With delight and triumph, Johannes found himself suddenly back in favor. His old team was reassembled by the Lovers, to make sense of what was happening.

Bellis was surprised to discover that he still talked to her and Carrianne about his work, now that he had been brought back into the inner circle.

"There can’t be anyone in the city who hasn’t noticed," he told them one night, exhausted and mystified. "The Lovers are waiting for us to solve it." He shook his head. "Even Aum can’t fathom it. The rockmilk engine’s still controlling it; the avanc’s still traveling… It’s just slowing."

"Something in the Hidden Ocean?" suggested Bellis.

Johannes bit his lip. "Doesn’t make sense," he said. "What in Bas-Lag can fuck with an avanc?"

"It must be sickening," said Carrianne, and Johannes nodded.

"I think it must be," he agreed slowly. "Kruach’s confident that we can fix whatever’s wrong. But I’m not sure we know enough to cure it."

The air above the Hidden Ocean was desiccated and suddenly hot. The city’s crops became brittle.

All the ridings withdrew into themselves, and the ridiculous semblance of normality that Armada had recently affected began to break down. There was little work done. The pirate-citizens waited, motionless in their homes beneath a punitive sky. The city was bleached and vague. Marooned. Lolling like a lifeboat, almost immobile.

Its wake grew daily more faint as the avanc slowed.

A slow-burning panic began to spread. Meetings were called. For the first time, they were not organized by the rulers, but by popular committees operating across the ridings. And if at first they were made up almost totally of men and women from Curhouse and Dry Fall, the minorities from Jhour and Booktown and Garwater grew each day. They discussed what was happening, urgently, seeking answers no one was able to give them.

A nightmare image was recurring in people’s heads: Armada, adrift, without motive power, in the barren waters of the Hidden Ocean. Or tethered by the motionless avanc, an anchor of unimaginable weight.

The city’s speed was still decreasing.

(Much later, Bellis realized that the day when the avanc’s condition became shockingly clear, the day that so many people died, was in Crobuzoner terms the first of Melluary-a Fishday. That fact made her cough with a desolate approximation of laughter, when she realized it later when the killing was over.)

It was midmorning when the impurities appeared in the sea.

At first, those who saw them thought they were more aggregates of the semisentient weed, but it became quickly obvious that they were something else. They were lighter, and lower in the water-sprawling patches of color, liquescent at the edges.

The blemishes appeared miles off, in the city’s path. As they came gradually closer, word spread, and crowds gathered in Shaddler’s Sculpture Garden, at Armada’s fore, to watch whatever it was approach.