"There is essence here, but still, for this?"The throat gasped. "You think we are children, we siblings, to cross the world for a puissant toy?"

With a long, exaggerated, slowed-down motion, the grindylow swung its arm in a great arc, curling the figurine through the air with a dramatic, petulant movement, releasing it. It must have been traveling very fast, but Bellis could see it clearly as it spun toward the bars, its arms tucked tight around a coiled-up tail, exquisitely and unpleasantly rendered, its gross mouth puckered and ready, its one eye glinting at her with cold humor.

The figurine hit the iron with a massive sound and broke apart.

Shards scattered, and cold drops of something like oil.

Bellis was stunned. She watched the particles settle and felt something in the aether resonate and go out.

In the middle of the floor, surrounded by stone dust and gelatinous residue, was a sliver of flesh. The magus fin, looking like some rotten wrinkled fillet.

The grindylow ignored it, and fluttered their tails, and approached Silas Fennec behind his bars.

"We have found what was stolen from us,"the grindylow whispered. And then it moved with a strange violence, wriggling through air as if the air fought back, and reaching up, it parted the bars as if they were waterweed, pulling them apart so that it seemed they might tear into stringy fronds. But they held; they oozed back and were solid and upright once more, and the grindylow had passed through them to the other side.

It hovered quite still over Silas Fennec, and he flailed in its shadow.

Bellis could not watch Fennec’s degradation, see him so stripped. She could not have imagined that he could be so afraid.

"We have what was taken,"the grindylow murmured, and it pulled back knife-sharp fingers and stabbed them down, and when she did not hear a cry or some wet sound Bellis opened her eyes again and saw that grindylow had rummaged in the rags that lay on the floor like castoff skins, and from them had pulled Silas Fennec’s notebook.

Bellis remembered it well: black-bound and thick, distended with inserted papers. She recalled its reams of nebulous jottings, heliotypes and inexpert sketches, notes, questions, and mementos.

The grindylow turned slowly through the pages. Periodically it would turn and hold up a page to the bars, showing Bellis something that told her nothing.

"The salp vats. The weapon farms. The castle. Our anatomy. A gazetteer of the second city. And see here,"it said with opaque triumph, "coastline maps. The mountains between the ocean and the Cold Claw Sea. Where our placements are. Where there are fissures, where the rock is weakest." And something moved in Bellis’ mind: the first stirrings of comprehension.

"Would you tell your masters where is best for their excavations, robberman?"it asked. Cradling the stump of his arm, Fennec tried to move further away.