If she ever became lost, Bellis needed only to find her way out from backstreets or alleys, look up through all the aerostats moored to masts, and find the Arrogance, looming stately over the glowering Grand Easterly. It was her beacon, and by it she steered her way home.

In the midst of the city there were rafts-wooden floats extending scores of yards to each side. Houses perched ludicrously on them. There were needle-thin submarines bobbing tethered between barquentines, and chariot ships filled with hotchi burrows. Tumbledown buildings smothered decks or perched precarious across the backs of tens of tiny vessels in the cheap neighborhoods. There were playhouses and prisons and deserted hulks.

When she raised her eyes to the horizon, Bellis could see disturbances out to sea: churning water, wakes without obvious cause. Wind- and weather-born, usually, but sometimes she might glimpse a pod of porpoises, or a plesiaur or seawyrm neck, or the back of something big and fast that she could not identify. The life beyond the city, and all around it.

Bellis watched the city’s fishing boats return in the evenings. Sometimes pirate ships would appear and be welcomed back into the harbors of Basilio or Urchinspine, the motors of Armada’s economy finding their way, uncannily, home.

Armada was full of figureheads. They poked up in unlikely places, ornate and ignored like the carved door knockers on New Crobuzon houses. At the end of a terrace, walking between rows of close brick dwellings, Bellis might come face-to-face with a splendid corroded woman, her breastplate moldering, her painted gaze flaked and vague. Hanging in the air like a spirit, below the bowsprit of her ship, which jutted across its neighbor’s deck and pointed into the alley.

They were all around. Otters, drakows, fish, warriors, and women. Above all women. Bellis hated the blank-eyed, curvaceous figures, wobbling up and down moronically with the swell, haunting the city like banal ghosts.

In her room, she finished Essays on Beasts and remained uncomprehending of Armada’s secret project.

She wondered where Silas was, and what he was doing. She was not upset or angry at his absence, but she was curious and a little frustrated. He was, after all, the closest thing she had to an ally.

He returned on the evening of the fifth of Lunuary.

Bellis let him enter. She did not touch him, nor he her.

He was tired and subdued. His hair was mussed, his clothes dusty. He sat back in a chair and covered his hands with his eyes, murmuring something inaudible, some greeting. Bellis made him tea. She waited for him to speak, and when after a while he did not, she returned to her book and her cigarillo.

She had made several more pages of notes before he spoke.

"Bellis. Bellis." He rubbed his eyes and looked up at her. "I have to tell you something. I have to tell you the truth. I’ve kept things from you."