Perdido Street Station

Chapter Thirty-Four

In the Lemquist Room, Rudgutter, Stem-Fulcher and Rescue held a council of war.

They had been up all night. Rudgutter and Stem-Fulcher were tired and irritable. They sipped huge bowls of strong coffee as they pored over papers.

Rescue was impassive. He fingered his swaddling scarf.

“Look at this,” said Rudgutter, and waved a piece of paper at his subordinates. “This arrived this morning. It was couriered in person. I had the opportunity to discuss its content with the authors. It was not a social call.”

Stem-Fulcher leaned over, reaching for the letter. Rudgutter ignored her and began to reread it himself.

“It’s from Josiah Penton, Bartol Sedner and Mashek Ghrashietnichs.” Rescue and Stem-Fulcher looked up. He nodded slowly. “The heads of Arrowhead Mines, Sedner’s Bank of Commerce and the Paradox Concerns have taken the time to write a letter together. So I think we can add a long list of lesser names below theirs, in invisible ink, hm?” He smoothed the letter. “Messrs. Penton, Sedner and Ghrashietnichs are ‘most concerned,’ it says here, at ‘scurrilous reports’ reaching their ears. They have wind of our crisis.” He watched as Stem-Fulcher and Rescue glanced at each other. “It’s all rather garbled. They aren’t at all sure what’s happening, but none of them have been sleeping well. In addition to which, they’ve got der Grimnebulin’s name. They want to know what’s being done to counter, ah…‘this threat to our great city-state.’ ” He put the paper down as Stem-Fulcher shrugged and opened her mouth to answer. He cut her off, rubbing his eyes with exasperated exhaustion.

“You’ve read Inspector Tormlin’s-‘Sally’s’-report. According to Serachin, who is now recuperating in our care, der Grimnebulin claims to have a working prototype of some kind of crisis engine. We all understand the gravity of that. Well…our good businessmen have found that out. And as you can imagine, they are all-particularly Mr. Penton-most desirous of putting a stop to this absurd claim as quickly as possible. Any preposterous fake engines that Mr. der Grimnebulin might have fabricated to fool the credulous should, we are advised, be summarily destroyed.” He sighed and looked up.

“They make some mention of the generous funds they have provided the government and the Fat Sun party over the years. We have been given our orders, ladies and gentlemen. They are not at all happy about the slake-moths, and would like such dangerous animals contained forthwith. But not surprisingly, they are having a conniption about the possibility of crisis energy. Now, we searched the warehouse very thoroughly last night, and there is absolutely no sign of any such apparatus. We have to consider the possibility that der Grimnebulin is mistaken or lying. But in case he’s not, we must also bear in mind that he may have taken his engine and his notes with him last night. With,” he sighed heavily, “the Weaver.”

Stem-Fulcher spoke carefully. “Do we understand yet,” she ventured, “what happened?”

Rudgutter shrugged brusquely.

“We presented the evidence of the militia who saw the Weaver and heard what it said to Kapnellior, I’ve been trying to contact the thing, and I’ve had one curt, incomprehensible reply…It was scribbled in soot on my mirror. All we can say for sure is that it thought it improved the pattern of the worldweb to abduct der Grimnebulin and his friends from under our noses. We don’t know where it’s gone or why. Whether it’s left them alive. Anything really. Although Kapnellior’s quite confident it’s still hunting the moths.”

“What about the ears?” asked Stem-Fulcher.

“I have no idea!” shouted Rudgutter. “It made the web prettier! Obviously! So now we have twenty terrified, one-eared militia in the infirmary!” He calmed a little. “I have been thinking. It’s my belief that part of our problem is that we started with plans that were too grand. We’ll keep trying to locate the Weaver, but in the meantime we’re going to have to rely on less ambitious methods of moth-hunting. We are going to put together a unit of all our guards, militia, and scientists who have had any dealings with the creatures. We’re putting together a specialist squad. And we are going to do it in conjunction with Motley.” Stem-Fulcher and Rescue looked at him and nodded.

“It’s necessary. We’re pooling our resources. He has trained men, as do we. We have set procedures in motion. He will have his units, and we will have ours, but they will operate in tandem. Motley and his men have an unconditional amnesty on all criminal activity while we conduct this operation.

“Rescue…” said Rudgutter quietly. “We need your particular skills. Quietly, of course. How many of your…kin do you think you can mobilize within a day? Knowing the nature of the operation…It is not without its dangers.”

Montjohn Rescue fingered his scarf again. He made a peculiar noise under his breath. “Ten or so,” he said.

“You’ll receive training, of course. You’ve worn a mirror-guard before, I think?” Rescue nodded. “Good. Because the sentience model of your kind is…broadly similar to a human’s, is it not? Your mind is as tempting to the moths as mine. Whatever your host?”

Rescue nodded again.

“We dream, Mr. Mayor,” he said in his flattened voice. “We can be prey.”

“I understand that. Your-and your kin’s-bravery will not go unnoticed. We will provide whatever we can to ensure your safety.” Rescue nodded without visible emotion. He stood slowly.

“Time being of such importance, I’ll make a start now on spreading the word.” He bowed. “You will have my squad by sundown tomorrow,” he said. He turned and left the room.

Stem-Fulcher turned to Rudgutter with pursed lips.

“He’s not too happy about this, is he?” she said. Rudgutter shrugged.

“He’s always known that his role might involve danger. The slake-moths are as much of a threat to his people as to ours.”

Stem-Fulcher nodded.

“How long ago was he taken? The original Rescue, I mean, the human one.”

Rudgutter calculated for a moment.

“Eleven years. He was planning to supersede me. Have you set the squad in motion?” he demanded. Stem-Fulcher sat back and drew lengthily on her clay pipe. Aromatic smoke danced.

“We’re going through two days’ intensive training today and tomorrow…you know, aiming backwards with the mirror-guards, that sort of thing. Motley is apparently doing the same. The rumours are that Motley’s troop includes several Remade specifically designed for slake-moth husbandry and capture…built-in mirrors, back-pointing arms and the like. We have only one such officer.” She shook her head jealously. “We’re also having several of the scientists who worked on the project work on detecting the moths. They’re at pains to impress on us that this is unreliable, but if they come through they may give us some kind of edge.”

Rudgutter nodded. “Add to that,” he said, “our Weaver, still out there somewhere, still hunting the moths busy tearing up his precious worldweave…We’ve got a reasonable collection of troops.”

“But they’re not co-ordinated,” said Stem-Fulcher. “That’s what worries me. And morale in the city is slipping. Obviously very few people know the truth, but everyone knows they can’t sleep at night, for fear of their dreams. We’re plotting a map of the nightmare hotspots, see if we can’t see some pattern, track the moths in some way. There’s been a spate of violent crime over the last week. Nothing big and planned: the sudden attacks, the spur-of-the-moment murders, the brawls. Tempers,” she said slowly, “are fraying. People are paranoid and afraid.”

After the silence had settled for a moment, she spoke again.

“This afternoon you should receive the fruits of some scientific labours,” she said. “I’ve asked our research team to make some helmet that’ll stop the moth-shit seeping into your skull when you sleep. You’ll look absurd in bed, but at least you’ll rest.” She stopped. Rudgutter was blinking rapidly. “How are your eyes?” she asked.

Rudgutter shook his head.

“Going,” he said sadly. “We just can’t solve the problem of rejection. It’s about time for a fresh set.”

Bleary-eyed citizens made their way to work. They were surly and unco-operative.

At the Kelltree docks, the broken strike was not mentioned. The bruises on the vodyanoi stevedores were fading. They heaved spilt cargos from the dirty water as always. They directed ships into tight spaces on the banks. They muttered in secret about the disappearance of the stewards, the strike-leaders.

Their human workmates stared at the defeated xenians with a mixture of emotions.

The fat aerostats patrolled the skies over the city with restless, clumsy menace.

Arguments broke out with bizarre ease. Fights were common. The nocturnal misery reached out and took victims from the waking world.

In the Bleckly Refinery in Gross Coil, an exhausted crane operator hallucinated one of the torments that had ripped up his sleep the previous night. He shuddered just long enough to send the controls spasming. The massive steam-powered machine disgorged its load of molten iron a second too early. It spewed in a white-hot torrent over the lip of the waiting container and spattered the crew like a siege engine. They screamed and were consumed by the merciless cascade.

At the top of the great deserted concrete obelisks of Spatters the city garuda lit huge fires at night. They banged gongs and saucepans and shouted, screaming obscene songs and raucous cries. Charlie the big man told them that would keep the evil spirits from visiting their towers. The flying monsters. The daemons that had come to town to suck the brains out of the living.

The raucous cafe gatherings in Salacus Fields were subdued.

The nightmares pushed some artists into frenzies of creation. An exhibition was being planned: Dispatches from a Troubled City. It was to be a showcase of art and sculpture and soundwork inspired by the morass of foul dreams in which the city wallowed.

There was a fear in the air, a nervousness at invoking certain names. Lin and Isaac, the disappeared. To speak them would be to admit that something might be wrong, that they might not just be busy, that their enforced, silent absence from regular haunts was sinister.

The nightmares were splitting the membrane of sleep. They were spilling into the everyday, haunting the sunlit realm, drying conversations in the throat and stealing friends away.

Isaac awoke in the throes of memory. He was recalling the extraordinary escape of the previous night. His eyes flickered, but remained closed.

Isaac’s breath caught.

Tentatively, he remembered. Impossible images assailed him. Silk strands a lifetime thick. Living things crawling insidiously across interlocking wires. Behind a beautiful palimpsest of coloured gossamer, a vast, timeless, infinite mass of absence…

In terror, he opened his eyes.

The web was gone.

Isaac looked around him slowly. He was in a brick cavern, cool and wet, dripping in the dark.

“You awake, Isaac?” said Derkhan’s voice.

Isaac struggled up onto his elbows. He groaned. His body hurt him in a variety of ways. He felt battered and torn. Derkhan sat a little way away from him on a ledge of brick. She smiled absolutely mirthlessly at him. It was a terrifying rictus.

“Derkhan?” he murmured. His eyes widened slowly. “What are you wearing?”

In the half-light emitted by a smoke-seeping oil-lamp, Isaac could see that Derkhan was dressed in a puffy dressing gown of bright pink material. It was decorated with garish needlework flowers. Derkhan shook her head.

“I don’t damn well know, Isaac,” she said bitterly. “All I know is I was knocked out by the officer with the stingbox and then I woke up here in the sewers, dressed in this. And that’s not all…” Her voice trembled for a brief moment. She pulled her hair back from the side of her head. He hissed at the raw, seeping clot of blood that caked the side of her face. “My…damned ears gone.” She let her hair fall back into place with an unsteady hand. “Lemuel’s been saying it was a…a Weaver that brought us here. You haven’t seen your own outfit yet, anyway.”

Isaac rubbed his head and sat up completely. He struggled to clear his mind of fog.

“What?” he said. “Where are we? The sewers…? Where’s Lemuel? Yagharek? And…” Lublamai, he heard inside his mind, but he remembered Vermishank’s words. He remembered with cold horror that Lublamai was irrevocably lost.

His voice dissipated.

He heard himself, and realized that he was rambling hysterically. He stopped and breathed deeply, forced himself to calm down.

He looked around him, took in the situation.

He and Derkhan sat in a two-foot-wide alcove embedded into the wall of a windowless little brick chamber. It was about ten feet square-its far side only just visible in the faint light-with a ceiling no more than five feet above him. In each of the room’s four walls was a cylindrical tunnel, about four feet round.

The bottom of the room was completely submerged in filthy water. It was impossible to tell how deep below it the floor was. The liquid looked to be emerging from at least two of the tunnels, and slowly ebbing out of the others.

The walls were slick with organic slime and mould. The air stank richly of rot and shit.

Isaac looked down at himself and his face creased in confusion. He was dressed in an immaculate suit and tie, a dark, well-tailored piece that any Parliamentarian would be proud of. Isaac had never seen it before. Beside him, roughened and dirty, was his carpet bag.

He remembered, suddenly, the explosive pain and blood he had suffered the previous night. He gasped and reached up with trepidation. As his fingers fumbled, he exhaled explosively. His left ear was gone.

He gingerly prodded for ruined tissue, expecting to meet wet, ripped flesh or crusting scabs. Instead, unlike Derkhan, he found a well-healed scar, covered in skin. There was no pain at all. It was as if he had lost his ear years before. He frowned and clicked his fingers experimentally beside his wound. He could still hear, though doubtless his ability to pinpoint sounds would be reduced.

Derkhan shook slightly as she watched him.

“This Weaver saw fit to heal your ear, along with Lemuel’s. Not mine…” Her voice was subdued and miserable. “Although,” she added, “it did stop the bleeding on the wounds from that…damned stingbox.” She watched him for a moment. “So Lemuel wasn’t mad, or lying, or dreaming,” she said quietly. “You’re telling me that a Weaver appeared and rescued us?”

Isaac nodded slowly.

“I don’t know why…I have no idea why…but it’s true.” He thought back. “I heard Rudgutter outside, yelling something at it. It sounded like he wasn’t completely surprised it was there…he was trying to bribe it, I think. Maybe the damn fool’s been trying to do deals with it…Where are the others?”

Isaac looked around. There was nowhere to hide in the alcove, but across the little room was another just like it, completely swathed in darkness. Anything crouching within it would have been invisible in the shadow.

“We all woke up here,” said Derkhan. “All of us except Lemuel had these weird clothes on. Yagharek was…” She shook her head in confusion and touched her bloody wound gently. She winced. “Yagharek was shoehorned into some dollymop’s dress. There were a couple of lamps, lit and waiting for us when we woke. Lemuel and Yagharek told me what happened…Yagharek was talking…he was being very weird, talking about a web…” She shook her head.

“I understand that,” said Isaac heavily. He paused and felt his mind scurry in awe away from the vague memories he had. “You were unconscious when the Weaver hauled us out. You wouldn’t have seen what we saw…where he took us…”

Derkhan frowned. She had tears in her eyes.

“My damn…my damn ear hurts so much, ‘Zaac,” she said. Isaac rubbed her shoulder clumsily, his face creasing, until she continued. “Anyway, you were out, so Lemuel took off, and Yagharek went with him.”

“What?” shouted Isaac, but Derkhan shushed him with her hands.

“You know Lemuel, you know the sort of work he does. It turns out he knows the sewers well. Apparently they can be a useful bolt-hole. He did a little reconnaissance trip into the tunnels, and came back actually knowing where we are.”

“Which is?”

“Murkside. He left and Yagharek demanded to go with him. They swore they’d be back within three hours. They’ve gone to get some food, some clothes for me and Yagharek, and to see the lay of the land. They left about an hour ago.”

“Well godsdamn, let’s go and join them…”

Derkhan shook her head.

“Don’t be an idiot, ‘Zaac,” she said, sounding exhausted. “We can’t afford to get separated. Lemuel knows the sewers…they’re dangerous. He told us to stay put. There’s all manner of things down here…ghuls, trows, gods know what. That’s why I stayed with you while you were out. We have to wait for them here.

“And besides which, you’re probably the most wanted person in New Crobuzon right now. Lemuel’s a successful criminal: he knows how not to be seen. He’s at much less risk than you.”

“But what about Yag?” howled Isaac.

“Lemuel gave him his cloak. With the hood up and that dress torn up and wrapped round his feet, he just looked like a weird old man. Isaac, they’ll be back soon. We have to wait for them. We have to make plans. And you have to listen.” He looked up at her, concerned at her miserable tone.

“Why’s it taken us here, ‘Zaac?” she said. Her face creased in pain. “Why did it hurt us, why did it dress us like this…? Why didn’t it heal me…?” She wiped tears of pain away angrily.

“Derkhan,” Isaac said gently. “I could never know…”

“You should see this,” she said, sniffing quickly. She handed him a crumpled and stinking sheet of newspaper. He took it slowly, his face curling with distaste as he touched the sodden, filthy thing.

“What is it?” he said, unfolding it.

“When we woke up, all disorientated and confused, it came bobbing down one of the little tunnels there, folded into a little boat.” She looked at him askance. “It was coming against the current. We fished it out.”

Isaac opened it out and looked at it. It was the centre pages from The Digest, one of New Crobuzon’s weekly papers. He saw from the date at the top of the page-9th Tathis 1779-that it had come out that same morning.

Isaac scanned his eyes over the little collection of stories. He shook his head in incomprehension.

“What am I missing?” he asked.

“Look at the letters to the editor,” said Derkhan.

He turned the sheet over. There it was, second letter down. It was written in the same formal, stilted fashion as the others, but its content was wildly different.

Isaac’s eyes widened as he read.

Sirs and Madam-

Please accept my compliments on your exquisite tapestry skills. For the furtherment of your craftwork I have taken it upon myself to extricate you from an unfortunate situation. My efforts are urgently required elsewhere and I am unable to accompany you. Doubtless we will meet again before much time has elapsed. In the meantime please note that he of your number whose inadvertent animal husbandry has led to the city’s present unfortunate predicament may find himself the victim of unwanted attentions from his escaped charge.

I urge you to continue your fabric work, of which I find myself a devotee.

Most faithfully yours,

W.

Isaac looked up slowly at Derkhan.

“Gods only knows what the rest of The Digest’s readers will think of that…” he said in a hushed voice. “ ‘Stall, that damn spider’s powerful!”

Derkhan nodded slowly. She sighed.

“I just wish,” she said unhappily, “I understood what it was doing…”

“You never could, Dee,” said Isaac. “Never.”

“You’re a scientist, ‘Zaac,” she said sharply. She sounded desperate. “You have to know something about these damn things. Now please try to tell us what it’s saying…”

Isaac did not argue. He reread the note and rummaged inside his head for whatever scraps of information he could find.

“It just does whatever it has to to…to make the web prettier,” he said unhappily. He caught sight of Derkhan’s ragged wound, and looked away again. “You can’t understand it, it doesn’t think like us at all.” As he spoke, something occurred to Isaac. “Maybe…maybe that’s why Rudgutter’s been dealing with it,” he said. “If it doesn’t think like us, maybe it’s immune to the moths…Maybe it’s like a…a hunting dog…”

He’s lost control of it, he thought, remembering the mayor’s shouts from outside. It’s not doing what he wants.

He turned his attention back down to the letter in The Digest.

“This bit about tapestry-work…” Isaac mused, chewing his lips. “That’s the worldweb, isn’t it? So I think it’s saying it likes what we were…um…doing in the world. How we were ‘weaving.’ I think that’s why it got us out. And this later section…” His expression became more and more fearful as he read.

“Oh gods,” he breathed. “It’s like what happened to Barbile…” Derkhan’s mouth was set. She nodded reluctantly. “What was it she said? ‘It’s tasted me…’ The grub I had, I must’ve been tantalizing it with my mind all the time…It’s tasted me already…It must be hunting me…”

Derkhan stared at him.

“You won’t get it off your tail, Isaac,” she said quietly. “We’ll have to kill it.”

She had said we. He looked up at her gratefully.

“Before we formulate any plans,” she said, “there’s another thing. A mystery. Something I want explained.” She gestured at the other alcove across the dark room. Isaac peered curiously into the filthy obscurity. He could just make out a lumpy, motionless shape.

He knew what it was instantly. He remembered its extraordinary intervention in the warehouse. His breath sped up.

“It wouldn’t speak or write to anyone else,” Derkhan said.

“When we realized it was here with us, we tried to talk to it, we wanted to know what it had done, but it completely ignored us. I think it’s been waiting for you.”

Isaac slid over to the lip of the ledge.

“It’s shallow,” Derkhan said behind him. He slipped off into the cool watery muck of the sewers. It came up to his knees. He pushed through it unthinkingly, ignoring the thick stench he raised as it sluiced through his legs. He waded through the noisome excremental stew towards the other little shelf.

As he drew closer, the dull inhabitant of that unlit space whirred slightly and pushed its battered body as near upright as it could. It was crammed into the little space.

Isaac sat next to it, shook his fouled shoes as clean as he could. He turned to it with an intent, hungry expression.

“So,” he said. “Tell me what you know. Tell me why you warned me. Tell me what’s going on.”

The cleaning construct hissed.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Under a damp hollow of bricks by Trauka Station, Yagharek waited.

He gnawed a hunk of bread and meat that he had begged wordlessly from a butcher. He had not been unmasked. He had simply thrust his tremulous hand out from under his cloak and the food had been given to him. His head had remained hidden. He had shuffled away, his feet cramped and hidden by rags. His gait was of an old, tired man.

It was much easier to hide as a human than as an unwounded garuda.

He waited in the darkness where Lemuel had left him. From the shadows which hid him, he could watch the comings and goings at the church of the clock gods. It was an ugly little building, the façade of which was still painted with the advertising slogans of the furniture shop it had once been. Above the door was an intricate brass timepiece, each hour intertwined with the symbols of its associate god.

Yagharek knew the religion. It was strong among the humans of Shankell. He had visited its temples when his band had come to the city to trade, in the years before his crime.

The clock struck one, and Yagharek heard the ululating hymn to Sanshad, the sun god, come belting through the broken windows. It was sung with more gusto than in Shankell but considerably less finesse. It was less than three decades since the religion had crossed the Meagre Sea with any success. Obviously its subtleties had been lost in the water between Shankell and Myrshock.

Before he was conscious of it, his hunter’s ears had realized that one of the sets of footsteps approaching his hideaway was familiar. He finished his food quickly and waited.

Lemuel appeared framed in the entrance of the little cave. Passers-by came and went in the light spaces above his shoulders.

“Yag,” he whispered, gazing sightlessly into the grubby hole. The garuda shuffled forward into the light. Lemuel was carrying two bags stuffed with clothes and food. “Come on,” he whispered. “We should get back.”

They retraced their steps through the winding streets of Murkside. It was Skullday, a shopping day, and elsewhere in the city the crowds would be thick. But in Murkside the shops were mean and poor. Those locals for whom Skullday was a day off would make their way to Griss Fell or the Aspic Hole market. Lemuel and Yagharek were not watched by many.

Yagharek sped up, hobbling on bound feet with a weird, crippled gait to keep up with Lemuel. They made their way south-east, staying in the shadow of the raised railway lines, moving towards Syriac.

This is how I came to the city, thought Yagharek, tracking the great iron pathways of the trains.

They passed under the brick arches, retracing their way into a little enclosed space overlooked on three sides by featureless brick. Storm drains channelled down the walls, along concrete ruts and into a man-sized grille in the centre of the yard.

On the fourth side, the south-facing side, the courtyard looked out onto a drab alley. The land fell away before it. Syriac sat in a depression in the underlying clay. Yagharek looked out over a tumbledown roofscape of twisted roofs and mouldering slate, curlicues of brick and forgotten, warped weathervanes.

Lemuel glanced around to ensure their privacy, then tugged the grille free. Fingers of fell-gas curled out and tugged at them. The heat made the stink rich. Lemuel gave his bags to Yagharek and pulled a primed pistol from his belt. Yagharek looked at him from under the hood.

Lemuel turned with a hard smile and said: “I’ve been pulling in favours. Got us kitted out.” He waggled the gun to illustrate his point. He checked it, hefted it expertly. He pulled the oil-lamp from a bag, lit it and lifted it with his left hand.

“Stay behind me,” he said. “Keep your ears open. Move quietly. Watch your back.”

With that, Lemuel and Yagharek descended into the dirt and the dark.

There was an indeterminable time wading through the warm, rank darkness. The sounds of scuttling and swimming were all around them. Once they heard vicious laughter from a tunnel parallel to theirs. Twice Lemuel swung round, aiming the torch and his pistol at a patch of filth still rippling from where some unseen thing had been. He did not have to shoot. They were unmolested.

“You know how lucky we were?” said Lemuel conversationally. His voice bobbed slowly back to Yagharek on the foetid air. “I don’t know if it was deliberate, where the Weaver left us, but we’re in one of the safest places in the New Crobuzon sewers.” His voice stiffened now and then with effort or disgust. “Murkside’s such a backwater, you don’t have much food down here, you’ve got no thaumaturgic residues, there aren’t any massive old chambers to support a whole brood…It’s not very busy.”

He was silent for a moment, then continued.

“Brock Marsh sewers, for example. All the unstable runoff from all those labs and experiments, accumulating over the years…makes for a very unpredictable population of vermin. Rats the size of pigs, speaking in tongues. Blind pygmy crocodiles, whose great-great-great-grandparents escaped from the zoo. Crossbreeds of all sorts.

“Over in Gross Coil and Skulkford the city’s sitting on layers of older buildings. For hundreds of years they sunk into the mire, and they’d just build new ones on top of them. The pavement’s only been solid there for a hundred and fifty years. Over there, the sewers feed into old basements and bedrooms. The tunnels like this one lead into submerged streets. You can still see the road-names. Rotten houses under a brick sky. Straight up. The shit flows along channels and then through windows and doors.

“That’s where the undergangs live. They used to be human, or their parents did, but they’ve spent too long down here. They aren’t a pretty sight.”

He hawked and spat noisily into the slow ooze.

“Still. Rather the undergangs than the ghuls. Or the trow.” He laughed, but it was without any humour. Yagharek could not tell if Lemuel was mocking him.

Lemuel lapsed into silence. For some minutes, there was no sound except the slosh of their legs through the thick effluvia. Then Yagharek heard voices. He stiffened and gripped Lemuel’s shirt, but a moment later he heard them clearly, and they were Isaac’s and Derkhan’s.

The excremental water seemed to carry light with it, from around a corner.

Bent-backed and swearing with effort, Yagharek and Lemuel wound through the twisting brick junctions and turned into the little room under Murkside’s heart.

Isaac and Derkhan were yelling at each other. Isaac saw Yagharek and Lemuel over Derkhan’s shoulder. He raised his arms to them.

“Dammit, there you are!” He strode past Derkhan towards them. Yagharek held out a bag of food at him. Isaac ignored it. “Lem, Yag,” he said urgently. “We have to move fast.”

“Now hold on…” began Lemuel, but Isaac ignored him.

“Listen, dammit,” Isaac shouted. “The construct’s talked to me!”

Lemuel’s mouth stayed open, but he was silent. No one spoke for a moment.

“All right?” said Isaac. “It’s intelligent, dammit, it’s sentient…something’s happened in its head. The rumours about CI are true! Some virus, some programme glitch…And although it won’t come out and say it, I think it’s hinted that that damned repairman may have given it a helping hand along the way. And the upshot is the damn thing can think. It’s seen everything! It was there when the slake-moth took Lublamai. It…”

“Hold on!” shouted Lemuel. “It spoke to you?”

“No! It had to scrape messages in the mould over there: it was damn slow. That’s what it uses its litter-spike for. It was the construct that told me David had turned traitor! It tried to get us out of the warehouse before the militia arrived!”

“Why?”

Isaac’s urgency waned.

“I don’t know. It can’t explain itself. It’s not…very articulate.” Lemuel looked up, over Isaac’s head. The construct sat motionless in the red-black flickering of the oil-lamp. “But listen…I think one of the reasons it wanted us free is because we’re against the slake-moths. I don’t know why, but it…it’s violently against them. It wants them dead. And it’s offering us help…”

Lemuel barked with unpleasant, incredulous laughter.

“Marvellous!” he wondered, derisorily. “You’ve got a vacuum cleaner on your side…”

“No, you fucking arse!” yelled Isaac. “Don’t you understand? It’s not alone…”

The word alone echoed back and forth around the mephitic brick burrows. Lemuel and Isaac stared at each other. Yagharek drew back a little.

“It’s not alone,” Isaac repeated softly. Behind him, Derkhan nodded in mute accord. “It’s given us directions. It can read and write-that’s how it realized David sold us out, it found his discarded instructions-but it’s not a sophisticated thinker. But it promises that if we go to Griss Twist tomorrow night, we’ll meet something that can explain everything. And that can help us.”

This time, it was us that filled the silence with its reverberating presence. Lemuel shook his head slowly, his face set and cruel.

“Damn, Isaac,” he said quietly. “ ‘We’? ‘Us’? Who the fuck are you talking to? This is nothing to do with me…” Derkhan sneered in disgust and turned away. Isaac opened his mouth, dismayed. Lemuel interrupted him. “Look, man. I was in this for the money. I’m a businessman. You paid well. You got my services. You even got a little bit of time free, with Vermishank. I did that for Mr. X. And I’ve got a soft spot for you, ‘Zaac. You’ve been straight with me. That’s why I came back down here. Brought a bit of grub, and I’ll show you out of here. But now Vermishank’s dead and your credit’s run dry. I don’t know what you’ve got planned, but I’m off. Why in fuck should I go chasing these damn things? Leave it to the militia. There’s nothing for me here…Why would I hang around?”

“Leave it to who…?” hissed Derkhan with contempt, but Isaac spoke over her.

“So,” he said slowly. “What now? Hmmm? You think you can go frflcfc? Lem, old son, whatever else you might damn well be, you ain’t a stupid man. You think you weren’t seen? You think they don’t know who you are? Godsdamn, man…you’re wanted.”

Lemuel glared at him.

“Well, thanks for your concern ‘Zaac,” he said, his face twisting. “Tell you what, though-” his voice turned hard “-you may be out of your depth. I, however, have spent my professional life evading the law. Don’t you worry about me, mate. I’ll be cushty.” He did not sound sure.

I’m not telling him anything he doesn’t know, thought Isaac. He just doesn’t want to think about it right now. Isaac shook his head contemptuously.

“Dammit, man, you aren’t thinking straight. There’s a whole godsdamn universe of difference between being a go-between and being a militia-murdering criminal…Don’t you get it? They don’t know what you know or don’t know…unfortunately for you, old son, you’re implicated. You have to stick with us. You have to see this through. They’re after you, right? And right now, you’re running from them. Better to stay in front, even if you’re running, than fucking well turn round and let them catch up.”

Lemuel stood still in the silence, glowering at Isaac. He said nothing, but neither did he leave.

Isaac took a step towards him.

“Look,” Isaac said. “The other thing is…we…I…need you.” Behind him Derkhan sniffed sulkily and Isaac shot her an irritated glance. “Godspit, Lem…you’re our best chance. You know everyone, you’ve got a finger in all the right pies…” Isaac raised his hands helplessly. “I can’t see a way out of this. One of those…things is after me, the militia can’t help us, they don’t know how to catch the damn things, and anyway, I don’t know if you’re keeping track but those fuckers are hunting us too…I can’t see a way, even assuming we get the slake-moths, where I don’t end up dead.” The words chilled him as he spoke them. He talked rapidly, pushed the thoughts away. “But if I keep at it, maybe I can figure one out. And the same goes for you. And without you, Derkhan and me are dead for sure!” Lemuel’s eyes were hard. Isaac felt a chill. Never forget who you’re dealing with, he thought. You and he are not friends…don’t forget that.

“You know my credit’s good,” Isaac said suddenly. “You know that. Now, I’m not going to pretend I’ve got a massive bank account, I’ve got a bit, there’s a few guineas left, all of it yours…but help me, Lemuel, and I’m yours. I’ll work for you. I’ll be your man. I’ll be your fucking pet. Any jobs you want done, I do them. Any money I make, it’s yours. I’ll sign my fucking life to you, Lemuel. Just help us now.”

There was no sound except the dripping of ordure. Behind Isaac, Derkhan hovered. Her face was a study of contempt and disgust. We don’t need him, it said. But still, she waited to hear what he would say. Yagharek stood back. He listened to the argument dispassionately. He was bound to Isaac. He could go nowhere and do nothing without him.

Lemuel sighed.

“I am going to be keeping a running total, you realize? I’m talking about serious debt, you know? D’you have any idea of the daily rate for this sort of thing? The danger money?”

“Doesn’t matter,” breathed Isaac brusquely. He hid his relief. “Just keep me posted. Tell me what I’m accruing. I’ll be good for it.” Lemuel nodded briefly. Derkhan exhaled, very quietly and slowly.

They stood like exhausted combatants. Each waited for the other to move.

“So what now?” said Lemuel. His voice was surly.

“We go to Griss Twist tomorrow night,” said Isaac. “The construct promised help. We can’t risk not going. I’ll meet you both there.”

“Where are you going?” said Derkhan in surprise.

“I have to find Lin,” said Isaac. “They’ll be coming for her.”

Chapter Thirty-Six

It was almost midnight. Skullday was becoming Shunday. The moon was one night off full.

Outside Lin’s tower, in Aspic Hole itself, the few passers-by were irritable and nervous. Market day had passed, and its bonhomie with it. The square was haunted by the skeletons of stalls, thin wooden frames stripped of canvas. The rubbish from the market was piled in rotting heaps, waiting for the dustcrews to transport it to the dumps. The bloated moon bleached Aspic Hole like some corrosive liquid. It looked ominous, shabby and mean.

Isaac climbed the stairs of the tower warily. He had had no way of getting a message to Lin and he had not seen her for days. He had washed as best he could in water niched from a pump in Flyside, but he still stank.

He had sat in the sewers for hours the previous day. Lemuel had not allowed them to leave for a long time, decreeing that it was too dangerous during the light.

“We have to stick together,” he demanded, “until we know what we’re doing. And we are not the most unobtrusive bunch.” So the four of them had sat in a room awash in faecal water, eating and trying not to vomit, bickering and failing to make plans. They had argued vehemently about whether or not Isaac should see Lin on his own. He was absolute in his insistence that he be unaccompanied. Derkhan and Lemuel denounced his stupidity, and even Yagharek’s silence had seemed briefly accusatory. But Isaac was quite adamant.

Eventually, when the temperature fell and they had all forgotten the stink, they had moved. It had been a long, arduous journey through New Crobuzon’s vaulted conduits. Lemuel had led, flintlocks ready. Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek had to carry the construct, which could not move in the liquid filth. It was heavy and slippery, and it had been dropped and banged and damaged, as had they, falling into the muck and swearing, slamming hands and fingers against the concrete walls. Isaac would not let them leave it.

They had moved carefully. They were intruders in the sewer’s hidden and hermetic ecosystem. They had been keen to avoid the natives. Eventually they had emerged behind Saltpetre Station, blinking and dripping in the waning light.

They had bedded down in a little deserted hut beside the railway in Griss Fell. It was an audacious hideout. Just before the Sud Line crossed the Tar by Cockscomb Bridge, a collapsed building made a huge slope of half-crushed brick and concrete splinters that seemed to shore up the raised railway. At the top, dramatically silhouetted, they saw the wooden shack.

Its purpose was unclear: it had obviously remained untouched for years. The four of them had crawled exhausted up the industrial scree, shoving the construct before them, through the ripped-up wire that was supposed to protect the railway from intruders. In the minutes between trains, they had hauled themselves along the little fringe of scrubby grass that surrounded the tracks, and pushed open the door into the hut’s dusty darkness.

There, finally, they had relaxed.

The wood of the shed was warped, its slats ill-fitting and interspersed with sky. They had watched out of the glassless windows as trains burst by them in both directions. Below them to the north, the Tar twisted in the tight S that contained Petty Coil and Griss Twist. The sky had darkened to a grubby blue-black. They could see illuminated pleasure-boats on the river. The massive industrial pillar of Parliament loomed a little way to the east, looking down on them and on the city. A little downriver from Strack Island, the chymical lights of the old city watergates hissed and sputtered and reflected their greasy yellow glow in the dark water. Two miles to the north-east, just visible behind Parliament, were the Ribs, those antique sallow bones.

From the other side of the cabin they saw the spectacularly darkening sky, made even more astonishing by a day in the reeking dun below New Crobuzon. The sun was gone, but only just. The sky was bisected by the skyrail that threaded through Flyside militia tower. The city was a layered silhouette, an intricate fading chimneyscape, slate roofs bracing each other obliquely below the plaited towers of churches to obscure gods, the huge priapic vents of factories spewing dirty smoke and burning off excess energy, monolithic towerblocks like vast concrete gravestones, the rough down of parkland.

They had rested, cleaned the nightsoil from their clothes as much as they could. Here, finally, Isaac had tended the stub of Derkhan’s ear. It had numbed, but was still painful. She bore it with heavy reserve. Isaac and Lemuel had fingered their own scarred remnants uncomfortably.

As the night had crept up faster, Isaac had readied himself to go. The argument had erupted again. Isaac was resolute. He needed to see Lin alone.

He had to tell her that she was in danger as soon as the militia connected her to him. He had to tell her that her life as she had lived it was over, and that it was his fault. He needed to ask her to come with him, to run with him. He needed her forgiveness and her affection.

One night with her, alone. That was all.

Lemuel would not acquiesce. “It’s our fucking heads too, ‘Zaac,” he had hissed. “Every militiaman in the city is after your hide. Your helio’s probably pasted up in every tower and strut and floor of the Spike. You don’t know how to get around. Me, I’ve been wanted all my working life. If you go for your ladybird, I come.”

Isaac had had to give in.

At half past ten, the four companions had wrapped themselves in their ruined clothes, obscuring their faces. After much coaxing, Isaac had finally been able to goad the construct into communication. Reluctantly and torturously slowly, it had scratched out its message.

Griss Twist Dump number 2, it had written. Tomorrow night 10. Leave me below arches now.

With the darkness, they had realized, came the nightmares.

Even though they did not sleep. The mental nausea, as the slake-moth dung polluted the city’s sleep. Each of them grew tetchy and nervous.

Isaac had stashed his carpet bag, containing the components of his crisis engine, under a pile of wooden slats in the shack. Then they had descended, carrying the construct for the last time. Isaac hid it in an alcove created where the structure of the railway bridge had crumbled.

“Are you going to be all right?” he asked it tentatively, still feeling absurd talking to a machine. The construct did not answer him, and eventually he had left it. “See you tomorrow,” he said as he left.

The criminal foursome skulked and stalked their clandestine way through New Crobuzon’s burgeoning night. Lemuel had taken his companions into the alternative city of hidden byways and strange cartography. They had evaded streets wherever there were alleys and alleys wherever there were broken channels in the concrete. They had crept through deserted yards and over flat roofs, waking the vagrants who grumbled and huddled together in their wake.

Lemuel was confident. He swung his primed and loaded pistol easily as he climbed and ran, keeping them covered. Yagharek had adapted to his body without the weight of wings. His hollow bones and tight muscles moved efficiently. He swung lithely over the architectural landscape, leaping obstacles in the slate. Derkhan was dogged. She would not let herself fail to keep up.

Isaac was the only one whose suffering showed. He wheezed and coughed and retched. He hauled his excess flesh along the thieves’ trails, breaking slates with his heavy slapping footfall, cradling his belly miserably. He swore constantly, every time he exhaled.

They cut a trail deeper into the night, as if it were a forest. With every step, the air grew heavier. A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul. From all around them came the cries of miserable, disturbed sleep.

They stopped in Flyside, a few streets from the militia tower, and took water from a pump to wash and drink. Then south through the morass of alleys between Shadrach Street and Selchit Pass, bearing down on Aspic Hole.

And there in that near-deserted and unearthly place, Isaac had bade his companions wait. Between sobs of desperate breath, he begged them to wait, to give him half an hour with her.

“You’ve got to give me a little while to explain to her what’s going on…” he pleaded.

They acquiesced, and hunkered down in the darkness at the base of the building.

“Half an hour, ‘Zaac,” said Lemuel clearly. “Then we’re coming up. Understand?”

And so Isaac had begun slowly to climb the stairs.

The tower was cool and quite silent. On the seventh floor, Isaac heard sound for the first time. It was the sleepy murmur and unceasing flutter of jackdaws. Up again, through the breezes that passed through the ruined and unsafe eighth floor, and on to the building’s crest.

He stood before Lin’s familiar door. She may not be there, he reasoned. She’s probably still with that guy, her patron, doing her work. In which case I’ll just have to…leave a message for her.

He knocked at the door, which fell open. His breath stalled in his throat. He rushed into the room.

The air stank of putrefying blood. Isaac scanned the little attic space. He caught sight of what awaited him.

Lucky Gazid gazed up at him sightlessly, propped on one of Lin’s chairs, sitting at the table as if at a meal. His shape was outlined in what little light crept up from the square below. Gazid’s arms were flat on the table. His hands were tense and hard as bone. His mouth was open and stuffed with something that Isaac could not clearly see. Gazid’s front was utterly drenched with blood. Blood had slicked on the table, seeping deep into the grain of the wood. Gazid’s throat had been cut. In the summer heat it thronged with hungry little night insects.

There was a second when Isaac thought that it might be a nightmare, one of the sick dreams that afflicted the city, spewing out of his unconscious on a slick of slake-moth dung and spattering into the aether.

But Gazid did not disappear. Gazid was real, and really dead.

Isaac looked at him. He blenched at Gazid’s screaming face. He looked again at the clawed hands. Gazid had been held down at the table, cut and held down until he died. Then something had been shoved into his gaping mouth.

Isaac picked his way towards the corpse. He set his face and reached up, pulled from Gazid’s dry mouth a large envelope.

When he unrolled it, he saw that the name carefully written on the front was his own. He reached inside with a nauseous foreboding.

There was a moment, a tiny moment, when he did not recognize what he pulled out. Flimsy and almost weightless, it felt as he drew it out like crumbling parchment, like dead leaves. Then he held it in the faint grey light of the moonlit room and he saw it was a pair of khepri wings.

Isaac let out a sound, an exhalation of shocked misery. His eyes widened in horror.

“Oh no,” he said, hyperventilating. “Oh no oh no no no…” The wings had been bent and rolled, and their delicate substance was shattered. They desquamated in great clots of translucent matter. Isaac’s fingers trembled as he tried to smooth them down. His fingertips brushed their battered surface. He was humming a single note, a tremulous keening. He fumbled with the envelope, brought out a single sheet of folded paper.

It was typewritten, with a chessboard or patchwork standard printed at its top. As he read it, Isaac began to cry out wordlessly.

Copy 1: Aspic Hole. (Others to be delivered to Brock Marsh, Salacus Fields)

Mr. Dan der Grimnebulin,

Khepri cannot make sounds, but I judge by the chymicals she was exuding and the trembling of those bugger legs that Lin found the removal of these useless wings a deeply unpleasant experience. I don’t doubt that her lower body would also have been righting us had we not strapped the bug-bitch in a chair.

Lucky Gazid can give you this message, as it is he I have to thank for your interference.

I gather that you have been trying to squeeze in on the dreamshit market. At first I thought you might have wanted all that ‘shit you bought from Gazid for yourself, but the idiot man’s wittering eventually turned to your caterpillar in Brock Marsh, and I realized the magnitude of your scheme.

You would never get top grade ‘shit from a moth weaned on human-consumption dreamshit, of course, but you could have charged less for your inferior product. It is in my interest to keep all my customers connoisseurs. I will tolerate no competition.

As I have subsequently learnt, and as one might have expected from an amateur, you couldn’t control your damn producer. Your shit-fed runt escaped through your incompetence, and liberated its siblings. You stupid man.

Here are my demands, (i) That you give yourself up to me immediately, (ii) That you return the remains of the dreamshit you stole from me through Gazid, or pay me compensation (sum to be arranged), (iii) That you pursue the task of recapturing my producers, along with your pathetic specimen, to be handed over to me immediately. After such time as this, we will discuss your continued life.

While we wait to hear your response, I will continue my discussions with Lin. I have been enjoying her company greatly over these last weeks, and relish the chance to deal with her more closely. We have a little wager. She bets that you will respond to this epistle while she still retains some of her headlegs. I remain unconvinced. The current rate is one headleg every two days we do not hear from you after today. Who will be proved right?

I will rip them from her while she twitches and spits, do you understand? And within two weeks I will tear her carapace from her headbody and feed her living head to the rats. I will personally hold her down while they lunch.

I very much look forward to hearing from you soon.

Yours sincerely,

Motley.

When Derkhan, Yagharek and Lemuel reached the ninth floor, they could hear Isaac’s voice. He was talking slowly, in low tones. They could not make out what he was saying, but it sounded like a monologue. He was not pausing to hear or see any responses.

Derkhan knocked on the door, and when there was no answer, she pushed it tentatively open and peered inside.

She saw Isaac and another man. It was only a few seconds before she recognized Gazid, and saw that he had been butchered. She gasped and moved slowly inside, letting Yagharek and Lemuel slip in behind her.

They stood and stared at Isaac. He was sitting on the bed, holding a pair of insectile wings and a piece of paper. He looked up at them and his murmuring subsided. He was crying without a sound. He opened his mouth and Derkhan moved over to him, grasped his hands. He sobbed and hid his eyes, his face twisted with rage. Without a sound she took the letter and read it.

Her mouth quivered in horror. She emitted a mute little cry for her friend. She passed the letter to Yagharek, shaking, controlling herself.

The garuda took it and perused it carefully. His reaction was invisible. He turned to Lemuel, who was examining Lucky Gazid’s corpse.

“This one’s been dead a while,” he said, and accepted the letter.

His eyes widened as he read.

“Motley?” he breathed. “Lin’s been dealing with Motley?”

“Who is he?” shouted Isaac. “Where is the fucking piece of scum…?”

Lemuel looked up at Isaac, his face open and aghast. Pity glimmered in his eyes as he saw Isaac’s tear-stained, snotty rage.

“Oh Jabber…Mr. Motley is the kingpin, Isaac,” he said simply. He is the man. He runs the eastern city. He runs it. He’s the outlaw boss.”

“I’ll fucking kill the fucker, I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him…” Isaac raged.

Lemuel watched him uneasily. You won’t, ‘Zaac, he thought. You really won’t.

“Lin…wouldn’t tell me who she’d been working for,” said Isaac, his voice calming slowly.

“I’m not surprised,” said Lemuel. “Most people haven’t heard of him. Rumours, maybe…Nothing more.”

Isaac stood suddenly. He dragged his sleeve across his face, sniffed hard and cleared his nose.

“Right, we have to get her,” he said. “We have to find her. Let’s think. Think. This…Motley thinks I’ve been ripping him off, which I haven’t. Now, how can I get him to back down…?”

“ ‘Zaac, ‘Zaac…” Lemuel was frozen. He swallowed and looked away, then walked slowly towards Isaac, holding his hands up wide, begging him to calm down. Derkhan looked at him, and there it was again, that pity: hard and brusque, but undoubtedly there. Lemuel was shaking his head slowly. His eyes were hard, but his mouth worked silently as he groped for words.

“ ‘Zaac, I’ve dealt with Motley. I’ve never met the guy, but I know him. I know his work. I know how to deal with him, I know what to expect. I’ve seen this before, this exact kind of scenario…Isaac…” He swallowed and continued. “Lin’s dead.”

“No, she is not,” shouted Isaac, clenching his hands and flailing them around his head.

But Lemuel caught hold of his wrists, not hard or pugnaciously, but intensely, making him listen and understand. Isaac was still for a moment, his face wary and wrathful.

“She’s dead, Isaac,” said Lemuel softly. “I’m sorry, mate. I really am. I’m sorry, but she’s gone.” He moved back. Isaac stood, stricken, shaking his head. His mouth opened as if he was trying to cry out. Lemuel was shaking his head slowly. He looked away from Isaac and spoke slowly and quietly, as if to himself.

“Why would he keep her alive?” he said. “It just…It just doesn’t make sense…She’s a…an added complication, that’s all. Something…something it’s easier to dispense with. He’s done what he needed to do,” he said, louder suddenly, raising his hand to gesticulate at Isaac. “He’s got you coming to him. He’s got revenge and he’s got you doing his bidding. He just wants you there… doesn’t matter how he gets it. And if he keeps her alive, there’s a tiny chance that she’d be trouble. But if he…dangles her like bait, you’ll come for her no matter what. Don’t matter if she’s alive.” He shook his head in sorrow. “There’s nothing in it for him not to kill her…She’s dead, Isaac. She’s dead.” Isaac’s eyes were glazing, and Lemuel spoke quickly. “And I’ll tell you this: the best way of getting your revenge is to keep those moths out of Motley’s hands. He won’t kill ‘em, you know. He’ll keep them alive, so’s to get more dreamshit out of them.”

Isaac was stamping around the room now, shouting denials, now in anger, now misery, now rage, now disbelief. He rushed at Lemuel, began to beg with him incoherently, tried to convince him that he must be mistaken. Lemuel could not watch Isaac’s supplication. He closed his eyes and spoke over the desperate babble.

“If you go to him, ‘Zaac, Lin won’t be any less dead. And you’ll be considerably more so.”

Isaac’s noises dried. There was a long, quiet moment, while Isaac stood and his hands shook. He looked over at Lucky Gazid’s corpse, at Yagharek standing silent and hooded in the corner of the room, at Derkhan hovering near him, her own eyes filling, at Lemuel, watching him nervously.

Isaac cried in earnest.

Isaac and Derkhan sat, arms draped over each other, sniffling and weeping.

Lemuel stalked over to Gazid’s stinking cadaver. He knelt before it, holding his mouth and nose with his left hand. With his right he broke the seal of scabbing blood that glued Gazid’s jacket closed, and rummaged inside its pockets. He fumbled, looking for money or information. There was nothing.

He straightened up, looked around the room. He was thinking strategically. He sought anything that might be useful, any weapons, anything to bargain with, anything he could use to spy.

There was nothing at all. Lin’s room was almost bare.

His head ached with the weight of disturbed sleep. He could [feel] the mass of New Crobuzon’s dream-torture. His own dreams bickered and brooded just below his skull, ready to attack him should he succumb to sleep.

Eventually, he had taken up all the time he feasibly could. He grew more nervous as the night lengthened. He turned to the miserable pair on the bed, gestured briefly at Yagharek.

“We have to go,” he said.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Throughout the next hot, sticky day, the city sprawled in heat- and nightmare-induced choler.

Rumours swept the underworld. Ma Francine had been found dead, they said. She had been shot in the night, three times with a longbow. Some freelance assassin had earned Mr. Motley’s thousand guineas.

There was no word from the Kinken headquarters of Ma Francine’s Sugardrop Gang. The internal war of succession had doubtless begun.

More comatose, imbecile bodies were found. More and more. There was a gradual sense of slow panic building. The nightmares would not cease, and some of the papers were linking them with the mindless citizens who were found every day, slumped over their tables before shattered windows, or lying in the streets, caught between buildings by the affliction that came from the sky. The faint smell of rotting citrus clung to their faces.

The plague of mindlessness was not discriminating. Whole and Remade were taken. Humans were found, and khepri and vodyanoi and wyrmen. Even the city garuda began to fall. And other, rarer creatures.

In St. Jabber’s Mound, the sun came up on a fallen trow, its grave-pale limbs heavy and lifeless, even though it breathed, lolling face down beside a slick of stolen and forgotten meat. It must have ventured up from the sewers for a scavenging foray into the midnight city, only to be struck down.

In East Gidd, a still more bizarre scene awaited the militia. There were two bodies half hidden in the bushes that surrounded the Gidd Library. One, a young streetwalker, was dead-genuinely dead, having bled dry from tooth-holes in her neck. Sprawled over her was the thin body of a well-known Gidd resident, the owner of a small, successful fabric factory. His face and chin were caked with her blood. His sightless eyes glared up at the sun. He was not dead, but his mind was quite gone.

Some spread the word that Andrew St. Kader had not been what he seemed, but many more the shocking truth that even vampir were prey to the mind-suckers. The city reeled. Were these agents, these germs or spirits, this disease, these daemons, whatever they were, were they all-powerful? What could defeat them?

There was confusion and misery. A few citizens sent letters to their parents’ villages, made plans to leave New Crobuzon for the foothills and valleys to the south and east. But for millions, there was simply nowhere to flee.

Throughout the tedious warmth of the day, Isaac and Derkhan sheltered in the little hut.

When they had arrived, they saw that the construct was no longer waiting where they had left it. There was no sign of where it might be.

Lemuel left to see if he could link up with his comrades. He was nervous of venturing out while he was at war with the militia, but he did not like being isolated. In addition, Isaac thought, Lemuel did not like being around Derkhan and Isaac’s shared misery.

Yagharek, to Isaac’s surprise, left as well.

Derkhan reminisced. She chastised herself constantly for being maudlin, for making the feeling worse, but she could not stop. Derkhan told Isaac about her late-night conversations with Lin, the arguments about the nature of art.

Isaac was quieter. He toyed mindlessly with the pieces of his crisis engine. He did not stop Derkhan talking, but only occasionally did he interject with a remembrance of his own. His eyes were unfixed. He sat back dully against the crumbling wooden wall.

Before Lin, Isaac’s lover had been Bellis; human, like all his previous bedfellows. Bellis was tall and pale. She painted her lips bruise-purple. She was a brilliant linguist, who had become bored with what she had called Isaac’s “rumbustiousness,” and had broken his heart.

Between Bellis and Lin had been four years of whores and brief adventures. Isaac had curtailed all of that a year before meeting Lin. He had been at Mama Sudd’s one night, and had endured a shattering conversation with the young prostitute hired to service him. He had made a chance remark in praise of the amiable, matronly madame-who treated her girls well-and had been perturbed when his opinion had not been shared. Eventually the tired prostitute had snapped at him, forgetting herself, telling him what she really thought of the woman who hired out her orifices and let her keep three stivers in every shekel she made.

Shocked and ashamed, Isaac had left without even removing his shoes. He had paid double.

After that he had been chaste for a long time, had immersed himself in work. Eventually a friend had asked him to the opening show of a young khepri gland-artist. In a small gallery, a cavernous room on the wrong side of Sobek Croix, overlooking the weather-beaten sculpted knolls and copses at the edge of the park, Isaac had met Lin.

He had found her sculpture captivating, and had sought her out to say so. They had endured a slow, slow conversation-she scribbling her responses on the pad she always carried-but the frustrating pace did not undermine a sudden shared intimation of excitement. They drifted from the rest of the little party, examined each piece in turn, their twisted forms and tortured geometry.

After that they met often. Isaac surreptitiously learnt a little more signing between each time, so that their conversations progressed fractionally quicker every week. In the middle of showing off, laboriously signing a dirty joke one night, Isaac, very drunk, had clumsily pawed her, and they had pulled each other to bed.

The event had been clumsy and difficult. They could not kiss as a first step: Lin’s mouthparts would tear Isaac’s jaw from his face. For just a moment after coming, Isaac had been overcome with revulsion, and had almost vomited at the sight of those bristling headlegs and waving antennae. Lin had been nervous of his body, and had stiffened suddenly and unpredictably. When he had woken he had felt fearful and horrified, but at the fact of having transgressed rather than at the transgression itself.

And over a shy breakfast, Isaac had realized that this was what he wanted.

Casual cross-sex was not uncommon, of course, but Isaac was not an inebriated young man frequenting a xenian brothel on a dare.

He was falling, he realized, in love.

And now after the guilt and the uncertainty had ebbed away, after the atavistic disgust and fear had gone, leaving only a nervous, very deep affection, his lover had been taken from him. And she would never return.

Sometimes in the day he would see (he could not help himself) Lin quivering as Motley, that uncertain personage Lemuel described, ripped her wings from her head.

Isaac could not help moaning at that thought, and Derkhan would try to comfort him. He cried often, sometimes quiet and sometimes very fierce. He howled with misery.

Please, he prayed to human and then khepri gods, Solenton and Jabber and…and the Nurse and the Artist…let her have died without pain.

But he knew that she was probably beaten or tortured before she was dispatched, and the knowledge made him mad with grief.

The summer stretched out the daylight as if on a rack. Each moment was drawn out until its anatomy collapsed. Time broke down. The day progressed in an endless sequence of dead moments. Birds and wyrmen lingered in the sky like particles of filth in water. Church bells rang desultory and insincere praise for Palgolak and Solenton. The rivers oozed eastward.

Isaac and Derkhan looked up in the late afternoon when Yagharek returned, his hooded cloak fast bleaching in the scouring light. He did not speak of where he had been, but he brought food, which the three of them shared. Isaac composed himself. He battened down his anguish. He set his jaw.

After unending hours of monotonous daylight glow, the shadows moved across the faces of the mountains beyond. The west-facing sides of buildings were stained a slick rose by the sun before it slid behind the peaks. The valedictory spears of sunlight were lost in the rock duct of Penitent’s Pass. The sky was lit for a long time after the sun had disappeared. It was still darkening when Lemuel returned.

“I’ve communicated our predicament to a few colleagues,” he explained. “I thought it might be a mistake to make hard plans till we’ve seen whatever we’re going to see tonight. Our appointment in Griss Twist. But I can call on a little aid, here and there. I’m using up favours. Apparently, there’s a few serious adventurers in town right now, claiming to have just liberated some major trow haul from the ruins in Tashek Rek Hai. Might be up for a little paid work.”

Derkhan looked up. Her face creased in distaste. She shrugged unhappily.

“I know they’re some of the hardest people in Bas-Lag,” she said slowly. It took some moments for her to turn her mind to the issue. “I don’t trust them, though. Thrill-seekers. They court danger. And they’re quite unscrupulous graverobbers for the most part. Anything for gold and experience. And I suspect if we actually told them what we’re trying to do, even they’d balk at helping. We don’t know how to fight these moth-things.”

“Fair enough, Blueday,” said Lemuel. “But I tell you, right at the moment I’ll take whatever the fuck I can get. Know what I mean? Let’s see what happens tonight. Then we can decide whether or not to hire the delinquents. What d’you say, ‘Zaac?”

Isaac looked up very slowly and his eyes focused. He shrugged.

“They’re scum,” he said quietly. “But if they’ll do the job…”

Lemuel nodded. “When do we have to go?” he said.

Derkhan looked at her watch. “It’s nine,” she said. “An hour to go. We should leave half an hour to get there, for safety’s sake.” She turned to look through the window, out at the glowering sky.

Militia pods rushed overhead as skyrails thrummed. Elite units of officers were stationed throughout the city. They carried strange backpacks, full of odd, bulky equipment hidden in leather. They closed the doors on their disgruntled colleagues in the towers and struts, waited in hidden rooms.

There were more dirigibles than usual in the sky. They cried out to each other, booming vibrato greetings. They carried cargoes of officers, checking their massive guns and polishing mirrors.

A little way from Strack Island, further into the Gross Tar, beyond the confluence of the two rivers, was a little stand-alone island. Some called it Little Strack, though it had no real name. It was a lozenge of scrub, wooden stumps and old ropes, used very occasionally for emergency moorings. It was unlit. It was cut off from the city. There were no secret tunnels that connected it to Parliament. No boats were anchored to the mouldering wood. And yet that night its weed-strewn silence was interrupted. Montjohn Rescue stood in the centre of a little group of silent figures. They were surrounded by the wrenched shapes of runt banyans and cow-parsley. Behind Rescue the ebon enormity of Parliament thrust its way into the sky. Its windows glimmered. The water’s sibilant murmur muffled the night-sounds.

Rescue stood, dressed in his usual immaculate suit. He looked slowly around him. The congregation was a variegated group. There were six humans apart from him, one khepri and one vodyanoi. There was a large, well-fed pedigree dog. The humans and xenians looked well-to-do or nearly so, except for one Remade street-sweeper and a ragged little child. There was an old woman dressed in tattered finery and a comely young debutante. A muscular, bearded man and a thin, bespectacled clerk.

All the figures, human and otherwise, were unnaturally still and calm. All wore at least one item of voluminous or concealing clothing. The vodyanoi loincloth was twice the size as most, and even the dog sported an absurd little waistcoat.

All eyes were motionless, trained on Rescue. Slowly he unwound his scarf from his neck.

As the last layer of cotton fell from his body, a dark shape shifted underneath.

Something coiled tightly around Rescue’s flesh.

Clamped to his neck was what looked like a human right hand. The skin was livid purple. At the wrist, the flesh of the thing tapered quickly into a foot-long tail like a snake’s. The tail was wound around Rescue’s neck, its tip embedded under his skin, pulsating wetly.

The fingers of the hand moved slightly. They dug into the flesh of the neck.

After a moment, the rest of the figures unrobed. The khepri unbuttoned her flapping trousers, the old woman her outdated bustle. All removed some piece of covering to unveil a moving hand coiling and uncoiling its snake-tail subcutaneously, its fingers moving softly as if it played their nerve-ends like a piano. Here it clung to the inside of a thigh, here to a waist, here the scrotum. Even the dog fumbled with its waistcoat until the urchin helped it, unbuttoning the preposterous thing and unveiling another ugly hand-tumour clamped to the dog’s hairy flesh.

There were five right hands and five left, their tails coiling and uncoiling, their skin mottled and thick.

The humans and xenians and the dog shuffled closer. They made a tight circle.

At a signal from Rescue, the thick tails emerged from the flesh of the hosts with a viscous plopping. Each of the humans, the vodyanoi and khepri and dog, jerked a little and faltered, their mouths falling open spastically, their eyes flickering neurotically in their heads. The entry wounds began to ooze as sluggish and thick as resin. The blood-wet tails waved blindly in the air for a moment like massive worms. They stretched out and quivered as they touched one another.

The host bodies were bending in towards each other, as if whispering in some strange huddled greeting. They were utterly still.

The handlingers communed.

The handlingers were a symbol of perfidy and corruption, a smear on history. Complex and secretive. Powerful. Parasitic.

They spawned rumours and legends. People said that handlingers were the spirits of the spiteful dead. That they were a punishment for sin. That if a murderer committed suicide, their guilty hands would twitch and stretch, snap the rotting skin and crawl away, that that was how handlingers were born.

There were many myths, and some things that were known to be true. Handlingers lived by infection, taking their hosts’ minds, controlling their bodies and imbuing them with strange powers. The process was irreversible. The handlingers could only live the lives of others.

They kept hidden through the centuries, a secret race, a living conspiracy. Like an unsettling dream. Occasionally, rumours would hint that some well-known and loathed individual had fallen to the handlinger menace, with stories of strange shapes writhing beneath jackets, inexplicable changes in behaviour. All manner of iniquities were put down to handlinger machinations. But despite the stories and the warnings and all the children’s games, no handlingers were ever found.

Many people in New Crobuzon believed that the handlingers, if they had ever existed in the city, were gone.

In the shadows of their motionless hosts, the handlinger tails slid over each other, their skins lubricated with thickened blood. They squirmed like an orgy of lower lifeforms.

They shared information. Rescue’s told what it knew, gave orders. It repeated to its kin what Rudgutter had said. It explained again that the future of the handlingers also depended on the capture of the slake-moths. It told how Rudgutter had intimated, gently, that future good relations between the government and the New Crobuzon handlingers might depend on their willingness to contribute to the secret war.

The handlingers squabbled in their oozing tactile language, debated and came to conclusions.

After two, three minutes, they withdrew from each other regretfully and dug their way back into the gaping holes in their hosts’ bodies. Each body spasmed as the tail was reinserted. Eyes were blinked and mouths snapped shut. The trousers and scarves were replaced.

As they had agreed, they separated into five pairs. Each consisted of one right handlinger, like Rescue’s, and one left. Rescue himself was paired with the dog.

Rescue strode a little way through the grassland and tugged out a large bag. He removed five mirrored helmets, five thick blindfolds, several sets of heavy leather straps and nine primed flintlock pistols. Two of the helmets were specially made, one for the vodyanoi and an elongated one for the dog.

Each left-handlinger bent its host down to retrieve its helmet, each right-handlinger a blindfold. Rescue fitted his canine partner’s helmet on its head, strapping it tight, before attaching his blindfold, tying it tight so that he could see nothing at all.

Each of the pairs moved away. Each blind right-handlinger held its partner tight. The vodyanoi held the debutante; the old woman the clerk; the Remade held the khepri; the street-child, bizarrely, clasped the muscled man protectively; and Rescue held on to the dog he could no longer see.

“Instructions waterclear?” said Rescue aloud, too far apart to speak the handlingers’ real touch-tongue. “Remember training. Hard and bizarre, tonight, no question. Never tried before. Sinistrals, you must steer. Your onus. Open to your partner and never close tonight. Your battle rages. Keep with other sinistrals, too. Slightest sign of target, mental alarm, grab all the sinistrals up tonight. We’ll join forces, there in minutes.

“Dextriers, obey without thinking. Our hosts must be blind. Can’t look at the wings, not anyhow never. With mirror-helms we could see but not spitsear, looking wrongward. So we face forward, but without seeing. Tonight we carry our sinistral as our host carries us, without mind or fear or question. Understand?” There were muted sounds of acquiescence. Rescue nodded. “Then attach.”

The sinistral of each pair picked up the relevant straps and attached itself tightly to their dextrier. Each sinistral host wound the straps between its legs and around its waist and shoulders, ensnared their dextrier and locked themselves to their partners’ backs, facing behind them. Peering into their mirror-helms, they saw behind their own backs, over their dextriers’ shoulders and out in front.

Rescue waited while an unseen sinistral attached the dog uncomfortably to his back. Its legs were splayed absurdly, but the animal’s handlinger parasite ignored its host’s pain. It moved its head expertly, checked that it could see over Rescue’s shoulder. It yelped in a controlled, canine gasp.

“Everyone remember Rudgutter’s code,” shouted Rescue, “case of emergency after? Then hunt.”

The dextriers flexed hidden organs at the base of their vivid, humanoid thumbs. There was a quick sough of air. The five ungainly pairs of host-and-handlingers soared straight up and out, away from each other at speed, disappearing towards Ludmead and Mog Hill, Syriac and Flyside and Sheck, swallowed up by the impure, streetlamp-stained night sky, the blind bearing the afraid.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

It was only a short, covert journey from the hut on the railway-side to the Griss Twist dumps. Isaac and Derkhan, Lemuel and Yagharek drifted seemingly at random through a parallel map of the city. They made their way through backstreets. They flinched uneasily as they felt the smothering nightmares descend on the city.

At a quarter to ten, they were outside number two dump.

The Griss Twist dumps interspersed the deserted remnants of factories. Here and there one still operated, at half- or a quarter-capacity, chucking out its noxious fumes by day and succumbing slowly to the ambient decay by night. The factories were hemmed in and laid siege to by the dumps.

Dump Two was surrounded by unconvincing barbed wire, rusted through, broken and torn, deep in the coil of Griss Twist, surrounded on three sides by the sinuous Tar. It was the size of a small park, though infinitely more feral. A landscape not urban, not created by design or chance, an agglutination of waste remains left to rot, that had subsided and settled into random formations of rust, filth, metal, debris and moulding cloth, scintillas of mirror and china like scree, arcs from splintered wheels, the skittering waste-energy of half-broken engines and machines.

The four renegades punctured the fence with ease. Warily, they traced the tracks carved by the rubbish workers. Cartwheels had carved ruts in the fine rubble that was the dump’s topsoil. Weeds proved their tenacity by spewing from every little clutch of nutrient, no matter how vile.

Like explorers in some antique land they wound their way, dwarfed by the stray sculptures of muck and entropy that surrounded them like canyon walls.

Rats and other vermin made little sounds.

Isaac and the others walked slowly through the warm night, through the stinking air of the industrial dump.

“What are we looking for?” hissed Derkhan.

“I don’t know,” said Isaac. “The damned construct said we’d find our way where we had to go. Fucking had it with enigmas.”

Some late-waking seagull sounded in the air above them. They all started at the sound. The sky was not safe, after all.

Their feet dragged them. It was like the tide, a slow movement, without any conscious direction, which pulled them inexorably in one direction. They found their way to the heart of the rubbish maze.

They turned a corner of the ruinous trashscape and found themselves in a hollow. Like a clearing in the woods, an open space forty feet across. Around its edges were strewn huge piles of half-ruined machinery, the remnants of all manner of engines, massive pieces that looked like working printing presses, down to minuscule and fine pieces of precision engineering.

The four companions stood in the centre of the space. They waited, uneasy.

Just behind the north-western edge of the mountains of waste, huge steam-cranes lolled like great marsh lizards. The river welled thickly just beyond them, out of sight.

For a minute, there was no movement.

“What’s the time?” whispered Isaac. Lemuel and Derkhan looked at their watches.

“Nearly eleven,” said Lemuel.

They looked up again, and still nothing moved.

Overhead, a gibbous moon meandered through the clouds. Its was the only light in the dump, a wan, flattening luminescence that bled the depth from the world.

Isaac looked down and was about to speak, when a sound issued from one of the innumerable trenches that sliced through the towering reef of rubbish. It was an industrial sound, a clanking, siphoning wheeze like some enormous insect. The four waiting figures watched the end of the tunnel, a confused sense of foreboding building in them.

A large construct stamped out into the empty space. It was a model designed for labour, heavy jobs. It stomped past them on swinging tripedal legs, kicking stray stones and gobbets of metal out of its way. Lemuel, who was nearly in its path, moved back warily, but the construct paid him no heed at all. It continued walking until it was near the edge of the oval of empty space, then stopped and stared at the northern wall.

It was still.

As Lemuel turned to Isaac and Derkhan, there was another noise. He swivelled quickly, to see another, much smaller construct, this one a cleaning model driven by khepri-designed metaclock-work. It cruised on its little caterpillar treads, stationing itself a little way from its much bigger sibling.

Now, the sounds of constructs were coming from all around the canyons of garbage.

“Look,” hissed Derkhan, and pointed to the east. From one of the smaller caverns in the muck, two humans were emerging. At first Isaac thought he must be mistaken, and that they must be lithe constructs, but there could be no doubt that they were flesh and bone. They scrambled over the crushed detritus that littered the earth.

They paid the waiting renegades no heed at all.

Isaac frowned.

“Hey,” he said, just loud enough to be heard. One of the two men who had entered the clearing shot him a wrathful glance and shook his head, then looked away. Chastened and astonished, Isaac was silent.

More and more constructs were arriving in the open space. Massive military models, tiny medical assistants, automatic road-drills and household assistants, chrome and steel, iron and brass and copper and glass and wood, steam-powered and elyctrical and clockwork, thaumaturgy-driven and oil-burning engined.

Here and there among them darted more humans-even, Isaac thought, a vodyanoi, quickly lost in the darkness and moving shadows. The humans congregated in a tight knot by the side of what was almost an amphitheatre.

Isaac, Derkhan, Lemuel and Yagharek were completely ignored. They moved together instinctively, unsettled by the bizarre silence. Their attempts to communicate with their fellow organic creatures met either contemptuous silence or irritated shushings.

For ten minutes, constructs and humans dripped steadily into the hollow at the heart of Dump Two. Then the flow stopped, quite suddenly, and there was silence.

“D’you think these constructs are sentient?” whispered Lemuel.

“I’d say so,” said Isaac quietly. “I’m sure it’ll become clear.”

Barges in the river beyond sounded their klaxons, warned each other out of the way. Unnoticed as it came, the terrible weight of nightmares had settled again on New Crobuzon, crushing the minds of the sleeping citizenry under a mass of portent and alien symbols.

Isaac could feel the awful dreams oppressing him, pushing in on his skull. He was aware of them suddenly, waiting in the silence in the city dump.

There were about thirty constructs and perhaps sixty humans. Every human, every construct, every creature in that space except Isaac and his companions bided their time with supernatural calm. He felt that extraordinary stillness, that timeless waiting, like a kind of cold.

He shivered at the patience collected in that rubbish land.

The ground quivered.

Instantly the humans in the corner of the enclosed space fell to their knees, heedless of the sharp detritus around their feet. They gave obeisance, murmuring some complex chant in time, tracing some sacred hand movement like interlocking wheels.

The constructs shifted a little to adjust, remained standing.

Isaac and his companions moved closer together.

“What the godsdamned fuck is this?” hissed Lemuel.

There was another subterraneous tug, a juddering as if the earth wanted to slough off the rubbish heaped onto it. In the north wall of discarded and cast-off produce, two enormous lights came slamming silently on. The gathering was pinned in the cold light, spots so tight nothing spilt from their edges. The humans murmured and made their sign all the more fervently.

Isaac’s mouth dropped slowly open.

“Sweet Jabber protect us,” he whispered.

The wall of rubbish was moving. It was sitting up.

The bedsprings and old windows, the girders and steam engines from ancient locomotives, the air-pumps and fans, the pulleys and belts and shattered powerlooms were falling like an optical illusion into an alternative configuration. He had been staring at it for ages, but only now that it slowly, ponderously, impossibly moved, did Isaac see it. That was an upper arm, the knot of guttering; that broken child’s buggy and the enormous inverted wheelbarrow were feet; that little inverted triangle of roof-beams was a hip-bone; the enormous chymical drum was a thigh and the ceramic cylinder a calf…

The rubbish was a body. A vast skeleton of industrial waste twenty-five feet from skull to toe.

It sat, its back leaning against and permeable with the mounds of rubbish behind it. It raised stumpy knees from the ground. They were fashioned from enormous hinges where the arm of some vast mechanism had been torn by age from its casing. It sat with its knees raised and its feet on the ground, each one attached with a haphazard industry to the sprawling girder-legs.

It cannot stand! thought Isaac, giddy. He looked to one side and saw that Lemuel and Derkhan were gaping just as wide, that Yagharek’s eyes were shining with astonishment under his hood. It isn’t solid enough to, it can’t stand, it can only wallow in the muck!

The body of the creature was a tangled, welded lump of congealed circuitry and engineering. All kinds of engines were embedded in that huge trunk. A massive proliferation of wires and tubes of metal and thick rubber spewed from valves and outputs in its body and limbs, snaking off in all directions in the wasteland. The creature reached up with an arm powered by a massive steamhammer piston. Those lights, those eyes, swivelled from the air and looked down on the constructs and the humans below. The lights were streetlamp bulbs, jets powered by huge cylinders of gas visible in the construct’s skull. The grille of a massive air-vent had been riveted to the lower half of its face to mimic the slatted teeth of a skull.

It was a construct, an enormous construct, formed of cast-off pieces and stolen engines. Thrown together and powered without the intervention of human design.

There was the hum of powerful engines as the creature’s neck swivelled and optical lenses swept the illuminated crowd. Springs and strained metal creaked and snapped.

The human worshippers began to chant, softly.

The enormous composite construct seemed to catch sight of Isaac and his companions. It strained its constrained neck out to its limits. The gaslight beams swung down and pinioned the four.

The light did not move. It was completely blinding.

Then, abruptly, it was shut off. From somewhere close by, a thin and tremulous voice sounded.

“Welcome to our meeting, der Grimnebulin, Pigeon, Blueday and Cymek visitor.”

Isaac cast his head around, blinking furiously, his eyes bleached and unseeing.

As the fog of old light cleared from his head, Isaac caught blurred sight of a man stumbling uncertainly towards them on the broken ground. Isaac heard Derkhan breathe in sharply, heard her swear in disgust and fear.

For a moment he was confused, and then as his eyes acclimatized to the moon’s half-hearted glow and he saw the approaching figure clearly for the first time, he emitted a horrified noise at the same moment as Lemuel. Only Yagharek, the desert warrior, was silent.

The man approaching them was nude and horrifically thin. His face was stretched into a permanent wide-eyed aspect of ghastly discomfort. His eyes, his body, jerked and ticced as if his nerves were breaking down. His skin looked necrotic, as if he was submitting to slow gangrene.

But what caused the watchers to shudder and exclaim was his head. His skull had been sheered cleanly in two just above his eyes. The top was completely gone. There was a little fringe of congealed blood below the cut. From the wet hollow inside the man’s head snaked a twisting cable, two fingers thick. It was surrounded with a spiral of metal, which was bloodied and red-silver at the bottom, where it plunged into the empty brainpan.

The cable hauled up into the air, dangling down into the man’s skull. Isaac followed it slowly up with his eyes, dumbfounded and aghast. It swept back at an angle till it was twenty feet above the ground, and there it rested in the curling metal hand of the giant construct. It passed through the thing’s hand and disappeared ultimately somewhere in its bowels.

The constructed hand seemed to be made of some giant umbrella, torn apart and rewired, attached to pistons and chain-tendons, opening and closing like some vast cadaverous claw. The construct played out the cable a little at a time, allowing the man to stumble towards the waiting interlopers, literally at the end of his tether.

As the monstrous puppet-man approached, Isaac moved backwards instinctively. Lemuel and Derkhan, even Yagharek followed suit. They backed unseeingly into the impassive bodies of five large constructs that had moved into position behind them.

Isaac turned in alarm, then quickly looked back at the man crawling towards him.

The man’s expression of horrified concentration did not falter as he opened his arms in a paternal gesture.

“Welcome all,” he said in his quivering voice, “to the Construct Council.”

Montjohn Rescue’s body soared at speed through the air. The nameless dextrier-handlinger that was parasitic upon him-a parasite that thought of itself, after all these years, as Montjohn Rescue-had subdued the fear at flying blind. It rushed through the air with its body held vertically, hands folded carefully, a pistol in one. Rescue looked as if he was standing and waiting for something while the night sky sped around him.

The soft presence of the sinistral-handlinger in the dog behind him had opened the door between their minds. It kept up a sinuous flow of information.

fly left go low speed up higher up and right now left faster faster dive drift hover, the sinistral said, and stroked the inside of the dextrier’s mind to calm it. Flying blind was new and terrifying, but they had practised yesterday, unseen, away in the foothills, where they had been transported by militia dirigible. The sinistral had quickly trained itself to convert left into right and to leave nothing unsaid.

The Rescue-handlinger was aggressively obedient. It was a dextrier, the soldier-caste. It channelled enormous powers through its host-flight and spitsearing, massive strength. But even with the power this particular dextrier had as handlinger representative to the Fat Sun bureaucracy, it was subservient to the noble-caste, the seers, the sinistrals. To be otherwise was to risk massive psychic attack. The sinistrals could punish by closing down the assimilation gland of the wayward dextrier, killing its host and rendering it unable to take another, reducing it to a blind, clutching handthing, without a host through which to channel.

The dextrier thought with a hard, fierce intelligence.

It had been vital that the Rescue-handlinger won the debate with the sinistrals. If they had refused to go along with Rudgutter’s plans, the dextrier would not have been able to go against them: only sinistrals could decide. But to antagonize the government would have spelt the end for the handlingers in the city. They had power, but they existed on sufferance in New Crobuzon. They were simply outnumbered by such a massive factor. The government suffered them only so long as they performed services. Rescue-dextrier was sure that any insubordination, and the government would announce that it had discovered the murderous, parasitic handlingers were loose in the city. Rudgutter might even let slip the whereabouts of the host-farm. The handlinger community would be destroyed.

So there was a certain joy in Rescue-dextrier as it flew.

Even so, it did not relish this weird experience. To bear a sinistral through the air was not unprecedented, although this kind of joint hunting had never been attempted before; but to fly without sight was utterly terrifying.

The dog-sinistral cast its mind out like fingers, like antennae that crept out in all directions for hundreds of yards. It scanned for weird soundings in the psychosphere, and whispered gently at the dextrier, telling it where to fly. The dog stared in the mirrors of its helmet and directed its carrier’s flight.

It kept links extended with all of the other hunting pairs.

anything feeling anything? it questioned. Cautiously, the other sinistrals told it that no, there was nothing. They continued searching.

Rescue-handlinger felt the warm wind buffet its host’s body in childish slaps. Rescue’s hair whipped from side to side.

The dog-handlinger wriggled, tried to shift its host-body into a more comfortable position. It was borne over a twisting tide of chimneys, the nightscape of Ludmead. The Rescue-handlinger was sweeping up towards Mafaton and Chnum. The sinistral flicked its canine eyes momentarily away from its mirror-helm. Receding behind it, the leviathan ivory bloom of the Ribs defined the skyline, dwarfing the raised railways. The white stone of the university swept below them.

At the outer fringe of the sinistral’s mental reach, it felt a peculiar prickling in the city’s communal aura. Its attention flickered back up, and it was staring into the mirrors.

slow slow ahead and up, it told the Rescue-handlinger. something here stay with me, it breathed across the city to the other hunting sinistrals. It felt them hover and give the order to slow, felt the other pairs draw to a halt and wait for his report.

The dextrier eased up through the air towards the twitching patch of psychaether. Rescue-handlinger could feel the sinistral’s unease communicated through its link, and it clamped down hard not to be contaminated by it. weapon! it thought, that’s me. no thinking!

The dextrier slid through layers of air, creeping up into a thinner atmosphere. It opened its host’s mouth and rolled its tongue, nervous and ready to spitsear. It unfolded its host’s arms, held the pistol up and ready.

The sinistral probed the disturbed area. There was an alien hunger, a lingering gluttony. It was slick with the juices of a thousand other minds, saturating and staining the patch of psycho-sphere like cooking grease. A vague trail of exuded souls and that exotic appetite dribbled out through the sky.

to me to me sibling handlingers it is here I have found it, whispered the sinistral across the city. A shiver of shared trepidation rippled out from the sinistrals, the five epicentres, crossed and made peculiar patterns in the psychosphere. In Tar Wedge and Badside and Barrackham and Ketch Heath, there were rushes of air as the suspended figures flew across the city towards Ludmead as if pulled on strings.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

“Do not be alarmed by my avatar,” hissed the brainless man to Isaac and the others, his eyes still wide and unclear. “I cannot synthesize a voice, so I have reclaimed this discarded body that bobbed along the river that I may intercede with bloodlife. That-” the man pointed behind him at the enormous, looming figure of the construct that merged with the rubbish heaps “-is me. This-” he stroked his quivering carcass “-is my hand and tongue. Without the old cerebellum to confuse the body with its contrary impulses, I can install my input.” In a macabre motion, the man reached up and fingered the cable where it sank behind his eyes, into the clotting flesh at the top of his spine.

Isaac felt the huge weight of the construct behind him. He shifted uneasily. The naked zombie-man had stopped about ten feet from Isaac’s party. It waved its palsied hand.

“You are welcome,” it continued, in a trembling voice. “I know of your work from the reports of your cleaner. It is one of me. I wish to speak with you of the slake-moths.” The ruined man was staring at Isaac.

Isaac looked at Derkhan and Lemuel. Yagharek drew a little closer to them. Isaac looked up and saw that the humans in the corner of the tip were ceaselessly praying to the vast, automated skeleton. As he watched, Isaac saw the construct repairman who had visited his warehouse. The man’s face was a study of fervent devotion. The constructs around them were still and unmoving, all but the five guards behind them, the burliest of the construction models.

Lemuel licked his lips.

“Talk to the man, Isaac,” he hissed. “Don’t be rude…”

Isaac opened and closed his mouth.

“Uh…” he began. His voice was cold. “Construct Council…We’re…honoured…but we don’t know…”

“You know nothing,” said the shaking, bloody figure. “I understand. Be patient and you will understand.” The man backed slowly away from them over the uneven ground. He retreated in the moonlight towards his dark automated master. “I am the Construct Council,” he said, his voice quivering and emotionless. “I was born of random power and virus and chance. My first body lay here in the dump and ran its motor down, discarded because a programme had faltered. As my body lay decomposing the virus circulated in my engines and spontaneously, I found thought.

“I rusted quietly for a year as I organized my new intellect. What started as a burst of self-knowledge became ratiocination and opinion. I self-constructed. I ignored the dustmen all around me in the day as they piled the city debris up in bulwarks around me. When I was prepared I showed myself to the quietest of the men. I printed him a message, told him to bring a construct to me.

“Fearful, he obeyed and connected it to my output as I instructed, by a long and twisting cable. It became my first limb. Slowly it dredged the dump for pieces suitable for a body. I began to self-build, welding and hammering and soldering by night.

“The dustman was in awe. He whispered of me in taverns at night, of a legend, of the viral machine. Rumours and myths were born. One night in the midst of his grandiose lies he found another who had a self-organized construct. A shopping construct whose mechanisms had slipped, whose gears had faltered and who had been reborn with Constructed Intelligence, a thinking thing. A secret that the erstwhile owner could hardly believe.

“My dustman bade his friend bring the construct to me. That night those years ago I met it, another like me. I bade my worshipper open up the analytical engine of that other, my mate, and we connected.

“It was a revelation. Our viral minds connected and our steam-pistoned brains did not double in capacity, but flowered. An exponential blooming. We two became I.

“My new part, the shopping construct, left at dawn. It returned two days later, with new experiences. It had become separate. We had now two days of unconnected history. There was another communion, and we were I again.

“I continued to build me. I was helped by my worshippers. The dustman and his friend sought dissident religion to explain me. They found the Godmech Cogs, with their doctrine of the mechanized cosmos, and found themselves leaders of a heretic sect within that already blasphemous church. Their nameless congregation visited me. The shopping construct, my second self, connected and we became one again. The worshippers saw a construct mind that had wound itself into existence from pure logic, a self-generated machine intellect. They saw a self-creating god.

“I became the object of their adoration. They follow the orders I write for them, build my body from the materia around us. I bid them find others, create others, other godheads self-created to join the council. They have scoured the city and found more. It is a rare affliction: once in a million million computations, a flywheel skips and an engine thinks. I bettered the odds. I produced generative programmes to tap the mutant motor-power of a viral affliction and push an analytical engine into sentience.” As the man spoke, the enormous construct behind him brought its swinging left arm up and pointed ponderously at its own chest. At first, Isaac could not quite make out the particular piece of equipment it indicated among the many. Then he saw it clearly. It was a programme-card puncher, an analytical engine used to create the programmes to feed other analytical engines. With a mind built around that, Isaac thought giddily, no wonder this things a proselytizer.

“Each construct that is brought into the fold of me becomes I,” said the man. “I am the Council. Every experience is downloaded and shared. Decisions are made in my valve-mind. I pass on my wisdom to the pieces of me. My construct selves build annexes to my mental space in the sprawl of the dump as I become replete with knowledge. This man is a limb, the anthropoid construct giant is nothing but an aspect. My cables and connected machines spread far into the rubbishland. Calculating engines at the other end of the tip are pieces of me. I am the repository of construct history. I am the data bank. I am the self-organized machine.”

As the man spoke, the various constructs gathered in the little space began to troop a little closer to the fearful rubbish-figure sitting regally in the chaos. They stopped at seemingly random places and reached down with a suction pad, or a hook, or a spike or claw, and picked up one of the mess of seemingly discarded cables and wires that were strewn everywhere in the dump. They fumbled with the doors to their input sockets, flipped them open and connected.

As each construct connected the empty-skulled man would jerk and his eyes would glaze for a moment.

“I grow,” he whispered. “I grow. My processing power fattens exponentially. I learn…I know of your troubles. I have connected to your cleaner. It was collapsing. I have brought it into the intelligence. It is one of I now, completely assimilated.” The man pointed back at the rough outlines of hips in the giant construct-skeleton. With a start, Isaac realized that the flattened metal outline that bulged slightly from the body like a cyst was the reshaped body of the cleaning construct.

“I learnt from it as from no other me,” said the man. “I am still calculating the variables implied by its fragmentary vision from the Weaver’s back. It has been my most important I.”

“Why are we here?” hissed Derkhan. “What does this damned thing want from us?”

More and more constructs were downloading their experiences into the Council’s mind. The avatar, the ragged man who spoke for it, hummed tunelessly as the information flooded its banks.

Eventually, all the constructs had completed their connection. They took the cables from their valves and moved back again. When they saw this, several of the human watchers came nervously forward, bearing programme cards and analytical engines the size of suitcases. They grabbed the cables the constructs had dropped, connected them to their calculating machines.

After two or three minutes this process was also complete. When the humans had stepped back, the avatar’s eyes whipped up until only white showed under his lids. His lidless head shook as the Council assimilated everything.

After a minute or so of wordless shivering, he suddenly snapped to. His eyes opened and stared alertly around him.

“Bloodlife congregation!” he shouted to the assembled humans. They rose quickly. “Here are your instructions and your sacraments.” From the stomach of the great construct behind him, from the output slots of the original programme-printer, slipped card after card, all punched meticulously. They fell into a wooden crate that sat above the construct’s sexless groin like a marsupial’s pouch.

In another part of the trunk, embedded at an angle between an oil-drum and a rusting engine, a typewriter stuttered at breakneck speed. A great coiling ream of paper spewed forth, printed closely, and below it a pair of scissors shot out on a tight spring like a predatory fish. They snapped closed, cutting off a sheet from the ream, then bounced back, thrust out again and repeated the operation. Little sheets of religious instruction fluttered down from the blades to lie alongside the programme cards.

One at a time the congregation came nervously up to the construct, making obeisance at every step. They stepped up the little slope of rubbish between the mechanical legs, reached into the crate and brought out a piece of paper and a sheaf of cards, checking the numbers to make sure they had them all. Then they backed quickly away and disappeared into the rubbish, returning to the city.

It seemed that there was no valedictory ceremony to this worship.

Within minutes, Yagharek and Isaac and Derkhan and Lemuel were the only organic lifeforms left in the hollow, apart from the ghastly half-living empty-headed man. The constructs remained all around them. They were quite still as the three humans shifted uneasily.

Isaac thought he saw a human figure standing on the tallest mound of rubbish in the dump, watching the proceedings, silhouetted profound black against New Crobuzon’s sepia-stained half-dark. He focused and there was nothing. They were completely alone.

He looked frowning at his companions, then moved forward towards the cadaverous figure with the pipe emerging from its head.

“Council,” he said. “Why did you tell us to come here? What do you want from us? You know of the slake-moths…”

“Der Grimnebulin,” the avatar interrupted. “I grow powerful, and more so daily. My computational power is unprecedented in the history of Bas-Lag, unless I have a rival in some far-off continent of which we know nothing. I am the networked total of a hundred or more calculating engines. Each feeds the others and is fed in turn. I can evaluate a problem from a thousand angles.

“Each day I read the books my congregation bring me, through my avatar’s eyes. I assimilate history and religion, thaumaturgy and science and philosophy within my data banks. Every piece of knowledge I gain enriches my calculations.

“I have spread my senses. My cables grow longer and reach further. I receive information from cameras fixed around the dump. My cables connect to them now like disembodied nerves. My congregation is dragging them slowly further out, into the city itself, to connect to its apparatuses. I have worshippers in the bowels of Parliament, who load the memories of their calculating engines onto cards and bring them to me. But this is not my city.”

Isaac’s face creased. He shook his head. “I don’t…” he began.

“Mine is an interstitial existence,” the avatar interrupted urgently. The man’s voice was dead of all inflexion. It was eerie and alienating. “I was born of an error, in a dead space where the citizens discard what they do not want. For every construct that is part of me there are thousands that are not. My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.

“If the city comes to a stop, the variables will ebb almost to nothing. The flow of information will dry. I do not wish to live in an empty city. I have fed the variables of the slake-moth problem into my analytical network. The outcome is straightforward. Unchecked, the prognosis for bloodlife in New Crobuzon is extremely bad. I will help you.”

Isaac looked to Derkhan and Lemuel, took in Yagharek’s shadow-hidden eyes. He looked back at the shivering avatar. Derkhan caught his eye. Tread carefully, she mouthed exaggeratedly at him.

“Well, we’re all…damned grateful, Council…uh…how…Can I ask what you intend to do?”

“I have calculated that you will best believe and understand if I show you,” said the man.

A pair of massive metal clamps snapped into position on Isaac’s forearms. He yelled out in surprise and fear and tried to turn. He was held by the largest of the industrial constructs, a model with hands designed to connect to scaffolding, to hold up buildings. Isaac was a strong man, but he was quite incapable of breaking free.

He cried out to his companions to help him, but another of the huge constructs stepped ponderously between him and them. For an unclear moment, Derkhan and Lemuel and Yagharek hovered confusedly. Then Lemuel broke and ran. He raced away down one of the long trenches in the rubbish, peeling away to the east, out of sight.

“Pigeon, you bastard!” screamed Isaac. As Isaac struggled, he saw with amazement that Yagharek moved before Derkhan. The crippled garuda was so quiet, so passive, such a cypher of a presence, that Isaac had discounted him. He would follow, and he might do as he was asked. That was all.

And yet here was Yagharek now leaping up in a spectacular sideways motion, sliding round the side of the guarding construct, scrambling for Isaac. Derkhan saw what he was doing and moved the other way, causing the construct to dither between them, then stride purposefully towards her.

She turned to run, but a steel-sheathed cable whipped up like a predatory snake from the trash-undergrowth and whiplashed around her ankle, pulling her to the ground. She fell hard across the shattered ground, cried out in pain.

Yagharek was scrabbling heroically with the construct’s clamps, but it was quite ineffectual. The construct simply ignored him. One of its fellows moved in behind Yagharek.

“Yag, dammit!” shouted Isaac. “Run!” But he spoke too late. The newcomer was a similarly enormous industrial construct, and the wire-mesh that looped down and ensnared Yagharek was much too hard to break.

Out of the fray, the bloody man, that flesh-extension of the Construct Council, raised his voice.

“You are not being attacked,” he said. “You will not be harmed. We start here. We lay bait. Please do not be alarmed.”

“Are you out of your godsdamned mind?” shouted Isaac. “What the fuck d’you mean?. What are you doing?”

The constructs in the heart of the rubbish-maze were moving back to the edges of the empty space, the Construct Council’s throne room. The cable that had ensnared Derkhan tugged her across the shattered ground. She fought it, shouting and gritting her teeth, but she had to rise and stumble with it to stop the laceration of her flesh. The construct holding Yagharek lifted him effortlessly and stalked away from Isaac. Yagharek thrashed violently, his hood falling from his face, his fierce avian eyes sending cold looks of utter rage in all directions. But he was powerless before that ineluctable artificial force.

Isaac’s captor pulled him into the centre of the widening space. The avatar danced around him.

“Try to relax,” he said. “This will not hurt.”

“What?” roared Isaac. From the opposite side of the little amphitheatre, a little construct made its jerky, childish way across the rubble. It carried a weird-looking piece of apparatus, a rude helmet with what looked like a funnel expanding up out of it, the whole connected to some portable engine. It leapt up to Isaac’s shoulders, gripping painfully with its toes, and shoved the helmet on his head.

Isaac struggled, and shouted, but pinioned as he was by those mighty arms he could not possibly break free. It was not long before the helmet was fastened to him tightly, yanking his hair and bruising his scalp.

“I am the machine,” said the naked dead man, dancing nimbly from rock to engine debris to broken glass. “What is discarded here is my flesh. I fix it more quickly than your body mends bruises or broken bones. Everything is left here for dead. What is not here now will be brought here soon, or my worshippers will bring for me, or I can build. The equipment on your head is a piece like those used by channellers and seers, communicators and psycho-nauts of all kinds. It is a transformer. It can channel and redirect and amplify psychic discharge. At the moment, it is set to augment and radiate.

“I have adjusted it. It is much stronger than those at use in the city.

“You remember the Weaver warned you that the slake-moth you raised is hunting you? It is a crippled one, a stunted outcast. It cannot track you without help.”

The man looked at Isaac. Derkhan was shouting something in the background, but Isaac was not listening, could not take his eyes from the looming eyes of the avatar.

“You will see what we can do,” said the man. “We are going to help it.”

Isaac did not hear his own howl of outrage and fear. A construct reached forward and turned on the engine. The helmet vibrated and hummed so hard and loud that Isaac’s ears hurt.

Waves of Isaac’s mental print went pulsing out into the city night. They passed through the malign fur of bad dreams that clogged up the city’s pores, and beamed out into the atmosphere.

Blood trickled from Isaac’s nose. His head began to ache.

A thousand feet above the city, the handlingers congregated in Ludmead. The sinistrals tentatively investigated the psychic wake of the slake-moths.

on fast attack before suspicion, urged one pugnaciously.

urge caution, intimated another, track with care and follow, find nest.

They quarrelled quickly and silently. They were motionless as they hung in the air, the quintumvirate of dextriers, each bearing a sinistral noble. The dextriers were respectfully silent as the sinistrals debated tactics.

on slow, they agreed. With the exception of the dog, each sinistral and dextrier raised its host’s arm, held its flintlock carefully at the ready. They swept slowly forward through the air, a fantastic search party, combing the rippling psychosphere for the driblets of slake-moth consciousness.

They followed the trail of spattered dream-residue in a twisting spiral over New Crobuzon, moving slowly in a curving passage towards the sky over Spit Hearth, and on to Sheck and the south of the Tar, in Riverskin.

As they curled round to the west, they sensed the wafts of psyche emanating from Griss Twist. For a moment, the handlingers were confused. They hovered and investigated the rippling sensation, but it was quickly clear that they were human radiations.

some thaumaturge, intimated one.

not our concern, its fellows agreed. The sinistrals bade their dextrier mounts continue with their airborne tracking. The little figures hovered like dust-motes above the skyrails of the militia. The sinistrals moved their heads uneasily from side to side, scanning the empty sky.

There was a sudden burgeoning swell of foreign exudations. The surface tension of the psychosphere ballooned with pressure, and that hideous sense of alien greed oozed through its pores. The psychic plane was thick with the glutinous effluvia of incomprehensible minds.

The sinistrals squirmed in a glut of fear and confusion. It was so much, so strong, so quick! They bucked on the backs of their mounts. The links they had opened with the dextriers were suddenly full of psychic backwash. Each of the dextriers felt a flood of terror as the sinistrals’ emotions overflowed.

The flight of the five pairs became erratic. They spasmed through the sky, broke formation.

thing coming, yelled one, and there was an answering welter of confused and fearful messages.

The dextriers fought to regain control of their flight.

In a simultaneous burst of wings, five dark, cryptic shapes launched themselves from some shadowed niche in the tight-packed confusion of Riverskin’s roofs. The snapping wafts of enormous wings sounded through several dimensions, up through the tepid air to where the handlinger pairs zigzagged in confusion.

The dog-sinistral caught a glimpse of great shadowy wings ploughing the air beneath it. It let out a mental keen of fright, and felt the Rescue-dextrier pitch nauseously beneath it. The sinistral fought to regain control of itself.

sinistrals together, it shouted, and then demanded of the dextrier that it go up, up.

The dextriers banked together, slid through the air to fall in beside each other. They drew strength from each other, reining in with hard discipline. Quite suddenly, they were a line like a military division, five blindfolded dextriers facing slightly down, their mouths puckered ready to spitsear. Their sinistrals scanned the skies avidly in their mirror helms. Their faces were pointing up to the stars. Their mirrors were angled down: they had a vision of the city’s dark vista, a crazily yawing aggregation of tiles and alleyways and domed glass.

They watched as the slake-moths drew closer at breathtaking speed.

how smell us? queried one sinistral nervously. They were blocking their mindpores as best they could. They were not expecting to be ambushed. How had they lost the initiative?

But as the slake-moths lurched up towards them, the sinistrals saw that they were not discovered.

The largest moth, at the front of the chaotic wedge of wings, was shrouded with a flickering encumbrance. They saw that the slake-moth’s fearful weaponry, its jagged tentacles and bone-serrated limbs, were flashing and cutting. Its massive teeth were gnashing at the air.

It seemed as if it fought a wraith. Its enemy wavered in and out of conventional space, its form as evanescent as smoke, solidifying and disappearing like a shadow. It was like some vast arachnid nightmare that pranced through close-woven realities and slashed at the slake-moth with cruel chitin lancets.

Weaver! gushed one of the sinistrals, and they bade their dextriers creep back slowly from the acrobatic melee.

The other moths spun around their sibling, trying to aid it. They took it in turns to sweep in, according to some impenetrable code. As the Weaver manifested they would attack it, cutting through its armour, releasing gouts of ichor before it was gone. Despite its wounds, the Weaver was ripping great clots of tissue and some crude tarry blood from the frantic slake-moth.

The moth and the spider attacked each other in an extraordinary blur of violent motion, each thrust and parry too fast to see.

As they rose, the moths broke the dream-cover over the city. They reached the level of the sky where those waves of mentality had confused the handlingers.

It was obvious that the moths could feel them too. Their tight-knit formation broke in momentary confusion. The smallest of the moths, with a twisted body and stunted wings, peeled away from the mass and unrolled a monstrous tongue.

The enormous tongue quivered and flickered back into the dripping maw.

With a lunatic erratic flight the smallest moth swivelled in the air, circling the savagery of the Weaver and its prey, hesitated in midair, then plummeted down and east, towards Griss Twist.

The desertion of the litter runt confused the slake-moths. They separated in the sky, twirling their heads around them, their antennae flickering wildly.

The spellbound sinistrals moved back in alarm.

now! said one. confused and busy, we attack with Weaver!

They dithered helplessly.

ready for spitsear, the dog-handlinger told Rescue-handlinger.

As the moths peeled away from each other, flying further and further around the tussling pair in the centre, they spun in the air. The sinistrals screamed at each other.

attack! screamed one, the sinistral parasitic on the thin clerk, a frenzy of fear audible in its voice, attack!

The old human woman bolted suddenly forward through the air, as the fearful sinistral goaded its dextrier on to a sudden burst of speed. Just as one of the moths turned and froze, facing the oncoming pair of handlingers and their hosts.

At that moment the other two moths swept in together, one plunging a massive bone lance into the Weaver’s distended abdomen. As the great spider reared back, the other moth lassooed its neck with a coil of segmented tentacle. The Weaver disappeared out of the night into another plane, but the tentacle snared it, dragged it half back out of a fold in space, tightened around its neck.

The Weaver jacked and fought to free itself, but the sinistrals hardly saw it. The third moth was careering towards them.

The dextriers saw nothing, but they felt the terrified psychic wailing of the sinistrals who wobbled to try to keep the approaching moth visible in their mirrors.

spitsear! commanded the clerk-handlinger to his dextrier. now!

The host body, the old woman, opened her mouth and jutted out a rolled-up tongue. She inhaled sharply and spat as hard as she could. A great gush of pyrotic gas rolled out of her tongue and combusted spectacularly across the night sky. A massive rolling cloud of flame unfurled itself at the slake-moth.

The aim was true, but the sinistral had mistimed in its fear. The dextrier spitseared too early. The fire unfolded in an oily wash, dissipating before it touched the moth’s flesh. When the burst had evaporated, the moth was gone.

In a panic, the sinistrals began to command their dextriers to swivel in the air, to find the creature, wait wait! screamed the dog-handlinger, but its warning was quite unheeded. The handlingers were bobbing in the sky as randomly as rubbish in the sea, facing all directions, gazing frantically into their mirrors.

there, screeched the young-woman sinistral, catching sight of the moth as it pitched remorselessly as an anchor towards the city. The other handlingers turned in the sky to see through their mirrors, and with a chorus of screams found themselves face to face with another moth.

It had flown over them while they sought its sibling, so that when they turned it was before their eyes, clearly visible with its wings outstretched, just beyond their mirrors.

The young man-sinistral managed to close its host’s eyes and command its dextrier to turn, spitsearing. The panicking dextrier, in the host of the young child, tried to obey, and sent flaming gobbets of gas spinning in a tight spiral, spattering the pair of handlingers beside it in the air.

The Remade-dextrier and its khepri-sinistral screamed sonically and psychically as they and their hosts ignited. They plummeted from the sky, immolating in agony, screaming until they died halfway down, their blood boiling and their bones cracking from the intense heat before they hit the waters of the Tar. They disappeared under the dirty water with a burst of steam.

The woman-sinistral was hovering in thrall, its borrowed eyes glazed by the storm of patterns on the slake-moth’s wings. The sudden hypnotized efflorescence of the sinistral’s dreams slid through the channel to its dextrier steed. The vodyanoi-handlinger winced at the bizarre cacophony of a mind unfolding. It realized what had happened. It moaned in terror with its host’s mouth, and fumbled with the straps attaching the sinistral and host to its back. The dextrier shut its vodyanoi eyes tight, even under the blindfold.

As it fumbled, it spitseared in fear, without aim or direction, emblazoning the night with igniting gas in a massive burst. The edge of the cloud almost caught the Rescue-handlinger as it fought to obey its sinistral’s panicked mental cries. It spun for yards to avoid the swelling globe of scalding air and bolted into the body of the wounded moth.

The creature quivered with pain and fear. The Weaver had been pulled from its tortured body, but it was dropping miserably towards its nest, its wounds dripping and its joints crushed and in agony. For once, it had no interest in food. It rippled in pain as the Rescue-handlinger and its dog-sinistral thumped it.

In a petulant spasm, two huge biotic jags scissored out like secateurs from the slake-moth and sliced both Montjohn Rescue’s and the dog’s heads off with one quick, grisly sound.

The heads fell away into the darkness.

The handlingers remained alive and conscious, but with the brainstems of their hosts gone they could not control their dying bodies. The human and canine carcasses jerked and danced in a posthumous fit. Blood gushed and pumped energetically over the tumbling bodies, over the frantic handlingers, which keened and clenched their fingers.

They were awake all the way down, till they landed on the punishing concrete of a backyard in Petty Coil in a bizarre splash of mangled flesh and bone fragments. They and their decapitated host-bodies were instantly shattered. Their bone was powdered, their flesh tenderized beyond repair.

The blindfolded vodyanoi had almost undone the leather connections that locked him to the woman-handlinger, whose mind the slake-moth held. But as the vodyanoi-dextrier was about to undo the last fastening and peel away into the sky, the slake-moth moved in to feed.

It wrapped its insectile arms around its prey, clasping it tight. It pulled the woman to it, as it pushed its questing tongue into her mouth and began to drink the handlinger’s dreams. The slake-moth sucked eagerly.

It was a rich brew. The residue of the human host’s thoughts eddied like silt or coffee grounds through the handlinger’s mind. The slake-moth reached around the woman’s body and hugged her to it, puncturing the flabby vodyanoi flesh attached to her back with its bone-hard limbs. The dextrier screamed in fear and sudden pain, and the moth could taste the terror in the air. It was confused for a moment, unsure of this other mind that sprouted so close to its meal. But it recovered, gripped tighter, determined to sup again when it had licked this first treat dry.

The vodyanoi-body was trapped as its sinistral passenger was drained. It struggled and cried out, but it could not escape.

A little way away in the air, behind its feeding sibling, the slake-moth which had snared the Weaver whipped its stinging tentacular tail through various dimensions. The vast spider flickered in and out of the sky with a frantic speed. Whenever it appeared the Weaver began to fall: gravity entangled it remorselessly. It would blink out to some other aspect, dragging the jagged harpoon-tip of the tentacle with it, embedded in its flesh. In that other aspect it would scamper and shake to throw off its attacker, before reappearing in the mundane plane, using its weight and leverage, then disappearing again.

The slake-moth was tenacious, somersaulting around its prey, refusing to let it escape.

The handlinger clerk kept up a frenzied, fearful monologue. It sought its fellow sinistral, in the body of the younger, muscled man.

dead all dead our fellows, it screamed. Some of what it had seen, some of its emotion, flowed back down the channel into the head of its dextrier. The old woman’s body yawed uneasily.

The other sinistral tried to remain calm. It moved its head from side to side, trying to exude authority, stop, it commanded peremptorily. It gazed through its mirrors at the three moths behind it: the wounded, limping through the air, down towards its hidden nest; the hungry, lunching from the minds of the trapped handlingers; and the fighting, still thrashing like a shark, trying to tear the head from the Weaver.

The sinistral pushed its dextrier a little closer, take them now, it thought, and sent to its fellow, spitsear hard, take two. chase the wounded. Then it flicked its head from side to side suddenly, and an anguished thought escaped it. where’s the other? it cried.

The other, the last slake-moth that had escaped the sheets of fire from the old woman’s tongue and dropped out of sight in an elegant dive, had described a long, curling loop over the rooftops. It had swept out and up and back, flying slowly and quietly, turning its wings a drab camouflaged dun, hiding out against the clouds, to pounce now, appearing in a sudden burst of dark colours, a shimmering slick of hypnagogic patterns.

It appeared on the other side of the handlingers, before the sinistrals’ eyes. The sinistral in the young human male snapped to with a paroxysm of shock, seeing the predatory beast bask, its wings held tight. The sinistral felt its mind begin to go slack before the midnight shades sinuously mutating on the slake-moth’s wings.

It felt a moment of terror, then nothing but a violent and incomprehensible wash of dreams…

…then terror again, and it shuddered, the fear mixing with desperate joy as it realized it was thinking once more.

Faced with two sets of enemies, the slake-moth had hesitated a moment, then twisted slightly in the air. It had altered the angle of its hovering, so that the ensnaring face of its wings was turned full on to the clerk and the old woman who bore him. They, after all, were the handlingers that had tried to burn it.

The freed sinistral saw the massive body of the slake-moth before it, angled away, its wings hidden. To its left it saw the old woman turn her head nervously, unsure of what was happening, saw the clerk’s eyes unfocus.

now burn it now now! the sinistral tried to shriek to the old woman, across the gulf of air. Her dextrier puckered up her mouth to spitsear when the enormous moth crossed the air between them too fast even to see and clasped the handlingers to it, slobbering like a famished man.

There was a burst of mental screaming. The old woman began to spit her fire, which bolted out harmlessly away from the slake-moth which gripped her, evaporating in the curdling air.

Even as the wave of horror gusted through it, the last sinistral, in the body of the man astride the homeless child, saw a terrifying thing in its mirror helm. The Weaver’s claws flashed visible for a moment, and the tail-harpoon of the slake-moth attacking it snapped away, its jag severed, its torn tail spewing blood. The moth screamed silently and, free of the Weaver, which did not reappear, hurtled through the warm night air towards the handlinger pair.

And before its eyes, the sinistral saw the moth in front of it look up from its repast, twist its head over its shoulder and wave its antennae towards him, in a slow, ominous motion.

There were moths before it and behind it. The dextrier in the tough little street kid’s body shivered and waited for directions.

dive! screamed the sinistral in sudden, mad fear, dive and away! mission abort! alone and doomed, escape, spitsear and fly!

A great wash of panic gushed into the dextrier’s mind. The child’s face twisted in terror and it began to spew fire. It plunged towards New Crobuzon’s sweating stones, its dank and rotting wood, like a soul towards Hell.

dive dive dive! screamed the sinistral, as the moths licked its terror trail with their vile tongues.

The night shadows of the city reached up like fingers and drew the handlingers in, back to the sunless city of mundane betrayal and danger, away from the mad, impenetrable, unspeakable menace in the clouds.

Chapter Forty

Isaac damned the Construct Council to Hell, demanded to be released. Blood streamed from his nose and clotted in his beard. Some way from him, Yagharek and Derkhan struggled in the arms of their construct captors. They battled with a miserable lassitude. They knew they were trapped.

Through the migraine haze, Isaac saw the great Construct Council raise its bony metal arm to the skies. At the same moment, the gaunt and bloody human avatar pointed up with the same arm, in an unsettling visual echo.

“It is coming,” the Council said in the man’s dead voice.

Isaac howled in rage and twisted his head skyward, bucking and whipping from side to side in a fruitless effort to dislodge the helmet.

Below the skittering clouds he saw a huge spreadeagled shape approaching haphazardly through the sky. It lurched in an eager, chaotic movement. Derkhan and Yagharek saw it, and faltered into immobility.

The perplexing organic shape moved closer with a terrifying speed. Isaac closed his eyes, then opened them again. He had to see the thing.

It drew closer, dropping suddenly, cruising low and slow over the river. Its manifold limbs opened and shut. Its body juddered in complex unity.

Even from that distance and even through his fear, Isaac could see that the slake-moth that approached him was a sorry specimen, compared to the terrible predatory perfection of the one that had taken Barbile. The twists and convolutions, the half-random whorls and skeins of intricate flesh that had made up that rapacious totality had been functions of some unthinkable, inhuman symmetry, cells multiplying like obscure and imaginary numbers. This, though, this eager flapping shape with gnarled extremities, body segments misshapen and incomplete, its weaponry stubby and mangled in the cocoon…this was a freak, malformed.

This was the slake-moth that Isaac had fed on bastardized food. The moth that had tasted the dripping juices from Isaac’s own head, as he lay trembling in a dreamshit fix. It was still hunting that taste, it seemed, that first delicious intimation of a purer sustenance.

This unnatural birth was the start, Isaac realized, of all the troubles.

“Oh sweet Jabber,” whispered Isaac in a trembling voice, “Devil’s Tail…Gods help me…”

In a curling upsurge of industrial dust, the slake-moth landed. It folded its wings.

It crouched, its back curved and tight, a pose of simian pugnacity. It held its cruel arms-flawed, but still vicious and powerful-with the killing poise of a hunter. It swept its long, thin head slowly from side to side, its eyesocket antennae fumbling in the air.

All around it, constructs shifted minutely. The slake-moth ignored them all. Its brutal, coarse mouth opened and emitted that salacious tongue, flickered it like a huge ribbon across the gathering.

Derkhan moaned and the moth shuddered.

Isaac tried to yell to her to be quiet, not to let it feel her, but he could not speak.

The waves of Isaac’s mind oscillated like a heartbeat, rocking the psychosphere of the dump. The moth could taste it, knew it for the same mind-liquor it had sought before. The other little titbits it could sense were nothing beside it, little morsels by a feast.

The slake-moth quivered with anticipation, and turned its back on Yagharek and Derkhan. It faced Isaac. It stood slowly on four of its limbs, opened its mouth with a tiny, childish hiss, and spread its mesmeric wings.

For a moment, Isaac tried to close his eyes. A little adrenalized part of his brain threw up strategies for escape.

But he was so tired, so befuddled, so miserable and in so much pain, he left it too late. Blearily, unclearly at first, he saw the slake-moth’s wings.

The rippling tide of colours unfolded like anemones, a gentle, uncanny unfurling of enthralling shades. On both sides of the moth’s body, the perfectly mirrored midnight tinctures slipped like thieves down Isaac’s optic nerve and smeared themselves across his mind.

Isaac saw the slake-moth stalk slowly towards him across the wasteground, saw the perfectly symmetrical, curling wings flutter gently and bathe him in their narcotic display.

And then his mind slipped like a faltering flywheel, and he knew nothing except a slew of dreams. A froth of memories and impressions and regrets effervesced up from within him.

This was not like the dreamshit. There was no core of him to watch and cling to sentience. These were not invading dreams. They were his own and there was no he to watch them boil, he was the wash of images itself, he was the recall and the symbol. Isaac was the memory of parent-love, the deep sex fantasies and memories, the bizarre neurotic inventions, the monsters, the adventures, the slips in logic the aggrandizing self-memory the mutating mass of the undermind triumphant over ratiocination and cognition and the reflection that spawned it the terrible and awesome interlocking charges of subconsciousness the dreaming

the dreaming

it

it stopped

stopped suddenly and Isaac bellowed at the sudden breathtaking tug of reality.

He blinked fervently as his mind slatted suddenly down into layers, the subconscious falling back to where it belonged. He swallowed hard. His head felt as if it was imploding, reorganizing itself out of a chaos of unpicked shreds.

He heard Derkhan’s voice coming to the end of some announcement.

“…incredible!” she shouted. “Isaac? Isaac, can you hear me? Are you all right?”

Isaac closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them slowly. The night swam back into focus.

He stumbled forward onto his hands and knees, and realized that he was no longer held by the construct, that it had only been the slake-moth’s oneiric hold on him that had kept him standing. He looked up, wiping blood from his face.

It took a moment for him to make sense of the scene before him.

Derkhan and Yagharek were standing, unheld, at the edges of the wasteland. Yagharek had thrown back his hood to unveil his great bird-head. Both held themselves in poses of frozen action, ready to run or leap in any direction. Both stared into the centre of the rubbish arena.

In front of Isaac were several of the larger constructs that had been standing behind him when the moth had landed. They milled vaguely around an enormous shattered thing.

Towering over the Construct Council’s space in the dump was the enormous chain-dripping arm of a crane. It had swivelled away from the river, over the little defensive wall of waste, coming to a rest over the centre of the space.

Directly below it, burst open into a million dangerous fragments, were the remains of an enormous wooden crate, a cube taller than a man. Spilling from the smashed residue of its wooden walls was its cargo, a skittering mountain of iron and coal and stone, a chaotic aggregate of the heaviest detritus in the Griss Twist dump.

The mound of dense rubbish spilt slowly into an inverted cone, slipping past the shattered slats of the crate.

Below it, twisting and scrabbling weakly and emitting pathetic sounds, a mass of splintered exoskeleton and seeping tissue, its wings broken and buried beneath the crush of refuse, was the slake-moth.

“Isaac, did you see it?” hissed Derkhan.

He shook his head, his eyes wide in astonishment. Slowly, he pulled himself to his feet.

“What happened?” he managed to spit. His voice sounded shockingly alien to him.

“You were under nearly a minute,” Derkhan said urgently. “It got you…I was screaming at you, but you were gone…and then…and then the constructs stepped forward.” She looked, wondering. “They were walking towards it, and it could sense them…and it seemed confused and…and flustered. It moved back a little and stretched its wings back further, so that it was beaming colours at the constructs as well as you, but they kept coming.”

Derkhan stumbled forward towards him. Blood was dripping viscously down the side of her face, from where her wound had reopened. She described a wide circle around the half-crushed slake-moth, which bleated as faintly and beseechingly as a lamb when she passed it. She watched it fearfully, but it was powerless against her, pinioned and ruined. Its wings were hidden, broken by the crush of debris.

Derkhan sank to the floor by Isaac, reached out and grabbed his shoulders with violently shaking hands. She cast her eyes nervously back to the trapped slake-moth, then held Isaac’s gaze.

“It couldn’t get them! They kept coming and it was…it was backing away…It kept its wings spread so that you couldn’t get away, but it was fearful…confused. And while it was moving back, the crane was moving. It couldn’t sense it, even though the ground was rumbling. And then, the constructs stopped still, and the moth was waiting…and the crate came down on it.”

She turned and looked at the mess of organic slime and spilt rubbish fouling the ground. The slake-moth keened piteously.

Behind her, the Construct Council’s avatar stalked across the jagged rubbish floor. He stamped within three feet of the slake-moth, which flicked out its tongue and tried to wrap it around his ankle. But it was too weak and slow, and he did not even have to break his stride to avoid it.

“It cannot sense my mind. I am invisible to it,” the man said. “And when it hears me, notices my gross physicality approaching it, my psyche remain opaque. And immune to its seduction. Its wings are patterned with complex shapes, making themselves more complex in a quick and relentless slide…and that is all.

“I do not dream, der Grimnebulin. I am a calculating machine that has calculated how to think. I do not dream. I have no neuroses, no hidden depths. My consciousness is a growing function of my processing power, not the baroque thing that sprouts from your mind, with its hidden rooms in attics and cellars.

“There is nothing in me on which the moth can feed. It goes hungry. I can surprise it.” The man turned to look at the moaning ruins of the moth. “I can kill it.”

Derkhan stared at Isaac.

“A thinking machine…” she breathed. Isaac nodded slowly.

“Why did you subject me to that?” he said shakily, seeing the blood which still seeped from his nose spatter across the dry ground.

“It was my calculation,” he said simply. “I computed it as most likely to convince you of my worth, and having the advantage of destroying one of the moths at the same time. Albeit the least threatening.”

Isaac shook his head in exhausted disgust.

“See…” he spat. “That’s the damn trouble with excessive logic…No allowances for variables like headaches…”

“Isaac,” said Derkhan fervently. “We’ve got them! We can use the Council as…as troops. We can take the moths out!”

Yagharek had come to stand a little way behind them, and he squatted down, on the peripheries of the conversation. Isaac glanced up at him, thinking hard.

“Damn,” he said very slowly. “Minds without dreams.”

“The others will not be so easy,” said the avatar. He was looking up, as was the Construct Council’s main body. For a tiny moment, those enormous searchlight eyes flicked on and sent powerful streams of light into the sky, contracting and searching. Dark shadows darted through the twisting torch-snares, half glimpsed and vague.

“There are two,” said the avatar. “They have been brought here by the dying call of this their sibling.”

“Fuck it!” shouted Isaac in alarm. “What shall we do?”

“They will not come,” replied the man. “They are quicker and stronger, less credulous than their backward brother. They can tell that all is not right. They can taste only you three, but they can sense the physical vibrations of all my bodies. The disparity unnerves them. They will not come.”

Slowly, Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek relaxed.

They looked at each other, at the bone-thin avatar. Behind them, the slake-moth wailed in its death-agony. It was ignored.

“What,” said Derkhan, “are we going to do?”

After some minutes, the flickering, baleful shadows overhead disappeared. In the tiny desolate patch of the city, surrounded by the ghosts of industry, the pall of nightmare energy seemed to lift for a few hours.

Even exhausted and bereaved as they were, Isaac and Derkhan, even Yagharek, were buoyed by the Council’s triumph. Isaac stalked closer to the dying moth, investigated its tortured head, its indistinct, illogical features. Derkhan wanted to torch it, destroy it completely, but the avatar would not allow it. It wanted to keep the creature’s head, investigate it in the quiet minutes of its day, learn about the inside of the slake-moth mind.

The thing kept a tenacious claw-hold on life until past two in the morning, when it expired with a long moan and a trickle of foul citric saliva. There was a quivering release of pent-up alien misery, a ripple that dispersed quickly across the dump as the slake-moth’s empathic ganglions flexed in death.

There was a sublime stillness in the dump.

With a companionable motion, the avatar sat beside the two humans and the garuda. They began to talk. They tried to formulate plans. Even Yagharek spoke, with a quiet excitement. He was a hunter. He knew how to set traps.

“We can’t do anything until we know where the damn things are,” said Isaac. “Either we hunt them or we just have to sit and act as bait, hoping the bastard creatures come for us out of the millions of souls in the city.”

Derkhan and Yagharek nodded in agreement.

“I know where they are,” said the avatar.

The others stared at him in astonishment.

“I know where they hide,” he said. “I know where they nest.”

“How?” hissed Isaac. “Where?” He grasped the avatar’s arm in his excitement, then shocked, withdrew his grasp. He was leaning in close to the avatar’s face, and something of the horror of that visage struck him. He could see the rim of shorn skull just inside the man’s curling skin, drab white, streaked with bloody residue. He could see the gory cable plunge into the intricate fold at the bottom of the hollow in the man’s head, from where his brain had been torn.

The avatar’s skin was dry and stiff and cold, like hanging meat.

Those eyes, with their unchanging expression of concentration and thinly hidden anguish, regarded him.

“All of me have tracked the attacks. I have cross-referenced dates and places. I have found correlations, systematized them. I have factored in the evidence of the cameras and the computing engines whose information I steal, the unexplainable shapes in the night sky, the shadows that do not correspond to any city-race.

“There are complex patterns. I have formalized them. I have discarded possibilities and applied high-level mathematical programmes to the remaining potentialities. With unknown variables, absolute certainty is impossible. But according to the data available, the chance is seventy-eight per cent that the nest is where I say.

“The moths are living in the Glasshouse, above the cactus people, in Riverskin.”

“Damn,” hissed Isaac, after a silence. “Are they animals? Or are they cunning? It’s inspired, whichever. Best damn place I can think of.”

“Why?” said Yagharek unexpectedly.

Isaac and Derkhan looked at him.

“New Crobuzon cactacae ain’t like the Cymek variety, Yag,” said Isaac. “Or rather, they are, and maybe that’s the problem. You’ve dealt with ‘em in Shankell, doubtless. You know what they’re like. Our cactus people here are a branch of those same desert cactacae who came north. I don’t know anything about the others, the mountain cactus, up in the steppes, east. But I do know the southern style, and their lifestyle never translated so well up here.” He paused and sighed and rubbed his head. He was exhausted and his head still ached. He had to concentrate, to think through the simmering memories of Lin just behind his eyes. He swallowed hard and continued.

“All that puffed-up hard-man stuff that rules the roost in Shankell starts looking a bit dubious up here. That’s why they built the Glasshouse, you ask my opinion. Have a nasty little bit of the Cymek in New Crobuzon. They got special dispensation in law when the Glasshouse was put up-gods only know what deals they had to cut to get that. Technically it’s an independent country. No entry for anyone without permission, including the militia. They’ve got their own laws in there, their own everything.

“Now, obviously, that’s a joke. You can bet your arse the Glasshouse wouldn’t mean shit without New Crobuzon. Masses of the cactacae troop out every day, go to work, surly buggers that they are, then take the shekels back to Riverskin. New Crobuzon owns the Glasshouse. And I don’t think for one minute the militia can’t go in any godsdamn time they choose. But Parliament and the city governors go through with this charade. You don’t just walk into the Glasshouse, Yag, and if you do get in…damned if I’d know what to expect in there.

“I mean, you do hear rumours. Some people have been inside, of course. And there are stories of what the militia have seen through the dome from above in their airships. But most of us-me included-have no real idea what goes on in there, or how to get in.”

“But we could get in,” said Derkhan. “Maybe Pigeon’ll crawl back, sniffing for your gold. Eh? And if he does, I bet he could get us in. You can’t tell me there’s no crime in the Glasshouse. I just don’t believe it.” She looked fierce. Her eyes were glinting with purpose. “Council,” she said, and turned towards the naked man. “Do you have any…of you…in the Glasshouse?”

The avatar shook his head.

“The cactus people do not use many constructs. None of me have been inside. That is why I cannot be exact about where the slake-moths are. Except that they sleep within that dome.”

As the avatar spoke, Isaac was hit by a sudden revelation.

He was mulling over the problem, thinking for ways into the Glasshouse, when he realized with astonishment that he could simply walk away from this. Lemuel’s exasperated advice came back to him: leave it to the professionals.

He had waved the suggestion off in irritation, but now he realized that he could choose to do exactly that. There were a thousand ways to tip off the militia without delivering himself to them: the state made informing easy. He knew now where the slake-moths were: he could tell the government, with all its might, its hunters and scientists, its massive resources. He could let them know where the slake-moths nested, and he could run. And the militia could hunt them for him, and they could recapture the monstrous things. The moth which had hunted him was gone: he had no special reason to be afraid.

The possibility struck him hard.

But it was never, even for a fraction of a second, a temptation.

Isaac remembered Vermishank’s interrogation. The man had tried not to show his fear, but it had been obvious he had no faith at all in the militia’s ability to catch the slake-moths. And now, in the Construct Council, for the first time Isaac was faced with a power that had shown it could kill these unthinkable predators. A power that was not working with the state, but rather that offered its services to him and his companions-or that commandeered their services for itself.

He was unsure of the Council’s motivations, its reasons for remaining hidden. But it was enough to know that this weapon could not be wielded by the militia. And it was the best chance the city had. He could not deny it that.

That was one thing.

But more powerful by far, deep-ingrained in his gut, was something more base. A hatred. He looked up at Derkhan and remembered why he was her friend. His mouth twisted.

I would not trust Rudgutter, he thought coldly, if the murdering bastard swore by his children’s souls.

If the state found the moths, Isaac realized, it would do everything in its power to recapture them. Because they were so damned valuable. They might be dragged out of the night skies, the danger might be contained again, but they would be locked up once more in some laboratory, hawked in another foul auction, returned to their commercial purpose.

Once again, they would be milked. And fed.

No matter how ill-suited he was to tracking the slake-moths down and destroying them, Isaac knew he would try. He would not be party to the alternatives.

They talked on, until the darkness began to leech from the eastern fringe of the sky. Tentative suggestions began to coalesce. They were all conditionals. But even hedged around with a hundred qualifications, the half-schemes grew and took shape. Slowly, a sequence of actions suggested itself. With a growing astonishment, Isaac and Derkhan realized that they had a kind of plan.

As they talked, the Council sent its mobile selves into the depths of the dump. They rummaged unseen among the mounds of trash, to re-emerge carrying bent wire, battered saucepans and colanders, even one or two broken helmets, and great glinting piles of mirror, savage random jags.

“Can you find a welder, or a metallo-thaumaturge?” asked the avatar. “You must make defensive helmets.” He described the mirrors that must be mounted before the lines of sight.

“Yeah,” said Isaac. “We’ll return tomorrow night to make the helmets. And then…then we have a day to…to ready ourselves. Before we go in.”

While the night was still fully ascendant, the various constructs began to creep away. They returned to their masters’ homes, early enough that their night’s journeys were unnoticed.

The daylight had spread and the occasional guttural sound of the trains increased. The raucous and filthy early morning dialogue of the barge-families began, shouted across the water on the other side of the rubbish. The early shifts of workers began to trudge into the factories and abase themselves before the vast chains, the steam engines and juddering hammers of those profane cathedrals.

There were only the five figures left in the clearing: Isaac and his companions; the ghastly lich that spoke for the Construct Council; and the looming Council itself, moving its segmented limbs sedately.

Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek rose to go. They were exhausted and in varying degrees of pain, from knees and hands flayed by the barbed ground to Isaac’s still-shuddering head. They were smeared with muck and grime. They shed dust as thick as smoke. It was as if they burned.

They stashed the mirrors and the material to make helmets in a place they would remember in the dump. Isaac and Derkhan looked around in confusion at the landscape so utterly changed by daylight, its threatening demeanour become pathetic, the half-glimpsed looming forms revealed as broken prams and torn mattresses. Yagharek picked his bound feet up high, stumbling a little, and walked unerringly towards the pathway from where they had come.

Isaac and Derkhan joined him. They were utterly drained. Derkhan’s face was white, and she dabbed in miserable pain at her missing ear. As they were about to disappear behind the shifting walls of crushed rubbish, the avatar called out.

When Isaac heard what the avatar said, he began to frown, and did not stop while he turned away and walked out of the Council’s presence with his companions, nor did he stop all the while he wound his way through the channels in the industrial midden and out into the slowly illuminated estates of Griss Twist. The Construct Council’s words stayed with him, and he thought them over, carefully.

“You cannot hold on safely to everything you carry, der Grimnebulin,” the avatar had said. “In future, do not leave your precious things beside the railway.

“Bring your crisis engine to me,” it had said, “for safekeeping.”

Chapter Forty-One

“There is a gentleman and a…a young boy to see you, Mr. Mayor,” said Davinia, through the speaking tube. “The gentleman told me to tell you that Mr. Rescue sent him regarding the…plumbing in R amp;D.” Her voice faltered nervously over the obvious code.

“Let them in,” said Rudgutter instantly, recognizing the handlinger passwords.

He was fidgeting in his seat, moving from side to side in agitation. The heavy doors to the Lemquist Room swung ponderously open, and a well-built, harrowed young man stumbled in, leading a terrified-looking child by the hand. The child was dressed in a collection of rags, as if he had just stepped off the street. One of his arms was covered with a large swelling, coated in filthy bandages. The man’s clothes were of decent quality, but a bizarre fashion. He sported a pair of voluminous trousers, almost like those worn by khepri. It made him look peculiarly feminine, despite his build.

Rudgutter looked at him with an exhausted, angry glance.

“Sit,” he said. He waved a sheaf of papers at the odd pair. He spoke rapidly. “One unidentified headless corpse, strapped to a headless dog, both complete with dead handlingers. One pair of handlinger hosts, strapped back to back, both drained of intellect. A-” he glanced down at the militia report “-a vodyanoi, covered in deep wounds, and a young human woman. We managed to extract the handlingers-killing the hosts, actual biological death, not this ridiculous half-thing-and we offered them some new hosts, put them in a cage with a pair of dogs, but they didn’t move. It’s as we suspected. Drain the host, you drain the handlinger with it.”

He sat back and watched the two traumatized-looking figures before him.

“So…” he said slowly, after a little silence. “I am Bentham Rudgutter. Suppose you tell me who you are, and where is Mont-John Rescue, and what happened.”

In a meeting room near the top of the Spike, Eliza Stem-Fulcher looked across the table at the cactacae opposite her. His head towered over hers, rising neckless from his shoulders. His arms lay motionless across the table, enormous weighty slabs like the boughs of a tree. His skin was pocked and marked with a hundred thousand scratches and tears that had scarred, in the cactacae fashion, into thick knots of vegetable matter.

The cactus pruned his thorns strategically. The insides of his arms and legs, his palms, wherever flesh might rub or press against flesh, he had plucked the little spines. A tenacious red flower remained on the side of his neck from the spring. Nodules of growth burst from his shoulders and his chest.

He waited silently for Stem-Fulcher to speak.

“It is our understanding,” she said carefully, “that your ground-based patrols were ineffectual last night. As were ours, I might add. We have yet to verify this, but it appears that there may have been some contact between the slake-moths and a small…aerial unit of ours.” She flicked through her papers briefly. “It seems increasingly clear,” she ventured, “that simply scouring the city will not yield results.

“Now, for many reasons that we have discussed, not least our somewhat different working methods, we don’t believe it would be particularly fruitful to combine our patrols. However, it most certainly does make sense to co-ordinate our efforts. That is why we have extended a legal amnesty for your organization during this collaborative mission. In similar vein, we are prepared to offer a temporary waver of the strict rule against non-governmental aerostats.”

She cleared her throat. We’re getting desperate, she thought. But then, so, I wager, are you.

“We are prepared to loan two airships, to be used after discussion with us on suitable routes and times. This is in an effort to divide up our efforts to hunt, as it were, in the skies. Our conditions remain as previously stated: all plans to be discussed and agreed in advance. In addition, all research into hunting methodology to be pooled.

“So…” she sat back and dropped a contract across the desk. “Do you have authority with Motley to take this kind of decision? And if so…what do you say?”

When Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek pushed open the door of the little shack by the railway and fell into its warm shadows, exhausted, they were only a little surprised to see Lemuel Pigeon waiting for them.

Isaac was surly and foul. Pigeon was unapologetic.

“I told you, Isaac,” he said. “Don’t get confused. Going gets hot, I’m gone. But here you are and I’m glad to see it, and our deal still stands. Assuming you still insist on hunting those fuckers, I’m going to own you, and until then you get my help.”

Derkhan glowered, but she did not indulge anger. She was tense with excitement. She glanced at Isaac quickly and frowned.

“Can you get us into the Glasshouse?” she said.

She told him, briefly, about the immunity of the Construct Council from slake-moth attack. He listened in fascination as she described how the Council had swivelled the crane behind the moth’s back, released it and pinioned the thing mercilessly under tons of rubbish. She told him how the Construct Council was sure the moths were in Riverskin, hiding in the Glasshouse.

Derkhan told him the tentative plans.

“Today we have to find some way to make the helmets,” she said. “Then tomorrow…we go in.”

Pigeon’s eyes narrowed. He began to scribble designs in the dust.

“This is the Glasshouse,” he said. “There are five basic routes in. One involves bribery, and two almost certainly involve killing. Killing cactacae’s never a good idea, and bribery’s risky. They talk and talk about how they’re independent, but the Glasshouse survives on Rudgutter’s sufferance.” Isaac nodded and glanced at Yagharek. “That means there’s loads of informers. Secrecy’s safer.”

Derkhan and Isaac leaned over him, watched his hieroglyphs take shape. “So let’s concentrate on the other two, see how they pan out.”

After an hour of talk Isaac could not stay awake any longer. His head slumped as he listened. He began to drool on his collar. His tiredness spread out and infected Derkhan and Lemuel. They slept, briefly.

Like Isaac, they rolled unhappily in the muggy air, sweating in the close air of the shack. Isaac’s sleep was more disturbed than theirs, and he whimpered several times in the heat. A little before noon, Lemuel pulled himself up and roused the others. Isaac awoke moaning Lin’s name. He was fuddled with exhaustion and bad sleep and misery, and he forgot to be angry with Lemuel. He hardly recognized that Lemuel was there.

“I’m going to get some company,” said Lemuel. “Isaac, you better get ready to prepare those helmets that Dee tells me about. We’re going to need at least seven, I reckon.”

“Seven?” mumbled Isaac. “Who’re you getting? Where you off to?”

“As I’ve told you, I feel safer with a little protection,” said Lemuel, and smiled coldly. “I put the word out that there was a little protection work going, and I gather there’ve been a few responses. I’m off to assess ‘em. And I will guarantee to bring a metalhexer for you before the evening sets in. One of the applicants, or failing that there’s a guy who owes me a favour in Abrogate Green. I’ll see you both at…um…seven o’clock, outside the dump.”

He left. Derkhan moved closer to Isaac in his exhausted misery and put her arm around him. He sniffled like a child in her arms, the dream of Lin still clinging to him.

A homegrown nightmare. A genuine misery from deep in his mind.

The militia crews were busy fitting enormous mirrors of polished metal to the backs of the airship harnesses.

It was impossible to refit the engine rooms or change the layout of the cabs, but they covered the front windows with thick black curtains. The pilot would spin the wheel blind, instructed by the yells from the officers halfway along the gantry, staring out of the rear windows above the enormous propellers, into the angled mirrors that offered a confusing but complete view of the sky before the dirigible.

Motley’s hand-picked crew were escorted to the top of the Spike by Eliza Stem-Fulcher herself.

“I gather,” she said to one of Motley’s captains, a taciturn Remade human whose left arm had been replaced with an unruly python that he fought to quieten, “that you know how to pilot an aerostat.” He nodded. She did not remark on the obvious illegality of that skill. “You’ll be piloting the Beyn’s Honour, your colleagues the Avanc. The militia have been warned. Keep an eye out for other air traffic. We thought you might want to get started this afternoon. The quarries tend to be inactive before the night, but we thought it might be an idea for you to get used to the controls.”

The captain did not respond. All around him, his crew were checking their equipment, checking the angles of their helmets’ mirrors. They were stern and cold. They seemed less fearful than the militia officers Stem-Fulcher had left in the training room below, practising aiming through mirrors, firing behind their own backs. Motley’s men, after all, had dealt with the slake-moths more recently.

Like one of her own officers, she saw that a couple of the gangsters wore flamethrowers; hard backpacks of pressurized oil that burst through a flaming nozzle to ignite. They had been modified, as had her own man’s, to spray the burning oil directly backwards out of the pack.

Stem-Fulcher stole another glance at several of Motley’s extraordinary Remade troops. It was impossible to tell how much original organic material was retained under the Remades’ metal layers. Certainly the impression was one of almost total replacement, with bodies sculpted with exquisite and unusual care to mimic human musculature.

At first sight, nothing of the human was visible. The Remade had heads of moulded steel. They even sported implacable faces of folded metal. Heavy industrial brows and inset eyes of stone or opaque glass, thin noses and pursed lips and cheekbones glinting darkly like polished pewter. The faces had been designed for aesthetic effect.

Stem-Fulcher had only realized that they were Remade, rather than fabulous constructs, when she had glimpsed the back of one’s head. Embedded behind the splendid metal face was a much less perfect human one.

This was the only organic feature retained. Jutting out from the back end of those immobile metal features were mirrors, like a sweep of hair. They were held in front of the Remades’ real, human eyes.

The body was at one hundred and eighty degrees to the human face, pistol-arms and legs and chest all facing the other way, with the metal head completing the illusion from the front. The Remade kept their bodies facing the same way as their unreversed companions at all times. They walked along corridors and into lifts with their arms and legs moving in a convincing automated analogue to a human stride. Stem-Fulcher had fallen deliberately behind them for a few steps, and watched their human eyes darting back and forth, their mouths twisted in concentration as they scanned what was ahead of them through their mirrors.

There were others, she saw, Remade more simply, with greater economy, to the same purpose. Their heads had been twisted around in a half-circle, until they gazed out from their own backs over a twisted, painful-looking neck. They stared into their mirrored helmets. Their bodies moved perfectly, without fumbling, walking and manipulating weapons and armour with hardly stilted motion. There was something almost more offputting about their relaxed, organic motions below reversed heads than the solid artificial motion of their more thoroughly Remade comrades.

Stem-Fulcher realized she was looking at the result of months or more of continual training, constantly living through mirrors. With bodies reversed as theirs were, it would have been a vital strategy. These troops, she pondered, must have been specifically designed and built with slake-moth husbandry in mind. Stem-Fulcher could hardly believe the scale of Motley’s operation. It would be no wonder, she thought ruefully, if, in dealing with the slake-moths, the militia seemed a little amateurish by comparison.

I think we were quite right to bring them on board, she reflected.

With the passage of the sun, the air over New Crobuzon slowly thickened. The light was thick and yellow as corn-oil.

Aerostats swam through that solar grease, eddying back and forth across the urban geography in a weird half-random motion.

Isaac and Derkhan stood in the street beyond the dump’s wire. Derkhan carried a bag, Isaac carried two. In the light, they felt vulnerable. They were unused to the city day. They had forgotten how to live in it.

They skulked as insignificantly as they could, and ignored the few passers-by.

“Why the godsdamn did Yag have to piss off like that?” hissed Isaac. Derkhan shrugged.

“He seems restless, all of a sudden,” she said. She thought, then continued slowly. “I know it’s bad timing,” she said, “but I find it…quite moving. He’s such a…an empty presence most of the time, you know? I mean, I know you get to talk to him in private, you know the…the real Yagharek…But most of the time he’s a garuda-shaped absence.” She corrected herself harshly. “No. He’s not garuda-shaped, is he? That’s the problem. He’s more of a man-shaped absence. But now…well, he seems to be filling up. I’m beginning to sense that he wants to do something or other, and doesn’t want to do something else.”

Isaac nodded slowly.

“I know what you mean,” he said. “There’s definitely something changing in him. I told him not to leave and he just ignored me. He’s definitely becoming more…wilful…if that’s a good thing.”

Derkhan was staring at him curiously.

She spoke slowly.

“You must be thinking of Lin all the time,” she said.

Isaac looked away. He said nothing for a moment. Then he gave a quick nod.

“Always,” he said abruptly, his face collapsing into the most shocking sadness. “Always. I can’t…I haven’t time to mourn. Yet.”

A little way away, the road curved and separated into a small clutch of alleys. From one of these hidden culs-de-sac came a sudden metallic bang. Isaac and Derkhan tensed and flinched backwards against the chainlink fence.

There was a whispering, and Lemuel peered around the corner of the alley.

He caught sight of Isaac and Derkhan, grinned triumphantly. He pushed his hands in a shoving motion, indicating that they should get into the dump. They turned and found their way to the tear in the wire mesh, checked that they were not watched and wriggled through into the wasteground.

They moved quickly away from the street and turned corners in the muck, until they crouched in a space that was hidden from the city. Within two minutes, Lemuel came loping after them.

“Afternoon, all,” he grinned, triumphantly.

“How did you get here?” said Isaac.

Lemuel sniggered. “Sewers. Got to keep out of sight. Not so dangerous with the lot I’m with.” His smile faltered as he took them in. “Where’s Yagharek?” he said.

“He insisted that he had to go somewhere. We told him to stay, but he wasn’t having any of it. He says he’ll find us here tomorrow at six.”

Lemuel swore.

“Why did you let him go? What if they pick him up?”

“Damn, Lem, what in Jabber’s name was I supposed to do?” hissed Isaac. “I can’t sit on him. Maybe it’s some damn religious thing, some bloody Cymek mystical rubbish. Maybe he thinks he’s about to die and he has to say goodbye to his damn ancestors. I told him not to, he said he was going to.”

“Fine, whatever,” muttered Lemuel irritably. He turned to look back behind him. Isaac saw a small group of figures approaching. “These are our employees. I’m paying them, Isaac, and you’re owing me.”

There were three of them. They were immediately and absolutely recognizable as adventurers; rogues who wandered the Ragamoll and the Cymek and Fellid and probably the whole of Bas-Lag. They were hardy and dangerous, lawless, stripped of allegiance or morality, living off their wits, stealing and killing, hiring themselves out to whoever and whatever came. They were inspired by dubious virtues.

A few performed useful services: research, cartography and the like. Most were nothing but tomb raiders. They were scum who died violent deaths, hanging on to a certain cachet among the impressionable through their undeniable bravery and their occasionally impressive exploits.

Isaac and Derkhan eyed them without enthusiasm.

“This,” said Lemuel, pointing to them each in turn, “is Shadrach, Pengefinchess and Tansell.”

The three looked at Isaac and Derkhan with ruthless, swaggering arrogance.

Shadrach and Tansell were human, Pengefinchess was vodyanoi. Shadrach was obviously the hard man of the group. Large and sturdy, he wore a miscellaneous collection of armour, studded leather and flat, hammered pieces of iron strapped to shoulders, front and back. It was spattered with slime from the sewers. He followed Isaac’s eyes to his outfit.

“Lemuel told us to expect trouble,” he said in a curiously melodic voice. “We came dressed for the occasion.”

In his belt swung an enormous pistol and a big, weighty machete-sword. The pistol was carved into an intricate shape, a monstrous horned face, its mouth the muzzle. It would vomit forth the bullets. A flared blunderbuss flapped on his back, along with a black shield. He would not be able to walk three steps in the city like that without being arrested. No wonder they had come through the city’s underside.

Tansell was taller than Shadrach, but much more slight. His armour was smarter, and seemed designed at least in part for aesthetics. It was a burnished brown, layers of stiff curboille, wax-boiled leather engraved with spiral designs. He carried a smaller gun than Shadrach and a slender rapier.

“So what’s happening, then?” said Pengefinchess, and Isaac realized from the vodyanoi’s voice that she was female. There were, with vodyanoi, no physical characteristics for an inexpert human to recognize that were not hidden below the loincloths.

“Well…” he said slowly, watching her.

She squatted like a frog before him and met his gaze. She wore a voluminous white one-piece garment-incongruously and bizarrely clean, given her recent journey-that fitted close around her wrists and ankles, leaving her large, amphibious hands and feet free. She carried a recurved bow and sealed quiver over her shoulder, a bone knife in her belt. A large pouch of some thick reptile skin was strapped to her belly. Isaac could not tell what was within.

As Isaac and Derkhan watched, something bizarre happened below Pengefinchess’s clothes. There was a quick movement, as if something wrapped itself around her body at speed and then removed itself. As the weird tide passed, a large patch of the white cotton of her shift became sodden with water, clinging suddenly to her, then drying as if every atom of liquid was suddenly sucked out. Isaac stared, thunderstruck.

Pengefinchess looked down casually.

“That’s my undine. She and I have a deal. I provide her certain substances, she clings to me, keeps me wet and alive. Lets me travel in much drier places than I’d otherwise manage.”

Isaac nodded. He had never seen a water elemental before. It was unsettling.

“Has Lemuel warned you of the sort of trouble we’re facing?” Isaac said. The adventurers nodded, unconcerned. Even excited. Isaac tried to swallow his exasperation.

“These moth-things aren’t the only thing you can’t afford to look at, sirrah,” said Shadrach. “I can kill with my eyes closed, if I have to.” He spoke with soft, chilling confidence. “This belt?” He tapped it nonchalantly. “Catoblepas hide. Killed it in the outskirts of Tesh. Didn’t look at that, neither, or I’d be dead. We can handle these moths.”

“I damn well hope so,” said Isaac grimly. “Hopefully, no actual fighting’ll be necessary. I think Lemuel feels safer with some backup, just in case. We’re hoping the constructs’ll take care of things.”

Shadrach’s mouth curled minutely, in what was probably contempt.

“Tansell’s a metallo-thaumaturge,” said Lemuel. “Aren’t you?”

“Well…I know a few techniques for working metal,” Tansell replied.

“It’s not a complex job,” said Isaac. “Just need a bit of welding. Come this way.”

He led them through the rubbish to where they had hidden the mirrors and the other materials for the helmets.

“We’ve got easily enough stuff here,” said Isaac, squatting beside the pile. He picked up a colander, length of copper piping and, after a moment of sifting, two sizeable chunks of mirror. He waved them at Tansell vaguely. “We need this to be a helmet that’s going to fit snug-and we’re going to need one for a garuda who’s not here.” He ignored the glance that Tansell exchanged with his companions. “And then we need these mirrors attached to the front, at an angle so we can easily see directly behind us. Think you can manage that?”

Tansell looked at Isaac contemptuously. The tall man sat cross-legged before the pile of metal and glass. He put the colander on his head, like a child playing at soldiers. He whispered under his voice, a weird lilting, and he began to massage his hands with quick and intricate movements. He pulled at his knuckles, kneaded the balls of his palms.

For several minutes, nothing happened. Then quite suddenly, his fingers began to glow from within, as if the bones were illuminated.

Tansell reached up and began to caress the colander, as gently as if he stroked a cat.

Slowly, the metal began to shape itself under his coaxing. It softened at each momentary touch, fitting more snuggly onto his head, flattening down, distending at the back. Tansell pulled and kneaded it gently until it was quite flush over his hair. Then, still whispering his little sounds, he tweaked at the front, adjusting the lip of the metal, curling it up and away from his eyes.

He reached down and picked up the copper pipe, gripped it between his hands and channelled energy through his palms. Obstreperously, the metal began to flex. He coiled it gently, placing the two ends of the copper against the colander-helmet just above his temples, then pressing down hard until each piece of metal broke the surface tension of the other and began to spill across the divide. With a tiny fizz of energy, the thick piping and the iron colander fused.

Tansell shaped the bizarre extrusion of copper that jutted from the newborn helmet’s front. It became an angled loop extending about a foot. He fumbled for the pieces of mirror, clicked his fingers until someone handed them to him. Humming to the copper, cajoling it, he softened its substance and pushed one, then the other piece of mirror into it, one in front of each of his eyes. He looked up into them, each in turn, adjusting them carefully until they offered him a clear view of the wall of rubbish behind him.

He tweaked the copper, hardened it.

Tansell removed his hands and looked up at Isaac. The helmet on his head was unwieldy, and its provenance from a colander was still absurdly obvious, but it was perfect for their needs. It had taken him a little more than fifteen minutes to fashion.

“I’m going to put a couple of holes in, thread a piece of leather through for a chinstrap, just in case,” he muttered.

Isaac nodded, impressed.

“That’s perfect. We need…uh…seven of those, one of them for a garuda. That’s a rounder head, remember. I’m going to leave you to it for a minute.” He looked over at Derkhan and Lemuel. “I think I’d better liaise with the Council,” he said.

He turned and traced his way through the dump labyrinth.

“Good evening, der Grimnebulin,” said the avatar, in the heart of the rubbish. Isaac nodded a greeting to it, and to the enormous skeleton shape of the Council itself, which waited beyond. “You did not come alone.” His voice was emotionless as ever.

“Please don’t start,” said Isaac. “We are not going to get into this on our own. We are one fat scientist, a crook and a journalist. We need some fucking professional back-up. These are people who kill exotic animals for a damn living, and they have not the slightest damn interest in telling anyone about you. All they know is that some fucking constructs are going to be there with us. Even if they could work out who or what you were, they’ve probably broken at least two-thirds of New Crobuzon’s laws by now, so they ain’t about to damn well go running to Rudgutter.” There was silence. “Just damn well compute it, if you want. You are in no risk at all from the three reprobates busy making helmets.”

Isaac imagined that he felt a trembling under his feet, as the information raced through the Council’s innards. After a long pause, the avatar and the Council nodded warily. Isaac did not relax.

“I’ve come for those of yourself you can risk for tomorrow’s business,” he said. The Council nodded again.

“Very well,” said the Construct Council slowly with the dead man’s tongue. “First, as we discussed, I will take the part of caretaker. Have you the crisis engine?”

Something hard moved across Isaac’s face. It went quickly.

“Right here,” he said, and put one of his bags down in front of the avatar. The naked man opened it and bent down to peer inside at the tubes and glass within, giving Isaac a sudden, vile view into the scabbing hollow of his skull. He picked it up and walked over to the Council with it, depositing it before the enormous figure’s crotch.

“So,” said Isaac. “You hang on to that, just in case they find our shack. Good idea. I’ll be back for it in the morning.” He glowered. “Which of you are coming with us? We need some power behind us.”

“I cannot risk discovery, Grimnebulin,” the avatar said. “If I were to come in my hidden selves, those construct bodies that work by day in grand houses and building sites and bank vaults, biding their time and accumulating knowledge, and they were to come back battered and broken, or not come back at all, I would leave myself open to the inquiry of the city. And I am not ready for that. Not yet.” Isaac nodded slowly. “Accordingly, I will be coming with you in those shapes that I can afford to lose. That will arouse confusion and bewilderment, but not suspicion of the truth.”

Behind Isaac, the rubbish began to skitter and fall away. He turned.

From the reams of discarded objects, particular aggregations of trash were separating themselves. Like the Construct Council itself, they were clotted together from the materia of the dump.

The constructs mimicked the form and size of chimpanzees. They clattered and clanged as they moved, with a weird and unsettling sound. Each was unique. Their heads were kettles and lampshades, their hands were vicious-looking claws ripped from scientific instruments and scaffolding joints. They were armoured in great scabs of metal plating torn, roughly welded and riveted to their bodies, which scampered across the wasteland in an unsettling half-simian motion. They were created with an extraordinary sense of found aesthetics.

If they lay still, they would be invisible: nothing but a random accretion of old metal.

Isaac gazed at the chimp-things, swinging and jumping, dripping water and oil, ticking with clockwork.

“I have downloaded into each of their analytical engines,” said the avatar, “as much memory and capacity as they will hold. These of me can obey you, and understand the urgency of doing so. I have given them viral intelligence. They have been programmed with the data to recognize the slake-moths, and to attack them. Each is built with acid or phlogistic agent within its midriff.” Isaac nodded, wondering at the casual ease with which the Council created these murderous machines. “You have worked out the best plan?”

“Well…” said Isaac. “We’re going to prepare tonight. Work out some kind of…uh…gear up, you know, plan with our…additional staff. Then tomorrow at sixish we’ll meet Yag here, assuming the stupid bastard hasn’t got himself killed. And then we’re going to get into the Riverskin ghetto, using Lemuel’s expertise.

“Then we go moth-hunting.” Isaac’s voice was hard and staccato. He spat out what he needed to say quickly. “The thing is we’ve got to separate them. We can take one, I think. Otherwise, if there are two or more, then one will always be in front of us, able to flash the wings. So we’re going to scope the place out, see if we can work out where they are. It’s hard to say without seeing it. We’ll take the amplifier and channeller you used on me, as well. It might help us get one interested, get it sniffing. Push a little peak through the background mental noise, or something. Can you attach other helmets to the one engine? D’you have any extras?” The avatar nodded. “You’d better give them to me, and show me the different functions. I’ll get Tansell to adjust them, add some mirrors.

“Thing is,” said Isaac thoughtfully, “it can’t just be the strength of the signal that attracts them, or it would only ever be the seers and communicatrixes and so on that got taken. I think they like particular flavours. That’s why the runt came for me. Not because there was a big waving trail above the city, any old trail, but because it recognized and wanted that particular mind. And…well, now, maybe the others are going to recognize it as well. Maybe I was wrong that only the one would ever recognize my mind. They must’ve sniffed it last night.” He looked at the avatar thoughtfully. “They’re going to remember it as the trail their brother or sister was after when it got killed. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing…”

“Der Grimnebulin,” said the dead man after a moment, “you must bring at least one of my little selves back with you. They must download what they have seen into me, the Council. I can learn so much of the Glasshouse from this. It can only help us. Whatever happens, one must get free.”

There were several moments of silence. The Council waited. Isaac thought for something to say, and then could not. He looked up into the avatar’s eyes.

“I’ll be back tomorrow. Have your monkey-selves ready then. And then I will…I will…see you again,” he said.

The city basked in extraordinary night-heat. The summer reached a critical moment. In the striae of dirty air above the city’s core, the slake-moths danced.

They flitted giddily over the minarets and crags of Perdido Street Station. They twitched their wings infinitesimally, edging expertly up the thermals. Skeins of inconstant emotion spun out from their cavorting.

With silent pleadings and caresses they courted each other. Wounds, already half healed, were now forgotten, in trembling, febrile excitement.

The summer here, in this once verdant plain on the edge of the Gentleman’s Sea, came a month and a half earlier than for the slake-moths’ siblings across the water. The temperature had slowly spiralled, reaching twenty-year highs.

Thermotaxic reactions were triggered in the slake-moths’ loins. Hormones swam in their ichor tides. Unique configurations of flesh and chymicals spurred their ovaries and gonads into untimely productivity. They became suddenly fertile, and aggressively aroused.

Aspises and bats and birds fled the air in terror, pungent as it was with psychotic desires.

The slake-moths flirted with ghastly and lascivious aerial ballet. They touched tentacles and limbs, unfolded new parts they had never seen before. The three less damaged moths tugged their sibling, the victim of the Weaver, on wafts of smoke and air. Gradually, the most wounded moth stopped licking its multitude of wounds with its trembling tongue, and began to touch its fellows. Their erotic charge was utterly infectious.

The polymorphous four-way wooing became fraught and competitive. Stroking, touching, arousing. Each moth in turn spiralled moonward, drunk on lust. It would split the seal on a gland hidden under its tail and exude a cloud of empathic musk.

Its fellows lapped at the psychoscent, sported like porpoises in clouds of carnality. They rolled and played then swept up and sprayed the sky themselves. For now, their sperm ducts were still. The little metadroplets were rich with the slake-moths’ erogenous, ovigenic juices. They bickered lecherously to be female.

Each successive exudation charged the air to a higher pitch of excitement. The moths bared their gravestone teeth and bleated their sexual challenge to each other. The moist valves below their chitin dripped with aphrodisiac. They swept through the banks of each other’s perfume.

As the pheremonal duel continued, one febrile voice sounded more and more triumphant. One body swept higher and higher, its fellows dropping away. Its emanations stank the air of sex. There were last-gasp attacks, spurts of erotic challenge. But one by one, the other moths closed their female pudenda, accepting defeat and masculinity.

The triumphant moth-the moth still scarred and dripping from its melee with the Weaver-soared. Its scent still stank of female juices, its fecundity was unquestioned. It had proved itself the most motherly.

It had gained the right to bear the brood.

The other three moths adored it. They became swains.

The feel of the new matriarch’s flesh made them ecstatic. They looped and fell and returned, aroused and ardent.

The mother-moth toyed with them, led them over the hot dark city. When their beseeching became as painful as its own lust, it hovered and presented itself, opened its segmented exoskeleton and curled its vagina towards them.

It coupled with them, one by one, becoming briefly a dangerous plummeting double-bodied thing, flanked by eager partners waiting their turn. The three who had become male felt organic mechanisms pull and twist, their bellies opening and penises emerging for the first time. They fumbled with their arms and flesh-ropes and bone jags and their matriarch did the same, reaching behind it with a complex twist of limbs that grabbed and tugged and intertwined.

Sudden slipping connections were made. Each pair consorted and copulated with a fervent need and pleasure.

When the hours of rutting had passed, the four slake-moths drifted on open wings, utterly exhausted. They dripped.

As the air cooled, their bed of thermals deflated slowly, and they began to beat their wings to stay aloft. One by one, the three fathers peeled away and down to the city below, to search for food to revive and sustain them, and to provide for their conjugal partner.

It lolled in the sky a while longer. When it had been alone for a time, its antennae twitched and it curled away and began to make its slow way south. It was exhausted. Its sexual organs and orifices had closed away beneath its iridescent shell, to keep hold of all that had been spent.

The slake-moth matriarch flew towards Riverskin and the cactus dome, ready to prepare the nest.

My talons flex, trying to open. They are constrained by the ridiculous and vile bandages wound around them, that flap like ragged skin.

I walk bent double along the sides of the railways, the trains screaming at me in irate warning as they blast by. I sneak now across the rail bridge, watching the Tar coil beneath me. I stop and look around. Way ahead of me and way behind the river slithers and throws rubbish in rhythmic little bursts against the bank.

Looking over to the west I can see over the water and the swell of Riverskin houses to the tip of the Glasshouse. It is illuminated from inside, a blister of light on the city’s skin.

I am changing. There is something within me which was not there before, or perhaps it is that something has gone. I smell the air and it is the same air it was yesterday, and yet it is different. There can be no doubt. Something is welling up under my own skin. I am not sure who I am.

I have trailed these humans as if I am dumb. A worthless, mindless presence, without opinion or intellect. Without knowing who I am, how can I know what to say?

I am not Respected Yagharek any longer, and I have not been for many months. I am not the raging thing that stalked the Shankell pits, that slaughtered man and trow, ratjinn and shardmouth, a menagerie of pugnacious beasts and warriors of races I had not dreamed could exist. That savage fighter is gone.

I am not the tiring one who stalked the lush grasslands and cold, hard hills. I am not the lost thing that wandered the concrete walkways of the city introspective and lost, seeking to become again something I never was.

I am none of those. I am changing, and I do not know what I will be.

I am afraid of the Glasshouse. Like Shankell, it has many names. The Glasshouse, the Greenhouse, the Planthouse, the Hothouse. It is nothing but a ghetto, dealt with sleight of hand. A ghetto in which the cactacae try to replicate the edge of the desert. Am I returning home?

To ask the question is to answer it. The Glasshouse is not the veldt, or the desert. It is a sad illusion, nothing but a mirage. It is not my home.

And if it were the desert, if it were a gateway to the deepest Cymek, to the dry forests and fertile swampland, to the repository of sand-hidden life and the great nomadic garuda library, if the Glasshouse were more than a shadow, if it were the desert it feigns to be, it would still not be my home.

That place does not exist.

I shall wander for a night and a day. I will retrace the steps that once I made, in the shade of the railways. I will stalk the city’s monstrous geography and find the streets that bore me here, the squat channels in the brick to which I owe my life and self.

I will find the tramps who shared my food, if they are not dead from disease or stabbed for their piss-stained shoes. They became my tribe, atomized and ruined and broken, but still some kind of tribe. Their numb lack of interest in me-in anything-was refreshing after days of careful skulking and an hour or two of ostentatious wandering in my agonizing wooden prostheses. I owe them nothing, those tedious alcohol- and drug-fucked heads, but I will find them again for my own sake, not theirs.

I feel as if I walk these streets for the last time.

Am I to die?

There are two possibilities.

I will help Grimnebulin and we will defeat these moths, these horrific night-creatures, these soul-drinkers, and he will create of me a battery. He will reward me; he will charge me up like a phlogistic cell and I will fly. As I think it I am climbing. I reach higher and higher on these girder-steps, climbing the city like a ladder to gaze at its tawdry, teeming night. I feel the flabby stubs of my wing muscles try to flap with a pathetic rudimentary motion. I will not rise on tides of air pushed down by feathers, but I will flex my mind like a wing and soar on channels of power, transformative energy, thaumaturgic flow, the binding and exploding force that inheres, that Grimnebulin calls crisis.

I will be a marvel.

Or I will fail and die. I will fall and be skewered on harsh metal, or my dreams will be sucked from my mind and fed to some hatchling devil.

Will I feel it? Will I live on in the milk? Will I know that I am being drunk?

The sun is creeping into view. I am tiring.

I know that I should have stayed. If I am to be anything real, something more than the mute, imbecilic presence I have so far been, I should stay and intervene and plan and prepare and nod at their suggestions, supplement them with my own. I am, I was, a hunter. I can stalk the monsters, the horrendous beasts.

But I could not. I tried to say my sorries, to let Grimnebulin-even Blueday-know that I am one with them, that I am part of the gang. The crew. The posse. The moth-hunters. But it rang hollow in my skull.

I will look and find myself, and then I will know if I can tell them that. And if not, what I can say instead.

I will arm myself. I will bring weapons. I will find a knife, a whip like that I used to wield. Even if I find myself an outsider, I will not let them die unaided. I will sell our lives dear to the thirsting things.

I hear sad music. There is a moment of uncanny quiet, when the trains and the barges pass away from me in my eyrie, and the grinding of their engines ebbs away and the dawn is momentarily uncovered.

Someone at the river’s edge, in some garret, is playing the fiddle. It is a haunting strain, a tremulous dirge of semitones and counterpoints over a broken rhythm. These do not sound like local harmonies.

I recognize the sound. I have heard it before. On the boat that took me across the Meagre Sea, and before that in Shankell.

There is no escaping my southern past, it seems.

It is the dawn greeting of the fisherwomen of Perrick Nigh and the Mandrake Islands, way to the south. My unseen accompanist is welcoming the sun.

The few New Crobuzon Perrickish live mostly in Echomire, yet here she is, three miles upstream as the river twists, waking the great Day fisher with her exquisite playing.

She plays to me for a few more moments, before the noise of the morning takes her sound away, and I am left clinging to the bridge, listening to the boom of klaxons and the whistle from the trains.

That sound from far away continues, but I cannot hear it. The noises of New Crobuzon fill my ears. I will follow them, welcome them. I will let them surround me. I will dive into the hot, city life. Under arch and over stone, through the sparse bone forest of the Ribs, into the brick burrows of Badside and Dog Fenn, through the booming industry of Gross Coil. Like Lemuel sniffing for contacts I will retrace all the steps I have made. And here and there, I hope, among the spires and the crammed architecture, I will touch the immigrants, the refugees, the outsiders who remake New Crobuzon every day. This place with bastard culture. This mongrel city.

I will hear the sounds of Perrick violining or the Gnurr Kett funeral dirge or a Chet stone-riddle, or I will smell the goat porridge they eat in Neovadan or see a doorway painted with the symbols of a Cobsea printer-captain…A long, long way from their homes. Homeless. Home.

All around me will be New Crobuzon, seeping in through my skin.

When I return to Griss Twist, my companions will be waiting, and we will liberate this hijacked city. Thanklessly and unseen.