The officials from the Abyssal government moved to the window, not too far from where Antaea and the stranger perched. "Behold," said the spokeswoman, "the Crier in the Dark!"

She gestured dramatically, and floodlights on the outside of the ship snapped on. The thing Antaea had at first taken to be a vast cloud blinked into view; at least, part of it did.

There were shouts of surprise, and relieved laughter; then, applause. "A capital bug!" someone shouted.

The spokeswoman bowed; behind her, the (entirely male) group of officials were smiling and nodding in obvious relief at the crowd's reaction. Their backdrop was a cavern of light carved by the floodlights out of an infinite ocean of night. The lights barely reached the gray skin of the city-sized beast that hung motionless and dormant in the icy air. Antaea could see a rank of tower-sized horns jutting from beyond the horizon of its back. In a live bug those horns would be blaring the notes of a chord so loudly that no ordinary form of life could survive within a mile of the thing.

Everybody was talking now, and the reporters were throwing questions at the Abyssals: When did you discover it was a capital bug? Why is it silent now? How did you save the city from it? The stranger next to Antaea shook his head minutely and his lips quirked into a faint smile.

"The gullibility of people never ceases to amaze me," he murmured.

Antaea realized that she'd bought this explanation, too, and frowned now in confusion. "You think it's a lie?" she asked quietly.