“A secret Octunggen strike team, more like. Some new weapon.”

“Whatever It is, could come here next.”

“Nonsense,” Greggory said. “The Gyrgins are a thousand leagues from here. Whatever did this isn’t anywhere close. Come on.”

Avery suddenly found it difficult to breathe. Steadying himself, he traded a dark look with Layanna. When the group moved on, he whispered, “It’s them, it must be. The R’loth.”

“Yes,” she said, almost reluctant. “I think so.”

“This is it. It’s really started. I wasn’t sure before, but, after three confirmed islands gone, I am now. Sheridan was right.”

“Don’t say that. We don’t know anything yet. Maybe she wasn’t.”

He knew she desperately wanted to believe that—he did, too, for that matter—but he also knew she was wrong. Everyone wanted to believe it was over, all over, Octung defeated and the world saved. It was time to return home, get the charges against them cleared and begin the next phase of their lives, which would surely consist of basking in the adulation of an entire planet and living as heroes to the end of their days. It was a nice thought, Avery could not argue, but it was wrong. Terribly, tragically wrong. It was coming: the nameless, formless doom he’d been dreading ever since that fateful day on the sea when they’d activated the Device, the doom created by the R’loth in retaliation for that very act. He opened his mouth to say something along these lines when suddenly sounds rang out, bugles and drums.

“What’s this?” Layanna said.

An official-seeming voice thundered over the festive market clamor, issuing through loudspeakers, and the vendors only casually glanced up before returning to business. Most buyers kept browsing, but some gravitated toward the new sounds, looking expectant. They’d known whatever was about to happen was about to, and Avery realized by their body language that some had just been killing time until it started. Strange ports, strange rituals.

Not seeming to share his unease—about this, at least—the whalers ambled toward the activity, taking their charges with them. Avery suddenly wished they were all armed, not just the captain, and that with only a revolver.

“What is it, Papa?” Ani asked. “What’s going on?”

“I ...” As a father, he knew he was supposed to have all the answers, but sometimes he just didn’t. “I guess we’ll find out.”

He noticed Layanna scanning the alleys and balconies again. He looked, then wished he hadn’t. The watchers were still there, and they were studying the visitors more intently than ever—or at least one of them.

“It’s you they’re watching,” he told Layanna.

“Yes. And there’s something else ...”

“They’re all ngvandi. I see it, too.”

Most mutants were like him, recognizably human but with some aquatic element, fins or pincers or gills or bioluminescence—in some individuals the aquatic elements were even dominant—but in the ones he thought of as ngvandi, they were wholly piscine or brachial or cephalopod-like or what-have-you. Stingray men or lobster women, salamander girls and squid boys. Completely alien and other, as Muirblaag had been. And like the great fish-man, they had probably been born into it.

These watching Azadi were mostly piscine, but of remarkably different types. They boasted scales of scarlet or viridian, fuscia or turquoise. Bulging fish eyes glared at the group over gaping, sharp-toothed mouths, and webbed hands, some ending in claws, twitched at their sides.

“Who are they?” Avery asked, hearing the tension in his voice.

Again Layanna merely shook her head, but he thought he saw something in her gaze, some knowledge she was holding back. She doesn’t want to alarm me. Of course, that alarmed him even more.

The party spilled out into a large open area. They’d left the bazaar behind and entered a wide plaza surrounded by the tall red buildings favored by Azadi. Quarried from the striking reddish marble of the islands, the structures often had bright golden wire wrapped around columns or creeping up walls in the shapes of trees or mountains or clouds. The golden wire criss-crossed the blue veins of the marble, creating intriguing lines for the eye to follow amidst the omnipresent sunset-hued stone. Directly ahead reared a splendid example of Azadi architecture: magnificent steps led up past fluting red columns twined in gold wire like climbing vines, and an obelisk-shaped red tower rose from the upper reaches—the courthouse.

A great crowd had gathered here, natives and seafaring visitors alike, and the whaling party pushed forward to get a better look at the attraction. All around vendors sold fried eel, baked eel, eel-ka-bob, stuffed eel ... eels eels eels.

Before the steps of the courthouse a platform had been constructed, and directly before this stood a large, open-topped aquarium, ten feet high by twenty feet wide, banded in aged brass. The glass was thick, old and smeared, and the view through it accordingly warped, but Avery could make out that inside the aquarium water churned and bubbled, and sparks leapt high into the air—water from the sea, then. Large shapes could be seen thrashing and darting, long and serpentine. Avery caught a glimpse of roiling green, the flip of a finned tail against the glass, but that was it.

A well-dressed Azadi at the forefront of the platform addressed the crowd, policemen and what might be attorneys arrayed behind him. More policemen stood guard over a line of half a dozen shackled prisoners. One was being marched forward, a short fellow, badly mutated, with a long, jointed, carapaced leg growing where his right ear should be and drooping down his chest, the limb twitching from time to time and drawing a line of blood under his right nipple with its sharp tip; old scars showed there, thick and scabby, hinting at a lifetime of pain; mutations could be cruel. The black eye of some crab-like creature stared blindly from the other side of the man’s head. As he went, his shackles were removed and he was, to Avery’s shock (and paternal horror) stripped of clothing, which consisted only of gray prison overalls, shoes and undershorts.

Ani gasped when the undershorts came off, and Avery wrapped a hand over her eyes. She pried his fingers apart. No matter; the prisoner had covered himself with shaking hands by then—not that there was anything remotely erotic about the scene. Quite the opposite. The condemned man stared first out over the crowd, blinking furiously, but his gaze was drawn irresistibly down to the frothing, crackling waters of the aquarium and the things inside it. Guards escorted him to the lip of the platform, directly above the water, and it was then that he started screaming. A small blast of lightning from the water, really just a minor discharge, lit his face in stark blue-white terror.

The man who must be mayor or judge continued speaking, and the crowd listened in surprising quiet. The man spoke Azadi, so Avery asked the nearby Captain Greggory what the condemned man was charged with.

 “He’s a pirate,” Greggory spat. The captain was surprisingly clean-shaven for a grizzled sailor. Bright red hair crowned a long, jowly, acne-scarred face, and the unpleasant bulge of a mole grew from his left nostril. “They all are. Rapists and murderers, every one. Bastards’ve been getting bold since Octung’s navies withdrew from the area. The Azadi catch them when they find them in port, but most get away. These fucks must’ve gotten sloppy. Doubt it will deter any others, but I’m happy to see him et just the same.”

Avery didn’t have to ask what would do the eating. The vendors still loudly hawked their edible eels of all types, symbols of the real stars of the show. Some men even wore giant eel heads on their heads, giving the impression from afar that they were mutated into eel-men. Some may have been.

At last the judge or politician finished reciting the pirate’s crimes, and the constables shoved the still-screaming man into the water without so much as offering him a chance at any last words. His final sound was a terrified squawk as he vanished into the fluid, which instantly bubbled and frothed even more violently than before.

Trembling, Ani pressed against Avery. When he replaced his hand over her eyes this time, she didn’t try to peek.

Green coils flashed and whipped through the smeared glass of the aquarium, occasionally beating against it with a loud thump, and a dark cloud filled the water, hiding for the most part even such quick glimpses of the creatures. Avery wondered how many great eels the aquarium held—no more than three or four, surely, each ten feet long or more. And with half a dozen prisoners, they would get a good meal. The last few they would probably just electrocute and save for later.

“It’s horrible,” Ani said.

“I know, honey.” Avery squeezed her shoulder. “I know.”

Many in the crowd were cheering—some of the sailors from the Verignun, too. “Fucking pirates!” one said. Another cupped his hands around his mouth as if to create a bullhorn and shouted, presumably to the eels, “Eat ‘em up good and shit ‘em out green!” That drew a laugh.

The official speaker called out, more bugles blew, and the next condemned man was shoved toward the aquarium while the mayor (Avery had begun to assume that’s who he was, anyway) read the man’s crimes aloud. Terror filled the condemned man’s face as he approached the aquarium—

The attack came out of nowhere. One moment Avery was standing beside Layanna, Ani against him. The next a hurtling shape, having threaded through the dense crowd, flew forward and knocked him aside. A gleaming knife flashed in a pink-scaled hand, right at Layanna’s back.

Layanna, her eyes on the imminent execution, didn’t see any of it.

Avery screamed a warning, and she turned. The knife merely scraped her ribs, and the assailant—one of the completely mutated ngvandi—sailed past. One of the whalers tackled him to the cobblestones, and others piled on. Seeing that the attacker wasn’t going anywhere, Avery’s attention returned to Layanna.

“You all right?”

She wavered for a moment, a hand pressed to her side, then collapsed.

Avery rushed over. A line of blood ran along her ribs, but the cut was shallow and wasn’t bleeding too much.

“You’re just in shock,” he said.

“No. I don’t ... not healing.”

At full strength it was nearly impossible to kill a Collossum without some sort of extradimensional weapon, Avery knew. They healed with shocking speed, or should.

“Rest,” he said, trying to hide his concern. Had the blade gone deeper than it looked?

Glancing over, he saw the whalers beating the attacker into submission. The fish-man thrashed on the cobblestones, foam beading his lips, his clawed feet scratching violently against the ground. The crowd drew away, not wanting to be too close to the violence—but not far enough away to miss it, either. The execution of the next pirate had been temporarily delayed.

Avery noticed the blade, spattered with Layanna’s blood, and plucked it from the cobblestones.

“Poison—it must be,” he said, though when he sniffed it he didn’t smell anything. He took in the elegant blade, the hilt embedded with flashing rubies. “A sacrificial knife, maybe.”

“Extradimensional,” Layanna said. Her breath came in labored gasps. “Specially made. That’s why ...”