The trees around them were evergreen and deciduous in an unruly mix. Silas and Bellis walked through pines and the black claws of leafless oaks and ash. Old masts soared over the canopy like the most ancient trees in the forest, barked in rust, dangling ragged foliage of long-frayed wire rigging. Bellis and Silas walked in their shadows, and in the shadows of the wood, past grassy undulations broken by little windows and doors, where cabins had been effaced by earth. Worms and burrowing animals moved behind the cracked glass.

The steamer’s ivy-caked chimneys disappeared behind them as they moved into the heart of the wood, out of sight of the surrounding ships. They traced spiraling paths that wound back on themselves arcanely, seeming to multiply the space of the park. Blistered cowls broke from the ground, choked with brambles; roots and vines entrapped the capstans and coiled intricately through the guardrails of moss-cushioned ladders leading into blank hillsides.

In the shade of a cargo derrick become some obscure skeleton, Bellis and Silas sat in the wintery landscape and drank wine. As Silas rummaged in his little bag for a corkscrew, Bellis saw his bulging notebook inside. She picked it up and looked at him questioningly, and when he nodded his permission she opened it.

There were lists of words: the jottings of someone trying to learn a foreign language.

"Most of that stuff’s from The Gengris," he said.

She turned slowly through the pages of nouns and verbs, and came to a little section like a diary, with dated entries written in a shorthand code she could make little of, words pared down to two or three letters, punctuation dispensed with. She saw commodity prices, and scribbled descriptions of the grindylow themselves: unpleasant little pencil sketches of figures with prodigious eyes and teeth and obscure limbs, flat eel-tails. There were heliotypes attached to the pages, executed furtively, it seemed, in dim light; unclear sepia tints, discolored and water-stained, the monstrosity of the figures they depicted exaggerated by blisters and impurities in the paper.

There were hand-drawn maps of The Gengris, covered in arrows and annotations, and other maps of the surrounding water of the Cold Claw Sea, the topography of submerged hills and valleys and grindylow fortresses picked out in different colors for different rocks, granite and quartz and limestone, carefully corrected over several pages. There were suggestive sketches of machinery, of defensive engines.

Silas leaned over her as she read, pointing out features.

"That’s a gorge just south of the city," he said, "that leads right up to the rocks separating off the sea. That tower there"-some irregular smudge-"was the skin library, and those were the salp vats."

Beyond those pages were scrawled diagrams of gashes and tunnels and clawed machines, and mechanisms like locks and sluices.

"What are these?" she said, and Silas glanced over, and laughed when he saw what she was looking at.