The thing is moving, way below the dying fringes of sunlight, in the midnight water miles down, past lantern fish and spider crabs, eclipsing their feeble phosphorescence. He feels it creeping nearer, displacing great gouts of cold water and sending them rolling up and out of the abyss in uncanny tides.

He is enthralled.

There is a lazy booming that makes the water shudder. Tanner imagines some monstrous appendage casually slapping the continental shelf, an unthinking apocalypse wiping out scores of crude bottom dwellers.

The water around him swirls. Thaumaturgic tides wash dissonant up from the hole. There is a sudden spasm of water pressure, and then a very faint sound of pounding reaches Tanner’s ears. Uncertain, he strains to hear.

It is a faint, regular beat that he feels in his innards. A ponderous, smashing stroke. His stomach pitches.

He hears it only for an instant, a quirk of space and thaumaturgy, but he knows what it is, and the knowledge stuns him.

It is a heart the size of a cathedral, beating far below him in the dark.

On the rain-wet steps, below a fierce sun and cloudless skies, Bellis waited.

Armada was like a ghost town. All but the most enthralled of its inhabitants hid, still terrified.

Something had happened. Bellis had felt the shifting of the Chromolith and the knocking of the chains. There had been many minutes now of silence.

She started, once again hearing metal on metal: a slow, threatening percussion as the chains below the city shifted, moving up and stretching out, emerging from the sinkhole below the world, returning to their home dimension, immersing themselves fully in the waters of the Swollen Ocean.

They angled slowly away from vertical, extending until they were stretched taut out in front of the city. Miles below, the bridle was just above the ocean floor.

There was a sudden juddering noise, and Armada shifted violently against itself, its ships shifting into subtly new positions, pulled in new directions from below, altering its outlines.

The city began to move.

The spasm almost knocked Bellis down.

She was agog.

The city was moving.

Cruising southward at a leisurely pace that easily eclipsed anything that had ever been achieved by the scores of tugboats.

Bellis could see the waves against the flanks of the outside vessels. She could see the turmoil of the city’s wake. They were traveling fast enough to leave a wake.

From the edge of Armada to the horizon, the city’s fleet of untethered ships-merchant-pirates, factories, messengers and warships and tugs-were now frantically moving. They were turning to face the city, starting their motors, unfurling their sails to catch up with their mother port.

Oh dear gods,Bellis thought, stunned. They must not be able to believe what they’re seeing. From the nearest of them, Bellis heard a chorus of delight. The sailors were standing on deck cheering.