The enormous chain corridor stretched out below him was more than four miles long. Hanging absolutely motionless in the darkness at its end was the bridle, bigger than any ship. It dangled into the pit below, investigated, perhaps, by the oarfish and huge-mouthed eels that frequented that depth.

Sitting and reading beside her window, Bellis became slowly aware of an odd stillness: a silence and a shift in the quality of the light. A neurotic pause, as if the air and the bleaching sun were waiting. She knew with a shock of amazed fear what was happening.

At last,she thought. Gods help me, they’ve done it.

From her front step, high up on the Chromolith chimney, she looked out over Armada’s gently bobbing vessels, at the Grand Easterly ’s masts. She stared into the crowded city. There had been no warning that another attempt was to be made: there were people everywhere. They were standing still in the markets and streets, peering up, trying to work out what they had sensed.

The sky began to change.

"Dear Jabber," whispered Bellis. "Oh my gods."

In the middle of the sun-bleached blue stretched out over Armada, a darkness unfolded. Thousands of feet above them, the clear sky spasmed for an instant and shat out of nothingness a tiny smear of cloud, a mote, an atom of impurity that unfurled like a flower, like a trick box-a conjuror’s prop that opened again and again, multiplying itself with its own substance.

It spread quickly like squid ink, uncoiling, staining the sky, spreading in a circle, an expanding disk of shadow. It emitted ominous sounds.

There was a wind, suddenly, slapping Armada’s shanks and towers, strumming the city’s rigging. Something was drifting down around Bellis, minuscule particles like mist, an arcane stink descending from the Grand Easterly ’s funnels and spreading out, the effluent of whatever forces were tearing the clouds out of nothing. Bellis recognized the smell: rockmilk. Some aeromorphic engine was being boosted.

The sun was completely occluded. Bellis shivered in the newborn dark and cold. Beyond the city limits, the sea had become choppy, seesawing with foam. The sound from the sky increased: from low vibrations it became purring, and then a drawn-out shout, and finally a bark of thunder, and with that percussive noise the storm erupted out of the cloudmass.

The wind went berserk. The sea pitched. Thunder again, and with it the oily darkness over the city shattered a thousand ways, and through every crack lightning glared incandescent. Rain raced in screaming swells, dousing Bellis in moments.

Across all the ridings of the city, Armadans scrambled to get below. The decks emptied fast. Men and women struggled to uncouple the bridges as the vessels they linked began to buck. Here and there stood people transfixed like Bellis, in fear or fascination, staring into the storm.

"Godspit!" shouted Bellis. "Sweet Jabber protect us!" She could not hear her own voice.