down on the town’s destruction.

‘I see nothing,’ Kennit declared, but an instant later, he did. They came drifting in from the jungle, in ones and twos. The door of one hovel was flung open. A man stood in the open door, holding a sword defiantly. His head was bound in a dirty brown bandage.

They tied up to the skeletal pilings that were the remnants of the main dock.

Kennit rode in the bow of the ship’s boat as it carried him ashore.

Sorcor in the Marietta’s boat kept pace with him.

Both Etta and the boy had insisted on accompanying him.

Grudgingly, he had said that the whole crew might have a brief shore-time, provided a skeleton crew always manned the ships.

Every man aboard seemed intent on getting ashore, to prove the destruction to himself.

Kennit would have been content simply to leave.

The burned town unsettled him. He told himself there was no telling what the desperate survivors might do.

The Divvytown survivors had gathered into a crowd before either gig touched the shore.

They stood like ragged, silent ghosts, waiting for the pirates to land.

Their silence seemed ominous to Kennit, as did the way he felt every pair of eyes follow him.

The boat nudged suddenly into the mucky shoreline.

He sat still, his hands gripping his crutch as the crew jumped out and dragged the boat further up.

He did not like this one bit. The shining muck of the beach was black, with a thin oily overlay of greenish algae.

His crutch and his peg were bound to sink into the muck as soon as he got out of the boat.

He was going to look very awkward. Worse, he would be vulnerable if the crowd decided to rush him.

He remained seated, staring over the crowd and waiting for some definite sign of their temperament.