Tanner Sack found the bridle and the now-visible chains a great pleasure to his eye. He had been born and raised in New Crobuzon, where mountains picked out the western sky and the architecture was complex and encompassing. There were times, he would admit, when the endless open skies of Armada, the unbroken water below, troubled him.

He found a comfort in the submerged harness. It gave him something big and real to stare at, breaking the monotonous deeps.

Tanner hung in the still waters of the deadeye.

There were a very few figures in the water-Tanner, Bastard John, the menfish-watching from below.

Everything had been prepared.

It was almost midday. The city was as still as if it were before dawn.

On neighboring ships, Bellis could see people watching from their roofs, or peering from behind railings or from the city’s parks. But there were not many. There was almost no noise. There were no dirigibles in the sky.

"Half the city’s indoors," she hissed to Uther Doul. He had found her on the deck of the Grand Easterly, gathered with the few Armadans who, like Bellis, felt compelled to watch the attempt from the flagship itself.

They’re frightened,she thought, staring over the empty streets on vessels below. They’ve realized what’s at stake here. Like shipwrecked sailors in a jolly boat tethering themselves to a whale. She almost laughed. And they’re afraid of the storm.

The citizens of Armada dreaded severe storms. The city could not avoid or ride the weather’s tempers, and the worst winds could tear vessel from vessel, throw them together no matter how strong their buffers. Armada’s history was punctuated with the stories of terrible and deadly squalls.

Never before had anyone deliberately called one down.

To puncture the membrane between realities, even at a weak point, to entice the avanc into this plane, a burst of colossal energy was required. Something like that required not just an elyctric storm, but a living one. An orgy, a frenzy of fulmen, lightning elementals.

And given that living storms were-thankfully-almost as rare as Torque rifts, Garwater would have to create one.

The Grand Easterly ’s six masts, particularly its towering main mast, were swathed with copper wiring, insulated with rubber, that stretched down and disappeared into the ship itself, passing down corridors and stairs, carefully guarded by the yeomanry, winding through the vessel until it slotted into the esoteric new engine running on rockmilk at the Grand Easterly ’s base, ready to send extraordinary charges into the stub ends of the colossal chain, down through the metal into the bridle and the deep sea.

Somewhere, scholars and pirate-thaumaturges from Booktown and Shaddler and Garwater were gathered: meteoromancers and elementalists with weird engines, furnaces, unguents, and offerings. Perhaps a sacrifice. Bellis could imagine their frantic work gauging aetherial currents, stoking and conjuring.