Even on the return journey, the scientists were making plans. They did not underestimate what they had yet to do. There was harder work ahead of them.

The Trident was not traveling in the opposite direction to the one by which it had come: Armada had moved and, by those arcane means Bellis did not understand, they were heading inexorably for it.

The dirigible began to speed up, gusted by grey clouds and bullets of rain. Bellis peered from the stateroom windows, out over the turmoil of the sea and the dark air at the edge of the sky.

A storm was coming.

They outpaced the worst of the bad weather. Within its own borders the storm was violent, but it did not move fast. It was tearing itself apart from the inside. The Trident ran at its edges, pelted by a periphery of rain, racing its shadow.

When she saw the broken mass of Armada breach the horizon and sprawl across the water below her, Bellis marveled at its scale. It looked like spillage, a slick of ruined and refitted boats, untidy across the waves, shapeless, its edges random and unchanging. The fringe of tugs and steamers that had hauled it for thousands of miles had been untethered while the city was still, and they puttered around it in great numbers, ferrying goods. Bellis thought again of the vast quantities of fuel that they must consume. It was no wonder that the pirate ships of Armada were voracious.

On seeing it, Bellis felt a great wash of emotion that she could not identify at all.

At the city’s outside edge, she saw the Terpsichoria. And with its spire flaming, its effluent warping the air, Bellis could see the complex outlines of the Sorghum rig. There was a bustle of vessels in the sea around its legs. It was drilling again, sucking oil and rockmilk out of the pressurized veins in which they had flowed for centuries. Armada had come to where there was a seam. The Sorghum was storing fuel for the almighty thaumaturgy to come.

They came in over Garwater’s aft-star’d, picking their way carefully over masts. Below them a mass of shapes followed the Trident curiously, tracking it in its shadow: aerocabs and single balloonists, odd ungainly looking airships.

The Trident docked at the Grand Easterly, at the same height as the crippled Arrogance. Bellis could see people staring from surrounding ships and little aircraft, but the Grand Easterly was sealed off. Its deck was almost empty. A small contingent of yeomanry was waiting for them, and at their head, his face alight, was the Lover.

Bellis saw a new cut on his face, a healing scab. It started at the left corner of his lips and curled below his chin. It was the mirror image of the one that Bellis had heard the Lover inflicting on herself.