He looks down and realizes with a dull shock that he has slipped back into phase with Bellis’ space. If she turned now, she would see him. He mouths the statue again, numbly, and disappears.

Dusk fell, and finally the Dry Fall dirigibles lifted off, each containing its murderous crew. They sailed low and fast over the last dregs of battle, their vampir passengers ready. Long tongues flickered in the night air as the ab-dead prepared to hurl themselves into any fray.

They were too late. The fight was over.

The airships meandered pointlessly over water fouled with coaldust and twisted metal and acid and oil, and here and there the shimmering residue of rockmilk, and sap, and many gallons of blood.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Seven

At first the city welled up with exhausted delight, a kind of ragged, wounded euphoria.

It did not last long. In the days that followed, Bellis was acutely conscious of silence; Armada was endlessly quiet. It started after the battle, when the roars of triumph died out and the scale of devastation became clear.

Bellis had not slept in the night after the carnage. She stumbled out with the dawn, with thousands of other citizens, and walked, dumb, across the city. The skyline she knew was broken in strange new ways. Ships in which she had bought paper, or drunk tea, or walked across, unthinking, a hundred times, were gone.

Croom Park was quite untouched. The Chromolith, the Tolpandy, the Grand Easterly itself were quite whole.

Many times in the days that followed, Bellis would turn a corner in some backstreet maze-or cross a wooden bridge, or come into a well-lit plaza-and see people crying, mourning the dead. Some were staring at one piece or another of the damage to their city-a blank, wave-flecked hole where their home ship had been, a shattered mess of a marketplace, a church crushed by fallen masts.

It was quite unfair, Bellis thought nervously, that so few of her own haunts had been harmed. By what right was that? She, after all, did not even care.

A huge number of Armadans had died. Several members of the Curhouse Council and Queen Braginod of Jhour were among them. The Council voted in replacements, and the stewardship of Jhour passed quietly to Braginod’s brother, Dynich. No one cared, particularly. Armada had left thousands of bodies in the sea.

People stared at the Sorghum, muttering that it was not worth it.

Bellis wandered through the brutalized cityscape as if she were dreaming. Even where no shells had fallen, the stresses caused by the bucking sea had ruined architecture. Arches were shattered, their keystones now resting on the ocean floor. There had been fires; narrow streets had crumbled, the rows of houses that seemed to lean into each other shifting, touching, their roofs cracking and collapsing. The city seemed to tremble with kinds of damage that would have been impossible on land.