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our fortunes.’
    ‘We thought that about the last one.’
    ‘This is Adrana, this is Arafura,’ Rackamore went on. ‘And this is . . . well, why don’t you introduce yourself?’
    ‘Prozor,’ she said.
    Her face had a hard, feral look to it. The name was one I’d already seen in the ledger. Rackamore had lost two Bauble Readers in the last ten years, but Prozor had been in that position for long enough that her name had gone all the way down the bottom half of the ledger, year by year.
    ‘Get them aboard, show them their quarters, make sure they’re given something to eat and drink. Oh – and Prozor?’
    ‘Cap’n?’
    ‘This is new to them. Every part of it, from weightlessness to living with vacuum only a scratch away.’
    Prozor shrugged. ‘I’ll make allowance.’
    ‘Good. And now I need to talk to Hirtshal about the new sail we’ve just brought from Mazarile. We’ll break orbit shortly, on ions if the sails aren’t ready. I’ve a mind to put some leagues between us and Hadramaw Dock.’
    ‘Something up?’
    Rackamore nodded, his jaw set tight. ‘Family business.’
     
    They never told us exactly how old the ship was, or who had owned it before Rackamore, much less who’d put down the quoins to have her made. But if the long- dead coves who’d designed the Monetta’s Mourn had set out to make her insides as confusing and twisty as possible, they couldn’t have bettered the job they’d done. It was a mad maze of passages and rooms and cupboards and doors. Four hundred spans doesn’t seem like much, and maybe it isn’t when you’re speaking of a row of houses or a stroll through Mavarasp Park. But it’s surprising how many little rooms you can stuff into the fat belly of a four-hundred- span ship, and surprising how many different ways you can come up with of linking them together, especially when there’s no up or down and no good reason not to put a door in a ceiling or a window in a floor. Passages twisted, forked, doubled back on themselves for no sound argument. Ladders and stairways threaded between decks, while bone- scraping crawlways linked compartments. There were hatches and ducts, elevators and winches. Pipes and wires went everywhere, and the ship gurgled, hissed and hummed to itself like a thing that was already half alive. Lightvine had been strung along the pipes and wires, encouraged to grow into all the inhabited spaces of the ship. Where the lightvine couldn’t be coaxed, other artificial lighting sources had been used.
    ‘This is where you’ll get your squint- time,’ Prozor said, when we reached what seemed to be a set of cupboards. ‘Ain’t large, but you won’t need much space when we’re under way. More beddin’ if you need it – you probably will.’
    ‘We sleep here?’ Adrana asked.
    ‘No, girlie, you play skittles here.’ Prozor opened the doors to show us what we were facing.
    ‘Does it get cold?’ I risked asking.
    ‘Truer to say it sometimes gets warm. Not afraid of a little cold, is you?’
    ‘I’m not,’ I said.
    ‘We’ll manage,’ Adrana said, casting me a glance.
    The space was a compartment about the size of the smallest room either of us had ever slept in, and this was meant for two. At the back of it were two hammocks, one above the other, and a curtain that you could tug across the hammocks for privacy. Prozor showed us the hatches that held more bedding, as well as space for personal effects – not that we’d brought anything with us.
    ‘Sumptuous,’ I said.
    ‘Used to better, is you?’
    ‘I thought the captain told you to be nice to us,’ Adrana said.
    ‘You were getting the nasty side of me, you’d know it.’ But after a heavy sigh Prozor said: ‘Ain’t as bad as it looks. A cove gets used to things soon enough, and you’ll only spend as much time here as you want to. We nosh together. You’ll be the new cooks now – it’s always the Bone Reader what cooks, ’cause them being so precious and delicate they