He found himself back in the punishment factory in New Crobuzon, where his extra limbs had been grafted to him in searing, drugged minutes of pain and humiliation. Once again the air clamored with industrial noises and screams, and he lay strapped to damp, stained wood, but this time the man bending over him was not a masked biothaumaturge, but the Armadan chirurgeon.

Just as he had in the waking day, the chirurgeon showed him charts of his body, with red markings where work would be done, emendations marked out like corrections on a schoolchild’s copybook.

"Will it hurt me?" Tanner asked, and the punishment factory faded and sleep faded, but the question remained. Will it hurt? he thought as he lay in his newly lonely room.

But when he had gone once more below the water, his longing overcame him again, and he realized that he was less afraid of the pain than of hankering like this forever.

Angevine told Shekel-sternly-how to treat her when she was working.

"Can’t try and talk to me like that, boy," she told him. "I been working with Tintinnabulum for years. Garwater pays me to look after him, ever since they brought him in. He’s trained me well, and I owe him loyalty. You don’t mess with me when I’m working. D’you understand?"

She spoke to him in Salt now, most of the time, forcing him to learn (she was hard on him, she wanted to bring him into her city without delay). As she turned to go, Shekel stopped her and told her, haltingly, that he did not think he could come to her cabin that night, that he felt he should spend a night with Tanner, who must be feeling a bit low, he said.

"Good of you to think of him," she said. So many ways he was growing, so fast. Loyalty and lust and love weren’t enough for her. It was these frequent glimmerings of the man underneath the childhood he was shucking that swept Angevine with true passion for him, that stained her vague parental warmth with something more hard and base and breathless.

"Give him an evening," she said. "Come by mine tomorrow, lover."

She gave him that last word carefully. He was learning to take such presents with grace.

Shekel spent hours alone in the library, in the shelfscape of wood and vellum, gently rotting leather and paperdust. He kept to the Ragamoll section, surrounded by books that he pulled carefully down and opened around him, text and pictures like flowers on the floor. He slowly took in stories about ducks and poor boys who became kings, and battles against the trow, and the history of New Crobuzon.

He kept notes of every troublesome word whose sounds tried to evade him: Curious, saber, tough, Jhesshul, Kruach. He practiced them constantly.