Shekel was talking to Bellis, but she did not hear him clearly: don’t know what to do, he was saying awkwardly, thought you could help, the one Tintinnabulum was looking for, did the best thing. Adrenaline and tremulous excitement were filling her as she studied the volume. There was no title. She turned to the first page, and her heartbeat quickened in her throat as she realized that she had been right about Aum’s name. The book was in High Kettai.

It was the arcane, classical language of Gnurr Kett, the island nation thousands of miles south of New Crobuzon, at the edge of the Swollen Ocean, where the warm water became the Black Sandbar Sea. It was a strange, very difficult tongue that used the Ragamoll script but derived from quite another root. Base Kettai, the everyday language, was much easier, but the relationship between the two was attenuated and ancient. Fluency in one gave only the slightest understanding of the other. High Kettai, even in Gnurr Kett itself, was the preserve of the cantors and a few intellectuals.

Bellis had studied it. Fascinated by its structures of embedded verbs, it was High Kettai that Bellis had made the subject of her first book. It was fifteen years since she had published High Kettai Grammatology, but even rusty as she was, looking at the opening chapter of the book, the meaning came slowly to her.

"I would lie if I told you that I write this without pride,"Bellis read silently, and looked up, trying to calm herself, almost afraid to go on.

She turned the pages rapidly, looking at the pictures. A man in a tower by the sea. The man on the shore, the skeletons of great engines littering the sand. The man making calculations by the sun, and by the shadows of strange trees. She turned to the fourth picture and caught her breath. A rill of goosebumps came and went over her.

In the fourth picture, the man stood again on the shore-his blank, stylized eyes the only features on his face, rendered by the artist as placid as a cow’s-and above the sea, swarming toward an approaching boat, was a cloud of dark figures. The picture was vague, but Bellis could see thin arms and legs dangling, and a blur of wings.

It made her uneasy.

She scanned, trying to remember the language. There was something very odd about this book. It felt very different from all the other High Kettai works Bellis had seen. Something incongruous was in the tone, quite at odds with the poetry that characterized the old Gnurr Kett canon.

"He would have sought help from outsiders,"she hesitantly made out, "but all others shun our island, fearful of our hungry women."

Bellis looked up. Jabber knows, she thought, what I’ve got my hands on.