>>6125311“I don’t know if it’s a saying you also have in the Mar da Candéa,” Mirari adds, cupping her hands over her mouth to get herself heard. She advances towards a rail and pulls on a metal lever. Heavy steel cranes and hooked chains start shifting pulling something up from the water. The ship slows down, its bulk groaning as something comes up from the black water, visible as a large spherical cocoon, like a wasp nest left to fester for a thousand years, seawater dripping below. That feeling of wrongness grows — it’s like someone fitted a spoke inside your stomach and was starting to stir. You reach for your cameo, praying for strength — the feeling lifts, a bit. “It would be ‘De ‘a busaca no se trà via nagott,’. Which in Maduan would be: ‘Every part of the pig finds its use’. The Throne believes this for pigs and Asterites alike.”
Oh.
Oh, Starless Night.
“That’s no engine,” Willow groans next to you.
“There’s one of them inside,” Soralisa covers her mouth with trembling hands. “I had heard about this but to see it with my own eyes…”
There is a noise spreading through the bowels of the ship. At first it reminds you of the tinny thrum you head in the Eye of the Sun, but this place is the farthest thing from the joyful and artistic craft of Candeloro. This feels messy, and punishing. Ah, of course — the Asterites did try to rebel once already. And pigs, so the Throne seems to think, ought to learn their place.
[cont.]
