Johannes glanced up toward the few onlookers and waved. Then he climbed into the cabin of the Ctenophore.

Bellis watched the hatch being screwed down tight on the cramped vessel. She watched the bathyscaphos being tugged up above the water, lurching sickeningly, and she remembered that same motion from when she had been lowered into Salkrikaltor City. A huge wheel on the Hoddling, reeling out reinforced rubberized cable, began to revolve as the deepwater submersible descended.

It touched the waters of the Hidden Ocean with a muted splash and sank below without pause. It would take at least three hours for the bathyscaphos to reach the avanc. Bellis watched the ripples from the disappearing submersible till she felt someone behind her and turned to face Uther Doul.

She set her mouth and waited. He studied her calmly and did not speak for several seconds.

"You’re worried for your friend," he said. "The Grand Easterly is out of bounds during this emergency, but if you’d like, you can wait there for him to return."

He took her to a small room at the rear of the Grand Easterly, whose porthole looked out over the Hoddling, which was suspending the submersible. Doul left her without a word, closing the door behind him. But he had taken her to a room more comfortable and better furnished than her own quarters and, five minutes after she arrived, one of the Garwater stewards brought her tea, unbidden.

Bellis sipped it as she watched the water. She was bewildered and untrusting. She did not understand why Doul was indulging her.

At first it was merely warm in the tiny spherical cabin of the Ctenophore, with three breathing bodies pushed together. They crushed each other uncomfortably, negotiating around each other’s arms and legs to peer through the little portholes.

The light fell away with astonishing speed, and Johannes checked this waning visibility with nervous fascination. They descended by one of the great chains that tethered the avanc, slipping past one massive link after another, psoriatic with shellfish and generations of weed. Placid fish with eyes like cows’ investigated their light, peering in at the intruders on their way down, spiraling the tubes that fed them air, shying away from the bubbles their vessel exhaled.

As the light in the sea declined, the chain became baleful. Its black shafts plumbed almost vertically, plaiting one into the other in patterns that seemed suddenly obscure and sinister, the links suggestive as hieroglyphs.

At the edge of absolute darkness, the sea seemed absolutely still, uncut by the Hidden Ocean’s predatory currents. The crew did not speak. The cabin was now quite black. There were chymical lights and lanterns aboard, but they could not risk exhausting them during their descent-it was at the bottom that they must be able to see. So they sat, pressed together, in the most profound darkness any of them had ever experienced.