He wouldn’t work an oar again. He would die first.

The net holding his hand shifted as the fat man stepped on it and heaved the harpoon into the waves. Gavin spun again, this time with the net releasing its grip on his hand. He couldn’t even feel that hand, couldn’t tell if his grip would hold. He scrambled, kicking in the waves, desperate to swim to steal the smallest moiety of assistance.

Two fingers of his other hand caught the net. Worn to scar and callus by his months on the oar, those blessed fingers held despite everything. And now he was being dragged straight backward, giving him a perfect view of the shark approaching. This would be no exploratory nuzzle, he could tell. It was going to strike.

Swinging slowly from left to right, Gavin got his fists full of net. He couldn’t spare the time to look up and see if he was putting a hand in the captured shark’s mouth above him; he couldn’t take his eyes off the shark in the water.

He pulled his knees up to his chest as the shark struck. Jaws flashed past his feet—missed. The shark spun in the waves and swam off in a broad circle. They didn’t like approaching the hull. Didn’t like that they could only strike from directly behind.

At least Gavin hoped that was how they were thinking, and that none were swimming deep under the waves to strike him from below.

The man on deck had almost retrieved his harpoon now, and Gavin saw his chance. The weight of the harpoon meant that it would dangle within reach of him at the stern. When it came, he would grab it and yank hard. The sailor, not expecting any such thing, would be hurled overboard. For the sharks.

It meant killing a stranger. A man about whom Gavin knew nothing. An innocent.

Fuck him. Gavin would live, and he would live free, and he would be armed.

The rope stretched within reach for one heartbeat, but Gavin couldn’t get his cramping hands to loosen in time to swing—and then the sailor pulled the harpoon off to the side so it wouldn’t tangle in the net. Damn!

Gavin turned his eyes back to the sharks, but none of them came at him. And indeed, they began hanging back farther and farther. The sailor with the harpoon swore.

“Freshwater,” he said, grumbling to himself.

And now that Gavin’s vision wasn’t battle tight, he saw that they had entered the very mouth of the river, not far from the western shore. The river itself was vast, wider than any river in the world. But the western shore was close—and as dirty with the sluggish current as he’d feared. If the boat he was riding on docked somewhere nearby, at least its hull would cut the sludge, and a quay would give Gavin plenty of places to hide. If, instead, they went farther up the river, he would jump off at the Great Bridge.

In a few minutes, though, he realized that he was being terrifically optimistic. He was hanging on the back of a boat, and though his arms didn’t have to bear the full weight of his body since he was half immersed, he did have to fight against the waves trying to pluck him from the boat, and his hands were losing feeling again.

He decided to try to climb up the net, but as soon as he coaxed one hand into releasing its death grip, the other hand betrayed him. He fell into the water.

The pain in his unclenching fingers was excruciating at first, but as he flopped his way to the surface, the pain almost felt good, a promise that his hands would function again. Someday.

With the river galley pulling away from him, Gavin got his bearings again. In the mouth of the river, with the sun rising, he was far more visible than he had been before. If he could get far enough up the river, he would fall under the city’s jurisdiction, and then at least he could hope to be turned over to a magistrate rather than directly enslaved. Depending on how law-fearing whatever captain picked him up was.

Best not to get captured at all.

By luck, he wasn’t too far from the Great Bridge. If he could make it to its shadow, he would be far less visible. Swim to a huge pylon, climb up the scaffolding, and make it to shore.

He set off immediately. He’d not made it this far in life by hesitating.

When he was two hundred paces away from the bridge, he saw two things at the same time, both of which took his breath away, for opposite reasons. A Ruthgari war galley was emerging from the shadow of the Great Bridge, and the standard flying from its low mast—deliberately just a couple of feet shy of the height of the Great Bridge—was the proud bull of the Malargos family. At the same time, Gavin saw a dolphin coursing through the river toward him. It popped out of the waves, and though Gavin couldn’t see the hue, he remembered the drawings, long-beaked and muscular. A river dolphin.

Please come here, you little miracle.

Gavin had heard of dolphins saving swimmers before. He’d heard of them letting men grab on to their backs and ride. The dolphin was his only hope to make it to the shadow of the bridge in time.

River dolphin. He couldn’t tell if it was pink or not, of course. It could have been piss yellow for all Gavin cared: it was salvation.

Gavin kept swimming as the dolphin slipped right up to him. But at the last moment, it turned and stabbed its beak into his ribs. His breath shot out and he inhaled water. Before he could even cough it out, the dolphin emerged again from nowhere and hit him again, cracking a rib.

He flailed, gasping for breath. Then it hit him again, this time smacking his head. Dazed, he sucked up a lungful of water. He lost consciousness.

Chapter 44

“I can’t do this,” Big Leo said. “This Lord Arias is a twig.”

“What’s hard about it?” Daelos asked. “Go out there and lower the boom on him. I’ve seen you do it before.”

“The boom?” Ferkudi asked.

“I didn’t mean I can’t. I meant I can’t,” Big Leo said.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Ferkudi said.

“I meant in good consc—” Big Leo said.

“Nah, I mean the boom. Aren’t booms more dangerous when they’re swinging around than—”

“Maybe that’s the test, Leo,” Ben-hadad said, fiddling with his lenses. “Maybe we’re supposed to refuse an immoral order.”

“Or maybe we’re supposed to follow an order when we can’t see the bigger picture,” Ferkudi said.

The others looked at him. After the three-quarters of the time that Ferkudi was a clown, he’d come back and surprise them with some keen observation.

“What?” he asked. “What?”

Kip’s squad, dressed in street clothes, had scouted the broad corner at Verrosh and Harmonia. There was nothing particularly special about this corner that they could see. No one else was watching it. It wasn’t particularly prosperous. It wasn’t the busiest in the city. Perhaps, for a heretic, that meant fewer merchants’ guards and house guards who might throw an elbow or a stone. Perhaps he was just moon mad and he’d picked this corner randomly.

Daelos and Goss were still out watching approaches to the corner, and Teia was ambling through the intersection itself, seeing what she could see, but the rest of them were huddled in a circle behind a store, trying to figure out what to do. They usually found a rendezvous point farther away, but there hadn’t been any good spots.

“Hey! What are you boys doing? Get out of here, scram!” a hairy-armed store guard barked.

Cruxer gave a mild oath at himself. Kip knew the young man would see it as a personal failure that someone had noticed them clumped up. Cruxer gestured, and they all started walking away from the shop.