"You were right," she had told him. "It took me a while to translate the book, but when I realized what it was-the account of an experiment-"

"They raised an avanc," Shekel had interrupted her, and she had nodded.

"When I realized what the book was," she went on, "I made sure that Tintinnabulum and the Lovers saw it. It was something that they needed, part of their plan…"

"The book I found," Shekel had said and begun to grin incredulously.

In the Custody Aeroworks, a massive framework of wires and curving girders was taking shape.

At one corner of the enormous room there was a heavy cloud of buff-colored leather. A hundred men and women sat around its edges, thick finger-long needles in each hand, stitching ambidextrously. There were vats of chymicals and resin and gutta-percha to seal the enormous gasbags. Wood frames and metal incandescent from forges were beginning to take the outlines of control and observation gondolas.

The Custody workshop, big as it was, could not contain this commission in its final form. Instead, all the finished components were to be lifted onto the bare deck of the Grand Easterly, where the bags would be inserted, the sections of skeleton riveted together, and the leather covering stitched into place.

The Grand Easterly was the only ship in Armada big enough for that.

It was Chainday the twentieth, or the seventh Skydi of Hawkbill-Bellis no longer cared which. She had not seen Silas for four days.

The air was warm and thick with birdsong. Bellis felt claustrophobic in her rooms, but when she left to walk the streets the feeling did not ebb. The houses and flanks of ships seemed to sweat in the sea-heat. Bellis had not changed her opinion of the sea: its size and monotony affronted her. But that morning she suddenly and urgently needed to get out from under the city’s eaves.

She was reproachful with herself for the hours she had waited for Silas. She had no idea what had happened to him, but the sense that she was alone, that he might not be coming back, had hardened her quickly. She realized how vulnerable she had become, and she reerected a wall around herself, like bone. Sitting and waiting like a fucking child, she thought furiously.

The yeomanry came for her every day, took her to the Lover and Tintinnabulum and the Castor ’s hunters, and to committees whose roles in the Summoning she did not understand. Her translation was scrutinized and picked apart: she had to face a man who read High Kettai, though not so well as she. He had demanded intricate details: Why had she chosen this tense, this part of speech? why had she rendered this word in this way? His manner was combative, and she took a small pleasure in undermining him.

"And on this page here," he had snapped in one typical exchange, "why render the word morghol ‘willing.’ It means the opposite!"