She blinked, and looked around her at the flags and the washing and the bridges and the towers, still all strong and knotted together with mortar. She was haunted by the images from Hedrigall’s story. She saw the city shattering and falling so clearly that it was a true relief to emerge and see it all solid.

Tanner began. The Lovers were still below, still organizing, trying to hide Hedrigall. While they secreted themselves below the air and schemed, Tanner began.

He looked first for the people he knew well. He spoke quickly and fiercely. One of the first he found was Angevine, and he involved her carefully with the group of dockers to whom he was speaking, who did not know her.

His passion was genuine, utterly guileless. He did not orate.

Bellis watched him move through the crowd still milling on the Grand Easterly ’s decks, arguing in angry tones about what it was they had heard, about what Hedrigall had seen-how and why he had come back. There were still a good number of pirates on the huge old ship, and Tanner spoke to them all.

He trembled with rage. Bellis followed him by an irregular and discrete course. She watched him, and was impressed by his fervor. She watched the stunned reactions move like a disease through the masses. She watched the disbelief quickly become belief and frightened anger, and then resolve.

Tanner insisted-she heard him-that they had the right to know the truth, and something uncertain moved inside Bellis.

She did not know what the truth was; she was not sure what she believed. She was not sure what lay behind Hedrigall’s extraordinary story. There were several possibilities. But it did not matter. She refused to think about that now. She had been brought to this place, and she would do what was required, and bring this to an end.

Bellis watched as those whom Tanner had told then told others, and they told more, until it was quickly impossible to track the story. It moved under its own momentum. Very soon, most of those who told a garbled story of Hedrigall’s escape from the Scar could not have said how they knew it.

The Lovers had told a great deal of the truth about the Scar, as they understood it, in a popular form. There were few people in Armada who did not know that possibilities spilled from it, that that was the source of its power. Several had seen Uther Doul’s sword switched on: they knew what probability mining did. And here, so deep in the Hidden Ocean, so close to the Scar itself, with its seepage, with probabilities welling up from it like plasma, it was not hard to believe that Hedrigall- this Hedrigall, raving in the lower decks of the steamer-was telling the truth.