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Then, abruptly, she started to come down, making a slow and cautious descent toward the grasslands that lay just beyond the woods in which Khyber and her companions slept. As she did so, Khyber saw what she had missed before. Three ropes dangled in a ragged line from the yardarm, pulled taut by the weight of the bodies attached.

“Pen!” Khyber hissed, reaching down quickly to shake the boy awake, galvanized by sudden shock and a rush of fear.

Penderrin Ohmsford jerked upright at once, eyes darting in all directions at once. “What is it?”

Wordlessly, she hauled him to his feet and pointed, leaving Tagwen still stretched out and asleep at her feet. Together, they watched the Skatelow settle toward the grasslands, a ghost ship dark and ragged against the moonlit sky, the bodies at the ends of the ropes swaying like gourds from vines. The light caught those bodies clearly by then, illuminating them sufficiently for Khyber to identify Gar Hatch and his crewmen, faces empty, mouths hanging open, eyes wide and staring. There was a wizened, drawn cast to their features, as if the juices had been drained from them, leaving only skin and bones.

“What’s happened?” Pen breathed.

Then his fingers tightened sharply about her arm, and he pointed. She saw it at once. Cinnaminson stood in the pilot box, a thin, frail figure against the skyline, her head lifted into the wind, her clothing whipping against her body, her arms hanging limply at her sides. One end of a chain was attached to a collar about her neck; the other was wound about the pilot box railing.

Khyber scanned the decks of the sloop from end to end, but no one else was visible. No one was sailing the airship, no one acting as Captain and crew, no one visible aboard save the three dead men and the chained girl.

Then Khyber saw something move across the billowing mainsail, high up in the rigging, a dark shadow caught in a swath of moonlight. The shadow skittered down the lines like a spider over its webbing, limbs outstretched and crooked as it swung from strand to strand. Nothing more of it was visible; its head and body were cloaked and hooded, its features hidden. It was there for just an instant, then gone, disappeared behind the sail and back into the shadows.

Khyber took a deep breath. It was the thing that had chased them through the streets of Anatcherae — the thing that had tried to kill Pen.

A shiver ran down Khyber’s back when Cinnaminson turned her head slightly in their direction, as if seeing them as clearly as they saw her. In that instant, her features were clearly revealed, and such anguish and horror were mirrored there that Khyber went cold all the way to her bones. Then the Rover girl looked away again and pointed north. The thing that hung from the mainmast moved quickly in response, leaping through the rigging, changing the set of the sail, the tautness of the radian draws, and thereby the direction of the airship. The Skatelow began to lift away again, turning north in the direction Cinnaminson had pointed. The crooked-legged thing darted back across the moonlight, then fastened itself in place against the mast, hunching down like a huge lizard on a pole.

Seconds later, the airship disappeared behind the rise of the bluff, and the sky was empty again.

In the dark aftermath, Khyber exhaled sharply and exchanged a hurried look with Pen. Then she jumped in fright as Tagwen stood up suddenly next to her, rubbing at his bleary eyes. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Don’t do that again!” she snapped furiously, her hands shaking.

They told him what they had seen, pointing north at the empty sky. A look of disbelief crossed his rough features, and he shook his head, blinking away the last of his sleep. “Are you certain of this? You didn’t dream it? It wasn’t just the clouds?”

“It’s tracking us,” Pen answered, his voice dismal and lost-sounding. “It’s killed Gar Hatch and his Rover cousins, and now it’s using Cinnaminson to hunt us.”

“But how did it get aboard the Skatelow?”

No one could answer him. Khyber stared at the empty sky,