Penned in the dark, the prisoners felt the ship uprooted suddenly from the sea.

" What’s happening?"they screamed toward the hatches. " What’s going on? Help us!"

They stumbled and kicked and clawed their way to the bars, crushing each other against the iron. There were more screams, and louder panic.

Tanner Sack shouted with his fellows.

No one came to them.

The ship reeled as if it had been punched. Bellis was hurled against the window. Passengers were scattering, screaming or shouting, getting to their feet with terror in their eyes, throwing spilled chairs and stools out of the way.

"What in Jabber’s name was that?" Johannes shouted. Someone nearby was praying.

Bellis stumbled with the others out onto the deck. The little armored boats were still plowing toward the Terpsichoria on the port side, but looming from nowhere on the starboard side, where no one had been looking, tight and flush against the ship, was a massive black submersible.

It was more than a hundred feet long, striated with pipes, studded with segmented metal fins. Seawater still streamed from it, from the seams between its rivets and the ridges below its portholes.

Bellis gaped at the baleful-looking thing. Sailors and officers were shouting in confusion, running from rail to rail, trying to regroup.

Two hatches on the top of the submersible began to rise.

" You!"From the deck, Cumbershum pointed at the passengers. " Inside, now! "

Bellis retreated into the corridor.

Jabber help me oh deargods oh spit and shit, she thought in a confused stream. She stared wildly about and heard passengers running pointlessly from place to place.

Then suddenly she remembered the little cupboard, from where she could see the deck.

Outside, beyond the thin wall, she could hear shouts and gunshots. Frantically, she cleared the shelf in front of the window and put her eyes to the dirty pane.

Bursts of smoke discolored the air. Men ran past the glass in panicked rout. Beyond them and below, across the deck, little groups of men fought in confused and ugly battle.

The invaders were mostly men and cactus-people, a few tough-looking women, and Remade. They were dressed in ostentatious and outlandish gear: long colorful coats and pantaloons, high boots, and studded belts. What distinguished them from the pirates of pantomime or cheap prints was the grime and age of their clothes, the fixed determination in their faces and the organized efficiency of their attacks.

Bellis saw everything with impossible detail. She perceived it as a series of tableaux, like heliotypes flashed up one after the other in the dark. The sound seemed disassociated from what she saw, a wiry buzz of noise at the back of her skull.

She saw the captain and Cumbershum screaming orders from the forecastle, firing their pistols and frantically reloading. Blue-clad sailors fought with inexpert desperation. A cactacae midshipman threw down his broken blade and felled one of the buccaneers with a massive punch, roared with pain as the man’s comrade hacked deep into his forearm in a spray of sap. A group of terrified men attacked the pirates with muskets and bayonets, hesitated, and were caught between two Remade with massive blunderbusses. The young sailors went down screaming in a rain of ragged flesh and shrapnel.