He walked without hurry along Garwater’s less salubrious byways. Needle Street and Blodmead Street and the Wattlandaub Maze on the Surge Instigant; the Cable’s Weft, a barquentine decaying into fungus-mottled camouflage; and on to the submersible Plengant. He picked his way past the trapdoors cut into its top, stayed in shadow close to the blistering periscope tower.

Behind him, its tower unlit among the spires and masts, he could see the derrick of the Sorghum.

The flat flank of the Grand Easterly swept up beside the Plengant like the side of a canyon. From deep within it, behind its metal skin, there were the vibrations of unceasing industry. There were trees on the surface of the submersible, gripping the iron with roots like knotted toes. The man walked in their shadow and heard the quick skin-sounds of bats above him.

There were thirty or forty feet of sea between the submarine and the cliff face of the steamship. The man saw the lights and shadows of late-night dirigibles in the sky, weak shifting rays spilling over the Grand Easterly ’s guardrail from the torches of the yeomanry patrolling the deck.

Opposite him was the enormous sweeping curve of the Grand Easterly ’s starboard sponson, the cover to the paddlewheel. From the bottom of its bell-shaped covering, the slats of a great wheel within emerged like ankles from a skirt.

The man emerged from the shade of the sickly trees. He removed his shoes, tying them to his belt. When no one came, and there were no sounds, he walked to the curving edge of the Plengant and slid suddenly into the cool water, with only a faint sound. It was only a short swim to the flank of the Grand Easterly, and into the shadows below the sponson.

Where, brine-soaked and dogged, the man hauled himself up the slats of the sixty-foot paddle, into the darkness. He was as quiet as he could be in the echoes. He climbed to the side of the wheel’s huge crankshaft and to a service hatchway, long forgotten, that he had known was there.

It took minutes of effort to break the scab of age, but the man finally managed to open it, to make his way along the crawl space into an enormous, silent engine room abandoned a long time ago to the dust.

He crept past the thirty-ton cylinders and huge, ignored engines. The chamber was a maze of walkways and monolithic pistons, thickets of gears and flywheels as tangled as a forest.

Neither dust nor light stirred. It was as if time had been bled dry and given up. The man picked the lock of the door, then stood motionless, holding the handle. He remembered the layout of the ship. He knew where he was heading-past the guards.