Hundreds of Armadans were dead. Torn open, caught in crossfires, bitten and paralyzed and drained by the vampir, crushed by collapsing architecture, burned in fires, beaten to death. It was far fewer than had been killed in the battle against New Crobuzon, but the trauma of these deaths was vastly larger. This had been a civil war; these people had been killed by their own. People were numbed and blasted by it.

There were those who had seen glimpses of the grindylow and who realized that there was no way the Brucolac could ever have stopped the avanc moving, and no way he could have warped reality with those thaumaturgic blasts. But in the whole of Armada, only a handful knew the truth of the deal that had been struck. For the most part people made vague, curt references to weird vampir magic and did not press discussion further.

The grindylow had come and gone, and of those few who had seen them, almost no one knew what they had been. Their presence remained inexplicable and overshadowed by the civil war.

Hundreds of Armadans were dead, killed by their own.

Kruach Aum was dead. Bellis did not mourn him-he had unsettled her with his sociopathic calm and his brain like a difference engine-but she felt a sense of pathos at his murder.

Escapee from a prison island locked down by its own history. Stepping out into the strangest city of Bas-Lag, used as ruthlessly as he had previously been used by the Kettai authorities, killed investigating the creature he had helped conjure. What a weird, etiolated life.

Johannes Tearfly was dead. It was a surprise to Bellis how that affected her. She was truly sad, truly sorry that he was gone. She remembered him with a catch in her throat. The manner of his death was unthinkable-so fearful it must have been, so dark and cold, so claustrophobic, so far below the world. She remembered him preparing to descend, all excitement and fascination. It had been impressive, for a coward.

Shekel was dead.

That shattered her.

In the day after the mutiny, when her legs had strengthened enough to walk, she had wandered random and dumb through the battle sites.

There was nothing to stop her shuffling through scenes of war, past the cadavers, trailing blood on her shoes.

On one of the trawlers by the ruined Hoddling, in the shadow of a wooden warehouse that belled over gory cobblestones, Bellis found Tanner Sack. She saw him bent double, by a wall. Beside him was Angevine, the Remade woman, tears cutting the filth on her face.

Bellis realized then, but she could not stop herself running forward with her hands over her mouth, wincing at Tanner Sack’s grief. As she had known it would be, the thing on his lap was Shekel’s corpse. Eviscerated. He looked dumbstruck, astonished at his own state.