All their free moments were spent like this, hunched together in Bellis’ cylindrical room, ignoring the sounds and the daylight or lamplight outside, she smoking furiously, cursing at Armada’s unpleasant ship-grown tobacco, both of them scribbling note after note, hunting through old books. Trying to make something from the knowledge they’d stolen. Trying to work out an escape.

They had hunted hard for the city’s secret. Now that they had it, the slowly dawning understanding that still, even so, even with that knowledge they might not make it home, appalled them.

If we can just work out where we’ll be…Bellis would think, and a queasy understanding would grow in her that it was not as if the whole damn city would dock, or would trundle past Kohnid or some other port in plain view. And if it did, she would still have to fight her own way from the city to the shore, to the docks, to a ship, across the water again, home. And there was no way at all that she could make that happen.

Get me to the shore,she thought. If I could get to the shore, maybe I could persuade someone to help me, or I could steal a boat, or I could stow away, or… something…

But she could not get to the shore. And even if she could, all those ideas might come to nothing, and she knew it.

"Shekel came to see me today," she said. "It’s been near enough a week since he gave me the book, Silas. He asked me what it was, whether it was what Tintinnabulum was looking for. I told him I’d know for certain soon."

"It won’t be long," she said ominously. "It won’t be long till he overcomes his shyness and tells someone. He’s friends with some loyal dockhand who works for the Lovers. He’s fucking Tintinnabulum’s servant, for Jabber’s sake.

"We have to move, Silas. We have to make a decision. We have to decide what we’re going to do. When he tells his friends that he found the book by Kruach Aum, the yeomanry’ll be here in minutes. And then not only will they have the book, but they’ll know we were keeping it from them. And gods know I don’t want to see the inside of an Armadan jail."

It was impossible to judge how much exactly the Lovers knew about raising the avanc. They must know something-the location of the sinkholes, the scale of the engines and thaumaturgy necessary, perhaps some parts of the science required. But they were particularly seeking the volume by Kruach Aum.