If something bad had happened to the Warden of Heaven, what did it mean for Jesry?

I was desperate to know. I didn’t dare ask.

When it was over, I was too drained to move. As the cabin emptied out I sat slumped against a steel bulkhead, letting the ship’s engines jiggle my brain around.

One of the other Kedevs had been talking to Alwash. When the cabin was nearly empty they approached me. I sat up and tried to muster strength to fight back another religious harangue.

This new guy’s name was Malter. “I was wondering,” Malter said, “are you one of the avout?”

I did not move or speak. I was trying to remember what the Kelx thought of us.

“The reason I ask,” Malter went on, “is that there were rumors going around town, before we shipped out, that an avout in disguise had come down the glacier in the last few days and got into trouble just like what you described.”

I was startled. Not for long. It was easy to imagine Laro raving, to anyone who would listen, about his bizarre and tragic adventure with the avout who called himself Vit. Maybe I raised an eyebrow or something.

“I’ve always wanted to meet an avout,” Malter said. “I think it would be an honor.”

“Well,” I said, “you just met one.”

Mahsht was four times the size of the city around Saunt Edhar, and as such was the biggest city I’d yet been to in my peregrination—or my life, for that matter. To the great consternation of the regulars on this ship—the men who journeyed in transports like this one to and from the Arctic all the time—we were not given leave to enter the harbor and tie up at a pier as usual. Instead we had to stand off and keep station in the outer harbor. Word filtered down from the bridge that Mahsht had been thrown into disarray by the military convoys and that novel arrangements were being worked out from hour to hour.

I spent much of that day abovedecks, just looking at the place, and enjoying being in a part of the world where the weather wasn’t trying to kill me. Even though Mahsht was farther north than Edhar, at fifty-seven degrees of latitude, its climate was moderate because of a river of warm water in the ocean. Having said that, it wasn’t warm, just dependably chilly. You could be comfortable if you wore a jacket and stayed dry. Staying dry could be a bit of a project.

Mahsht was built around a fjord that forked into three arms. Each arm supported different kinds of facilities. One was military, and quite busy. One was commercial. It had been built around the end of the Praxic Age to handle cargo in steel boxes and hadn’t changed much since then. Normally our ship would have put in at a passenger terminal in that district. The third was the oldest. It had been built up out of stone and brick a thousand years before the Reconstitution, during the age when ships moved under power of wind and were unloaded by hand. Apparently there was still a demand for such facilities because smaller vessels went in and out of its stone docks all the time.

The old town and the port facilities were built on filled tide flats, incised with networks of canals, narrow and irregular in Old Mahsht, gridded lanes in the commercial and military sectors. Much of the land that separated the arms of the fjord was too steep to build on. The spires and ridges of stone supported ancient castles, luxury casinos, and radar stations. The territory outside of town was steeper yet: a misty green-black wall with unrecognizable constructs scraped out of it, hanging at crazy angles a mile in the sky. Alwash explained to me that these were places where people paid to slide downhill on packed snow. It didn’t appeal to me at the moment.

After a day, a tug came out and brought us to a wharf in Old Mahsht. According to the regulars, this had never happened before—they always went to the “new” commercial district. So, as much as I was absorbed in the workings of the tug and the shifting views of Old Mahsht’s warehouses, arks, cathedrals, and town center, I had now to give some thought to how I was going to find Cord, Sammann, Gnel, and Yul—or how I could help them find me. Should I walk to the commercial port on the assumption they’d be waiting for me there? Or would they have already heard about the disruptions in traffic and be looking for me in Old Mahsht?

As soon as I came down the gangplank it was clear that Old Mahsht was the right place. Since the military part of town could not tolerate disarray and the commercial part found it unprofitable, all of the chaos had been pushed into the old town, which had become the kingdom of broken plans and improvisations. All of the city’s proper lodgings had been claimed by contractors from the south who were involved in this project of moving the military north, so people were sleeping in mobes and fetches, or on the streets. Against them, all doors were locked and many were guarded, so they were channeled into such open places as could be found, such as the tops of the wharves, unbuilt stretches of tide flat, and lots where ancient warehouses had been demolished to make room for new projects that had never been realized. This is what the gangplank spewed me into. I shuffled down the ramp scanning the crowd for my friends. The longer I sought their faces, the lower I was pushed on the ramp and the less I could see. Then I was down in it and could see nothing. Having no plan, I let the currents of the multitude stir me around. When I sensed still pockets or eddies in the flow I sidled into them and stood and looked about. From what I’ve described so far you might think it was a scene of terrible poverty, but the more I observed the more it was plain to me that there was work to be had here, that people had come to find it, and that what I was seeing—what I had become part of—was a kind of prosperity. Young men queued to talk to important fellows who I assumed were buyers of labor. Many others had come to sell goods or services to those who’d found work, so people were cooking food in carts or on open fires, hawking mysterious effects from the pockets of their coats, or behaving in very strange ways that, as I slowly realized, meant that they were willing to sell their bodies. Old road-worn passenger coaches nudged through the crowds at slower than walking pace to discharge or take on passengers. The only wheeled transport that seemed to be of any practical use were pedal-powered cycles and motor scooters. Preachers of diverse arks commandeered pinch-points in the flow and shouted gospels and prophecies into crackling amps. There was a lot of uncollected garbage and open-air defecation, which made me glad it wasn’t warmer.

The generous climate had long attracted immigrants, who came from all over the world, singly or in waves, and climbed up into fjords or mountain valleys to live as they pleased. Over time they developed their own modes of dress and even distinct racial characteristics. I bought food from a cart—it was easily the best food I’d had since my last supper at Saunt Edhar—and stood there eating it and watching the pageant. Long-haired mountain men, always alone. A huge family, moving in a tight formation, males in broad-brimmed hats, females in face-veils. A multi-racial group, all wearing red T-shirts, every head—men’s and women’s alike—shaved clean. A race, if that was the right word, of tall people with bony noses and prematurely white hair, hawking fresh shellfish packed in poly crates full of seaweed.

After I’d been off the ship for an hour, it had become evident that meeting up with Cord, Sammann, and the Crades could easily take more than one day. I started considering where I might sleep that night—for I had at last reached a latitude where the sun went down for a few hours at this time of year. I knew that there were no great concents this far north. But in a city as old as this one there had to be at least one small math—perhaps even one dating to the Old Mathic Age. Wondering if I should try to seek one out and talk my way in, I walked up a broad street that ran from the waterfront up to the Bazian cathedral, scanning the fronts of old buildings for Mathic architecture or anything that looked like a cloister.