Bellis felt the air beside her twitch, disturbed, as the other two grindylow wriggled their bodies, sending a ripple from their shoulders through their taut bellies and down their elongated tails. They moved with that same marine suddenness to the bars. Their leader moved his hands in brute arcana till the iron became flaccid again, and they squeezed through.

Fennec began to shriek louder as the three grindylow surrounded him.

With a horrible sense of nausea, Bellis was certain that she was about to see him butchered, and she heard herself protest weakly. No more, she thought.

But the grindylow reached out and gripped him, and he screamed and battered at them, but they plucked at him easily with their intricate cruel fingers and, linking together in an unsettling, ill-defined morass, the three deepwater creatures locked him into a tangle of limbs, and began to rise.

They were suspended above the floor. Fennec’s shrieks were muting. His feet did not touch the ground. He was being borne up, across the little cell, swaddled in limbs and thick eel tails.

The grindylow magus gripped the notebook hard in one hand, and with the other he reached out, for a moment releasing his grip on his companions and his captive, and gesticulated at the largest porthole that broke the wall of the little prison. She heard the bones around his neck rattle balefully.

As if it were liquid, as if it were a still pool into which someone had slipped a stone, the glass in the porthole rippled, and Bellis realized what the grindylow was doing as the glass began to vein. She pulled herself from her daze-a torpor of disgust and shock and fear-and slipped in blood as she scrambled for the door.

She heard Fennec cry out once, and then a moist exhalation and the sound of wetness as the magus clamped his massive mouth over Fennec’s, lacerating his face with sharp teeth but breathing air into him as the hexed glass burst like a boil and the sea blasted into the room.

In seconds the room was inches deep, and the cannoning water did not slow. Bellis’ fingers were numb as she pulled at the door handle, the water pushing against the hatch. She hauled it open and turned for half a second at the threshold, her skirt wrapping her wetly, cold water bleeding torrentially past her feet into the corridor and chilling her.

The grindylow floated, poised, in this gush of ocean. Fennec’s hands extruded from their tight-cloyed mass, clenching and unclenching. As the water level grew higher beneath them, with stunning speed the grindylow triumvirate moved together in the air, congealing tightly, impossibly tightly, until with a perfectly timed spasm of their tails they jetted for the porthole, passing through it without pause, and on, and out, taking Fennec away, carrying what was stolen from them-information, secrets-into the sea.