She sat and tried to speak, tried to think of ways she could save New Crobuzon, her city which she treasured with a ferocious, unromantic love, and which lay under the most baleful threat. And the moments passed and passed, and Chet and the summer and the grindylow harvest kept coming closer, and she could say nothing.

Bellis imagined bodies like puffy eels, eyes and slablike recurved teeth heading under cold water toward her home.

"Oh dear gods, dear Jabber…" she heard herself say. She met Silas’ troubled eyes. "Dear gods, what are we going to do?"

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen

Slow like some vast, bloated creature, Armada passed into warmer water.

The citizens and the yeomanry put aside their heavier clothes. The press-ganged from the Terpsichoria were disorientated. The idea that seasons could be escaped, could be outrun physically, was profoundly unsettling.

The seasons were only points of view-matters of perspective. When it was winter in New Crobuzon, it was summer in Bered Kai Nev (so they said), though they shared the days and nights that grew long and short in antiphase. Dawn was dawn all across the world. In the eastern continent, summer days were short.

The birds of Armada’s microclimate increased in number. The small, inbred community of finches and sparrows and pigeons that clung to the city’s skyline wherever it moved were joined by transients: migrators that crossed the Swollen Ocean, following the year’s heat. A few were waylaid from their gigantic flocks by Armada, coming down to rest and drink, and staying.

They circled confused over the wheeled spires of Curhouse, where the Democratic Council met in session after emergency session, fiercely and ineffectually debating Armada’s direction. They agreed that the Lovers’ secret plans could not be good for the city, that they must do something, bickering miserably as their impotence became more and more clear.

Garwater had always been the most powerful riding, and now Garwater had the Sorghum, and the Democratic Council of Curhouse could do nothing at all.

(Nevertheless, Curhouse opened tentative communications with the Brucolac.)

The hardest thing for Tanner was not gill-breathing, not moving his arms and legs like a frog or vodyanoi, but staring into the face of the colossal gradient of dark water below him. Attempting to look it full-on and not be cowed.

When he had worn his diving suit, he had been an intruder. He had challenged the sea, and he had worn armor. Clinging to the rungs and the guy ropes, hanging on for life, he had known that the endless space below him that stretched out like a maw was exactly that: a mouth the size of the world, straining to swallow him.