But Fennec showed no commitment to them at all. He badmouthed the Crobuzoner authorities with bohemian good humor.

"They’re snakes," he went on. "Rudgutter and all the others, I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could piss them. Dammit, I’ll take their money. If they want to pay me to tell them things I’d be happy to tell them anyway, am I going to say no? But they’re no friends of mine. I can’t sit easy in their city."

"So is all this…" Bellis spoke carefully, trying to gauge him. "Is this not a hardship, then, being here? If you’ve no great love for New Crobuzon-"

"No." He interrupted her with a hard manner quite unlike the amiable arrogance he had so far displayed. "That is not what I said. I’m a New Crobuzon man, Bellis. I want somewhere to come home to… even if I leave it again. I’m not rootless; I’m not some vague wanderer. I’m a businessman, a merchant, with a base and a house in East Gidd and friends and contacts, and New Crobuzon is always where I return to. Here… I’m a prisoner.

"This isn’t the kind of exploring that I have in mind. I’m damned if I’m staying here."

And hearing that, Bellis opened another bottle of wine and poured him some more.

"What were you doing in Salkrikaltor?" she asked. "More business?"

Fennec shook his head. "I got picked up," he said. "Salkrikaltor patrols sometimes deploy hundreds of miles away from the city, checking the kraals. One of their craft picked me up in the outskirts of the Basilisk Channel. I was heading south in a crippled ammonite-sub, leaking and very slow. The cray in the shallows east of the Sols told them about this dubious-looking tub limping round the edge of their village." He shrugged. "I was damn well livid to get picked up, but I think they did me a favor. I doubt I’d have made it home. By the time I met any cray who could understand me, we were all the way out in Salkrikaltor City."

"Where’d you come from?" said Bellis. "Jhesshul Islands?"

Fennec shook his head and observed her, without speaking, for several seconds.

"Nothing like that," he said. "I crossed over from the other side of the mountains. I was in the Cold Claw Sea. In The Gengris."

Bellis looked up sharply, ready to laugh or sniff dismissively, but she saw Fennec’s face. He nodded slowly.

"The Gengris," he said again, and she looked away, astonished.