Perhaps Fennec’s papers, his researches, planned for a passage that emerged north of The Gengris and its wider borders. Perhaps the traders and industrialists and soldiers of New Crobuzon could ignore the grindylow, sail blithely past them to the pickings beyond, leaving them raging, pathetic and ignored, in their little corner to the south.

But surely that was not enough. Fennec’s book contained too many details, assiduously and covertly collected, of grindylow strategies, weapons, and plans. Perhaps any such incursion by New Crobuzon would necessitate war, and Fennec had gathered the information to ensure that his paymasters would win it.

A constellation of places that were so far little more than myth would open to New Crobuzon. With trade, colonies, and all that they entailed. Bellis remembered the stories she had heard about Nova Esperium, the riches and the brutality.

Whatever happened, the grindylow monopoly on terror in the Cold Claw Sea would be broken. New Crobuzon’s canal would open up a free market in power-control of which only New Crobuzon could possibly win.

Bellis shook her head, astonished. This hadn’t been some dramatic, romantic escapade. Fennec’s theft had been planned carefully, an analysis of costs and difficulties carried out by an expert. And how much more sense this made of the grindylow. They were not like the vengeful bugaboos of the stories she had read to Shekel, chasing a symbol. Their motivations were clear. They were protecting the source of all their power, their interests, and existence.

"The statue was just a trinket, wasn’t it?" Bellis said, and even in his fear Fennec met her eyes, for a second. "A bonus just for you? That wasn’t why New Crobuzon sent you there, or why the grindylow came.

"You were doing a feasibility study…"

He could have sent it home. He could have hidden his papers in the message he had given Bellis, to courier for him like a fool, but then, of course, his masters would not have come to rescue him. So he had held on to his research, knowing what it was worth, knowing that for those scrawls New Crobuzon would send its navy across the world.

But they had failed to recover him, or his precious notes. There would be no canal, thought Bellis, watching the grindylow. Not now.

Fennec was jabbering. For a moment Bellis thought he was having a fit and venting random sounds, but she realized that he was speaking in some attenuated, human version of the grindylow tongue. He leaned back against the wall for strength and held forth with controlled panic. Pleading, Bellis supposed, for his life.

But the grindylow had what they wanted, and he had nothing to offer them.

The figure eddying before him in the cell raised its claws. It spoke, slowly and loudly, in its own language, and Silas Fennec let out a shriek.