Flintlocks firing, the Crobuzoner navy boards Armada. At the point where the two forces meet, there is the most savage bloodletting. The Armadan cactacae are at the front, and the Crobuzoners are faced by a line of their massive, thorned bodies. The cactacae split men with great strokes from their war cleavers.

But there are cactus-people on the New Crobuzon side, too; and men firing rivebows with weighted, spinning chakris that smash like axe blades into the vegetable-muscles and bones of the cactacae, severing limbs and cutting fibrous skulls; and there are thaumaturges on the invading vessels who link hands and send bolts of darkly glowing unlight into the Armadan mass.

The Crobuzoners are forcing the Armadans back.

Around the base of Bellis’ squat platform, now, is the New Crobuzon navy. She is paralyzed. Part of her wants to run to them, but she waits. She does not know how this will turn. She does not know what she will do.

Once again, someone is on the platform with her. That feeling comes and goes.

With a drab and bloody inexorability, the New Crobuzon troops encroach across the Grand Easterly ’s deck.

Uniformed men approach Uther Doul from aft, port, and star’d. He is waiting. Armadans are falling around him, pushed back, felled by flintlock bullets and a cascade of blades.

Bellis is watching Uther Doul when finally, suddenly, sur-rounded now by fast-encroaching enemies, by pistols and rifles and curving sabers, he moves.

He calls out: a long bark that is savage but musical, that takes shape and becomes his own name.

" Doul," he cries, repeating it, drawing it out like a huntsman’s call. " Dooooouuuuul!"

And he is answered. Armadans around the deck take up the call as they fight, and his name echoes across the ship. And as the Crobuzoners try to encircle him, try to pen him in with their weapons, Uther Doul finally attacks.

Suddenly he holds a pistol in each hand, drawn from his hip holsters, and they are raised and firing in quite different directions, each one bursting open the face of a man. Their bullets spent, he hurls the guns away from him as he twists (the men around him looking quite still), and they spin through the air at speed and smash into one man’s chest and another’s throat, and Doul has two more flintlocks in his hands, and is firing again simultaneously (and only now do his first two victims finish falling), sending two more men away in ugly cartwheels, one dead, one dying, and he is turning and the guns are missiles again, clubbing a man unconscious.

Every motion Doul makes is perfect: flawless and straight-lined. There is no excess; there are no curves.