‘I know.’ Her lips had turned blue. She was shaking.

‘Remember when we talked in the garden? I promised you that no one, not even God, would destroy you. I’ve kept my word as best I could.’

She nodded, a spasm of shivers running through her.

‘I don’t know what else to say. It’s been a hell of a day. I fought the unmakers, rescued you from the emperor’s guards, tried to rebuild a ship’s mind with my bare hands, and I’m so exhausted I’m weepy and indecisive. Watching you dispatch yourself to oblivion would just about top things off nicely. Elenya, I’ve saved your life once already. I didn’t do it so you could throw it away a few hours later.’

Elenya tried to talk. Her teeth were chattering too much for Benzamir to catch all that she said. ‘ . . . ask you . . .’

‘No, you didn’t ask me to. You weren’t conscious, and I assumed you wanted to live. I was wrong.’ He bowed low. ‘Apologies, Princess.’

Benzamir turned away and started to walk back to Said and Wahir. He’d lost all feeling below his knees, and he stumbled and fell. He waved away any attempt to help him. He crawled from the water like a beast and hung his head low.

‘Master?’

‘Yes, Wahir?’

‘Should I get the holy man?’

‘He’s the only one who can save her, but look – he’s not here. Neither is he coming, though I expect he’s on his knees just like me, railing at God for having put him in such an impossible situation.’

‘But . . .’

‘Just don’t watch when it happens. Why do you think I’m down here?’

Alessandra was walking towards them, her robes fluttering like flags in the wind. ‘If you’re looking for someone to blame, Benzamir, you can blame me.’

He looked up. ‘What?’

‘Ariadne has been teaching me how to fight with your weapons.’

‘How did you make her do that?’

‘Make her? I didn’t make her. She suggested it,’ she said, ‘because neither of us will stand by and watch you die. Elenya must have overheard us. I didn’t know she could speak Arabic.’ She carried on walking, past them, to the lake’s edge.

‘If you were on Ariadne, it wouldn’t have been Arabic to her.’

‘That’ll be it.’ Alessandra gathered up her skirts to her thighs and gasped at the first touch of water. Then she ploughed out into the lake until she was no more than an arm’s length away from Elenya.

‘I’m going to lose them both.’ Despite everything, Benzamir rolled onto his backside and held up his arms. ‘Said? Wahir?’

They pulled him up, barely daring to breathe. Alessandra faced Elenya, who had been in the water so long, she could no longer move.

‘How can you stand this?’ asked Alessandra. ‘The water is so cold.’

Elenya’s hands still cradled the bomb, but she did nothing with it.

‘If you kill yourself, you’ll kill me. I don’t know if you even care, but I choose life.’

Alessandra’s hand stretched out slowly. She took half a step closer. ‘Princess? Elenya?’

She found that she was able to reach out and pluck the bomb as if she were taking an apple from a bowl. She held it for a moment in front of her face, then threw it into the deep water.

The men on the beach stood nonplussed, then Said patted Benzamir’s arm. ‘I’ll fetch them out.’

He too waded out towards Elenya, creating a wave, white with foam, that flowed around his legs. As he approached her, she fell backwards into the black water and vanished with barely a ripple.

‘No!’

‘I have her,’ said Said. He plunged his hands below the surface and pulled out a limp white body, clothed in green and brown. He gathered her up and called back to the shore. ‘See! I have her.’

CHAPTER 41

VA WAS SITTING hunched on a rock at the brow of the hill. Ariadne’s drive-pod loomed over his head, blocking out what light there was that came from the leaden sky. The sun had spiralled away behind them, low on the horizon. It was inexpressibly cold.

‘Brother?’ said Benzamir. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Looking for answers. Finding none. And you, Mahgrebi?’

‘More or less the same.’ Benzamir kicked a rock down the slope, and watched it tumble and bounce away.

‘The ship, Persephone. Did you heal it?’

‘No. It was a fool’s errand from start to finish. She was dead; now she’s mad. All she does is sing.’ He sat down next to the monk. ‘For some reason Ariadne takes comfort in that. She used to play among the stars, and she’s reduced to this. I should never have agreed to meddle with her.’

‘So why did you?’

‘Because,’ said Benzamir, ‘I have an insatiable urge to try and fix things. Situations, ships, people. It makes so much trouble for me.’

Va stared into the distance. ‘Then you should stop.’

‘I know. What’s to be done with the princess?’

‘You seem to ask as if I had some power or authority over her. She is free to do whatever she wishes.’ Va rubbed his hands together slowly, squeezing the problem between his palms to make it more malleable. ‘I loved her once. No, that’s not true. I thought I could possess her once. Own her body and soul. Her rejection of me was like a fire that would never go out. And now it is me who is glacially cold towards her, and she who burns every moment of every day.’

‘I would’ – Benzamir stared at his feet, even as he felt his cheeks colour despite the cold – ‘I would fix her.’

Va looked at him suddenly, as if noticing him for the first time.

‘What? What is it?’ asked Benzamir with increasing urgency.

‘Should I laugh or cry? Listen, Maghrebi, this is not a game that you can win. Even you are not magician enough to change the way Elenya feels about me. Sometimes I wonder if any power in Heaven or Earth can. If you took her beyond this world, as I believe you can, and showed her every wonder of creation, do you think it would make her want me less? And you more?’

‘I don’t know what I’m thinking,’ confessed Benzamir. ‘I used to. Before I met her.’

‘You’re not the first. Look at me.’ Va swept a hand over the scars on his head. ‘Look what I’ve done, what I could do. I am a monster. And yet she loves only me.’

Benzamir swallowed hard. He felt almost weightless. ‘It’s time we went.’ But he didn’t move. He stared out to sea, searching fruitlessly for the line which divided the ocean from the sky.

The hum of the ship invaded Benzamir’s cabin and kept him from sleep so long that he never noticed the slide into unconsciousness. One moment he was staring, dry-eyed, at the wall, the next he was awake again with a figure sitting at his feet. There was no transition, no sense of time passing, no feeling of being rested.

He could see in the dark. What light there was from the pinpoints marking the door frame was sufficient.

‘Alessandra? How long have you been there?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘A while.’

Benzamir blinked. ‘Ariadne should have told me. In fact, Ariadne shouldn’t have let you in.’

‘She said you couldn’t sleep.’

‘I’ve become unused to this room. All the places I’ve slept in: cots, beds, floors, hammocks slung over the decks of ships at sea. And now I have problems. I should have gone to the flight deck; there’s something about that chair.’

‘She said she was worried about you.’

‘Ariadne is always worried about me. It’s part of the arrangement.’ He rubbed his face. ‘Except she’s not talking to me at the moment. I suppose I could see this as a thaw in relations.’

‘Why are you angry with her?’

‘Because Ariadne has an armoured hull and a gigawatt laser. You don’t. She has no business asking you to risk your neck in any battle plan we might come up with. I told her so, and that was pretty much that.’

‘You’re going to fight them, aren’t you?’

Benzamir dialled the lights up enough to allow her to see him, wrapped in a sheet, face slack with fatigue, and for him to see her properly, hunched over, tense as a steel wire.