The Skir Master stood before the boy, poking and prodding him, inspecting him like livestock. Then he checked the bonds.

Argoth spoke aside to the captain. “I thought the practice was to use a goat or ram.”

The Skir Master answered. “Some fish fancy flies, others worms, others a bit of stinking gore. It all depends on what you’re trying to catch and what the beasts are biting.”

“Yes, Great One,” said Argoth.

The ship rolled with a large wave, and Argoth held to the rail.

An officer called to the captain from the main deck. “Everything secured, Zu.”

“Great One,” the captain said and bowed slightly to the Skir Master.

The Skir Master faced Argoth, his coat flapping in the breeze. He withdrew a large spike from his coat pocket and held it up. “Here is the spark. When I set it and quicken the weave, the bait’s essence will rise into the sky like a smoke. It will call to them like bloody chum calls to sharks.” Then he turned and inserted the spike into a slot. When it was set, he inserted a pin crossways through the end of the spike to secure it.

The boy in the bowl sagged.

In that moment Argoth told himself he was not like the Divines. There was a difference. But then the boy looked up through his drugged eyes and Argoth saw Nettle, drugged and lying on the table.

What had he done to his son?

“Can you hear it?” asked the Skir Master.

“Great One?”

“The singing.”

Argoth did not know what he meant.

He patted the great bowl. “The weave. It’s calling, singing. They all do, great and small. That is the Kain’s art-to weave the songs of power. You can hear this one if you listen carefully.”

Argoth knew that weaves thrummed when you quickened them. But singing? He closed his eyes and focused. He heard the waves slapping the hull, the creak of the rigging. Then he heard something else. Something very soft that he immediately lost. He focused, then caught it again-a chorus of winds, rising and falling in a pattern, with a deep rumble running through them. Then one voice rose above the rest. He opened his eyes in wonder.

“All living things sing,” said the Skir Master. Then he smiled, and the look in that smile was so malevolent it took Argoth aback. But as soon as it came the look was gone.

“I see,” said Argoth.

“No, you don’t.” The Skir Master gestured out over the sea. “Empty. Nothing but a few thin clouds, right?”

Argoth did not have an answer.

“It’s full,” said the Skir Master. “Teeming with life. The air, waters, heavens, and earth-teeming. The Creators let nothing go to waste. Humans see, smell, perceive almost nothing.”

“And do you see it all, Great One?” asked Argoth.

The Skir Master did not reply. Instead he reached into his coat and retrieved something made of gold. He held it out to Argoth. “Put these on.”

Argoth bowed slightly, then walked to where the Skir Master stood inside his pulpit railing.

All this time the bowl and boy had claimed Argoth’s attention. Now he saw the pulpit railing circled a large weave of bronze inlaid into the deck of the ship.

Argoth took the object from the Skir Master’s hand. It was made of two wafers of milky stone, about the diameter of duck eggs, affixed between two bows of gold. Two long hooks were attached to the points of the bows.

“Spectacles,” said the Skir Master. “Place the bow upon your nose and the hooks about your ears.”

Argoth hesitated.

“It’s wondrous,” said the captain. “I’ve looked through them myself.”

Argoth could not fathom how he might see anything through the opaque stones, but he put the spectacles on. He felt a thrumming and knew it was a weave.

“Give it some time,” said the Skir Master.

Argoth stared at the milk walls of the stones. He wondered how many other weaves were aboard this ship. For a moment he thought about looking for them. They would be a boon to the Order. But then he discarded the idea. He was going to have enough problems enthralling the Skir Master and finding out who else knew their secrets.

He stood at the railing for half an hour and then he noticed the stones begin to clear. That or he was seeing things.

“Great One?”

“Do you see them, Clansman?”

He saw a flash of something: the palest of lavenders with a yellow streak running through it. Then the milk of the stones was gone, and he saw it was not one thing, but three, no, five.

He took in his breath. There before him was a ghostly image of the ship and bowl. He could see the Skir Master and the sea. But they too were insubstantial. Mere phantoms. And clustered about the boy were creatures as long as one of his arms. They had attached to him like a remora attaches to a great fish.

“What are they?”

“Hoppen. Minor things.”

“I thought all skir were fearsome.”

“There are indeed skir deep in the earth, beings so frightful none dare call them. But there are also small things, playful things, curious things.”

“What are they doing?”

“Feeding on the boy’s Fire,” said the Skir Master. Then he took what looked like a brush of long horsehair, a flyswatter, and waved it amid the creatures. They scattered like fish.

Argoth lifted his spectacles. The sunlight made him squint, but he saw it wasn’t horsehair at all. Only a thin bone wrapped with leather at one end. A bone from a human forearm maybe. He replaced the spectacles and lifted them again. Only part of what the Skir Master held in his hand was visible.

“Do you see the ignorant pride of humans?” said the Skir Master. “And this is only a part. Every time we extend our ability to perceive, we find a world already there.”

A chill ran through Argoth then. All his life he had thought himself wise with lore. Wise with years. And now he realized he knew nothing. When he attacked the Skir Master this night, would it be like a little boy carrying a stick attacking a man in full armor?

Argoth lowered the spectacles back to his nose. Two of the creatures returned like magpies to carrion, hovering in the air just out of the Skir Master’s reach, their bodies undulating like sea snakes in the tide.

The wind rose sharply about Argoth, tossing his hair and wetting him with sea spray. The captain let out a slow moan, and suddenly the wind was in Argoth, passing over his bones. All about him shone a brightness, a translucent presence like the rounding of a thinly tinted glass.

The presence flowed over him and then to the bowl. Argoth gasped. It was a creature as thick as a horse but far longer, tapering and flattening at each end. It coiled one end about the bowl, the rest of its body stretching along the aftercastle and ending far out over the water. Argoth thought at first it was a giant serpent, but it had no head. No mouth. Not one eye. Along its whole length undulated thousands of bright, fine hairs half as long as he. In those hairs smaller creatures moved like band fish in the tentacles of an immense anemone.

“What is it?” Argoth asked.

“An ayten,” said the Skir Master.

The ayten inserted one of its ends into the bowl and began to feel the boy with its bright hairs.

“How they can eat both Fire and soul,” said the Skir Master, “we do not know. But when she’s finished the sacrifice will be hollow.”

The boy cried out. A soft moan that rose into a desperate keening.

Then the ayten bent that end and pressed into the bowl, engulfing the boy in its hairs. The hairs tossed and jerked as if the boy struggled within them. Then they were still. “Lords,” said Argoth in horror.

“An amazing thing,” said the captain, “isn’t it?”

Amazing was not the word Argoth would have used. When he finally found his voice, he said, “And this creature then powers the ship?”

“No,” said the Skir Master, raising his hand and pointing behind Argoth. “She does.”

Argoth turned, looked up, and the immensity of what he saw stole his breath.