They screamed and laughed as they zigzagged, their cries something between sound and current. The fulmen tore with astonishing speed over the skyline, metamorphosing in arcs of current, trailing a slew of ghost shapes formed in their discharge, mimicking the outlines of the city’s buildings, mimicking fish and birds and faces.

A cluster swept down to the Chromolith deck, shrieking past Bellis and almost stopping her heart. They gusted around the funnel.

From somewhere in the Grand Easterly came a pulse of power, and all over the city the elementals snapped up from their games and eddied in agitation. Again the hidden machines gave out a jolt of energy, sending it coursing along the wires to the tip of the mast. The fulmen howled, and danced along chains and metal railings. They began to swarm. Bellis turned her head and watched them go, out over the body of her ship, through the channels of water between vessels, up and over reconstituted decks toward the huge steamer’s mainmast.

Bellis did not notice the rain or the thunder. All she could see or hear were the living lightnings that outlined Armada with their blazing cold, squabbling and spasming in and out of existence by the city’s tallest roofs. She peered through the storm, over the intervening vessels. Like bait, a flow of energy dangled at the tip of the Grand Easterly ’s towering mast.

We fish for a storm to fish for the elementals to fish for the avanc,thought Bellis. She felt drunk.

The fulmen circled the mast, a sheet of bristling presences, spinning into a vortex. They spat in the storm’s darkness, illuminating the city negatively, as if with black sunlight, until a last great gout of binding energy burst out of the wires.

The fulmen shrieked and gibbered and began to pour into the metal.

With hexes and machinery, the elementalists reeled them in.

The elementals screamed as they were taken, their forms conducted through the thick cabling, lights snuffed out in rapid succession. In half a second the sky was dark again.

The elyctric elementals coursed as supercharged particles along the network of copper, bleeding one into the other and becoming a stream of living power, racing down stairs and into the Grand Easterly ’s guts, to the rockmilk engine, into the stump ends of the chain that stretched down into the rift below the sea.

Below millions of tons of brine, this condensed substance of a tribe of lightning elementals burst through the links of chain, through prongs the size of masts, out into the water in a bolt of massively potent energy that blazed white light and spasmed instantly into the deeps of the sinkhole, bleaching and destroying what rude life it passed, until it lanced the membrane between dimensions, many miles down.

In the bottom of the Grand Easterly, the rockmilk engine hummed, and sent potent pulses out along the chain.