Sometimes he opened books and found words that had defeated him the first time he had seen them, and that he had then written down and learned. It delighted him. He felt like a fox that had tracked them. That was how it was with thorough, and climber, and khepri. When he encountered them for the second time, they surrendered to him, and he read them without pause.

In the shelves of foreign volumes, Shekel found release. He was fascinated by their cryptic alphabets and orthographies, their strange pictures for foreign children. He came and rummaged among them when he needed quiet in his head. He could be assured that they would be silent.

Until the day that he picked one up and turned it in his hands, and it spoke to him.

At twilight, something idled out of the deep sea and came toward Armada.

It approached the last day-shift of engineers below the water. They were coming slowly up, clambering hand over hand up the ladders and pitted surfaces of the undercity, wheezing into their helmets, not looking down, not seeing what was coming.

Tanner Sack was sitting with Hedrigall on the edge of the Basilio docks. They dangled their legs like children over the side of a little cog, watching the cranes shift cargo.

Hedrigall was hinting at something. He spoke to Tanner obliquely. He hedged and implied, and Tanner understood that this was about the secret project, the unspoken thing that so many of his workmates shared. Without a scrap of that knowledge, Tanner could not make sense of what Hedrigall was saying. He could tell only that his friend was unhappy, and fearful of something.

A little way away they could see the corps of engineers emerge streaming from the water, climbing the ladders to rafts and weather-beaten steamers where juddering engines and colleagues and constructs pumped air for them.

The water in that little corner of the harbor began abruptly to bubble as if at a boil. Tanner touched Hedrigall’s forearm to quiet him, and stood, craning his neck.

There was a commotion at the water’s edge. Several workers rushed over and began to haul in the divers. More men surfaced, breaking the water in little bursts and scrabbling desperately at their helmets and at the ladders, fighting to get into the air. A furrow in the water swelled and broke the surface as Bastard John breached. He thrashed his tail wildly until it looked as if he stood unsteadily on the surface of the sea, and chattered like a monkey.

One man, hanging from a ladder, hunched out of the green water, finally threw off his helmet, and shrieked for help.

"Bonefish!" he screamed. "There are men down there!"

All around them people looked out of windows in alarm, left their work, and ran to the water, leaning out over the little trawlers bobbing in the middle of the harbor, pointing into the water and shouting to those on the docksides.