Little filigrees of rumor twist away from them, recurve, and tease. The southern ship has disappeared. From the rock edges of the continent, where land rises to separate fresh- from saltwater, they have tracked to the Basilisk Channel, to the up-pointing fingers of Salkrikaltor City, to the ship puttering between the sea and New Crobuzon the river-straddler. But that ship has disappeared, leaving lies and stories eddying behind it.

Mouths from the deep. Ghost pirates. Torque. Hidden storms. The floating city.

Again and again the floating city.

The hunters investigate the rigs that loom from Salkrikaltor’s southern waters: supports like outsize trees, like pachyderms’ legs, crumbling concrete shafts in the seabed, mud oozing up around them as if around toes.

Drills worry at the soft rock, sucking at its juices. The rigs feed in shallows like swamp things.

Men in shells of leather and air descend on chains to tend to the mumbling giants, and the hunters spirit them away with predatory ease. They take away the masks, and the men scrabble futilely and emit their lives in bubbling howls of air. Their captors keep them alive with hexes, with mouth-kisses of oxygen, with massage to slow their hearts, and in caves under the light water the men beg for mercy and, at their captors’ insistence, tell them all manner of stories.

Stories, above all, of the floating city that snatched the Terpsichoria away.

Night falls, and the shadows shed by day are smothered.

The unclear figures have all the water of the world to search. The Oceans: the Rime; the Boxash; the Vassilly and Tarribor and Teuchor; the Muted and Swollen. And the Gentleman’s Sea and the Spiral Sea and the Clock and Hidden and others; and all the straits and sounds and channels. And the bays, and the bights.

How can they search it all? How can they start?

They ask the sea.

They strike out for the deep waters.

-where is the floating city? they ask.

The king of the goblin sharks does not know or care. The corokanth will not tell. The hunters ask elsewhere.- where is the floating city?

They find monkish intelligences masquerading as cod and congers that claim ignorance and swim away for more contemplation. The hunters ask the salinae, the brine elementals, but cannot make sense of the liquid shrieks of information with which they are answered.

Rising with the sun and breaching, the hunters bob in waves and think again.

They ask the whales.

-where is the floating city?they ask the great stupid krill-swillers, the grey and the humpback and the blue. They straddle them like mountaineers and manipulate the pleasure centers of their heavy brains. They bribe them, funneling tons of plankton in a panicked soup into the whale’s gurning grins.

The hunters make the question a demand.

-find the floating city,they say carefully, in concepts simple enough for the whales to understand.