The kissing is never a pleasure. But the power that he has, that enters him with the stone thing’s spit, is a wonder.

He steps out into the night, unseen and emboldened, with arcane energies in him, to look for his ring.

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty

Armada lolled in the sun. It was getting hotter.

The frantic work continued, and below the water, the shape of the avanc’s harness grew slowly more solid. It was ghosted, its outlines in girders and wooden supports, like an abstract for some implausible building. As the days went on it grew a little more substantial, its intricate spines and gears more like something real. It grew through the extraordinary efforts of the crews. The city was on something like a war footing, every iota of industry and effort commandeered. People understood that they were careering at breakneck speed into a new epoch.

The scale of the harness always staggered Tanner Sack. It loomed below the ecology of scavenger fish that never left the city’s underside, larger by a long, long way than any ship. It dwarfed the Grand Easterly, which bobbed above it like a bath toy. And the bridle was to be completed within weeks.

The work was constant. During the dark hours, the sputtering illumination of chymical flares and welding torches attracted night fish. They surrounded the chains and gangs of divers, schools of them staring big-eyed, agog at the lights.

There were moving parts, and joints, and rubberized gasbags cannibalized from old dirigibles. There were sealed motors. But essentially it was just a vast halter, its links and segments stretching more than a quarter of a mile long.

Ship after ship was gutted, stripped from the inside, scuttled, and melted down. The fleet of warships and traders that surrounded the city and its ports was thinned, for the sake of this project. A frontier of smoke plumes enveloped the sacrificed vessels while heat torches took them apart.

As Shekel made his way along the aft of Garwater one evening, to Bellis’ house, he looked out toward the horizon and saw a half-gone ship at the edge of the city. It was the Terpsichoria: its outlines crumbled and broken; its bridge, most of its superstructure, and its deck gone; its metal viscera taken to the factories. The sight brought him up short. He had no affection for the vessel; he was not dismayed-but astonished, for reasons he could not articulate.

He stared down at the water that turned below him. It was hard to believe that it was happening, that such colossal efforts were taking place, link after link slotted together in a vast series under the fabric of the city.

There were several languages active in Bellis’ life. She felt exhilarated to relearn her disciplines: the nameless technique she had perfected for segmenting her mind, keeping her internal dictionaries distinct; the language trance she had last used in Tarmuth.