For some days, Tintinnabulum had been conscious of a change in his servant, a difference in the clattering of her engines. She moved more quickly and exactly, turning in tight arcs and stopping without a wheezing slowdown. She found it easier to negotiate Armada’s swaying bridges. An edge of anxiety in her was gone-her constant scavenging, her scrabbling for discarded coal and wood, had stopped.

"What has happened to your engine, Angevine?" he had asked her. And smiling with immense, shy pleasure, she had shown him.

He rummaged in her tubework, burning his hands stoically on her boiler, examining her reconfigured metal viscera.

Tintinnabulum knew that Armadan science was a mongrel. It was as piratical as the city’s economy and politics, the product of theft and chance-as various and inconsistent. The engineers and thaumaturges learned their skills on equipment that was rotted and out of date, and on stolen artifacts of such sophisticated de-sign that they were mostly incomprehensible. It was a patchwork of technologies.

"This man," he murmured, up to his elbow in Angevine’s motor, fingering a three-way switch at the back of her chassis, "this man may be just a jobbing engineer, but… this is the choicest work. Not many aboard Armada could make this. Why did he do it?" he asked her.

She could only respond vaguely to that.

"Is he trustworthy?" Tintinnabulum said.

Tintinnabulum and his crew were not Armadan-born, but their commitment to Garwater was unquestionable. Stories were told about how they had joined Armada-the Lovers had tracked them by esoteric means, persuaded them to work in the city for unknown wages. For them, the ropes and chains linking the fabric of Garwater had been parted. The riding had opened itself, let Tintinnabulum enter and embed himself in the very heart of the city, which had resealed behind him.

That morning, Angevine too had picked up one of the slew of leaflets that suddenly clogged up Armada’s alleys, and had learned the purpose of the Garwater project. It had excited her, but had not, she realized, come as a particular surprise. She had been present on the edge of official discussions for a long time, had seen the literature left lying on Tintinnabulum’s desk, had caught glimpses of scribbled diagrams and half-finished calculations. As soon as she discovered what it was that Garwater was attempting, she felt that she had always known. After all, did she not work for Tintinnabulum? And what was he but a hunter?

His room was full of evidence. Books-the only ones that she knew of outside the library-etchings, carved tusks, broken harpoons. Bones and horns and hides. In the years she had worked for him, Tintinnabulum and his crew of seven had lent their expertise to Garwater. Horned sharks and whales and ceti, bonefish, shellarc-he had snared and harpooned and caught them all, for food, for protection, for sport.