The avanc is slowing again, one final time.

It is still wounded from the grindylow’s abuse. Whatever they did to it has not healed, not scarred, but remains raw and unpleasant. We pass from time to time by messes of its pus again.

Its heart, I think, is winding down.

We all know that the avanc is dying.

Perhaps it is looking for its home. Perhaps it is trying to find its way back to the universe of lightless brine from where we fished it. And all the time it grows ill, and weak, its blood thickening, decaying and clotting, its great flukes moving more slowly.

Never mind. We are very close to the edge of the Hidden Ocean. We will emerge soon-any day, perhaps within hours-and there the Armadan fleet will be waiting. The avanc will live till then.

The day is close, though, when the city will come to a final stop.

We will be stranded, attached to an organic anchor, millions of tons of corpse rotting on the floor of the abyss.

Five chains, five links to sever. For each link, two cuts. Each link many feet thick, and thaumaturgically tempered. It will take some time, but eventually, one by one, the miles of metal will fall free.

What a catastrophe that will be, to the bottom dwellers-like divine anger. Tons of metal falling, accelerating, through four, five miles, eventually to slam into the ooze at the sea’s bottom, cutting through to the rock below. Landing across the poor avanc’s corpse, perhaps, bursting it open, its miles of intestines littering the dark mud.

Perhaps in time whole ecosystems will evolve around that unprecedented richness.

We will be gone.

We will have reached the fleet, and they will reattach themselves, and Armada will be as it was. There will be less vessels to drag it, of course, after the carnage of the Crobuzoner War, but the city will have shed countless thousands of tons of chain. It will balance.

Armada will be as it was.

Back across the Swollen Ocean, back toward the richest shipping lanes, back toward the ports and traders. The Armadan pirates who have waited for months, tracking the city with strange devices, will find it again. We will go back toward the Gentleman’s Sea, the Hebdomad, Gnurr Kett, the Basilisk Channel.

Back toward New Crobuzon.

It has been a month since the woman left, whose name I did not know. Things have changed.

It did not take long for the mutineers to relinquish control. They had no program, no party. They were only ever a disparate group who found out they had been lied to, who did not want to die. They snatched power in an anarchic and momentary coup, and gave it up easily.

Within days, the Lover reemerged. He came out of the Grand Easterly and issued orders. People were glad to carry them out. No one has a quarrel with him.