It was a mass of some viscous liquid, thick as dense mud. Where waves reached its outer edges they reduced to ugly ripples that crawled weakly across the surface of the substance and were swallowed up.

The stuff was the pallid yellow-white of a caveworm.

Bellis swallowed, feeling sick with anxiety, and then realized very suddenly as the wind shifted that it was not anxiety at all. It was the stench.

A rolling mass of smell oozed over them. The citizens blenched and puked. Bellis and Carrianne staggered and stared at each other, paling, managing not to spew even amid a chorus of retching. The wobbling white mass stank of the worst, most septic rot, air-starved flesh gone putrid.

"Jabber pre serveus!" gasped Bellis. Above her head Armada’s carrion birds wheeled, coiling excitedly like some living cloud toward the rank stuff, then arcing suddenly away as they grew close, as if its degree of corruption defied even them.

The city reached the outer edges of the reeking substance. There were great swathes of it ahead, a bobbing purulent mass.

Most of those who had gathered to watch had run back to their houses to burn incense. Bellis and Carrianne remained, watching Johannes and his colleagues at the edge of the park. With perfume-soaked rags around their faces, Garwater’s investigators leaned over the rail, trolling a bucket on a rope into the substance. They hauled it up and began to examine it.

Then recoiled from it, violently.

When Johannes saw Bellis and Carrianne, he ran over to them and tore off his mask. He was white and trembling, his skin reflective with sweat.

"It’s pus," he said, and pointed to the sea with an unsteady finger. "It’s a slick of pus."

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Three

The avanc is sick.

Trying to continue its mindless motion at the rockmilk engine’s command, it slows and slows. It is-what? Bleeding, wounded? Fevered? Chafed sore by the alien reality around it? Too mute or stupid or obedient to feel or show its pain, the avanc’s lesions are not healing. They are shedding their dead matter in suppurating clots that eddy free and drift up like oil, expanding as the crushing pressure lessens, enveloping and suffocating fish and weed, until what breaks the waves with a mucal slurp is a noisome coagulate of infection and smothered sea-life.

Somewhere between two and three thousand miles into the Hidden Ocean, the avanc is sick.

A few miles clear of the repulsive pus-flats, the avanc came to a stop.

Desperately, signals from the rockmilk engine were increased, sent down repeatedly, but there was no response. The avanc was absolutely still.

It hovered, static, unable or unwilling to move, miles down.