"I was there for more than half a year. Oh, it’s dangerous like nowhere else I’ve been, don’t get me wrong. You know if you trade in The Gengris that the rules… are very different. That you’ll never learn, never understand them. I’d been there six weeks when my best friend there, a vodyanoi from Jangsach who’d been there for seven years, trading back and forth… he was taken away. I never found out what happened to him, or why," Fennec said flatly. "It might be that he insulted one of the grindylow gods, or it might have been that the catgut he supplied wasn’t thick enough."

"So why did you do it?"

"Because, if you could last," he snapped, suddenly excited, "it was so worth it. There was no reason to grindylow trades, no point bartering or trying to second-guess. They ask me for a bushel of salt and glass beads in equal parts-fine. No questions, no queries; I’ll provide it. Mixed fruit? It’s there for them. Cod, sawdust, resin, fungus, I don’t care. Because, by Jabber, when they paid, when they were happy…

"It was worth it."

"But you left."

"I left." Fennec sighed. He got up and rummaged around in her cupboard. She did not scold him for it.

"I was there for months, buying, selling, exploring The Gengris and its environs-diving, you understand-and keeping my journal." He spoke with his back to her, fussing with the kettle. "Then I got word that I’d… that I’d transgressed. That the grindylow were angry with me, and that my life was over unless I could get out, fast."

"What had you done?" said Bellis slowly.

"I have no idea," he snapped. "No idea at all. Maybe the ball bearings I provided were the wrong kind of metal, or the moon was in the wrong house, or some grindylow magus had died and they blamed me. I don’t know. All I knew was that I had to leave.

"I left a few things that gave them a false trail. See… I’d come to know the southern jag of Cold Claw Sea pretty well. They like to keep it secret, but I could find my way around it better than any outsider’s supposed to. There are tunnels. Fissures in the ridge that cuts off Cold Claw Sea from the Swollen Ocean. Through those burrows, out to the coast."

He paused and looked out into the sky. It was nearly five o’clock. "I was trying to head south once I got into the ocean, but I got dragged out into the edges of the channel. Which is where the cray found me."

"And you waited for a New Crobuzon ship to take you home," Bellis said. He nodded. "Ours was going in the wrong direction, so you decided to commandeer it… with the powers vested in your little letter."