"The sun angled down through the surface of the sea, filtered and refracted by the waves, and passed out again through the vertical face. I could see fishes bigger than me nosing up to the edge where it met the air, a hundred feet below the surface. Light bathed into it. There must be a whole ecology around the edges of the Scar. Even two, three miles down, where the pressure’s merciless, the water there’s sunlit.

"That sheer face of water, colors and eddies moving in strata, extended down miles. Perspective defeated me.

"And then mud. I could see it: a thick, sandwiched band of mud, black, at the bottom of the sea. And then rock. Rock extending down for so many miles that it dwarfed the layer of water. Red and black and grey rock, split wide, clean-edged. And many miles down a glow that moved and burned, showing dimly through the air. Magma. Rivers of molten stone, geothermal tides.

"And then? Below that?

"Then the void."

Hedrigall’s voice was hollow and appalled.

"It must have been seconds I saw it," he said, "but I remember every layer, like colors of sand drooled into a bottle. It defeated the eye. It was too big to see.

"Armada paused, poised for seconds on the edge of that abyss, and the avanc gave a final push forward.

"I saw it first through the water. I saw it four miles down, a little way above the dark sea bottom. I saw a shape appear in the deeps, unclear through the sea, suddenly nearer, its outline visible, as it powered itself forward. Until with a sound like a cataclysm it began to breach. To push itself through the brine cliff.

"A mile of flesh.

"Its head was through, water splintering, shattering around it, cataracts thousands of yards long booming and splitting, drops of water the size of houses spinning and disintegrating, falling voidward, into the Scar.

"I could see the first of its chains, colossal, bursting through the water in a four-mile straight tear, splitting the sea between the avanc and the city above. Other chains came through after it, so that the sea wall was scored with parallel vertical rips, like a claw wound.

"The avanc’s body continued through, indescribable, fins and spines, cilia, and as it came through into the air gravity took it, and it began to pitch forward. The chains tightened on the city, and the edges of Armada reached the edge and were pulled on, over.

"The avanc gave out a sound that burst all the glass around me.

"I saw the submarine hulks on which the Sorghum rested welling up toward the flat cliff face of water and then burst through, and all around them, hundreds of feet away on either side, the aft of Garwater and Bask and Curhouse reached the end of the sea, and jutted out, and trembled, and fell.

"There are so many ships in Armada.