It was only two hundred feet from her, and she could still see Doul. She could watch him sliding down the steeply angled bridge, thumbing on the Possible Sword, which shimmered and became a thousand ghost-swords as he ran. She watched him disappear behind a billowing sheet, as if it had swallowed him up. The sheet gusted and cracked with the wind, and beyond it there were a series of sudden noises.

The stark white linen was streaked from behind with red.

It fluttered twice, as if wounded, and then was torn down as a staggering body collapsed into it and gripped it in death, staining it bloodier and twisting it into a makeshift shroud, revealing the scene behind. Doul stood among a mass of wounded, who were cheering and kicking the swaddled vampir corpse.

Their triumph was brief. Thaumaturgic energy spat like hot fat across from the Hoddling, and the wood and metal around the men and women began to buckle and ooze. Uther Doul pointed with his red-dripping sword, sending the exhausted fighters running from the boat.

The vampir they left behind was not the only one to fall. Bellis could not see much of the fighting-her view was interrupted by cobbled streets and building sites and cranes and avenues of stumpy trees. But she thought she could see, here and there, other vampir succumbing. They were terrifyingly fast and strong, and they left a trail of punctured bodies, bleeding and dead, but they were vastly outnumbered.

They used the architecture and the shadows as their allies, but they could not avoid every one of the deluge of bullets and sword strokes that followed them. And though those wounds might not kill them as they would an ordinary woman or man, they hurt and slowed them down. And inevitably there were places where a gang of terrified pirates closed in on one of the buckling, snarling figures and hacked the head from its shoulders, or savaged it so remorselessly that they destroyed its bones and innards beyond even the preternatural vampir capacity for self-repair.

Alone, the vampir might eventually have been contained, but too many of Garwater’s fighters were engaged with the unseen enemy on the Hoddling.

Small, low boats had been launched, forty-footers with cannons and fire-throwers on their decks. They raced across the little bay toward the factory ship, to cover it from its open sides, to surround it.

But in the water around the Hoddling, shapes were rising.

The sea was illuminated by the glow from the fires and the firepower, and through a few feet of brine Bellis could make out the outlines of the things below: bloated bodies wobbling like sacks of rotten meat; malignant little pig eyes; degenerate fin stubs. Splitting them wide open, mouths mounted with irregular footlong teeth of translucent cartilage.