More than a thousand miles west of New Crobuzon was a huge lake, four hundred miles across-Cold Claw Loch. From its northern tip jutted Cold Claw Sound, a corridor of freshwater a hundred miles wide and eight hundred long. At its northern end the sound expanded massively and suddenly, stretching back eastward almost the width of the continent, narrowing like a talon, became the jaggedly curving Cold Claw Sea.

These were the Cold Claws, a conjoined body of water too vast to be anything but an ocean. A massive, freshwater, inland sea ringed by mountains and scrubland and swamps and the few hardy, remote civilizations that Fennec claimed to know.

At its easternmost edge, Cold Claw Sea was separated from the saltwater of the Swollen Ocean by a tiny strip of land: a ribbon of mountainous rock less than thirty miles wide. The sea’s sharp southernmost tip-the point of the talon-was almost directly north of New Crobuzon, more than seven hundred miles away. But the few travelers who made the journey from the city always bore a little west, to reach the waters of Cold Claw Sea two hundred miles or so away from its southern vertex. Because lodged like an impurity in the sea’s jag was an extraordinary, dangerous place, something between an island, a half-sunk city, and a myth. An amphibious badland about which the civilized world knew next to nothing, except that it existed and that it was dangerous.

That place was called The Gengris.

It was said to be the home of the grindylow, aquatic demons or monsters or degenerate crossbred men and women, depending on which story one believed. It was said to be haunted.

The grindylow, or The Gengris (the distinction between race and place was unclear), controlled the south of the Cold Claw Sea with unbreakable power and a cruel, capricious isolationism. Their waters were lethal and uncharted.

And here was Fennec claiming-what?-to have lived there?

"It isn’t true that there are no outsiders there," he was saying, and Bellis quieted her mind enough to listen. "There are even a few native human, born and bred in The Gengris…" His mouth twisted. "And bred is the word, though I’m not sure human is, anymore. It suits them fine that everyone thinks it’s… like a little piece of hell there in the water, that it’s beyond any kind of pale. But, shit, they deal with traders like everyone else. There’re a few vodyanoi, a couple of humans… and others.