Doul had left once she had chosen her punishment, without glancing back at the thick sheaf of paper still in her hands. All its evidence went unread, languishing still. Uncommunicated.

Bellis turned the pages over, one by one, recounting what had happened to her in Armada. She tried to calm herself. There was something very important that she had to address. Her plans were collapsing. With Fennec caught, there was no one to put out the information she had, no one to stop the Lovers’ crazy plan to cross the Hidden Ocean. And Bellis should turn her mind to that, should try to think of some way to disclose the truth.

But she could not concentrate on that, on anything but what Doul had just told her.

Her hands were shaking. She gritted her teeth, furious at that, and ran her hands over her swept-back hair and exhaled, but she could not stop herself from trembling. She had to press her pen quite hard upon the paper so that the trembling would not make her words illegible. She scrawled a single quick sentence, then stopped suddenly, and stared at it, and could not write any more. She read what she had written, again and again.

Tomorrow they flog me.

Interlude IX: The Brucolac

Interlude IX: The Brucolac

Now in this deepest gutter of night where moments lie still like frightened things and we who are about are free of time I go walking.

My city moves. Its outlines shift.

Spires converge and part again and ropes coil like muscles and take the strain as Armada’s skyline breaks, heals, breaks.

Wild animals alive in shadows keep their whimpers quiet, sniff my dead smell and move on (four-footed or two) quick and cowed through a randomly serrated shipscape, along trenches of brick and wood on reshaped decks. The cadavers of vessels incorporated. Backstay stools, coaming, pawls, davits, and catheads encased in salt-aged architecture.

Behind every wall a maritime atomy, a mummy, a sacrifice, like a servant murdered in the temple’s foundations. This is a city of ghosts. Every quarter is haunted. We live like graveworms on our dead ships.

Withered flowers and weeds strain for what poor lamplight in the veins of walls, in ruts of concrete and wood. Life is tenacious, as we who have died know.

Trails of dust, parings of bone and brick, past ragged wounds of bomb-surgery: carbon and rubble, waste-ground punctuation in the city’s dull monologue. Paint, age, all the rubbish of urban chance brands squat towerblocks (on foredecks) and tenements (in the shadows of bowsprits). Flowerpots and wheels like meager tattoos, deliberate defacements. Infinite markings, sculptures accidental and made (the drabness peppered with signs of life and preference, awnings left just so, ribbons on sleeping livestock).

Where glass is, it is burst and scored-intricate with shadows. Lit windows are edged with darkness. Austere and coldly shining.