The storm was muted for Tanner, cosseted deep as he was in the water of the deadeye. The surface above him lost its integrity in the rain. The city rose and fell as if the sea were trying to shuck it off. The huge chains moved below it.

Even through the tons of water, Tanner realized, the sound of thunder and the water’s motions were increasing. He swam, agitated, waiting for the storm to reach its final pitch, growing more and more nervous as the violence did not dissipate, as it continued to increase.

’ Stail,he thought in awe and fear. They’ve done it this time, ain’t they? What the fuck kind of storm is this? What the fuck have they done?

Bellis held tight to the rail, terrified that the wind would pull her out and over, to be crushed between vessels.

The air was stained by shadows, a darkness burst by lightning like camera flashes.

Even with air rinsed by the torrent, the weird stink of rockmilk vapor was strong and increasing. Bellis could see ripples distorting the air. Lightning struck the city’s masts again and again, lingering around the huge copper-shrouded column on the Grand Easterly.

Armada danced as the sky boiled. As the aeromorphic engine vented ever more power, the lightning patterns began to change. Bellis watched the clouds, mesmerized.

At first the streaks and jags were random, snapping and shivering like brilliant snakes in the darkness. But they began to synchronize. They grew closer in time, so that the light from one still scored Bellis’ eyes while the next fired, and their movements grew more purposeful. The lightning bursts bolted toward the center of the cloud, vanishing at its core.

The thunder grew more intense. The rockmilk smell was nauseating. Bellis was hypnotized by what she saw through the deluge, capable only of thinking come on come on! without consciousness of what she was waiting for.

And then finally, with a single stunning report of thunder, the lightning reached phase.

They burst out of nothing at the same moment around the storm’s edge, scored through the dark air together toward its heart as if they were spokes, meeting at the axis of the tempest in a single, painfully intense point of light that crackled and did not dissipate.

Energy burst up, invisible, amplified through the valves and transformers of occult engines, spurting out of the Grand Easterly ’s smokestacks, racing skyward into the storm.

The invocation burst in the heart of the cloud.

The crackling star of lightning shone cold and intense and blue-white, trembling, glowing brighter, taut as if pregnant as if full as if ready to explode and then it

burst

and a swarm of shrieking presences coalesced out of its shreds and were about the ship, crackling apparitions outlined in energy, in elyctricity, leaving trails of burned air as they raced with intent through the sky, informed and capricious and purposeful.

Fulmen. Lightning elementals.