He had filled his lungs before descending, out of habit, but aerated he was too buoyant. Slowly, in a kind of luxuriant panic, he exhaled through his nose and let his air disappear above him.

And felt nothing. No dizziness or pain or fear. Oxygen still reached his blood, and his heart kept pumping.

Above him, the pasty little bodies of his fellow citizens floundered across the surface of the water, tethered to the air they breathed. Tanner spun beneath them, clumsy still but learning, corkscrewing, looking above and below-up into the light and bodies and the massive sprawling interlocking shape of the city, down into the boundless blue dark.

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen

Silas and Bellis spent two nights together.

During the days, Bellis shelved, helped Shekel to read and told him about Croom Park, sometimes ate with Carrianne. Then she returned to Silas. They talked some, but he left her quite ignorant of how he passed his hours. She had a sense that he was full of secret ideas. They fucked several times.

After the second night, Silas disappeared. Bellis was glad. She had been neglecting Johannes’ books, and she now returned to their unfamiliar science.

Silas was gone for three days.

Bellis explored.

She ventured finally into the farthest parts of the city. She saw the burn temples of Bask riding, and its triptych statues spread across the fabric of several boats. In Thee-And-Thine (which was not as rough or as frightening as she had been led to believe, was little more than an exaggerated, pugnacious marketplace) she saw the Armada asylum, a massive edifice that loomed from a steamer, cruelly placed, it seemed to Bellis, right next to the haunted quarter.

There was a little outcropping of Garwater boats like a buffer between Curhouse and Bask, separated off from the main body of their riding by some historical caprice. There, Bellis found the Lyceum, its workshops and classrooms staggering precipitously down the sides of a ship, layered like a mountainside town.

Armada had all the institutions of any city on land, devoted to learning and politics and religion, only perhaps in a harder form. And if the city’s scholars were tougher than their landside equivalents, and looked more like rogues and pirates than doctors, it did not invalidate their expertise. There were different constabularies in each riding, from the uniformed proctors of Bask to Garwater’s loosely defined yeomanry who were marked out only by their sashes-a badge as much of loyalty as office. Each riding’s law was different. There was a species of court and disputation in Curhouse, while the lax, violent, piratical discipline of Garwater was doled out with the whip.

Armada was a profane and secular city, and its unkempt churches were treated as irreverently as its bakers. There were temples to the deified Croom; to the moon and her daughters, to thank them for the tides; to sea gods.