He did not get angry this time, just closed his hand with a soft clap and raised his eyes to ask her what had happened.

"It was Tanner," she said, ready for him to fly at her. "He dropped it in the sea."

"It’s a ring, Bellis," Silas said quietly. "It sits safe on your finger. You don’t lose it. He hasn’t lost it. He’s kept it, gods know why. Souvenir from home? Something to blackmail you with? Gods know." He shook his head and sighed, and she was furious with his manner, which said I am disappointed in you.

"I’d better leave, Bellis," he said. "Carefully-you’re watched, remember. So don’t be surprised if I come and go by… unconventional means. Would you excuse me a moment?"

He descended the spiral stairs. Bellis heard the sound of his feet dissipating on the metal, ringing hollow like thin tin on tin. She turned at the weird sound, but he had gone. She could still hear the slightest ring of his feet on her staircase, descending, reaching the bottom step, but there was nothing to be seen. He was invisible or gone.

Bellis’ eyes widened very slightly, but even in his absence she begrudged Silas any awe.

He comes and goes like a rat or a bat, now,she thought. Keeping out of sight. Been learning thaumaturgy, has he? Got some facility, a little puissance?

But she was unnerved and somewhat intimidated. His departure suggested a charm of exceptional subtlety and strength. I didn’t know you had that in you, Silas, she thought. She realized again how little she knew of him. Their conversation was like an elaborate game. Despite his words, despite the fact that she knew they shared secrets, she felt alone.

And she did not think that Tanner Sack had kept the New Crobuzon seal, though she could not say why.

Bellis felt as if she were waiting.

The man stands waiting with wind gusting him on the staircase that spirals the height of her absurd chimney-pot apartment, and he knows that the eyes that might watch her door cannot see him at all.

In his hand is the statue, its filigree of fin folded like layers of cake pastry, its round betoothed remora mouth pouting upward, and his tongue is still cold where he has kissed it. He is much quicker now; he finds it much easier to accept the cold stone’s flickering little tonguing, and he can direct the energies their passionless coupling unleashes far more adroitly.

He stands at angles to the night at a place the statue shows him and where its kiss allows him to stand, at a place or a kind of place where the beams of lights intersect and he is unnoticed, as doors and walls and windows do not notice him so long as he is the brine-stinking statue’s lover.