The Akaneed stared down at the deck as those upon it stared back up at the titanic snake. Its head snapped forward, jaws parting to expose rows of needlelike teeth, a roar tearing out of its throat on sheets of salty miss.

‘ That,’ Gariath roared over it, ‘ is big.’

You served your people.

Kataria heard it over her own footsteps.

Yours was a duty to all shicts.

Kataria heard it over her own thoughts.

You did the right thing.

Kataria did not believe it.

And yet, she continued down the stairs of the companionway, all the same. She may have doubted the quality of the Howling’s message, but was driven forward by the frequency and urgency of its insistence. It spoke inside her a dozen times with each step she took.

You did the right thing. You did the right thing. You did the right thing.

By the time she reached the end of the stairs, she knew it was right, because the shict who spoke to her knew it was right. It had ceased to be reassurance, ceased to be a message. It was knowledge now, as primal a knowledge as knowing how to swim and to hunt.

But with the next step, between the two hundred and forty-first time and the two hundred and forty-second time she heard it, she knew she still didn’t believe it.

Perhaps it was that doubt that no shict could ever feel for the Howling that brought the tears to her eyes. Perhaps those came from a different instinct altogether. She didn’t dare think on it. She brushed them from her face with the back of her hand. If she began weeping now, over a human, over the doubt, that knowledge would become shared.

And she could not bear the thought of descending and finding her kinsman weeping as well.

The sight that greeted her in the vast ship’s hold, however, was one of emptiness. Benches and cots lined the hull, presumably for the netherlings to sleep upon when they weren’t fighting, crushing, killing, shoving jagged blades into throats from which her name emerged on blood-choked screams …

Stop it, she told herself.

Stop it, the Howling agreed.

And she did. It was powerful here, speaking to her with greater clarity, greater urgency. It needed only to speak once, and she knew it to be true. She felt her eyes drawn to the darkness at the end of the cabin, the great void that ate the light of overhanging oil lamps. She could see the shadows of a cage’s cold iron bars, and while she could see nothing beyond that, she could hear something; she could feel something.

A heartbeat. A thought. A knowledge that was hers. A knowledge that was theirs.

A shict.

She had barely taken another step when she noticed the lone netherling in her path, and then only after she noticed the jagged blade hurtling towards her. She fell to the deck, hearing the blade’s frustrated wail as its teeth sheared only a few hairs from her head.

‘Just how many colours do you things come in?’ the longface grunted.

Kataria’s answer came with a growl.

The arrow was up and in the bow, drawn back as far as she could force the rigid thing to go, and launched a moment later. A moment was all it took, however, for the longface’s shield to go up, sending the missile ringing off.

Stupid piece of …Kataria thought irately, glowering at the weapon. Who the hell would call this stick a bow?

The netherling, apparently, agreed, if the broad grin with which she raised her sword was any indication. Still, she refused to advance, holding her shield up defensively as she watched Kataria draw her final arrow back. Such lack of a willingness to have a piece of iron wedged in one’s brow, the shict figured, was likely what led this one to be below.

And yet it served her frustratingly well as Kataria aimed and launched, slipping past the longface’s shield to find an unyielding iron breastplate below. It was clear, then, that what the black bow lacked in accuracy it made up for in power. The longface was driven back a step, nothing more than an inconvenience before she readied to charge upon the now-defenceless shict.

Still, Kataria smiled. A single step was all she had needed.

The green fingers that came slithering out between the bars would handle the rest.

The longface’s cry was brief as the long fingers, attached to longer hands and longer arms still, wrapped around her throat in five tiny pythons. They scarcely trembled as they intertwined and pulled her back towards the bars, possessed of a cold passionlessness that suggested this was just one more neck, like all the other necks that had been strangled. Cold hands. Killer hands.

Shict hands.

Kataria forced herself to watch as the crown of the long-face’s head was pulled between the bars, her screams choked as she was fed head-first into an unyielding iron mouth. There was nothing to silence the sound of bone groaning and popping as, hairsbreadth by agonising hairsbreadth, she was pulled between bars that would not accommodate her thick skull.

This, she reminded herself, was what shicts did. Shicts did what they had to. The world, filled with diseases of pink and purple, left them no choice.

The long, purple face was consumed in the void of the cage. Her body twitched soundlessly for but a moment before her legs went slack, bending her back at an awkward angle as she lay still, thick neck wedged between the bars and suspending her in standing, artificial rigour.

Cold, killer fingers slipped out and calmly reached into a pouch at the longface’s belt. A few moments of deft search revealed a wrought-iron key that was drawn out neatly between two green digits. A faint clicking noise emerged after those fingers vanished back into shadow. The cage door groaned as it swung open, dragging the corpse frozen in its grip across the deck with it.

He stepped out of the void, a great green plant out of dark earth, stepping lightly on feet bearing thumbs. Countless time in a cramped cage had done nothing to stunt his stature as he rose high enough for his bald pate to scrape the underside of the oil lamp above him. From his groin up, a long line of symbols ran the length of his body, each one a story.

And each one a death. Of wife. Of child. Of their murderers.

Each symbol was no bigger than a thumbprint, but each sorrow and every hatred was condensed into a pattern of lines that only a shict would know.

Kataria knew.

‘What is your name?’ she asked.

He stared at her with even blue eyes.

‘You already know.’

Upon his lips, the shictish tongue, theirtongue, sounded so eloquent. She wondered absently if he could hear the dust on her own tongue.

She searched herself, listened to the Howling.

‘Naxiaw,’ she said, looking up at him. ‘I am … pleased you are well.’

‘Pleased?’ His lips peeled back into a broad smile, his canines twice as large as hers. Long arms parted in a gesture almost warm enough for her to forget they had just been used to pull a longface through bars. ‘Sister. We are not strangers.’

She would have been shocked to find herself laughing, possibly a little worried to find the sound so hysterical. That thought was lost in a sea of emotion that carried her on running feet to leap into him. His arms wrapped about her, drew her close to a broad chest. A great weight had fallen from her, evidenced by how easily Naxiaw drew her up off her feet.

In his arms, she found memory. She found a hand on her shoulder, reassuring her after her ears were notched. She found the scent of rabbits cooking and fires. She found the dirge of bows and the song of funeral pyres. She found memories of her father, his sternness, his words, his speeches, his memories. Of her mother, she found only lightness.

She found everything the Howling said she would find.

‘Little Sister,’ Naxiaw said, holding her closely, ‘you are far from home.’