Just before the chill hit, Bellis saw whales off the city’s port edge, playing with apparent pleasure. After a few minutes they came suddenly much closer to Armada, slammed the water with their huge tails, and were gone. The cold came quickly after that.

There was no winter in the city, no summer or spring, no seasons at all; there was only weather. For Armada it was a function not of time, but place. While New Crobuzon hunkered under snowstorms at the end of the year, Armadans might be basking in the Hearth Sea; or they might be bunked below while crews in thick coats tugged them slowly to anchor in the Muted Ocean, at temperatures that would have made New Crobuzon seem mild.

Armada tramped the oceans of Bas-Lag in patterns dictated by piracy, trade, agriculture, security, and other more opaque dynamics, and took what weather came.

The city’s irregular climate was hard on plant life. The flora of Armada survived by thaumaturgy, luck and chance, as well as stock. Centuries of husbandry had produced strains that grew fast and hardy, and could thrive in a wide range of temperatures. There were irregular crops throughout the year.

Farmlands were draped across decks and under artificial lights. There were mushroom plantations in dank old holds, and loud, stinking berths full of generations of wiry inbred animals. Fields of kelp and edible bladderwracks grew on rafts suspended below the city, alongside mesh-cages full of crustaceans and food-fish.

As days passed, Salt came to Tanner more easily, and he began to spend more time with his workmates. They would carouse in the pubs and gambling halls on the aft edge of Basilio Harbor. Shekel came too, sometimes, happy in the company of the men, but more often he took himself off, alone, to the Castor.

Tanner knew that he went to see the woman Angevine, whom Tanner had not met, a servant or bodyguard for Captain Tintinnabulum. Shekel had told him about her, in faltering adolescent terms, and Tanner had started off amused and indulgent. Nostalgic for himself at that age.

Shekel spent more and more time with the strange studious hunters who lived on the Castor. Once, Tanner came looking for him.

Belowdecks, Tanner had passed into a clean, dark corridor of cabins, each with a name stamped upon it: Modist, he had read, and Faber, and Argentarius. The berths of Tintinnabulum’s companions.

Shekel was in the mess, with Angevine.

Tanner had been shocked.

Angevine was in her thirties, he estimated, and she was Remade.

Shekel had not told him that.

Just below her thighs, Angevine’s legs ended. She jutted like some strange figurehead from the front of a little steam-driven cart, a heavy contraption with caterpillar treads, filled with coke and wood.

She could not be city-born, Tanner had realized. That kind of Remaking was too harsh, too capricious and inefficient and cruel to have been effected for anything other than punishment.