The avanc responded, uncomplaining and accommodating as a cow. It altered its course (with a flickering of its fins or filaments or paws or gods knew what) in response to the faint tugging. It allowed itself to be led.

In the bottom of the Grand Easterly, the work of the engine room quickly become routine. All day the juddering boilers were fed a thin stream of the rockmilk the Sorghum had drawn up, and they sent a steady pulse of coddling through the chain and the spines and into what approximated the avanc’s cortex.

The huge creature was drugged, drowsy with contentment, mindless as a tadpole.

At first, after the avanc was called, when it became clear that the thaumaturgy, the hunting, had actually worked, that the fabled beast had entered Bas-Lag, Armada’s citizenry were hysterical with excitement.

That first night had been a spontaneous party. The quarto’s-end decorations were brought out again, and the boulevards and plazas across the city were filled with lines of dancing people, men and women, khepri and cactus and scabmettler and others, carrying aloft a variety of papier-mâché models of the avanc, as unlikely as they were inconsistent.

Bellis spent the evening in a pub with Carrianne, buoyed up by the revelry despite herself. The next day she was tired and downcast. It was the third Markindi of Flesh Quarto, and Bellis referred to the New Crobuzon calendar she had scribbled down and discovered that it was the fifteenth of Swiven-Badsprit Eve. This realization depressed her. It was not that she thought the baleful influence of the festival would extend this far, but the near coincidence of the avanc’s arrival with that night was discomfiting.

As the days wore on, even with the excitement still fresh, even with the astonishment of waking each day to a sea slapping against a city in motion, Bellis sensed an anxiety growing in Armada. Central to that was the realization that the Lovers of Garwater, who controlled the avanc, were heading north and would not say why.

Discussions about where the avanc would take the city had so far been in general, nebulous terms. Garwater’s representatives had stressed the creature’s speed and power, the ability to escape storms and barren seas, to make for fair weather, where crops would thrive. Many citizens had assumed that the city would head for somewhere warm, where there were few naval powers, where goods and books and soil and other plunder could be taken from the shore with ease. The southern Kudrik, or perhaps the Codex Sea. Somewhere like that.

But as the days went on, the city continued north, without slowing or deviating. Armada was heading somewhere definite at the Lovers’ behest, and nothing was being said.

"We’ll find out soon enough," was what the loyalists said in the dockside pubs. "They’ve nothing to hide from us."