Only now there was a rent beneath the sea, and now the enticing signals the machine sent out, inaudible to anything born in the seas of Bas-Lag, might be heard.

Tanner Sack heads down into the twilit water. The storm has dissipated, almost instantly, and the sea above him is bright. Tanner is testing himself, pushing on and down, as far as he can go, into the disphotic zone.

There are others around him: cray and menfish and Bastard John, he supposes, curious to plumb as far as they are able, but he cannot see them. The water is cold, and silent, and dense.

He felt the jolts of energy pass him through the huge links of chain. He knows that astonishing events are unfolding directly below, and like a child he indulges himself, sinking toward the dark. He has never swum so deep before, but he follows the enormous chain links as far down as he can go, steeling himself, acclimatizing as the pressure wraps him tight. His tentacles reach out and seem to grasp, as if he can pull himself deeper, gripping the substance of the water.

His head hurts; his blood is constricted. He hangs still in the water when he can go no further. He does not know how far he has come down. He cannot see the great chain by his side. He can see nothing. He is suspended in the cold and the grey, and he is quite alone.

A long time passes while the signals from the rockmilk engine continue to reverberate enticingly into the deep water. Everything is still.

Until Tanner’s eyes snap open (he did not know they were closed).

There has been a sound, a sudden feeling of slick grinding, like the snapping of bolts, things slotting into grooves. A long, rumbling report that travels through the water like whalesong, that he feels in his stomach more than he hears.

Tanner is still. He listens.

He knows what he has heard.

It was the restraints on the quarter-mile bridle-the jags and pegs and pins and rivets, the bolts as long as ships-sliding into place. Something has come snuffling up through layers of water and reality, he thinks, to investigate the delicious rockmilk pulses, and has slipped its neck or some part of itself into the collar until the harness is around it, and the spines and studs like tree trunks have jutted forward, piercing its flesh, and the cinctures have tightened, and the thing is trapped.

There is silence again, and stillness. Tanner knows that above him, the thaumaturges and engineers are sending carefully measured signals into what approximates the creature’s cortex, soothing, suggesting, cajoling.

He feels minute shifts of tide and temperature-thaumaturgic washes rolling up at him.

Tanner feels vibrations against his skin and then, harder, inside him.