“Oh, no,” she told me. “A knife wouldn’t have scratched him.” She grinned. “That’s what the whoremaster said when the sailor came.” I laughed, and she linked her arm through mine. “Anyway, a knife’s not mainly for fighting. It’s for working, one way or another. How’re you going to splice rope without a knife, or open ration boxes? You keep your eyes open as we go along. No telling what you’ll find in one of these cargo bays.”

“We’re going in the wrong direction,” I said.

“I know another way, and if we went out the way we came in, you’d never find anything. It’s too short.”

“What happens if Sidero turns out the lights?”

“He won’t. Once you wake them up they stay bright until there’s nobody to watch. Ah, I see something. Look there.” I looked, suddenly certain she had noticed a knife during our hunt for the shaggy creature and was merely pretending to have found it now. Only a bone hilt was visible.

“Go ahead. Nobody’ll mind if you take it.”

“That wasn’t what I was thinking about,” I told her.

It was a hunting knife, with a narrowed point and a heavy saw-backed blade about two spans long. Just the thing, I thought, for rough work.

“Get the sheath too. You can’t carry it in your hand all day.”

That was of plain black leather, but it included a pocket that had once held some small tool and recalled the whetstone pocket on the manskin sheath of Terminus Est. I was beginning to like the knife already, and I liked it more when I saw that.

“Put it on your belt.”

I did as I was told, positioning it on the left where it balanced the weight of my pistol. “I would have expected better stowage on a big vessel like this.”

Gunnie shrugged. “This isn’t really cargo. Just odds and ends. Do you know how the ship’s built?”

“I haven’t the least idea.”

She laughed at that. “Neither does anyone else, I suppose. We have ideas we pass along to each other, but eventually we usually find out they’re wrong. Partly wrong, anyway.”