But when finally the news sheets and journals, the street speakers and polemicists composed themselves enough to ask the question on everyone’s minds, there was still no answer. After a week, The Flag ’s front page consisted of just four huge words: Where Are We Going?

Still there was no answer.

There were those for whom this silence did not matter. What mattered was that Armada was a great power controlling something more astonishing than they could have imagined. The specifics of their journey were of no more concern to them than they ever had been before. "We’ve always left it to them who make the decisions," some said.

But there had never been really serious decisions before, only the vaguest agreement that the steamers would haul roughly in such-and-such a direction, in the hope that in a year or two-currents, tides, and Torque permitting-the city might reach congenial water. Now, with the avanc, came a new kind of power, and there were some who realized that everything had changed-that there were now real decisions to be made, and that the Lovers were making them.

In the absence of information, rumor flowered. Armada was heading for Gironella’s Dead Sea, where the water was ossified in its wave forms, entombing all the life within. It was heading for the Malmstrom, for the edge of the world. It was heading for a cacotopic stain. It was heading for a land of ghosts, or talking wolves, or men and women whose eyes were jewels or who had teeth like polished coal, or a land of sentient coral, or an empire of fungus, or it was heading somewhere else, maybe.

On the third Bookdi of the quarto, Tintinnabulum and his crew left Armada.

For the best part of a decade, the Castor had been embedded near Garwater’s foremost point, where it met Shaddler riding. Lashed beside the Tolpandy, it had sat for a long time beside an iron-clad warship that had become a shopping district, its greys mottled with commercial coloration, the byways between its derelict guns surrounded by alleys of tin-shack shops.

People had forgotten that the Castor was not a permanent fixture. Bridges had linked it to its surrounds, and chains and ropes and buffers had tethered it. Those links were cut, one by one.