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pity, no tears left for the carnage she watched lit by an azure glow.
    When it was done, when Bralston flicked the errant sparks from his finger and left the blackened corpse twitching violently against the door, the Librarian barely spared a nod to the woman. Instead, he looked up to the Lector, who regarded the smouldering bodies on his floor with the same distaste he might a wine stain on his carpet.
    ‘Tomorrow, then?’ Bralston asked.
    ‘At the dawn. It’s a long way to Port Destiny.’ The Lector raised a brow. ‘Do bring your hat, Librarian.’
    With an incline of his bald head and a sweep of his coat, Bralston vanished out the door. The Lector’s eyes lazily drifted from the two corpses to the woman, who sat staring at them with an empty stare, her body as stiff as a board. It wasn’t until he noticed the pile of ash still clenched in the charred hand of the Cragsman that he finally sighed.
    ‘Waste of good paper …’

Two
TO MURDER THE OCEAN
     
    T here was no difference between the sky and the sea that Lenk could discern.
    They both seemed to stretch for eternity, their horizons long having swallowed the last traces of land to transform the world into a vision of indigo. The moon took a quiet departure early, disappearing behind the curtain of clouds that slid lazily over the sky. With no yellow orb to disperse the monotony, the world was a simple, painful blue that drank all directions.
    The young man closed his eyes, drawing in a breath through his nose. He smelled the rain on the breeze, the salt on the waves. Holding up his hands as though in acknowledgement for whatever god had sent him the unchanging azure that emanated around him, he let the breath trickle between his teeth.
    And then, Lenk screamed.
    His sword leapt to his hand in their mutual eagerness to lean over the edge of their tiny vessel. The steel’s song a humming contrast to his maddening howl, he hacked at the ocean, bleeding its endless life in frothy wounds.
    ‘Die, die, die, die, die! ’ he screamed, driving his sword into the salt. ‘Enough! No more! I’m sick of it, you hear me?’ He cupped a hand over his mouth and shrieked. ‘ Well, DO YOU? ’
    The water quickly settled, foam dissipating, ripples calming, leaving Lenk to glimpse himself in ragged fragments of reflections. His silver hair hung in greasy strands around a haggard face. The purple bags hanging from his eyelids began to rival the icy blue in his gaze. Lenk surveyed the pieces of a lunatic looking back at him from the water and wondered, not for the first time, if the ocean was mocking him.
    No , he decided, it’s far too impassive to mock me …
    How could it be anything but? After all, it didn’t know what it was requested to stop any more than Lenk did. Stop being the ocean? He had dismissed such thoughts as madness on the first day their tiny sail hung limp and impotent on its insultingly thin mast. But as the evening of the second day slid into night, it didn’t seem such an unreasonable demand.
    The sea , he thought scornfully, is the one being unreasonable. I wouldn’t have to resort to violence if it would just give me some wind .
    ‘Hasn’t worked yet, has it?’
    His eyes went wide and he had to resist hurling himself over the ledge in desperation to communicate with the suddenly talkative water. Such delusional hope lasted only a moment, as it always did, before sloughing off in great chunks to leave only twitching resentment in his scowl.
    Teeth grating as he did, he turned to the creature sitting next to him with murder flashing in his scowl. She, however, merely regarded him with half-lidded green eyes and a disaffected frown. Her ears, two long and pointed things with three ragged notches running down each length, drooped beneath the feathers laced in her dirty blond hair.
    ‘Keep trying,’ Kataria sighed. She turned back to the same task she had been doing for the past three hours, running her fingers along the fletching of the same