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the pair inside the funnel, and beside her Taliktrum hissed. Dri felt it, too: the huge weight of the funnel, tearing at her ribs. The East Arqualis were crawling out past their legs, making an about-face on the rope
(Hurry, by Rin, hurry!)
and climbing, like the others, up her body and Taliktrum's. Her nephew's teeth were locked and his lips pulled back in a snarl of pain. But together they bore the weight.
    “Climb, Aunty,” he whispered.
    Dri shook her head. “You first.”
    “I'm stronger—”
    “Go! S'an order!”
She could not manage another word. Still he disobeyed! He glanced down at her straining ribs, seemed to consider. Then, with the same acrobat's grace as his father at twenty, he loosed his grip and kicked himself past the rim of the funnel.
    Something ripped inside her. She cried out. The ixchel above seized Taliktrum as he leaped, turned him in the air by his ankles, and just as Dri's grip broke his hand descended and caught her own, and dragged her past the funnel's lip.
    The last thirty feet were a red agony for Diadrelu. But when they gained the ship they were safe—the rope was cleated next to a lifeboat bound under a broad tarpaulin. They slipped under this rainproof cloth with ease. Dri found her people clustered about a message scrawled with charcoal on the deck. Ixchel words, too small for giant eyes:
    DOOR AT STEPRAIL, NO LATCH, 8 FT 9 IN. STARBOARD. WELCOME ABOARD, M'LADY .
    Dri turned to look for the hidden door—and collapsed. The pain in her chest was like a swallowed knife. But at last it was done. Fourclans brought aboard in as many days. Nine of her people killed on previous boardings, just one today.
Nytikyn
. He was to marry a girl in Etherhorde, wore her clan emblem on a chain at his wrist. Dri herself would have to tell her. And his parents. And the other parents, children, lovers of the slain.
    Ten dead for this mission already. And we haven't left port
.

The Master and His Lads
     
    2–3 Vaqrin 941

     
    On a skysail mast, three hundred feet over the deck of the
Chathrand
, a bird sat in the dawn drizzle, watching the ixchel's progress up the rope with perfect indifference. He was an extraordinarily beautiful bird: a moon falcon, black above, cream-yellow below. He was smaller than a hawk but a better hunter, and quick enough to steal a fish from an eagle's claw if he took a mind to. When the she-ix flapped about in her feather suit, the falcon thought idly of killing her, out of pride more than hunger, for she was offensively ugly in flight. Not her domain. But the falcon knew his duty, and did not move as the little people staggered under the lifeboat, and a few last rats hurled themselves aboard by the gangplanks, and a toothless prisoner from the Sorrophran jail dabbed hot tar on the mast just a few yards below him, chattering foolishly:
“Lo, Jimmy Bird! Sailin' with the Great Ship, are we?”
    There were prisoners all over the ship, sanding rough planks, tarring ropes against the months of salt spray ahead, driving brass pegs into transom and mast. The falcon noted them as he would cattle in a field: inedible, useless, no threat to him. In all Sorrophran, just one thing mattered: an ornate red carriage by the Mariners' Inn,eight blocks uphill from the water. The falcon's eyes were so sharp he could count the flies on the horses' rumps, but they could not pierce the tavern door, nor see who had arrived by that carriage in the night.
    “’Ere's bread for a handsome Jim!”
    The prisoner took a moldy biscuit from his pocket, snapped it in two and tossed half at the falcon. The bird did not deign to move. On the wharf, a great crowd was gathering before the
Chathrand:
street boys, staggering drunks, noncommissioned sailors with their pale wives and barefoot children, fruit-sellers, grog-sellers, Rappopolni monks in their mustard-yellow robes. All were held back from the
Chathrand's
main gangway by a wooden fence that cut the square in two. Imperial marines, their gold