The city was near the southern border between the Swollen Ocean and the Black Sandbar Sea. Bellis was stunned when she heard that. Have we really come so fucking far? she had thought.

They lay absolutely still in the water. By arcane techniques like echo-catching and sensory projection, Armada had found its way to the center of a deadeye. These existed randomly across the oceans-patches of water a few miles across, where there were no currents or winds. Without motive power, things floating on the surface of deadeyes would bob up and down with waves, but would not move an inch in any compass direction.

They were signs of sinkholes.

In this region, the ocean was between three and four miles deep. But below the deadeye the seafloor fell away in a steep cone, into a circular hole that stretched down below the reach of any geo-empath.

The sinkhole was a mile and a half wide, and bottomless.

It stretched so deep that Bas-Lag’s dimension could not possibly contain the water’s gravity and density, and reality was unstable in the shaft’s lower reaches. The sinkhole was a duct between realms. Where the avancs breached.

There was not a time when Kruach Aum and his new subordinates declared their researches over-there was no sudden announcement, no claim that the last problems had been solved. Bellis could not say exactly when she knew that Armada was ready.

Doul did not tell her. The knowledge soaked into her, and into all the other citizens. In rumor and guesswork, in triumphant speculation and then in triumph, the word spread. They’ve succeeded. They know how to do it. They’re waiting.

Bellis wanted not to believe it. The awareness that the scientists had perfected the techniques they needed took her so gently that there was no sudden shock, just a slowly waxing foreboding. How? she thought, again and again. She considered the scale of what was to be attempted, and the question overwhelmed her. How can they do it?

She considered everything that had to be done, all the knowledge that they had had to amass, the machines to be built, the puissance to channel. It seemed impossible. Is it down to me? she wondered incredulously. Without Aum, without his book, could this be done?

With every hour, Bellis could feel the tension, the anxiety and excitement, increasing all around her.

Days after they reached the deadeye, finally, the announcement was made that everyone had been expecting. Posters and criers warned people to be ready, that the research was over, that an attempt was to be made.

As momentous, as extraordinary, as it was, it surprised no one. And after such long official silence, even to Bellis, that final confirmation was almost a relief.