There was a glimmer of something like fear in him, she thought, when an insinuation hung between them. Perhaps, she thought, he’s no interest in such matters. Or perhaps he’s a coward.

Shekel and Tanner traded stories.

Shekel already knew many of Crawfoot’s Chronicles, but Tanner knew them all. And even those that Shekel had heard before Tanner knew variations of, and he narrated them all well. In turn Shekel told him about the officers and passengers. He was full of scorn for Gimgewry, whose frantic masturbation he had heard through the privy door. He found the vacantly avuncular Tearfly enormously dull, and he was nervous of Captain Myzovic, but blustered and told lies about him wandering the decks drunk.

He lusted after Miss Cardomium. He liked Bellis Coldwine-’Cold ain’t the fucking word, though," he said, "for Miss Black-and-blue."

Tanner listened to the descriptions and insinuations, laughing and tutting where appropriate. Shekel told him the rumors and fables that the sailors told each other-about the piasa and the she-corsairs, Marichonians and the scab pirates, the things that lived below the water.

Behind Tanner stretched the long darkness of the hold.

There was a constant scavenging fight for food and fuel. It wasn’t just leftover meat and bread: many prisoners were Remade with metal parts and steam engines. If their boilers went out, they were immobilized, so anything that might burn was hoarded. In the far corner of the chamber stood an old man, the pewter tripod on which he walked locked solid for days. His furnace was dead cold. He ate only when someone bothered to feed him, and no one expected him to live.

Shekel was fascinated by the brutality of that little realm. He watched the old man with avid eyes. He saw the prisoners’ bruises. He glimpsed peculiar double silhouettes of men coupling in consent or rape.

He had run a gang in Raven’s Gate, back in the city, and he was worried about what would happen to them now, without him. His first-ever theft, aged six, had netted him a shekel piece, and the nickname had stuck. He claimed that he could not remember any other name. He had taken this job on the ship when his gang’s activities, which included the occasional burglary, had attracted too much attention from the militia.

"Another month and I’d have been in there with you, Tanner," he said. "Ain’t a lot in it."

Tended by the ship’s thaumaturges and wyrdshipmen, the meteoromancing engine by Terpsichoria’s bowsprit displaced air in front of the ship. The ship’s sails bowed out to fill the vacuum; pressure billowed in from behind. They made good speed.

The machine reminded Bellis of New Crobuzon’s cloudtowers. She thought of the huge engines jutting over the Tar Wedge roofscape, arcane and broken. She felt a hard longing for the streets and canals, for the size of the city.

And for engines. Machines. In New Crobuzon they had surrounded her. Now there was only the little meteoromancer and the mess-hall construct. The steam engine below made the whole of Terpsichoria a mechanism, but it was invisible. Bellis wandered the ship like a rogue cog. She missed the utilitarian chaos she had been forced to leave.