The city’s motion was its own dynamic. There were no strong voices arguing to turn back. Even those other rulers who disapproved of the Lovers’ plans had given in, or only spoke their criticisms in camera. But Hedrigall’s dissident ghost stalked the ridings, and the triumph, the excitement with which the journey had started, was gone.

Tanner and Shekel gave new names to the creatures they saw below the water: runrunners and dancing flies and yellowheads.

They watched Armada’s naturalists drifting over the curious new animals, snatching a few in nets, keeping their distance from the big, snub-faced yellowheads, heliotyping them with unwieldy waterproof cameras and phosphoric flares.

Schools of the animals gusted through the pipes and hulls that jutted below like roots. They mixed with more recognizable fish-there were whiting and baitfish even in the Hidden Ocean-eating them or being eaten.

Tanner dived and teased a couple of hand-sized specimens with his tentacles. At the surface, Shekel looked down on Tanner’s scars.

Further and further into that sea.

There were strange sounds at night: the rutting calls of unseen animals with voices like bulls. Some days there was no swimming at all, not by the hardiest or most inquisitive diver, and even the menfish hid themselves in their little city-bottom caverns. These were dangerous waters. Armada passed through the unpredictable edges of boiltides, by the hunting grounds of piasa, living whirlpools that circled the city hungrily but kept their distance.

In moonless dark, lights pulsed below the waters, like the bioluminescence of benthic things magnified many hundreds of times. There were times when the clouds above the sea moved much faster than the wind. One day when the air was dry as elyctricity, shapes appeared off the city’s star’d edge, like tiny islands. They were rafts of unknown weed, great clots of mutant bladderwrack that moved suddenly away from the city under some motive power of their own.

Across the whole of Armada, in every riding, in tumbledown slums and the most elegant townhouses, there was a tension, a neurotic expectancy. People did not sleep well. Bellis blenched when that began, remembering the misery of the nightmares that had racked New Crobuzon and that ultimately had led her here. From one set of ruined nights to another, she thought after several miserable, insomniac hours.

During some of those dark times, Bellis walked to the Grand Easterly to watch the city’s journey through mysterious, faintly moving seas. She would stare out at the remorseless miles of water until, cowed by the scale of it, she fled into the corridors of the great ship, moved by a compulsion she did not understand.

She would wind through its warren of empty passages, into the forgotten zone of the steamer, to the little cubbyhole that Doul had shown her. And there she would perch, uncomfortable and disturbed, eavesdropping on the fucking and the bedroom talk of the Lovers.