The pair conversed in a bastard dialect of Galactic Two, at best a difficult tongue for humans. Moreover, the breeze carried off the treble whistle-tones, leaving just the lower track of syncopated clicks. Perhaps for those reasons the two travelers seemed unconcerned anyone might listen.

Maybe, as often happened, they underrated the reach of human hearing.

Or else they’re counting on something called common courtesy, she thought ironically. Lately Sara had become quite an eavesdropper, an unlikely habit for a normally shy, private young woman. Her recent fascination with language was the cause. This time though, fatigue overcame curiosity.

Leave them alone. You’ll have plenty of chances to study dialects in Tarek Town.

Sara took her blanket over to a spot between two crates marked with Nelo’s seal, exuding the homey scents of Dolo’s paper mill. There had been little time for rest since that frenetic town meeting. Only a few miduras after adjournment, the village elders had sent a herald to wake Sara with this assignment-to lead a delegation downriver in search of answers and guidance. She was chosen both as one with intimate knowledge of Biblos and also to represent the Dolo craft workers — as Jop would speak for the farmers, and Blade for the upriver qheuens. Other envoys included Ulgor, Pzora, and Fakoon, a g’Kek scriven-dancer. Since each was already billeted aboard the Hauph-woa, with business in Tarek Town, they could hardly refuse. Together with the ship’s captain, that made at least one representative from all Six exile races. A good omen, the elders hoped.

Sara still wondered about Jomah. Why would Henrik dispatch the boy on a trip that promised danger, even in quiet times?

“He will know what to do,” the taciturn exploser had said, putting his son in Sara’s nominal care. “Once you reach Tarek Town.”

If only I could say as much for myself, Sara worried. It had been impossible to turn down this assignment, much as she wanted to.

It’s been a year since Joshu died — since shame and grief made a hermit of you. Besides, who is going to care that you made a fool of yourself over a man who could never be yours? That all seems a small matter, now that the world we know is coming to an end.

Alone in the dark, Sara worried.

Are Diver and Lark safe? Or has something dreadful already happened at Gathering?

She felt Prity curl up alongside in her own blanket, sharing warmth. The hoonish helmsman rumbled a crooning melody, with no words in any language Sara knew, yet conveying a sense of muzzy serenity, endlessly forbearing.

Things work out, the hoonish umble seemed to say.

Sleep finally climbed out of her body’s fatigue to claim Sara as she thought—

I… sure… hope… so.

Later, in the middle of the night, a dream yanked her bolt upright, clutching the blanket close. Her eyes stared over the peaceful river, lit by two moons, but Sara’s heart pounded as she quailed from an awful nightmare image.

Flames.

Moonlight flickered on the water, and to her eyes it became fire, licking the Biblos roof-of-stone, blackening it with the heat and soot of half a million burning books.

Unconscious, he is helpless to control dark images roiling across the closed universe of his mind. It is a tight universe — narrow and confined — yet teeming with stars and confusion. With galaxies and remorse. With nebulae and pain.

And water. Always water — from dense black ice fields all the way to space-clouds so diffuse, you might never know they thronged with beings the size of planets. Living things as slow and thin as vapor, swimming through a near-vacuum sea.

Sometimes he thinks water will never leave him alone. Nor will it let him simply die.

He hears it right now, water’s insistent music, piercing his delirium. This time it comes to him as a soft lapping sound — the sluicing of wooden boards through gentle liquid, like some vessel bearing him along from a place he can’t remember, toward another whose name he’ll never learn. It sounds reassuring, this melody, not like the sucking clutch of that awful swamp, where he had thought he was about to drown at last—

—as he so nearly drowned once, long ago, when the Old Ones forced him, screaming, into a crystal globe they then filled with a fluid that dissolved everything it touched.

—or as he once fought for breath on that green-green-green world whose thick air refused to nourish while he stumbled on and on half-blind toward a fearsome glimmering Jophur tower.

—or the time his body and soul felt pummeled, squeezed, unable even to gasp as he threaded a narrow passage that seemed about to strip him to his spine… before abruptly spilling him into a realm where shining light stretched on and on until—

His mind rebels, quailing from brief, incoherent images. Fevered, he has no idea which of them are remembered, which are exaggerated, and which his damaged brain simply invented out of the pitchy stuff of nightmare—

—like a starship’s vapor contrail (water!) cleaving a blue sky that reminded him of home.

—or the sight of beings like himself (more water!) living on a world where they clearly don’t belong.

Amid the chaos of fevered hallucinations, another impression penetrates. Somehow he knows that it comes from beyond his delusion-from someplace real. It feels like a touch, a stroke of softness on his brow. A brush, accompanied by murmurs in a voice that soothes. He can make no sense of the words, but still he welcomes the sensation, even knowing that it should not be. Not here. Not now.

It is a comfort, that touch, making him feel just a little less alone.

Eventually, it even pushes back the fearsome images — the memories and dreams — and in time he slips from delirium into a quietude of sleep.

The Mount Guenn tram climbs a steep route from Wuphon Port all the way up to the workshops of Uriel the Smith. The railway is small and hard to see, even when you’re looking for it. Still, it’s allowed by the sages only because it’s important for getting Uriel’s forgings down to market. Also, it uses no artificial power. Water from a hot spring, high up on the mountain, pours into a tank aboard whichever car is waiting at the top station. Meanwhile, the bottom car’s tank is emptied, so it’s much lighter, even with passengers aboard. When the brake is cut, the heavier car starts down, pulling the cable, which in turn hauls the bottom car up.

It sounds gimmicky, but in fact it goes pretty fast and can even get scary for a few seconds in the middle, when the other car seems to be rushing right at you along the same set of slim wooden rails. Then you reach a split section where that car streaks past in a blur. What a thrill!

It’s a trip of over forty arrowflights, but the water’s still near boiling hot in the first car’s tank when it reaches bottom — one reason folks like it when Uriel ships her wares down to port on laundry day.