"But… well I told them all the things you’d said to me," Johannes said, and smiled. "And I can’t promise anything, but… I think you’d be the best person, and I told them that."

Silas seemed to be sleeping when she returned to bed, but something in the shallowness of his breath told her he was not. She leaned over him as if about to kiss him hard, her lips found his ear, and she whispered, "It’s working."

They came for her the next morning.

It was after Silas had left, heading for Armada’s underworld to perform his opaque, illegal activities. To the work that kept him under the city’s skin, that made him too dangerous even to attempt passage to the anophelii island.

Two of the Garwater yeomanry, pistols slung easy in their belts, steered Bellis to an aerostat cab. It was not far from Chromolith to the Grand Easterly. The mass of the enormous steamer stretched out above the city. Its six colossal masts, its chimneys, its bare decks unadorned by houses or towers.

The sky was full of aerostats: Scores of little cabs studding the air like bees around a hive; outlandish vessels built for freight, transporting heavy goods between the ridings; the peculiar little single-rider balloons with their pendulous occupants. A little way out were warflots, elliptical flying guns. And above them all the massive, crippled Arrogance.

They wound over the skyscape of Armada, lower than Bellis was used to, rising and sinking with the topography of roofs and rigging. Warrens of brick like New Crobuzon slums passed below. Built on the cramped space of deck tops, they looked precarious: their outer walls too close to the water, the alleyways that riddled them impossibly thin.

Beyond the haze above the Gigue, whose fore was an industrial district of foundries and chymical plants, the Grand Easterly was approaching.

Bellis was uncertain. She had never been inside the Grand Easterly before.

Its architecture was austere: darkwood panels, lithographs and heliotypes, stained glass. A little age-blistered, but well kept, its innards were a tangle of passageways and staterooms. Bellis was left to wait in a small chamber. The door was locked on her.

She went to the iron-fringed window and looked down over Armada’s random ships. In the distance she could see the green of Croom Park, spread like disease across the bodies of several ships. The room she was in was higher by far than any of the surrounding vessels, the side of the ship falling away below. At eye level she saw dirigibles and a mass of thin masts.

"This is a New Crobuzon ship, you know."

Even as she turned, Bellis recognized the voice. It was the scarred man, the Lover, standing in the doorway, alone.

Bellis was shocked. She had known that there would be interrogation, investigation, but she had not expected this: to be questioned by him. I translated the book, she thought. I get special treatment.