They entered a gulf that lay between two desert lands. It became a narrow sea, which they followed north-west for several days, until it funnelled into what was clearly a man-made canal, which most of the sailors thought the Old People had built, though the more superstitious among them claimed was cut by the hand of a god. It sliced through a great desert. Enormous sand dunes coasted slowly across the horizon.

The canal opened out into a warm, tranquil inland sea, and they docked at a port near the delta of a great river. Nick saw ruins here so ancient that nobody knew who had built them. They stopped only long enough for supplies, then set sail again, heading west.

In a few days they had come to a strait between two rocky peninsulas. Beyond lay an ocean Nick knew only from maps, and which nobody had ever crossed. It was rumoured it dropped off the edge of the world. The Northerners were said to believe that the earth was round; when Nick suggested this to the sailors they laughed at him, but uneasily, for the Northerners seemed to know things no godly person should. A spherical world though – that was just too bizarre an idea to countenance.

Once upon this ocean they had turned north, keeping the mainland visible to starboard. The weather had cooled.

They soon entered the channel that lay between the mainland and the fabled isle of Albion. They didn't dock there. It was a land of sorcery, its towering white cliffs like something seen in dreams. It was rumoured to be the land where Lethe, the River of Forgetfulness, flowed, and its history was known only from a tradition of legends in which myth and fact were difficult to distinguish; if any people lived there they were not seen from the ship, though at night queer lights winked slyly on the distant downs. It was as they sailed past this land of faerie that the first iceberg had appeared.

Nick had had a lot of time for thinking during the voyage. He was still not certain his decision to leave Bareheep had been the right one. He knew Bunker would engineer his way into the role of Kidsman in his absence. He could remain there for all Nick cared: he had long thought of the boy as his successor anyway. His empire had only ever been a tool to destroy the Brotherhood – once that was achieved he would have no need for it. He never thought beyond the final act of vengeance, and if he died in its execution so be it.

Gone was the white-hot hatred that had consumed him as a boy, but the memory of it was still clear and bright. He could still recall the sickening swoop in his stomach when he recognised the two people standing on the scaffold; Anna Carmichael holding him to herself and pleading with him to look away; tearing free of her in time to see the ropes snap taut, his parents dangling there like marionettes, their faces turning first red, then blue; the sudden realisation that they would never come back. His rage. And like a man who blows on a hot coal to keep a fire burning, he dwelt on the memory, keeping the pain of it fresh in his mind.

Vendettas are bad, m'kay.