Victor woke them early the next morning; he explained that he wanted to climb the two remaining walls before sundown, a feat that would bring them to the edge of Ka'rhashan by midmorning of the next day. They all agreed, reluctantly.

"Are you sure that the city will still be there?" Neana asked. "Because two days ago you thought it was east of us, and now it's north and to the west."

"I am sure," Victor said, while looking not at all certain. "The land around here is tiered, like a…" He pondered the definitional topography and made vague shapes with his gnarled hands. "Ziggurat? Fancy wedding cake? You know the shape that I mean? Well, Ka'rhashan is on the top tier. If we climb, we can't help but stumble across it."

Two hours later, they were standing in front of another sheer cliff face that stretched as far as the eye could see in either direction. It looked almost exactly the same as the Bleeding Wall, with two exceptions; the stones here were more weathered and rounded, and the water that fell and spattered and poured down the cliff face was clear as crystal.

"This is the Weeping Wall," he said. "Although some just call it the Weep. You see the hand and foot holds carved into the rock here, and here?"

They saw. They climbed.

The way was difficult. The hand-holds on this wall were shallower, and harder to grip. When Razze pointed this out, Victor told him that the wind and the weather were stronger at this altitude, and this had worn away the stone over the centuries. Since humans had come to Q'Barra, the lizardfolk were in no hurry to re-cut the hand-paths that lead to their only city, and the ways had grown treacherous. The third wall, he said, could be downright deadly.

Halfway up the Weep, they found that a shelf of rock had fallen away and taken the hand-holds with it. Victor told them that if they walked along the deep depression the shelf had left for a hundred yards, they would find a new set of hand holds that the Cold Sun tribes had carved into the Weep.

"You may find something else as well," he added, in what Neana considered to be an overly cryptic and annoying tone of voice.

They walked – well, really the crawled, since the empty socket in the side of the Weep was less than four feet high – to the end of the little cavern, and found the hand-holds. They looked to be only a few years old, and provided a much better grip.

"What else were we supposed to find?" Sam asked.

Victor pointed.

"What? I don't see anything."

Victor sighed, and pointed again.

"It's a rock," Neana said flatly.

"No," Sam said, "It's a face…"

And once she'd said it, everyone could see it. It was a face, but just barely. Time and water and wind had smoothed his features to the consistency of melted butter, but it was still possible to make out a broad nose, two sockets for the eyes, and a pair of jagged nubs where the ears should have been. He had a beard as well; in fact, he had two. Water had worn the stone one to the smoothness of a pillar, but strings of ropy lichen had grown to take its place.

"What was he?" Sam wondered.

"He must have been a king," Razze said. "Kings always have beards. Very masculine symbolism."

"You're never going to give up the beard thing, are you?"

"Not a king," Victor said proudly, "but an Emperor."

Neana stared at it doubtfully. "It's not Karrn. Is it Galifar the first? Because I don't remember anything in my history books about Galifar coming to Q'barra…"

Chandra chuckled; a sound like little silver bells. This was such a rare occurrence that they all turned to stare at her. "That's not Galifar," she said. "Look at the ears."

They looked. The ears, Neana noticed, had been very broad and long before the elements had broken them off. "He's a goblin," she said eventually.

"Like me, he was a ghaal'dar." Victor said. "What you call a hobgoblin. You stand before the statue of Gan'duur, the Burning Emperor, Cleanser of the Hearthlands, the Eater of Sorrow, fifth supreme ruler of the Dhakaani."

"That's a mouthful," Razze whistled.

"It sounds better in Goblin," Sam whispered. "Very terse language."

Victor ignored them. "These were his lands, once. Before the humans came, before the dwarves came, before the halflings came, the ghaal'dar ruled here. While your ancestors were still tying flint knives to wooden sticks to make spears, the Dhakaani forged an empire of blood and bronze and byeshk out of the mud of Khorvaire. While the elves were cowering behind their spell-shields for fear of dragonfire, we conquered a continent. While the giants of X'endrik were devolving into feral savagery, my people were raising granite monuments to our own glorious might." He clenched a fist. "And it was glorious: from one end of the continent to the other, from sea to sea, one nation ruled for ten thousand years. Your Galifar built an empire that only survived for fifty generations; Dhakaan built one that lived for five hundred."

They stared at him. Victor paid them no notice. He reached out, almost tenderly, and cleared away some of the lichen that covered the statue's cheek. "You cannot imagine it. I cannot imagine it. Ten thousand years of history; ten thousand years of war and conquest, of art and poetry and song; the strength and audacity of it. Look at him! He came here to conquer a jungle. Why? There is nothing here worth conquering. But Gan'durr did it. I think he wanted to prove that he could. The Cold Sun tribes lived in Talenta long ago, did you know that? It is true. The Blackscales lived in the swamps, and the Greenscales lived in the grasslands. But Gan'duur wanted the plains to make farms, so he chased the Greenscales east, over the mountains and into Q'barra. Then he raised a mighty armada, sailed around the cape, and built a towering citadel here, just to keep an eye on the Greenscales. So that they would know that they had been conquered. He raised statues like this all over Q'barra; he wanted them to live forever in the shadow of their defeat."

They stared at him, at the odd little hobgoblin man and his odd little smile. It was the most that he'd ever said to them at one time. Neana had never suspected that there might be so many words hidden in that broad, stocky breast, or such pride. Belatedly, she began to wonder what other secrets might hide behind that fanged mien.

"There was a citadel here, once?" Sam asked, half-stunned. She sounded like she was groping for a fact to anchor herself too. She looked around. "Where?"

Victor sighed. "Two thousand years ago, the earth moved. The citadel of Gan'duur fell off the side of the mountain. Now even the rubble has been swallowed by the jungle."

"That's…," Sam hesitated. Her gift with words failed her. "That's very sad."

That's life, Neana almost retorted. Peoples die, cities fall, and everything falls apart. But she held her tongue. She of all people knew what it was like to mourn for a past that was lost forever. Two lost pasts now, with Cyre gone. Perhaps that thought occurred to the others as well, because a palpable hush settled over the group. Lost civilizations were getting more common every day.

Chandra coughed discretely into her hand to cover the embarrassing silence. "Shall we go? I believe there is still plenty of cliff left to climb."

There was. There were more ancient ruins as well, although none were as well preserved as the imperial statue. They saw faces worn to unrecognizable smoothness, broken pillars that looked like stalactites and, the crowning achievement, a working length of aqueduct at the very top of the Weeping Wall. In ancient times it must have fed the citadel, but now it fed the open sky. And so it came to pass that Sam and Neana ate the most picturesque lunch of their lives, at the broken edge of the trough of the aqueduct, with their legs dangling out over the edge of infinity. The jungle below them was a carpet of green. The grey cliff face was only dimly visible though a curtain of clinging mists, courtesy of a thousand, thousand waterfalls. Razze and Victor were sharing a small silver flask farther down the channel, and Chandrasitari had prudently decided to eat her skewer of lizard-kabob on solid ground.

Sam trailed slender grey fingers through the stream of water that still poured down the length of the stone trough before spilling out into empty air. Neana watched the spray of silver droplets fall away into the wind and become a curl of trailing mist. It was beautiful.

Sam flicked droplets of water off her fingertips, before using them to speak. "So, dear. How was your day at work?"

Neana smiled softly, and said in finger-talk, "Pretty boring. Nothing much happened. There was a minor flying lizard attack." Finger-talk was a simple, crude language; there was no word for wyvern. "But it was easily taken care of."

Sam clasped her hands to her chest theatrically. "A flying lizard? But weren't you most terribly afraid?"

Neana wiggled her fingers self-deprecatingly. "Not at all, not at all. A perfectly ordinary event. Just another day in the life of Lieutenant Neana Tacey, world-famous dragonslayer."

"My hero!" Sam made as if to swoon, and thought better of it when she almost lost her balance. They both let out what sounded surprisingly like girlish giggles. Razze and Victor glanced at them, with the self-conscious, distrust stares men always give to the laughter of women. Sam marveled. "Well, aren't you in a good mood! I think I can count the number of times I've heard you laugh on my fingers. I don't know if I'd even need both hands."

Neana shrugged. "I killed something very big yesterday. It tends to cheer me up."

"Well," Sam switched to speaking aloud, "that was very brave of you. And selfless. I always thought that you didn't like Chandra, but there you were, diving straight after her like that, without any hesitation... Well, it's good to be proven wrong."

"Oh, you weren't wrong. I hate her."

Sam's smile dimmed. "You don't really mean that."

That earned her a blank look. "Why do you say that? Of course I mean it. I hate most things. Most people too." She considered this intellectually. "I suppose I hate people more than things, on the whole. But I definitely hate Chandra."

Sam looked betrayed. "But she's your shipmate! You used to share a cabin."

"Oh, I know. That's why I saved her. And if it happened again, I'd save her again, just like I would for any of the Kitten's crew, but that doesn't make us friends. She's just crew. Why," she asked sarcastically, "you don't like everyone aboard the Mother Bear, do you?"

"Well…" The question appeared to strike her as odd. "Well, yes. I mean, I like some more than others, but yes. As much as the officer/crew arrangement allows, I'd like to think that I am on friendly relations with all my people. And I hope that they all like me. Captain Klein always says that we should think of the ship as our second family. Although, he's kind of sarcastic about it. You'd understand, if you'd ever met his family."

This thought was so alien that Neana ignored it. "I hate Chandra. She's a sanctimonious bitch who thinks she's better than everyone else. She's a stuck up, icy harridan."

"You, on the other hand, are a little ray of sunshine," Sam said sourly.

Neana glanced up. The changeling's face – a face that nature had intended to be gaunt, alien, and almost featureless – could be astonishingly expressive. It would never be a beautiful face, but it could at least be a lively and animated one. There may have been shapeshifting involved, but Sam could impart vast amounts of nuance and feeling with her thin lips and pearlescent eyes. Right now she was imparting consternation, disapproval, and…

Neana's anger flared. She tried to shout, "Don't pity me! Don't you dare," but the scars on her throat made it come out quiet and breathy and harsh. She loathed sympathy; hated charity. It made her feel small, and weak, and she would never be made that way again. She knew that she was fundamentally broken, but that didn't give other people the right to look down on her. She hurt people who tried to pull that shit with her. She had gotten enough false compassion, enough patronization, in her years at the orphanage, and she wasn't about to take any more from the woman she was sleeping with.

Sam gave her an odd, complex look. It was like a hurtful glance, but there were layers and layers underneath that; sympathy and shame and sorrow. She slipped a hand over her face, and where it passed her features had changed. She made herself into someone else. It was a young half-elven woman, with curls of copper hair, mossy green eyes, and rosy, freckled cheeks; if Sam had had a half-elven sister, she would look like this. It was a mostly-pretty face – boyish, and yet possessed of far more femininity than the one Sam had been born with. It was the face Sam had made for her, as an accommodation between Sam's desire to be seen for who she was and Neana's natural inclination to be attracted to members of her own mixed race. When they slipped beneath the covers most nights, this was the face Neana saw, the lips she kissed. They had never discussed it, never even spoken of it, but there it was: it was a sign of the compromise that their relationship represented.

"I've never pitied you," Sam said.

"You look down on me," Neana said sullenly. "Don't bother denying it."

"Only because I'm a foot taller than you," Sam quipped. "Look: can we go back to the part of the conversation where we were laughing?" She asked wistfully. "I don't feel like fighting right now. It's too nice a day for it."

Neana started to say something sharp – and then she didn't. Her anger, which had been building towards an outrageous blow, suddenly evaporated. For the second time today, for reasons she couldn't quite explain, she overrode her own natural resentment and said, "All right." And then, as if she were a different person, she smiled, and went back to watching the stream of falling water paint the sky with clouds. "It is a very fine day."

"What?" Sam was shocked. "You're giving in, just like that? Are you...," she paused, before settling on the most likely explanation. "Are you drunk?"

Neana laughed. She actually laughed. "Maybe. I don't know what's come over me. I think it's because I used too much magic yesterday. My brain is still a little addled from arcanic vapors."

"Well… Whatever it is, you should do it more often."

"I'll make a note to try and fight more wyverns. Just let me get my quill and ink."

Water trickled and burbled beside them. Neana thoughtfully bit off the last bite of gamey lizard flesh and tossed aside the twig it had been skewered on. The stick whirled and tumbled away into the empty air.

She said, "I've never hated you, though."

Sam said, "I know."

"Some days, I think I hate everything but you."

"That's… sweet. I think."

More water passed, and more time. Sam grew dozy, and lay down lengthwise along the trough. Over the sound of rushing water, they heard Razze and Victor's conversation grow quite animated.

"I think I was wrong," Neana said eventually.

"Quick, somebody put up a monument!" Sam said. "Maybe a nice marble obelisk, that says: 'On this day, the nineteenth of Dravago, in the nine hundred and ninety fourth year since the founding of Galifar, Neana Tacey admitted she was wrong.'"

"You are so clever," Neana said sarcastically. "What did I ever do to deserve someone who is so clever? No, I'm serious. I think I got it wrong when I tested the area for magic yesterday."

This did not appear to impress Sam very much. She squinted into the sun's glare, and seemed to be counting the number of moons that were still visible. "You said you could only sense very weak magic around here. You said it would be impossible to miss anything that could teleport us while we slept, or rearrange the land, or something."

Neana frowned. "And I was wrong. I think I missed something big. I think this place is like a boiling frog."

"Oh," Sam said. Her eyebrows came together. "What?"

"It's something they make apprentices do in their Basic Anatomic Necromancy classes. Look: frogs have a very weak animus. An animus is like… well, it's kind of like your life-force, or soul. Most simple creatures have very little animus. That means they have trouble affecting or being affected by the outside world. If you take a frog, and put it in a cauldron full of water, and stoke the fire very gradually, the frog will never even notice. If the change is gradual enough, and if the heat completely surrounds it, it won't be able to feel it, because its animus is too weak. You can boil it alive, and it won't even know."

"That's horrible!" Sam said.

"Oh? I guess. Anyway, this place could be like that."

"What, like a big bowl of frog stew?" Sam did not appear capable of abandoning the image of a slowly simmering amphibian.

"No," Neana sighed. "I mean that the spell I worked is like the frog. I can only get the general sense of the strength of nearby magical auras by comparing them to the natural amount of background magic. If there's too much background magic, I can't get a sense of the strength of the auras." Neana, who was never very poetic at the best of times, struggled for a better metaphor. "You know how at night, when you turn away from the campfire, your eyes have to gradually adjust to the darkness? It's the same principle. Q'barra could be like a campfire – like a bonfire – no, like that stupid pillar of silver fire the Flamers are always going on about, and I wouldn't know it, because my eyes have become adjusted to the light."

"Oh." Sam whistled appreciatively. "Oh! I see what you mean. So we could be sitting right on top of magic hoodoo central, and we wouldn't even know it? Because we've been approaching it so slowly that we've had time to adjust?"

"And we wouldn't even realize it until things start exploding," Neana confirmed. "If they haven't already."

"You think that's why we got… displaced in the night?"

"Maybe. Victor said that there were demons imprisoned in the soil beneath our feet. Not just demons, but demon kings. Rajahs. Frankly, I think that could be used to explain just about anything happening. It could explain why there are so many giant lizards around here, or what pushed a flat plain up into a tiered plateau, or why this whole jungle is so fucking hostile to warm-blooded life."

Sam considered this. She chewed her lower lip. In her concentration she let her control of her shapeshifting slip, and her flesh flowed, her skin bleached, and her eyes filmed over until she was her old changeling shape again. "I don't suppose…" she said slowly, her voice rich with underlying horror, "that there was ever a demon imprisoned underneath Cyre? Maybe a … a really big one?"

Neana had no answer for that.

Below them, falling water curled away into tendrils of pallid, grey mist.

"Ladies!" Razze shouted, absolutely shattering the somber mood. "You'll never guess what our companion Victor has been hiding from us!"

They glanced up. Even Chandra rose gracefully from her meditative position and looked at him. Razze's face shone with boyish good humor, and Victor's face was a decidedly darker orange than it had been. Was the old hob actually blushing?

Razze grinned. "Do you want to tell them, or should I?" Victor harrumphed and cross his arms, but said nothing. "I guess it's up to me then. You see: while we were talking, our friend here let something slip. Along with being a skilled woodsman, a loving husband, and a diplomatic go-between from civilization to the reptilian races, Victor has been harboring a dark secret. You'd never guess from looking at him, but our friend here is a closet nautophile."

There was a short pause.

Sam broke it. "You mean he has sex with fish?" she asked, her voice bubbling over with horror. Neana buried her face in her hands. Sam was a very clever woman in many ways, but her streetside education often left much to be desired.

"What?" Razze looked mystified. "No! I mean he loves boats." He jabbed the hobgoblin with his elbow. "Tell them, Victor."

Victor coughed. "It's true. When I was a boy, I wanted to be a sailor. I dreamed of going out on the ocean in a great, white-winged ship."

"So why didn't you?" Neana asked.

"I did, once. I… got sea-sick. For a week." He harrumphed. "Never tried it again."

"You should have heard him ten minutes ago," Razze said, in the voice of someone determined to jolly things along. "One minute we were talking about Newthrone politics, and then I made an off-hand comment about how the idiots in charge of Q'barra sound a lot like the idiots in charge of the Admiralty Board, and suddenly questions were just pouring out of him. It was as if a great dam broke. I've never met a man so interested in the sailing life. Go on, Victor: ask them." Victor harrumphed and turned away. "Don't mind him, he's just embarrassed."

Sam was interested. "You wanted to be a sailor, Victor?"

"Uh. Yes, Miss." The hobgoblin's speech tended to get more servile the more socially uncomfortable he was. Almost shyly, he added, "I wanted to be a navigator."

"Well that's what Chandra does. Isn't that right, Chandra? I'm sure you two could find a lot to talk about," Sam lied.

Victor's brow furrowed. "I thought you were all lieutenants? Is that not your job?"

"We are," Razze said. "But that's just a rank, not a profession. All of us have other duties as well. For instance, Neana and I are First Swords. We're in charge of our ship's marine contingent. Chandra is a Navigator, and also a Ship's Master."

"That sounds like an important position," Victor said, with what sounded like genuine respect.

Neana chuckled cruelly. "It means she keeps the ship's books, ledgers, and so on. She's a glorified clerk. In the Brelish navy, they'd call her the Purser, but in the Cyran navy we like to use the old names."

"And I would hardly equate my vocation with that of a simple clerk! I am responsible for the management of all the ship's monies—" Chandra began, but Sam rolled smoothly over the potential argument by adding in, "And I'm the ship's First Bow, which means I'm in charge of all the archers, and the ballista and the stone-throwers. I'm also the ship's Cappabarrio."

"Cappabarrio? I don't know that word."

She grinned. "It means I'm the ship's official thief."

Victor looked shocked. Everyone but Sam looked mildly embarrassed. "You mean to say that that's an actual position?"

Razze tried to explain. "It's like this: whenever a ship is damaged, they put into a friendly port, and they apply to the port authority for resupply and repairs. But the port authorities aren't always… uh… completely…"

"Some of them are crooks," Neana said bluntly.

"Yes," Razze admitted. "Especially the ones that are far away from Metrol, and the reach of the royal accountants. And while they're supposed to distribute their resources among her majesty's ships impartially, according to need, they have a tendency to hoard supplies and hand them out in exchange for bribes and favors. Getting supplies out of a local governor is like squeezing blood from a rock. A hard, stony rock. A dry, parched, desert rock that hasn't seen moisture in centuries."

"So sometimes," Sam said proudly, "when the Captain needs a new mast, or brass fittings, or sacks of flour that aren't one-quarter weevils by volume, and the port authority balks, he comes to me. And I can usually find a way to get them. I can go through… adjacent… channels, and get my hands on goods that might not ordinarily be available."

Neana nodded gloomily. "She does. Sometimes the casks still have the Queen's seal on them. Sometimes, it's not even our queen."

"It's not wrong to take what ought to have been yours anyway," Sam said. "That's practically ethical, that is."

Razze smirked. "Think of it as yet another in a long line of fine old naval traditions."

"And this really happens?" Victor was fascinated. "Tell me more."

So they did. They talked of topgallants and bowsprits, of topsails and trysails and staysails. They explained to him the difference between a brig and a brigantine, and a barque and a barquentine. They argued the merits of square rigged versus lateen sails, and which was better for coastal ships, and which was better for far voyaging ships, and whether the trade-off in sailing power was made up for by the ability to tack two points into the wind. They spoke of bluff-bowed hulls and knife-bladed hulls and clinker-builts and carvel-builts until Victor begged off, because his head was spinning from all the unfamiliar terminology.

They lapsed into the natural refuge of all seamen: verbally impugning the sailing abilities of other nation's ships. They told him how the Brelish boats were all shallow-bottomed wallowers, more river pirates than true sea-goers. They described the way that Auindaren warships carried so great a load of men and weapons that they had to spread great clouds of white sails simply in order to catch the wind, and as a result they had the worst speed and points of sail of any nation's warships: in the parlance of sailors they were known as the Ogres of the Sea. They spoke of the dread galleys of the Karrnathi navy, crewed by skeletal oarsmen, which were hell to fight and deadly in coastal ambushes but had all the deep-ocean seamanship of a bathtub sailboat. They talked of the grab-bag nature of the Thanish navy, where deadly crimson cutters rubbed shoulders with impressed fishing boats and rotting pontoons, and where the Admiral of the Navy was as likely as not to have been a priest or a saintly hermit as a boat's captain, all because the Thranes prized religious zeal over seaworthiness and fighting ability. And they spoke of their own navy, which was admittedly tiny, but so fierce and well trained and well-armed that it could hold its own with any other in the world. They told him of the different kinds of ships that Cyre deployed; of the small, quick spear-ships which killed by ramming and the great shield-ships which were like great wooden fortresses filled to the brim with archers and marines, and they spoke of their own ships, The Kitten and the Bear, which were somewhere in between. Sam and Razze took turns explaining the glorious history of the Mother Bear; how it had once been an enemy vessel – the flagship of a Brelish blockade armada – before it had been captured at sea, and how Captain Klein had never lost a battle,though there had been some draws, and how, according to tradition, the figurehead sported a bear cub representing each of the three ship's watches, and how each watch group and their officers was responsible for painting and decorating their own cub.

"Mine is lavender," Sam put in.

"My watch's is a lot manlier," Razzed added quickly.

Even Neana felt moved to speak of the "curse" of the Black Cat, that killed every male officer until the ship was eventually commissioned entirely by women and ironically renamed the Dire Kitten. "Since then," she added dryly, "the ship has become the most desired listing for male sailors in the fleet. I can't imagine why."

By this point in the day the sun was beginning to flag and the five of them were more than halfway up the final cliff; the so-called Screaming Wall. The streams of water that had dotted the other cliffs were gone, replaced by jagged crags and cruel, whipping winds. The wind made a high, keening sound as it clutched at the face of the rock which did indeed sound like a woman's grief-stricken cries. Victor explained that it was called The Wail by some, who whispered darkly that it was an orphan-maker or a wall. At this height, the cliff's face was more exposed to the naked elements, and so the carved hand-holds were eroded and worn; every strong gust threatened to pull them off the face of the wall. Neana looked down once and saw that Chandra's face was ghastly in the orange light of sunset. She felt a stab of unaccustomed pity, but could do nothing but keep her flight spell at the forefront of her mind. All of them kept the conversation going purely to keep themselves from thinking about the drop.

It was fortunate that they had Sam and Razze with them, because between the two of them they could keep the words flowing like water. They waxed poetic. They tried to make Victor feel the ocean as they did. They described the way in which at ship at sea was like a musical instrument, how the crew coaxed speed from the taught lines and billowing sails like a musician drawing chords from a harp. They told him of the way that the water moved with the ship, and around the ship; how water had its own rich landscape. Sometimes you got sweet flowing ocean current, like a road straight to your destination, and sometimes you hit a patch of bitter bitch-sea, where hateful waves battered at the hull of your ship like fists and for every league you moved forward you were pounded two leagues back. They talked of the calm glass seas, where the water was so still and flat that sailors could go mad and believe that they could walk across the face of it, and the wine-dark Rage Sea, where even on a calm day the waves were like moving walls of water as tall as a ship.

Neana felt her heart moved by unaccustomed nostalgia, and she found herself missing the sea.

They ran out of words by the time the sun set, after they had finally pulled their aching limbs over the lip of the Screaming Wall and lay in crumpled piles upon the ground. Even Razze, always the soul of endurance, gasped and wheezed and poured his canteen over his face.

"We'll make camp here," Victor said, and the four lieutenants gave little cheers of relief. But when Neana reported that there was another of those obsidian slabs a few dozen yards from the cliff's edge, his face grew troubled and he changed his mind. "We'll go on a little farther."

They walked in the closing darkness, beneath trees whose gnarled bark was like running wax and whose limbs dripped with hanging mosses. They walked through wells of almost palpable shadow, and they stumbled with every other step despite the blue fire that Neana called up to light their way. They passed two more of the huge blocks of black glass, and they were only a few minutes past the last of them when Victor decided that they could go no farther in the gloomy dark.

"It's only a matter of time before one of you trips and kills yourselves," he said. "We'll have to rest here."

"What about the obsidian?" Neana objected.

"Those were once paving stones for the Devils' roads," he sighed. "And in those days, all roads led to Ka'rhashan. They'll only get more common as we get closer to the city."

When they were done eating, and Sam had pulled out her box-harp, Victor turned bashful again. "Could you play me a sea shanty?" he asked. "A proper one? Like Lonesome, Lowly Waters, or Last Voyage of the Ocean Queen?"

This confused them. "I've never heard either of those," Sam said.

"What? Well what about The Hanging of Jack O'Green-Waters? Or The Maiden's Lament?"

"Never heard of those either. Have any of you?" None of them had. "I can play you Drop of Blood," Sam offered. "Or Tavern Champion, or The Good Ship Fornication – that's my favorite – or Lolling Molly's Complaint."

Victor looked mystified. "I've never heard any of those."

This went on for some time, with Sam and Victor each naming long lists of songs that the other had never heard of. Sam sang a few snatches of this and that, usually choosing the dirtiest, liveliest part of each song, and Victor would hum a few notes of the songs that he knew, which were usually mournful dirges.

Blood Red Roses? No. Bonnie Portmore? No. The Last Mermaid? Nope. Haul the Bowline? Never heard of it.

Finally Razze brought the whole thing to a head by observing, "It seems to me that there are basically two kinds of sea shanties. There are the kind that people on land sing about the sea, which are full of wishing and wailing and lamenting and pining for lost loves, and there are the kind that sailor's sing about getting back to port, which are about drinking and fighting and, ah…"

"Fucking and whores," Sam supplied.

"Right. Right. I guess that makes sense; when a sailor is at sea, he's not thinking about the beauty of the moons on the misty waters, or the call of the lonesome gull. A sailor has his eye on a good, hot meal, a measure of rum, a bed that isn't damp, and somebody warm to share it with."

"Poets do not write odes to what they have," Chandra said, "but to what they lack, and desire."

"Well put. Seamen are a busy, practical lot on the whole. They don't have the time or energy for frivolities. It's only the people on land who have the spare time necessary to ponder the mysteries of the sea." He paused. "It's a kind of metaphor for existence, you see?"

"That was some prime philosophizing, Razze." Sam said admiringly.

"Thank you."

"Well now that I'm on land again," Sam said, "I'm starting to miss the sea. I guess I'm thinking like a landlubber. So I think I'll play some of these philosophical sea songs, if our new friend Victor is willing to teach them to me."

He was, and they did. Some of them were quite sad, and many of them were hauntingly beautiful, even if they did contain a little too much "too-rah-loo-rah" and "down by the sea-o, the sea-o" for Neana's taste. And then she played a few of the old shipboard favorites: the Cussing Round they used to raise the anchors – "Oh, you have to cuss up the anchor, otherwise the anchor, she won't rise." – and The Good Ship Fornication, which was probably the filthiest song ever sung in any language, and caused Chandra to excuse herself and retreat to her tent after only three verses.

It was the best night they all had together in Q'barra.

It was also the last.