Desperate as she was to get out of this place, she would not have helped him had she known his plans. She would not have been party to that.

With dreadful self-disgust, Bellis realized that Silas had judged her well. His job was to know what he could tell to whom, to know how far those around him would go, and to lie to them accordingly. He had to judge what to tell each of his pawns.

He had been right about her.

Bellis remembered Uther Doul’s rage when she and Tanner had come to him.

He had stared at them as they explained, his face growing stiller and more cold, his eyes darker, as they spoke. Flustered, Bellis and Tanner in turn had tried to explain to him that they had known nothing, that they had both been used.

Tanner had gabbled, and Doul had been impassive, waiting for him to finish and punishing him with silence, saying nothing at all. But then he had turned to Bellis and waited for her explanations. He had unnerved her-he was quite unmoving when she told him that she knew Silas Fennec, Simon Fench. He had not seemed surprised at all by that. He had stood quietly, waiting for more information. But when she told him what she had done, what she had couriered for Fennec, then quite suddenly Doul had exploded with anger.

" No," he had shouted. "What did he do?"

And when she had murmured something to him-some shamefaced, stuttered assertion that she had had no idea, that she had never dreamed, that she could not have known -he had stared at her very hard, with an expression of cold dislike and cruelty that she had never seen him wear before and that had cut her to her innards.

"Are you sure?" he had said to her, appallingly. "Is that so? No idea? None at all?"

He had birthed a maggot of doubt in her head that grubbed pitilessly through her remorse and misery.

Did I never know? Did I never doubt?

The rulers were arguing about the geography of Armada’s haunted quarter, about the ghuls and the tallow ghast, about how they should set their trap.

Bellis spoke loud enough to interrupt them all. "Senate," she said. They were silent.

Doul took her in, his eyes absolutely unforgiving. She did not flinch.

"There’s something else that should be remembered," she said. "I don’t believe that New Crobuzon would cross so many thousands of miles out of love. They wouldn’t risk all those ships, and all that effort, not even for the Sorghum, and certainly not just to bring their man home.