"Silas Fennec has something they want. I don’t know what it is, and I… I swear to you that I would tell you if I knew. I believe… One thing I believe is true, that he told me, is that he spent time in High Cromlech, and most recently in The Gengris. I saw his notebooks, and I believe that.

"He told me that the grindylow had hunted him. And maybe that was true, too. Perhaps because of something he’d taken: something that New Crobuzon would risk crossing the world for, when they found out he had it. Perhaps that’s why they came.

"You’ve all agreed that he’s done things he should never have been able to do: stolen things, broken into impregnable places. Well, perhaps whatever Silas Fennec has-whatever he stole, whatever the Crobuzoners came to fetch-is behind all that. So I suppose I’m saying… remember that, when you track him down, that he might be using something… And be careful."

There was a long, unbending silence after she spoke.

"She’s right," someone said.

"And what of her?" said a pugnacious youth from the Curhouse Council. "Do you-do we -believe them? That they knew nothing? That they were just trying to save their own city?"

" Thisis my city," shouted Tanner Sack suddenly, to shocked silence.

Uther Doul looked at Tanner, whose head slumped slowly back down.

"We deal with them later," Doul said. "They’ll be incarcerated for now, until we bring in Silas Fennec. Then we can question him, and we can judge."

It was Uther Doul himself who led Tanner and Bellis to their cells.

He took them from the meeting room into the warren of tunnels that riddled the Grand Easterly. Through the darkwood paneled corridors, past ancient heliotypes of New Crobuzon sailors. Down gaslit tunnels. Where they eventually stopped, there were strange sounds of settling metal and laboring engines.

Doul pushed Tanner (gently) through a door, and Bellis glimpsed a sparse berth within: a bunk, a desk and chair, a window. Doul turned away from Bellis and walked on. He judged correctly that she would follow him: even like this, toward her own imprisonment.

In the cell, the darkness beyond the window was not cloudy night. They were lower than the waterline, and her porthole opened onto the unlit sea. She turned and held onto the door, stopping Doul from pushing it closed.

"Doul," she said, and looked for any sign of softness, or friendship or attraction or forgiveness, and saw none.

He waited.