A mile below the lowest cloud, rock breaches water and the sea begins.

It has been given many names. Each inlet and bay and stream has been classified as if it were discrete. But it is one thing, where borders are absurd. It fills the spaces between stones and sand, curling around coastlines and filling trenches between the continents.

At the edges of the world the salt water is cold enough to burn. Huge slabs of frozen sea mimic the land, and break and crash and reform, crisscrossed with tunnels, the homes of frost-crabs, philosophers with shells of living ice. In the southern shallows there are forests of pipe-worms and kelp and predatory corals. Sunfish move with idiot grace. Trilobites make nests in bones and dissolving iron.

The sea throngs.

There are free-floating top-dwellers that live and die in surf without ever seeing dirt beneath them. Complex ecosystems flourish in neritic pools and flatlands, sliding on organic scree to the edge of rock shelves and dropping into a zone below light.

There are ravines. Presences something between molluscs and deities squat patiently below eight miles of water. In the lightless cold a brutality of evolution obtains. Rude creatures emit slime and phosphorescence and move with flickerings of unclear limbs. The logic of their forms derives from nightmares.

There are bottomless shafts of water. There are places where the granite and muck base of the sea falls away in vertical tunnels that plumb miles, spilling into other planes, under pressure so great that the water flows sluggish and thick. It spurts through the pores of reality, seeping back in dangerous washes, leaving fissures through which displaced forces can emerge.

In the chill middle deeps, hydrothermic vents break through the rocks and spew clouds of superheated water. Intricate creatures bask in this ambient warmth their whole short lives, never straying beyond a few feet of warm, mineral-rich water into a cold which would kill them.

The landscape below the surface is one of mountains and canyons and forests, shifting dunes, ice caverns and graveyards. The water is dense with matter. Islands float impossibly in the deeps, caught on charmed tides. Some are the size of coffins, little slivers of flint and granite that refuse to sink. Others are gnarled rocks half a mile long, suspended thousands of feet down, moving on slow, arcane streams. There are communities on these unsinking lands: there are hidden kingdoms.

There is heroism and brute warfare on the ocean floor, unnoticed by land-dwellers. There are gods and catastrophes.

Intruding vessels pass between the sea and the air. Their shadows fleck the bottom where it is high enough for light to reach. The trading ships and cogs, the whaling boats pass over the rot of other craft. Sailors’ bodies fertilize the water. Scavenger fish feed on eyes and lips. There are jags in the coral architecture where masts and anchors have been reclaimed. Lost ships are mourned or forgotten, and the living floor of the sea takes them and hides them with barnacles, gives them as caves to morays and ratfish and cray outcastes; and other more savage things.

In the deepest places, where physical norms collapse under the crushing water, bodies still fall softly through the dark, days after their vessels have capsized.

They decay on their long journey down. Nothing will hit the black sand at the bottom of the world but algae-covered bones.

At the edges of the shelves of rock where cold, light water gives way to a creeping darkness, a he-cray scrambles. He sees prey, clicks and rattles deep in his throat while he slips the hood from his hunting squid and releases it.

It bolts from him, diving for the shoal of fat mackerel that boil and re-form like a cloud twenty feet above. Its foot-long tentacles open and whip closed again. The squid returns to its master, dragging a dying fish, and the school reknits behind it.

The cray slices the head and tail from the mackerel and slips the carcass into a net bag at his belt. The bloody head he gives his squid to gnaw.

The upper body of the cray, the soft, unarmored section, is sensitive to minute shifts of tide and temperature. He feels a prickling against his sallow skin as complex washes of water meet and interact. With an abrupt spasm the mackerel-cloud congeals and disappears over the crusted reef.

The cray raises his arm and calls his squid closer to him, soothes it gently. He fingers his harpoon.

He is standing on a granite ridge, where seaweed and ferns move against him, caressing his long underbelly. To his right, swells of porous stone rise above him. To the left the slope falls away fast into disphotic water. He can feel the chill emanating from below. He looks out into a steep gradation of blue. Way overhead, on the surface, there are ripples of light. Below him the rays peter swiftly out. He stands only a little way above the border of perpetual dark.

He treads carefully here, on the edge of the plateau. He often comes to hunt here, where prey are less careful, away from the lighter, warmer shallows. Sometimes big game rises curiously from the pitch, unused to his shrewd tactics and barbed spears. The cray shifts nervously in the current and stares out into the open sea. Sometimes it is not prey but predators that rise from the twilight zone.

Eddies of cold roll over him. Pebbles are dislodged around his feet and bounce slowly down the slope and out of sight. The cray braces himself on the slippery boulders.

Somewhere below him there is a soft percussion of rocks. A chill not carried by any current creeps across his skin. Stones are realigning, and a spill of thaumaturgic wash is spewing through new crevices.

Something baleful is emerging in the cold water, at the edge of the dark.

The cray hunter’s squid is beginning to panic, and when he releases it again, it jets instantly up the slope, toward the light. He peers back into the murk, looking for the source of the sound.

There is an ominous vibration. As he tries to see through water stained by dust and plankton, something moves. Way below, a plug of rock bigger than a man shudders. The cray bites his lip as the great irregular stone falls suddenly free and begins a grinding descent.

The thundering of its passage reverberates long after it has become invisible.

There is a pit in the slope now, that stains the sea with darkness. It is quiet and motionless for a time, and the cray fingers his spear with anxiety, clutching at it and hefting it and feeling himself tremble.

And then, softly, something colorless and cold slips from the hole.

It confuses the eye, flitting with a grotesque organic swiftness that seems to belie intention, like gore falling from a wound. The he-cray is quite still. His fear is intense.

Another shape emerges. Again he cannot make it out: it evades him; it is like a memory or an impression; it will not be specified. It is fast and corporeal and coldly terrifying.

There is another, and then more, until a constant quick stream dribbles from the darkness. The presences shift, not quite invisible, communing and dissipating, their movements opaque.

The he-cray is still. He can hear strange, whispering discourses on the tides.

His eyes widen as he glimpses massive backbent teeth, bodies pebbled with rucks. Sinuous muscled things fluttering in the freezing water.

The he-cray starts and steps backward, his feet skittering on sloping stone, trying to quiet himself but too slow-small shattered sounds emerging from him.

With a single motion, a lazy, predatory twitch, the dark things that huddle in council below him move. The he-cray sees the darks of a score of eyes, and he knows with a sick-making fear that they are watching.

And then with a monstrous grace, they rise, and are upon him.

Chapter Two

Outside of Iron Bay, the sea was hard. Bellis woke to its slapping assault. She quit the cabin, picking her way past Sister Meriope, who was vomiting with what Bellis did not believe was just seasickness.

Bellis emerged into wind, and a great cracking as sails tugged like animals at their tethers. The enormous smokestack vented a little soot, and the ship hummed with the power of the steam engine deep below.

Bellis sat on a container. So we’re off, then, she thought nervously. We’re heading out. We’re away.

The Terpsichoria had seemed busy while they were moored: someone was always scrubbing something, or raising a piece of machinery, or running from one end of the ship to the other. But now that sense of activity was increased by a huge factor.

Bellis squinted out across the maindeck, not yet ready to look at the sea.

The rigging teemed. Most of the sailors were human, but here and there a spined hotchi raced along rope crawlways and onto crow’s nests. On the decks men lugged containers and wound huge winches, shouting instructions in incomprehensible shorthand, threading chains onto fat flywheels. There were towering cactacae, too heavy and ungainly to climb rope but making up for that with their efforts below, with their strength, fibrous vegetable biceps bunching massively as they tugged and tied.

Officers in blue uniforms strode among them.

The wind blew across the ship, and the deck’s periscopic cowls crooned like dolorous flutes.

Bellis finished her cigarillo. She stood slowly and walked to the side, her eyes lowered, till she reached the rail and she looked up and out to sea.

There was no land at all.

Oh gods, look at it all, she thought in shock.

For the first time in her life, Bellis looked out across nothing but water.

Alone beneath a colossal rearing sky, anxiety welled up in her like bile. She wanted very much to be back in the alleys of her city.

Slicks of spume spread fast around the ship, disappearing and reappearing incessantly. The water moiled in intricate marbled surges. It shifted for the ship, as it would for a whale or a canoe or a fallen leaf, a dumb accommodation that it might overturn with any sudden swell.

It was a massive moronic child. Powerful and stupid and capricious.

Bellis cast her gaze about nervously, looking for any island, any jag of coastline. At that moment, there was none.

A cloud of seabirds trailed them, plunging for carrion in the vessel’s wake, spattering the deck and the foam with guano.

They sailed without stopping for two days.

Bellis felt almost stupefied with resentment that her journey was under way. She paced the corridors and decks, shut herself in her cabin. She watched blankly as the Terpsichoria passed rocks and tiny islands in the distance, illuminated by grey daylight or the moon.

Sailors scanned the horizon, oiling the large-bore guns. With hundreds of ill-charted islets and trading towns, with an unending number of ships supplying the insatiable commercial hole of New Crobuzon at one end, Basilisk Channel was plied by pirates.

Bellis knew that a ship this size with an ironclad hull and New Crobuzon’s colors flying would almost certainly not be preyed upon. The crew’s vigilance was only slightly unnerving.

The Terpsichoria was a merchant vessel. It was not built for passengers. There was no library, no drawing room, no games room. The passengers’ mess was a halfhearted effort, its walls bare but for a few cheap lithographs.

Bellis took her meals there sitting alone, monosyllabic to any pleasantries, while the other passengers sat below the dirty windows and played cards. Bellis watched them surreptitiously and intensely.

Back in her cabin, Bellis took endless stock of what she possessed.

She had left the city in a sudden hurry. She had very few clothes, in the austere style she favored: severe and black and charcoal. She had seven books: two volumes of linguistic theory; a primer in Salkrikaltor Cray; an anthology of short fiction in various languages; a thick, empty notebook; and copies of her own two monographs, High Kettai Grammatology and Codexes of the Wormseye Scrub. She had a few pieces of jewelry in jet and garnet and platinum; a small bag of cosmetics; ink and pens.

She spent hours adding details to her letter. She described the ugliness of the open seas, the harsh rocks that poked up like traps. She wrote long, parodic descriptions of the officers and passengers, reveling in caricature. Sister Meriope; Bartol Gimgewry the merchant; the cadaverous surgeon Dr. Mollificatt; Widow and Miss Cardomium, a quiet mother and daughter transformed by Bellis’ pen into a scheming pair of husband hunters. Johannes Tearfly became the professorial buffoon pilloried in music halls. She invented motivations for them all, speculating on what might send them halfway across the world.

Standing at the back of the ship on the second day, by the morass of gulls and ospreys still bickering over the ship’s effluent, Bellis looked for islets but saw only waves.

She felt jilted. Then, as she searched the horizon, she heard a noise.

A little way from her the naturalist, Dr. Tearfly, stood watching the birds. Bellis’ face set hard. She prepared to leave as soon as he spoke to her.

When he looked down and saw her watching him coldly, he gave her an absent smile and pulled out a notebook. His attention was off her immediately. She watched as he began to sketch the gulls, paying her no mind at all.

He was in his late fifties, she guessed. His thinning hair was combed tightly back, and he wore little rectangular spectacles and a tweed waistcoat. But despite the academic uniform he did not look weak or absurdly bookish. He was tall, and he held himself well.

With quick, precise strokes, he marked out folded avian claws and the brute pugnacity of the seagulls’ eyes. Bellis warmed to him very slightly.

After a while she spoke.

It made journeying easier; she admitted that to herself. Johannes Tearfly was charming. Bellis suspected he would be equally friendly to everyone on board.

They took lunch together, and she found it easy to steer him away from the other passengers, who watched them intently. Tearfly was endearingly free of intrigue. If it occurred to him that keeping the company of the rude and distant Bellis Coldwine might lead to rumors, he did not care.

Tearfly was happy to discuss his work. He enthused about the unstudied fauna of Nova Esperium. He told Bellis about his plans for publishing a monograph, on his eventual return to New Crobuzon. He was collating drawings, he told her, and heliotypes and observations.

Bellis described to him a dark, mountainous island she had seen in the north, in the small hours of the previous night.

“That was North Morin,” he said. “Cancir’s probably off to the northwest right now. We’ll be docking at Dancing Bird Island after dark.”

The ship’s position and progress were matters of constant conversation among the other passengers, and Tearfly looked at Bellis curiously, bewildered by her ignorance. She did not care. What was important to her was where she was fleeing from, not where she was, or where she was going.

Dancing Bird Island appeared just as the sun went down. Its volcanic rock was brick-red, and hunched into little peaks like shoulder bones. Qe Banssa clambered up the slopes of the bay. It was poor, an ugly little fishing port. The thought of setting foot in another resentful town imprisoned by maritime economics depressed Bellis.

The sailors without shore leave were sullen as their comrades and passengers disappeared down the gangplank. There were no other New Crobuzon ships at dock: nowhere for Bellis to deliver her letter. She wondered why they were stopping at this negligible port.

Apart from an arduous research trip to the Wormseye Scrub years previously, this was the furthest Bellis had ever been from New Crobuzon. She watched the small crowd at the dockside. They looked old and eager. Over the wind she heard a smattering of dialects. Most of the shouts were in Salt, the sailors’ argot, a found language riveted together from the thousand vernaculars of the Basilisk Channel, Ragamoll, and Perrickish, the tongues of the Pirate and Jheshull Islands.

Bellis saw Captain Myzovic climb the steep streets toward New Crobuzon’s crenellated embassy.

“Why are you staying on board?” said Johannes.

“I don’t feel any great need for greasy food or trinkets,” she said. “These islands depress me.”

Johannes smiled slowly, as if her attitude delighted him. He shrugged and looked up at the sky. “It’s going to rain,” he said, as if she had returned his question, “and I have work to do aboard.”

“Why are we stopping here anyway?” said Bellis.

“I suspect it’s government business,” said Johannes carefully. “This is the last serious outpost. Beyond this the New Crobuzon sphere of influence becomes far more… attenuated. There are probably all manner of things to be attended to, out here.

“Luckily,” he said after a silence, “it’s none of our business.”

They watched the still-darkening ocean.

“Have you seen any of the prisoners?” Johannes asked suddenly.

Bellis looked at him in surprise. “No. Have you?” She felt defensive. The fact of the ship’s sentient cargo discomfited her.

When it had come, Bellis’ realization that she had to leave New Crobuzon had been urgent and frightening. She had made her plans in low panic. She needed to get as far away as she could, and quickly. Cobsea and Myrshock seemed too close, and she had thought feverishly of Shankell and Yoraketche, and Neovadan and Tesh. But they were all too far or too dangerous, or too alien, or too hard to reach or too frightening. There was nothing in any of them that could become her home. And Bellis had realized aghast that it was too hard for her to let go, that she was clinging to New Crobuzon, to what defined her.

And then Bellis had thought of Nova Esperium. Eager for new citizens. Asking no questions. Halfway across the world, a little blister of civilization in unknown lands. A home from home, New Crobuzon’s colony. Rougher, surely, and harder and less cosseted-Nova Esperium was too young for many kindnesses-but a culture modeled on her city’s own.

She realized that, with that destination, New Crobuzon would pay her passage, even as she fled it. And a channel of communication would remain open to her: regular if occasional contact with ships from home. She might then know when it was safe to return.

But the vessels that undertook the long, dangerous journey from Iron Bay across the Swollen Ocean carried with them Nova Esperium’s workforce. Which meant a hold full of prisoners: peons, indentured laborers, and Remade.

It curdled the food in Bellis’ stomach to think of the men and women locked below, out of the light, and so she did not think of them. She would have had nothing to do with such a voyage and such harsh traffic if she had had a choice.

Bellis looked up at Johannes, trying to gauge his thoughts.

“I must admit,” he said hesitantly, “I’m surprised I’ve heard no sound at all from them. I had thought they would be let out more often than this.”

Bellis said nothing. She waited for Johannes to change the subject, so that she could continue to try to forget what lay beneath them.

She could hear the bonhomie from Qe Banssa’s waterfront pubs. It sounded urgent.

Under tar and steel, in the damp chambers below. Food bolted and fought over. Shit, spunk, and blood congealing. Shrieks and fistfights. And chains like stone and all around whispers.

“That’s a shame, lad.” The voice was rough from lack of sleep, but the sympathy was genuine. “You’ll most probably get a hiding for that.”

Before the bars of the prison hold, the cabin boy stood looking mournfully at shards of pottery and spilt stew. He had been spooning food into bowls for the prisoners, and his hand had slipped.

“Clay like that looks strong as iron, till you drop it.” The man behind the bars was as filthy and tired as all the other prisoners. Bubbling from his chest, visible beneath a torn shirt, was a huge tumor of flesh from which emerged two long ill-smelling tentacles. They swung lifeless, deadweight blubbery encumbrances. Like most of the transportees, the man was Remade, carved by science and thaumaturgy into a new shape, in punishment for some crime.

“Reminds me of when Crawfoot went to war,” said the man. “Did you ever hear that story?”

The cabin boy picked greasy meat and carrots from the floor and dropped them into a bucket. He glanced up at the man.

The prisoner shuffled back and settled against the wall.

“So one day, at the beginning of the world, Darioch looks out from his treehouse and sees an army coming toward the forest. And bugger me if it ain’t the Batskin Brood come to get back their brooms. You know how Crawfoot took their brooms, don’t you?”

The cabin boy was about fifteen, old for his position. He wore clothes not much cleaner than the prisoners’. He looked the man full on and grinned yes, he knew that story, and the sudden change in him was so marked and extraordinary it was as if he were briefly given a new body. For a moment he looked strong and cocky, and when the smile went and he returned to the slop of food and pottery, some of that sudden swagger remained.

“All right then,” the prisoner continued. “So Darioch calls Crawfoot to him and shows him the Batskins on their way, and he says to him, ‘This is your fuck-up, Crawfoot. You took their stuff. And it happens that Salter’s away at the edge of the world, so you’re going to have to do the fighting.’ And Crawfoot’s bitching and moaning and giving it all this…” The man opened and shut his fingers like a talkative mouth.

He started to continue, but the cabin boy cut him off. “I know it,” he said with sudden recognition. “I heard it before.”

There was a silence.

“Ah well,” the man said, surprised by his own disappointment. “Ah well, I tell you what, son, I’ve not heard it for a while myself, so I think I’ll just carry on and tell it.”

The boy looked at him quizzically, as if trying to decide whether the man was mocking him. “I don’t mind,” he said. “Do what you want. I don’t care.”

The prisoner told the story, quietly, interrupted by coughing and sighs for breath. The cabin boy came and went in the darkness beyond the bars, cleaning the mess, spooning out more food. He was there at the story’s end, when Crawfoot’s chimney-pot-and-china-plate armor shattered, cutting him worse than if he’d worn none at all.

The boy looked at the tired man, the story finished, and grinned again.

“Ain’t you going to tell me the lesson?” he said.

The man smiled weakly. “I reckon you already know it.”

The boy nodded and looked up for a moment, concentrating. “ ‘If it’s nearly right, but it isn’t quite, better to have none, than make do with one,’ ” he recited. “I always preferred them stories without the morals,” he added. He squatted down by the bars.

“Fuck but I’m with you there, lad,” said the man. He paused and held out his hand through the bars. “I’m Tanner Sack.”

The cabin boy hesitated a moment: not nervous, just weighing up possibilities and advantages. He took Tanner’s hand.

“Ta for the story. I’m Shekel.”

They continued.