The brutality of the voyage is even with its wonder; distant shapes of mountains, white silhouettes like ancient gods, become the grandest skeletons of volcanoes, at the same time as climbing them means to annihilate every man to the marrow. Creatures never before described by humans, plants that the naturalists say grew alongside the beasts whose bones bear extinction titles, preserved by the pristine, frightening ice, which in turn breathes and seizes around them like being on another world entirely.

He had wondered aloud some months ago, on deck with his steward (the steward he is still adapting to having at all, but back then, first leaving the oppressive heat of Van Diemen's Land and slipping into the cold like sinking beneath a black lake, he was adapting even harder), if the moon did not look the same— Francis has been to the Arctic time and again, but it is a different kind of haunting, this place, with no Inuit, no Greenland in the distance. He'd been a little drunk, but most of them are a little drunk, most of the time.

Following the voyage, the men, too, are at evens with bad and good. Brutality and wonder again, for every infraction, swinging wildly between parties and bitter fights with blood freezing to dull rubies before it can hit the planks of the deck. And now, on this strange evening, the split is one he is still feeling out the edges of. For there is one, even if it's twisting like firelight at the moment.

"A lie is just that."

Seated at his desk in the great cabin, the least plausible suspect stood before him.

"You can make it wear all sorts of costumes, lovely carnival ones or just.. mud. Still a lie, painted one way or another. And now I have to open the guts of it."

He looks at Thomas Jopson, and tries to work out the puzzle. Why?