Perdido Street Station

Chapter Forty-Two

The streets of Riverskin inclined gently upwards towards the Glasshouse. The houses were old and tall, with rotting wooden frames and walls of damp plaster. Every rain saturated and blistered them, sent slates cascading from the steep roofs as rusted nails dissolved. Riverskin seemed to sweat, gently, in the slow heat.

The southern half of Riverskin was indistinguishable from Flyside, which it adjoined. It was cheap and not too violent, crowded, mostly good-natured. It was a mixed area, with a large human majority beside small colonies of vodyanoi by the quiet canal, a few solitary outcast cactacae, even a little two-street khepri hive, a rare traditional community outside of Kinken and Creekside. Southern Riverskin was also home to some of the city’s small number of more exotic races. There was a shop run by a hotchi family in Bek-man Avenue, their spines carefully filed blunt so as not to intimidate their neighbours. There was a homeless llorgiss, which kept its barrel body full of drink and staggered the streets on three unsteady legs.

But northern Riverskin was very different. It was quieter, more sullen. It was the preserve of the cactacae.

Large as the Glasshouse was, it could not possibly contain all the cactacae of the city, not even those who kept faith with tradition. At least two-thirds of New Crobuzon’s cactus people lived outside its protective glass. They packed the Riverskin slums, and a few other quarters in places like Syriac and Abrogate Green. But Riverskin was the centre of their city, and there they mixed in equal numbers with human locals. They were the cactus underclass, who entered the Glasshouse to shop and worship, but were forced to live in the infidel city.

Some rebelled. Angry cactacae youths vowed never to enter the Glasshouse which had betrayed them. They referred to it ironically by an older, obsolete name: the Nursery. They scarred themselves and fought in brutal, pointless and exciting gangfights. Sometimes they terrorized the neighbourhood, mugging and stealing from the humans and cactacae elders who shared their streets.

Outside, in Riverskin, the cactus people were surly and quiet. They worked for their human or vodyanoi bosses without demur or enthusiasm. They did not communicate with their workmates of other races in anything more than curt grunts. Their behaviour inside the walls of the Glasshouse was never seen.

The Glasshouse itself was a huge, flattened dome. On the ground, its diameter was more than a quarter of a mile. At its peak, it was eighty yards high. Its base was angled to sit tight on the listing streets of Riverskin.

The framework was wrought in black iron, a great thick skeleton decorated with occasional curlicues and flourishes. It bulged out over the Riverskin houses, visible from a long way off on the top of its low hill. Emerging in two concentric circles from its skin were colossal girdered arms, nearly the size of the Ribs, suspending the dome and taking its weight on great cords of twisted metal.

The further away it was seen from, the more impressive the Glasshouse appeared. From the wooded top of Flag Hill, looking down across two rivers, the railways, the skyrails and four miles of grotesque urban sprawl, the facets of the dome glinted with clean shards of light. From the surrounding streets, however, the multitude of cracks and dark spaces where glass had fallen in were visible. The dome had been repaired only once in its three centuries of existence.

From the base of the dome the age of the structure showed. It was decrepit. Paint curled in great tongues away from the metal-work, and rust had eaten it like worms. For the first fifteen or so feet above the ground, the panes-each nearly seven feet square at the bottom, descending in width like pieces of pie as they approached the vertex-were filled with the same crumbling, painted iron. Above that, the glass was dirty and impure, tinted green and blue and beige in chance patchwork. It was reinforced, and was supposed to be able to support the weight of at least two decent-sized cactacae. Even so, several panes were broken and empty of glass, and many more were laced with a filigree of cracks.

The dome had been built without much concern for the surrounding houses. The pattern of streets that surrounded it continued until they reached its solid metal base. Those two or three or four houses that had been in the way of the dome’s edges had been crushed, and then the rows continued beneath the glass canopy, at a variety of random angles.

The cactacae had simply enclosed an existing clutch of New Crobuzon streets.

Over the decades, the architecture within the dome had been altered to adapt the once-human houses to cactacae tenants, tearing down some structures and replacing them with strange new edifices. But the broad layout and much of the structure was said to remain, exactly as it was before the dome existed.

There was one entrance to the dome, at the southern tip of its base in Yashur Plaza. At the opposite end of its circumference was its exit on Bytrash Street, a steep road that looked down onto the river. Cactus law stated that entrance to and exit from the Glasshouse was only by these portals respectively. This was unlucky for the cactacae who lived just outside in sight of one or other of the portals. Getting in, for example, might take two minutes, but returning home from the exit would involve a long, tangled walk home.

Each morning at five the gateways were thrown open, onto the short enclosed passage beyond, and each evening at midnight they were closed. They were guarded by a small unit of armoured guards, hefting huge war-cleavers and the powerful cactacae rivebow.

Like their dumb, rooted cousins, the cactacae had thick, fibrous vegetable skin. It was taut and punctured easily, but it healed fast, in ugly, thick scars-most cactacae were covered in harmless ganglions of scab tissue. It took a lot of thrusts or a lucky shot into the organs to have any real damaging effect. Bullets or arrows or quarrels were usually ineffective against cactacae. Which was why the cactus soldiers carried rivebows.

The designers of the first rivebow had been human. The weapons had been used during the ghastly premiership of Mayor Collodd-they had been carried by the human guards of the mayor’s cactus farm. But after the reforming Sapience Bill dissolved the farm and granted cactacae something approaching citizenship, the pragmatic cactus elders had realized this would be an invaluable weapon to keep their own people in line. Since then, the bow had been improved many times, this time by cactacae engineers.

The rivebow was an enormous crossbow, too large and heavy for a human effectively to operate. It fired not bolts, but chakris; flat metal disks with serrated or razored edges, or metal stars with curved arms. A toothed hole in the chakri’s centre slotted neatly onto a little bud of metal that emerged from the rivebow shaft. When the trigger was pulled, the wire in the shaft snapped violently to, pulling the metal bud at massive speed, intricate gears grinding together to send it spinning at an enormous rate. At the end of the enclosed channel the whirling bolt slipped sharply down and out from the chakri’s hole, and the chakri was discharged as fast as a slingshot stone, spinning like the blade of a circular saw.

Aerial friction dissipated its momentum quickly: it did not have nearly the range of a longbow or a flintlock. But it could sever a cactus limb or head-or a human one-at nearly one hundred feet, and slice savagely some way beyond that.

The cactacae guards glowered, and swung their rivebows with surly arrogance.

The late rays of the day blazed out from above the far-off peaks. The west-facing aspects of the Glasshouse dome glowed like rubies.

Straddling a corroded ladder that swept up to the peak of the dome, a silhouetted human figure grasped and clung to the metal. The man crept gradually up the rungs, rising up the curved firmament of the dome like the moon.

The walkway was one of three that extended at regular intervals from the very top of the dome’s arch, designed originally for the repair crews that had never appeared. The curve of the dome seemed to break the surface of the earth like the tip of a bent back, implying a vast body below ground. The figure was riding a gargantuan whaleback. He was buoyed up by the light that the dome trapped, that played on the underside of the glass and made the whole great edifice shine. He kept low, moving very slowly to avoid being seen. He had chosen the ladder on the Glasshouse’s northwestern side, so as to avoid the trains on the Salacus Fields branch of the Sud Line. The tracks passed close by the glass on the opposite side of the dome, and any observant passengers would see the man crawling up the curved surface.

Eventually, after several minutes climbing, the intruder reached a metal lip that surrounded the apex of the great structure. The keystone itself was a single globe of limpid glass about eight feet in diameter. It sat perfectly in the circular hole at the dome’s apogee, suspended half in, half out like some great plug. The man stopped and looked out over the city, through the tips of the supporting struts and the thick suspension wires. The wind whipped about him, and he clung to the handholds with vertiginous terror. He looked up into the darkening sky, the stars dim to him from all the clotted light that surrounded him, that ebbed through the glass below his body.

He turned his attention to that glass, scanned its surface minutely, pane by pane.

After some minutes he raised himself and began to climb backwards down the rails. Down, fumbling with his feet, feeling for holds, gently probing with outstretched toes, pulling himself back towards the earth.

The ladder ran out twelve feet from the earth, and the man slid down on the grappling hook he had used to get up. He touched the dusty ground and looked around him.

“Lem,” he heard someone hiss. “Over here.”

Lemuel Pigeon’s companions were hiding in a gutted building at the edge of a rubble-strewn wasteground flanking the dome. Isaac was just visible, gesticulating at him from behind the doorless threshold.

Lemuel paced quickly across the thin scrub, treading on bricks and concrete overgrown and anchored with grass. He turned his back on the early evening light and slipped into the gloom of the burnt-out shell.

In the shadow before him crouched Isaac, Derkhan, Yagharek and the three adventurers. There was a pile of ruined equipment behind them, steam-pipes and conducting wires, the clasps from retort stands, lenses like marbles. Lemuel knew that the mess would resolve itself into five monkey-constructs as soon as they moved.

“Well?” demanded Isaac.

Lemuel nodded slowly.

“I was told right,” he said quietly. “There’s a big crack up near the top of the dome, in the north-eastern quarter. From where I was it was a bit hard to tell the size, but I figure it’s at least…six feet by four. I looked pretty hard up there, and that was the only break I saw big enough for anything man-sized or thereabouts to get in or out. Did you have a little glance around the base?”

Derkhan nodded. “Nothing,” she said. “I mean, plenty of little cracks, even a few places where a fair bit of glass was missing, especially higher up, but there were no holes big enough to get through. That must be the one.”

Isaac and Lemuel nodded.

“So that’s how they’re getting in and out,” said Isaac softly. “Well, it seems to me the best way of tracking them is to reverse their journey. Much as I damn well hate to suggest it, I think we should get up there. What’s it like inside?”

“You can’t see all that much,” said Lemuel, and shrugged. “The glass is thick, old and damn dirty. They only clean it once every three or four years, I think. You can make out the basic shapes of houses and streets and what have you, but that’s about all. You’d have to look inside to get the lay of the place.”

“We can’t all troop up there,” said Derkhan. “We’ll be seen. We should’ve asked Lemuel to go in, he’s the man for the job.”

“I wouldn’t have gone anyway,” said Lemuel tightly. “I don’t enjoy being that high up, and I certainly damn well won’t dangle upside down hundreds of feet above thirty thousand pissed-off cactacae…”

“Well, what are we going to do?” Derkhan was irritated. “We could wait until nightfall, but then the bloody moths are active. What we’ll have to do is go up one at a time. If, that is, it’s safe to. We need someone to go first…”

“I will go,” said Yagharek.

There was silence. Isaac and Derkhan stared at him.

“Great!” said Lemuel archly, and clapped twice. “That’s that sorted. So you can go up, and then…um…you can look around for us, chuck us down a message…”

Isaac and Derkhan were ignoring Lemuel. They were still staring at Yagharek.

“It is right that I should go,” said Yagharek. “I am at home so high,” he said and his voice clucked slightly, as if at a sudden emotion. “I am at home so high, and I am a hunter. I can look down on the landscape within and see where the moths might lurk. I can gauge the possibilities within the glass.”

Yagharek retraced Lemuel’s steps up the shell of the Glasshouse.

He had unwrapped the foetid bandages from his feet, and his talons had stretched out in a delightful reflex. He had scrambled up the initial patch of bare metal with Lemuel’s grappling rope, and then had climbed far faster and more confidently than the human had done.

He stopped every so often and stood swaying in the warm wind, his avian toes gripping the metal slats tightly and securely. He would lean alarmingly and peer into the hazy air, hold out his arms a little, feel the wind fill his spreadeagled body like a sail.

Yagharek pretended he was flying.

Swinging from his thin belt was the stiletto and the bullwhip he had stolen the previous day. The whip was a clumsy thing, not nearly so fine as the one he had cracked in the hot desert air, stinging and snaring, but it was a weapon his hand remembered.

He was fast and assured. The airships that were visible were all far away. He was unseen.

At the top of the Glasshouse, the city seemed to be a gift to him, laid out ready to be taken. Everywhere he looked, fingers and hands and fists and spines of architecture thrust rudely into the sky. The Ribs like ossified tentacles reaching always up; the Spike slammed into the city’s heart like a skewer; the complex mechanistic vortex of Parliament, glowing darkly; Yagharek mapped them with a cold, strategic eye. He glanced up and to the east, to where the skyrail connecting Flyside Tower and the Spike thrummed.

When he had reached the edge of the enormous glass globe at the dome’s tip, it took him only a moment to find the rent in the glass. A part of him was surprised that his eyes, the eyes of a bird of prey, could still perform for him as they used to.

Below him, a foot or two under the gently curving ladder, the glass of the dome was dry and scaled with bird and wyrmen droppings. He tried to peer through, but he could make out nothing beyond the shadowy suggestions of roofs and streets.

Yagharek struck out across the glass itself.

He moved tentatively, feeling with his talons, tapping the glass to test it, sliding as quickly as he could to a metal frame for his claws to grip. As he moved he realized how at ease he had become with climbing. All those weeks and weeks of night-time climbing, on the roof of Isaac’s workshop, up into deserted towers, seeking the city’s crags. He climbed easily and without fear. He was more ape than bird, it seemed.

He skittered nervously across the dirty panes, until he breached the final wall of girders that separated him from the split in the glass. And when he vaulted that, the fault was before him.

Leaning over, Yagharek could feel heat gusting from the lamplit depths within. The night outside was warm, but the temperature within must be very high.

He wound the grappling hook carefully around the metal joist at one side of the crack and tugged it hard to ensure it was secure. Then he wrapped the end of the rope three times around his waist. He gripped it near the hook, lay across the girder and put his head in through the lips of broken glass.

It felt like pushing his face into a bowl of strong tea. The air inside the Glasshouse was hot, almost stiflingly so, and full of smoke and steam. It shone with a hard, white light.

Yagharek blinked his eyes clean and shielded them, then looked down on the cactus town.

In the centre, below the massive nugget of glass at the dome’s tip, the houses had been cleared away and a stone temple had been built. It was red stone, a steep ziggurat, that reached a third of the way to the Glasshouse roof. Every stepped level was lush with desert and veldt vegetation, abloom in garish reds and oranges against their waxy green skins.

A little rim of land, about twenty feet wide, had been cleared all around it, beyond which point the streets of Riverskin had been left. The cartography was a snarled puzzle, a collection of road-ends and the rumps of avenues, here the corner of a park and there half a church, even the stump of a canal, now a trough of stagnant water, cut off by the edge of the dome. Lanes criss-crossed the little township at odd angles, segments cut from longer streets where the dome had been placed over them. A little random patch of alleys and roads had been contained, sealed under glass. Its content had changed even as the outlines remained mostly the same.

The chaotic aggregate of street-stubs had been reformed by the cactacae. What, years ago, had been a wide thoroughfare had been made a vegetable garden, the edges of its lawns flush with the houses on either side, little trails from front doors indicating the routes between patches of pumpkin and radishes.

Ceilings had been removed four generations ago to convert human houses into homes for their new, much taller inhabitants. Rooms had been added to the tops and backsides of buildings, styled like weird miniature effigies of the stepped pyramid in the centre of the Glasshouse. The additional buildings had been wedged into every space possible, to cram the dome with cactacae, and strange agglomerations of human architecture and monolithic, stone-slab edifices stretched in big blocks of variegated colour. Some were several storeys tall.

Swaying, dipping bridges of wood and rope were draped between many of the upper floors, linking rooms and buildings on opposite sides of streets. In many of the yards and on the tops of many buildings, low walls enclosed flat desert-gardens, with tiny patches of scrubby grass, a few low cactuses and undulating sand.

Little flocks of captive birds that had never found the shattered vents to the outside city swept low over the houses and called out in hunger. With a lurch of adrenalin and nostalgic shock, Yagharek recognized a bird-call from the Cymek. There were dune-eagles, he realized, perching on one or two roofs.

Rising around them on all sides, the dome refracted New Crobuzon like a dirty glass sky, rendering the surrounding houses a confusion of darkness and deflected light. The whole diorama below him thronged with cactus people. Yagharek scanned slowly, but he could not see another sapient race.

The simple bridges swung as cactacae passed over them in all directions. In the sand-gardens, Yagharek saw cactacae with big rakes and wooden paddles carefully sculpting the sastrugi that mimicked the rippling dunes made by the wind. Here in this tightly closed space, bounded on every side, there were no gusts to carve patterns, and the desert landscape had to be wrought by hand.

The streets and paths were tight crammed with cactacae buying and selling in the market, arguing gruffly too low for Yagharek to hear. They pulled wooden carts by hand, two working together if the vehicle or load was particularly large. There were no constructs in sight, no cabs, no animals of any sort beyond the birds and a few rock-rabbits Yagharek caught sight of on the ledges of buildings.

In the city outside, cactacae women wore great shapeless dresses like sheets. Here in the Glasshouse they wore only loincloths of white and beige and dun cloth, exactly like the men. Their breasts were somewhat larger than the men’s, and tipped with dark green nipples. In a few places, Yagharek could see a woman carrying a baby held tight to her chest, the child unworried by the pinprick wounds its mother’s spines inflicted. Boisterous little gangs of cactacae children played on corners, ignored or cuffed absently by passing adults.

On every part of the pyramid temple were cactacae elders, reading, gardening, smoking and talking. Some wore sashes of red or blue around their shoulders, that stood out strongly against their pale green skin.

Yagharek’s skin was prickling with sweat. Wafts of woodsmoke blurred his vision. They rose from a hundred chimneys at all different heights, trickling gently into the sky and eddying in slow mushrooming gusts. A few hazy threads found their way up and seeped from the cracks and holes in the glass sky. But with the wind kept out and the sun magnified by the vaulted translucent bubble, there were no breezes or bluster to dissipate the fumes. The underside of the glass, Yagharek saw, was coated in greasy soot.

There was still more than an hour to sundown. Yagharek glanced to his left and saw that the orb of glass atop the dome seemed to be bursting with light. It was sucking up every scrap of the sun’s emissions, concentrating them and sending them vividly into every nook of the Glasshouse, filling it with unforgiving light and heat. He saw that the metal casing which held it was wired for power, with cables snaking down the insides of the dome and disappearing from sight.

The flat sand-garden at the top of the layered tower at the Glasshouse’s centre was covered in complex machinery. Exactly below the swollen nugget of clear glass was a huge lensed machine, with fat pipes snaking out into vats around it. A cactacae with a coloured sash polished its copper workings.

Yagharek remembered rumours he had heard in Shankell, stories about a heliochymical engine of immense thaumaturgic power. He looked carefully at the glowing contraption, but its purpose was quite opaque.

As he watched, Yagharek became conscious of the large number of armed posses that were evident. He narrowed his eyes. He was gazing down at them like some god, seeing every surface of the little cactus town in the fierce light of the glass globe. He could see almost all the rooftop gardens, and it seemed to him that on at least half, a group of three or four cactus were stationed. They sat or stood, their expressions unreadable at such a distance, but the massive, weighty rivebows they carried were unmistakable. Hatchets dangled from their belts, curved poleaxes glowed in the reddening light.

There were more of the little patrols beside stalls in the sprawling market, sitting alert on the lowest level of the central temple, and walking the streets with a deliberate step, rivebows cocked and ready.

Yagharek saw the looks that the armed guards received, the nervous salutations and the frequent skyward glances of the populace.

He did not think that this situation was normal.

Something was making the cactus people uneasy. They could be truculent and taciturn, in his experience, but the subdued air of menace was like nothing he had experienced in Shankell. Perhaps, he reflected, these cactacae were different, a more sombre breed than their southern siblings. But he felt his skin prickle. The air was fraught.

Yagharek concentrated, and began to scan the inside of the dome with a hard, rigorous eye. He focused carefully, went into something of a hunter’s trance.

He started looking at the edges of the dome. He took in the whole inside circumference in one long, slow sweep, then spiralled his vision carefully towards the centre, examining and investigating the circle of houses and streets a little way in, and then further in again.

In this exacting, methodical way, he could cast his eye on every nook and cranny of the Glasshouse’s surfaces. His eyes stopped briefly, momentarily, on imperfections of the red stone, then moved on.

As the day came closer to its end, the nervousness of the cactus people seemed to increase.

Yagharek came to the end of his scanning sweep. There was nothing immediate, nothing clearly wrong that leapt out at him. He turned his attention to the inside of the roof immediately around him, looking for some purchase.

It would not be easy. Some way from him the girders coalesced around the heavy glass globe, but on the underside of the glass they were not as protuberant. He believed that with some effort he could climb them: as, probably, could Lemuel and perhaps Derkhan or one or two of the adventurers. But it was hard to imagine Isaac clinging so close and holding his bulk suspended, crawling hundreds of yards of dangerous metal piping to the earth.

The sun was low outside. Even with the languorous summer evenings, time was short.

He felt someone tap his back. Yagharek raised his head up, lifting it out of the inverted bowl into the air of New Crobuzon, air that felt suddenly chill.

Behind him, Shadrach was crouched on the glass. He wore a mirror-helm, and held out a similar piece cobbled together from plate iron towards Yagharek.

Shadrach’s helmet looked different. Yagharek’s was a rude piece of rescued metal. Shadrach’s was intricate, wired and valved with copper and brass. At the top was a socket, with holes to screw in some fitting. It was only the mirrors that seemed a makeshift addition.

“You forgot this,” Shadrach said in his gentle voice, waving the helmet. “No waved flag, no word from you for twenty minutes. I’m here to check you’re alive and all right.”

Yagharek showed him the girders inside the dome. He and Shadrach discussed the problem of Isaac in urgent whispered tones.

“You must go down,” said Yagharek. “You must go by the sewers, with Lemuel as your guide. You must find your way as fast as you can into the dome. Send some of the mechanical monkeys to me, to aid me if I am attacked. Look inside.”

Shadrach leaned over carefully and peered into the darkening glass. Yagharek pointed down, across the thronging village at a crumbling ghost-building by the vile canal end. The water, its tow-paths and a little finger of torn land on which the broken house stood were all enclosed by an accidental fence of rubble, brambles and long-rusted barbed wire. The rejected sliver of space backed directly onto the dome, which swept up steeply over it like a flat cloud.

“You must find your way there.” Shadrach began to make some sound, murmuring about the impossibility, but Yagharek cut him off. “It is difficult. It will be difficult. But you cannot climb down from here on the inside, and if you can then Isaac certainly cannot. We need him inside. You must take him in. As fast as you can. I will come down to you, I will find you, when I have found the slake-moths. Wait for me.”

As he spoke, Yagharek strapped the makeshift helmet on his head and investigated the field of view it gave behind him.

He caught Shadrach’s eye in one of the big slivers of mirror.

“You must go. Be quick. Be patient. I will come to you and find you before the night is out. The moths must leave by this break, and so I will wait and watch for them.”

Shadrach’s face set. Yagharek was right. It was unthinkable that Isaac would be able to climb down the steep and dangerous iron rafters.

He nodded at Yagharek curtly, signalling goodbye into the garuda’s mirrors, then turned and scrambled back to the main ladder, descended at expert speed out of sight.

Yagharek turned and looked into the last of the sun. He breathed deeply and flickered his eyes from left to right, checking his vision in each jagged mirror. He calmed himself completely. He breathed in the slow rhythm of the yajhu-saak, the hunter’s reverie, the martial trance of the Cymek garuda. He composed himself.

After some minutes there came the skittering clatter of metal and wire on glass, and one by one three monkey-constructs came into view, approaching him from different directions. They gathered around him and waited, their glass lenses glinting rose in the evening, their thin pistons hissing as they moved.

Yagharek turned and regarded them through the mirrors. Then, gripping the rope carefully, he began to lower himself through the hole in the glass. He gesticulated at the constructs to follow him as he slipped past the gash. The heat of the dome washed up around him and closed over his head as he descended into the glass-bounded village, towards houses immersed in red light as the clear globe magnified and dispersed the setting sun’s rays, into the slake-moths’ lair.

Chapter Forty-Three

Outside the dome, the air darkened inexorably. With the onset of the night, the bright rays that burst from the glass globe in the dome’s roof were snuffed out. The Glasshouse grew suddenly dimmer and more cool. But much of the heat was retained. The dome was still far warmer than the city outside. The lights from the torches and the buildings within reflected back on the glass. To the travellers looking back on the city from Flag Hill, to the slum-dwellers gazing desultory down from the towerblocks of Ketch Heath, to the officer glancing from the skyrail and the driver of the south-bound Sud Line train, peering through smokestacks and flues, over the smoke-soiled roofscape of the city, the Glasshouse looked stretched out taut, distended with light.

As dusk fell, the Glasshouse began to glow.

Clinging to the metal on the inside skin of the dome, unnoticed like some infinitesimal tic, Yagharek slowly flexed his arms. He was affixed to a little knot of scaffolding about one-third of the way down the height of the dome. He was still easily high enough to look down on all the housetops, the tangles of architecture on all sides.

His mind was poised in yajhu-saak. He breathed slowly and regularly. He continued his hunter’s search, his eyes flitting restlessly from point to point below him, not spending more than a moment on each place, building up a composite picture. Occasionally he would unfocus and take in the whole sweep of the roofs below him, alert for any strange movements. He returned his attention often to the scum-covered trench of water where he had told Shadrach to assemble the others.

There was no sign of the band of intruders.

As the night deepened, the streets cleared at extraordinary speed. The cactacae flocked back to their houses. From a teeming township, the Glasshouse emptied, became a ghost town in a little over half an hour. The only figures left on the streets were the armed patrols. They moved nervously through the streets. Lights from windows were dimmed as shutters and curtains were closed. There were no gaslights in these streets. Instead, Yagharek watched lamp-lighters walk the length of the streets, reaching out with flaming poles to ignite oil-soaked torches ten feet above the pavements.

Each of the lamp-lighters was accompanied by a cactacae patrol, moving nervously, pugnacious and furtive through the obscuring streets.

On the top of the central temple, a group of cactus elders was moving around the central mechanism, pulling levers and tugging at handles. The enormous lens at the top of the device swung down on a ponderous hinge. Yagharek peered closely, but he could not discern what they were doing or what the machine was for. He watched without comprehension as the cactacae swung the thing around, about a vertical and a horizontal axis, checking and adjusting gauges according to obscure calibrations.

Above Yagharek’s head, two of the chimpanzee-constructs clung to the metal. The other was a few feet below him, on a strut parallel to his own. They were quite motionless, waiting for him to move.

Yagharek settled back, and waited.

Two hours after sundown, the glass of the dome looked black. The stars were invisible.

The streets of the cactacae Glasshouse glowed with a forbidding, sepia firelight. The patrols had become shadows on a darker street.

There were no sounds beyond the undertone of burning, the soft complaints of architecture and the sound of whispering. Occasional lights flitted like will-o-the-wisps between the slowly cooling bricks.

There was still no sign of Lemuel, Isaac and the others. A small part of Yagharek’s mind was unhappy at this, but for the most part he was still inside, concentrating on the relaxation technique of the hunting trance.

He waited.

Some time between ten and eleven o’clock, Yagharek heard a sound.

His attention, which had spread out to suffuse him, to saturate his awareness, focused instantly. He did not breathe.

Again. The tiniest rippling, a snap like cloth in the wind.

He twisted his neck around and stared towards the noise, down at the mass of streets, into the fearful dark.

There was no response from the watchtower at the Glasshouse’s centre. Fancies crept through Yagharek’s mind, deep inside. Perhaps he had been deserted, a part of him thought. Perhaps the dome was empty but for him and the monkey-constructs, and some unearthly floating lights in the depths of the streets.

He did not hear the sound again, but a shade of deep black passed across his eyes. Something huge flitted up through the murk.

Terrified at some semi-conscious level far below the calm surface of his thoughts, Yagharek felt himself stiffen and grip the metal in his fingers, flatten himself painfully against the dome’s supports. He snapped his head away, facing the metal that he held. Intently, carefully, he stared into the mirrors before his eyes.

Some fell-creature inched its way up the Glasshouse skin.

The shape was almost exactly opposite him, as far away as it could be. It had sprung from some building below and flown a tiny distance to the glass, from there to crawl hand over tendril over claw, up towards the cooler air and the uncontained darkness.

Even through the yajhu-saak, Yagharek’s heart reeled. He watched the thing progress in his mirrors. It fascinated him in an unholy way. He tracked its dark-winged silhouette, like some deranged angel, all studded with dangerous flesh and dripping bizarrely. Its wings were folded, though the slake-moth gently opened and closed them, now and then, as if to dry them in the warm air.

It crawled with a horrible sluggish torpor towards the invigorating city night.

Yagharek had not pinpointed its nest, and that was critical. His eyes batted inconstantly between the insidious creature itself and the patch of domed darkness from where he had first seen it rise.

And as he watched intently through his mounted mirrors, he won his prize.

He kept his eyes on a tangle of old architecture at the southwestern edge of the Glasshouse. The buildings, amended and tinkered with after centuries of cactus occupation, had once been a clot of smart houses. There was almost nothing to distinguish them from their surroundings. They were a little taller than the neighbouring edifices, and their tops had been sliced off by the descending curve of the dome. But rather than demolish them outright, the buildings had been selectively cut, their upper floors taken off where they impeded the glass and the rest left intact. The further out from the centre the houses were, the lower the dome over them and the more of their raised floors had been destroyed.

It was originally the wedge of building at the fork where a street had split. The vertex of the terrace was almost intact, with only the roof removed. Behind it was a dwindling tail of brick storeys, shrinking under the mass of the dome, and evaporating at the edge of the cactus town.

From the uppermost window of this old structure emerged the unmistakable thrusting maw of a slake-moth.

Again, Yagharek’s heart moved, and it was a stern effort that restored its regular beat. He experienced all his emotions at a remove, through a foggy filter of the hunting trance. And this time he was diffusely aware of excitement, as well as fear.

He knew where the slake-moths roosted.

Now that he had discovered what he had sought, Yagharek wanted to shin as fast as he could down the innards of the dome, to remove himself from the slake-moth’s world, to get out of the heights of the air and hide on the ground under the looming eaves. But to move quickly, he realized, was to risk the slake-moth’s attention. He had to wait, swinging very slightly, sweating, silent and immobile, while the monstrous creatures crawled out into the deeper darkness.

The second moth leapt without the slightest sound into the air, gliding on spread wings for a second and alighting on the metal bones of the Glasshouse. It slid with a vile motion up towards its fellow.

Yagharek waited, without moving.

It was several minutes before the third moth appeared.

Its siblings had nearly reached the top of the dome, after a long, stealthy climb. The newcomer was too eager for that. It stood poised at the same window from which the others had emerged, gripping the frame, balancing its convoluted bulk on the edge of the wood. Then, with an audible snap of air, it beat its way straight upwards, into the sky.

Yagharek could not be sure where the next noise came from, but he thought the two crawling slake-moths hissed at their flying sibling, in disapproval or warning.

There was an answering hum. In the stillness of the Glasshouse curfew, the clicking of mechanized gears from the top of the temple was easily heard.

Yagharek was quite still.

A light burst forth from the top of the pyramid, a blazing white ray, so sharp and defined it seemed almost solid. It beamed from the lens of the strange machine.

Yagharek stared through his mirrored glasses. In the faint ambience radiating backwards from the glaring searchlight he could see a crew of cactacae elders stationed behind it, each frantically adjusting some dial, some valve, one grasping two enormous handles that jutted from the back of the light-emitting engine. He swivelled and twisted the thing, directing its luminous shaft.

The light glared savagely onto a random patch of the dome’s glass, then was wrested by its wielder into another position, swung randomly for a moment, then pinioned the impatient slake-moth as it reached the broken panes.

It turned its horned eyesockets to the light. The monstrous creature hissed.

Yagharek heard shouts from the cactus people on the ziggurat, a half-familiar tongue. It was an alloy, a bastard hybrid, mostly words he had last heard in Shankell, alongside New Crobuzon

Ragamoll and other influences he did not recognize at all. As a gladiator in the desert city, he had learnt some of the language of his mostly cactus bookmakers. The formulations he heard now were bizarre, centuries out of date and corrupted with alien dialects, but still almost comprehensible to him.

“…there!” he heard, and something about light. Then as the slake-moth dropped away again from the glass to extricate itself from the torch, he heard, very clearly, “It’s coming!”

The slake-moth had easily fallen away and out of the reach of the enormous torch. Its beam oscillated wildly like a madman’s lighthouse as the cactacae fought to point it in the right direction. Desperately they swung it over the streets, up at the roof of the dome.

The other two moths remained unseen, flattening themselves against the glass.

There was a shouted discussion from below.

“…ready…sky…” he made out, then some word that sounded like the Shankell words for “sun” and “spear” run together. Someone shouted out to take care, and said something about the sunspear and the home: too far, they shouted, too far.

There was a barked order from the cactus directly behind the vast torch, and his team adjusted their motions obscurely. The leader demanded “limits,” of what Yagharek could not understand.

As the light lurched wildly, it found its target again, momentarily. For a moment, the tangled presence of the slake-moth sent a ghastly shadow across the inside of the dome.

“Ready?” shouted the leader, and there was a confirming chorus.

He continued to swivel the lamp, desperately trying to pin the flying moth with its hard light. It swooped and curved, arcing over the tops of the buildings and careering in spirals, a dimly glimpsed display of virtuoso aerobatics, a shadowy circus.

And then, for a moment, the creature was caught spreadeagled in the sky, the light caught it full on and time seemed to stop at the sight of the thing’s awesome, unfathomable and terrible beauty.

At the sight, the cactacae aiming the light tugged some hidden handle, and a gob of incandescence spat out of the lens and blazed along the path of the searchlight. Yagharek’s eyes widened. The clot of concentrated light and heat spasmed out of existence a few feet before it hit the glass of the dome.

The momentary white-out seemed to still all sound in the dome.

Yagharek blinked to clear the afterimage of that savage projectile from his eyes.

The cactacae below began to talk again.

“…get it?” asked one. There was a confusion of unclear answers.

They peered, along with Yagharek, unseen above them, into the air where the slake-moth had flown. They scoured the ground with their eyes, turning the powerful beam towards the pavement.

Throughout the streets below, Yagharek saw the armed patrols standing still, watching the searching light, standing implacable as it swept over them.

“Nothing,” shouted one to the elders on high, and his report was repeated from all sectors, shouted into the claustrophobic night.

Behind the thick curtains and the wooden shutters of Glasshouse’s windows, threads of light spilt into the air as torches and gaslights were lit. But even woken by the crisis, the cactacae would not peer out into the darkness, would not take the risk on what they might see. The guards were left alone.

And then, with a sough of wind as lascivious as a sexual breath, the cactus people on the temple summit learnt that they had not hit the slake-moth: it had ducked in a sharp zigzagging manoeuvre out of the range of their sunspear, it had flown low enough over the rooftops to touch them, to claw its way towards the tower, to pull itself slowly up and to rise magisterially into view, wings outstretched to their full compass, patterns flickering across them as fierce and complex as dark fire.

There was a tiny moment when one of the elders shrieked. There was a split second when the leader tried to tug the sunspear into position to blast the slake-moth into burning fragments. But they could not but see the wings unfolded before them, and their cries, their plans, evaporated as their minds overflowed.

Yagharek watched in his mirrored eyepieces, not wanting to see.

The two moths still clinging to the ceiling of the dome dropped suddenly away. They plummeted towards the earth, to lurch away from gravity with a stunning curving glide. They swept up the steep sides of the red pyramid, rising like devils from inside the earth, manifesting beside the transfixed cactacae horde.

One reached out with grasping creepers and whipped it around the thick leg of one of the cactus people. Thin arms and avaricious talons bit into cactus flesh without response, as the three slake-moths selected their victims, each grabbing hold of one of the entranced elders.

On the ground below the lights were moiling in confusion. The armed patrols were running in circles, shouting to each other, aiming their weapons skyward and lowering them again, cursing. They could see almost nothing. All they knew was that some vague, fluttering things were whirling like leaves around the top of the temple, and that the elders had stopped firing the sunspear.

A group of hard, brave warriors ran in to the entrance of the temple, racing up its wide staircases towards their leaders. They were too slow. They were helpless. The moths moved away from the building, slipping smoothly through the sky, their wings still stretched out, somehow flying while the wings presented an unmoving, mesmerizing vista. Each moth dipped slightly in the air as its prey was dragged from the edge of the brick. The three cactus elders dangled in snares, cat’s-cradles of eerie slake-moth limbs, gazing up in stupor at the tumbling storm of night-colours on their captors’ wings.

Several seconds before the squad of cactacae burst up from the trapdoor onto the roof, the moths disappeared. One by one, according to some flawless unspoken order, they shot straight up and burst out of the crack in the dome. They slipped out by some breakneck charm, passing without a moment’s pause through a gap not quite large enough for their wings.

They took their comatose prey with them, tugging the deadweight bodies into the night-city with a repulsive grace.

The cactus elders left beside the wilting sunspear shook themselves in confusion and exclaimed in amazement and discomfort as their minds returned to them. Their shouts became horrified when they saw that their companions had been taken. They wailed in rage and swung the sunspear up, aiming pointlessly at the empty skies. The younger warriors appeared, their rivebows and machetes poised. They looked around in confusion at the miserable scene and lowered their weapons.

Only then, finally, with the victims shouting blood-oaths and caterwauling in anger, with the night full of confused sounds, with the slake-moths flying out across the dark metropolis, did Yagharek emerge from the martial trance and continue climbing down the girders inside the Glasshouse dome. The monkey-constructs saw him move, and followed him towards the streets.

He moved sideways along cross-beams, ensuring that he came to ground behind the backs of the houses, in the little scrap of wasteland that surrounded the foetid stub of the canal.

Yagharek dropped the last few feet and landed silently, rolling on the broken bricks. He crouched and listened.

There were three little crunches as the mechanical apes landed around him and waited for orders or suggestions.

Yagharek peered into the filthy water beside him. The bricks were slippery with years of organic muck and slime. At one end, thirty feet or so within the dome’s walls, it came to an abrupt brick end. This must have been the start of a little tributary onto the main canal system. Where it met the dome’s wall, the canal was cut off with a rudely made blockage of concrete and iron. It had been hammered into place in the water, its edges sealed as tight as they could. There were still enough tiny impurities and channels in the sodden brickwork to ensure that the trench was kept full of water from outside. It seeped in through the decaying stone and eddied to a stop, thick with rubbish and dead things, a cloying broth of water-rotting filth.

Yagharek could smell it. He crept a little further away, towards the squat stumps of a wall that rose out of the shattered architecture. Outside, he realized, in the streets of the Glasshouse, the frantic shouts continued. The air was full of idiot demands for action.

He was about to settle down, to wait for Shadrach and the others, when Yagharek saw mounds of the broken bricks rising all around him. They tumbled to the ground with a little thudding downpour. Isaac and Shadrach, Pengefinchess and Derkhan and Lemuel and Tansell rose out of the brickdust. Yagharek saw that a pile of scrap-wire and glass behind them was two more monkey-constructs, moving forward now to join their fellows.

For a moment, no one spoke. Then Isaac stumbled forward, trailing ashes and grime. The sewer muck that coated his clothes and bag was now coated with the grit from the collapsed buildings. His helmet-another like Shadrach’s, complex and mechanical looking-lolled battered and absurd on his head.

“Yag,” he said haltingly. “Good to see you, old son. So glad…you’re all right.” He grasped Yagharek’s hand, and the garuda, taken aback, did not extricate himself from the grip.

Yagharek felt himself emerge from a reverie he had not known he was in, looking around him, seeing Isaac and the others clearly, for the first time. He felt a belated surge of relief. They were filthy and scratched and bruised, but none of them looked hurt.

“Did you see it?” said Derkhan. “We’d just come up-it took us ages to work our way through the damn sewers, we kept hearing things…” She shook her head at the memory. “We found our way up through a manhole and we were in a street not too far from here. It was chaos, total chaos! The patrols were all running towards the temple, and we saw some…that light-gun thing. It was quite easy to make our way here. No one was interested in us…” Her voice trailed off. “We didn’t really see what happened,” she concluded quietly.

Yagharek breathed in deep.

“The moths are here,” he said. “I have seen their nest. I can take us there.”

The assembled company were elyctrified.

“Don’t the damn cactus know where they are?” said Isaac. Yagharek shook his head (a human gesture, the first he had learnt).

“They do not know the slake-moths sleep in their houses,” said Yagharek. “I heard them shouting: they think the moths come in to attack them. They think them intruders from without. They do not…” Yagharek stopped, thinking of that panic-stricken scene on the top of the cactacae sun-temple, of the helmetless cactus elders, the brave, idiot soldiers charging up, lucky enough to have missed the moths, saving themselves from pointless death. “They do not know how to deal with the moths at all,” he said quietly.

As he watched, Pengefinchess’s undine swept over her shirt from below, wetting her skin, rinsing the dust from her and her clothes, leaving them incongruously clean.

“We should find the nest,” said Yagharek. “I can take us to it.”

The adventurers nodded and began an automatic inventory of their weapons and equipment. Isaac and Derkhan looked nervous, but set their jaws. Lemuel looked away sardonically and began to pick his nails with a knife.

“There is something you must know,” said Yagharek. He was addressing everyone, and there was something peremptory in his tone, something that would not be ignored. Tansell and Shadrach looked up from carefully rummaging through their backpacks. Pengefinchess put down the bow she had been testing. Isaac looked at Yagharek with a terrible forlorn resignation.

“Three moths left by the broken roof, dandling mindless cactacae. But there are four. Vermishank told us. Perhaps he is wrong, or perhaps he lied. Perhaps another has died.

“Or perhaps,” he said, “one has stayed behind. Perhaps one is waiting for us.”

Chapter Forty-Four

The cactacae patrols huddled together at the base of the Glasshouse, arguing with the remaining elders.

Shadrach crouched behind an alley, out of sight, and pulled a miniature telescope from some hidden pocket. He flicked it out to its full extent, played it over the congregated soldiers.

“They really don’t seem to know what to do,” he mused quietly. The rest of the intruding gang were huddled behind him, flat against the damp wall. They were as unobtrusive as they could make themselves in the moving shadows cast by the elevated torches that sputtered and burnt above them. “That must be why they have this curfew going on. The moths are taking them. Of course, it may always be in place. Whatever-” he turned to face the others “-it’s going to help us.”

It was not hard to creep unseen through the darkened streets of the Glasshouse. Their passage was quite unimpeded. They followed Pengefinchess, who moved with a weird gait, halfway between a frog’s leap and a thief’s creep. She held her bow in one hand, in the other an arrow with a wide, flanged head for use against cactacae, but she did not have to use it. Yagharek moved with her, a few feet behind, hissing directions at her. Occasionally she would stop and gesticulate behind her, flattening against the wall, hiding behind some cart or stall, watching as a brave or foolhardy soul above her pulled back the curtain from their window and peered into the street.

The five monkey-constructs scampered mechanically beside their organic companions. Their heavy metal bodies were quiet. They emitted only a few strange sounds. Isaac did not doubt that for the cactus people of the dome, the regular diet of nightmares would that night be amended to include some metallic scuttling thing, some clattering menace that stalked the streets.

Isaac found walking in the dome deeply unsettling. Even with the red-stone additions to the architecture and the spitting torchlight, the streets seemed basically normal. They could have been anywhere in the city. And yet, stretching over everything, creeping inwards from horizon to horizon, encircling the world like some claustrophobic sky, the enormous dome defined everything. Glimmers of light came through from outside, warped by the thick glass, uncertain and vaguely threatening. The black lattice of ironwork that held the glass in place ensnared the little townscape like a netting, like a vast spider’s web.

At that thought, Isaac felt a sudden shuddering lurch of emotion.

He felt a vertiginous sense of certainty.

The Weaver was somewhere nearby.

He faltered as he ran and looked up. He had seen the world as a web, for a split second, had glimpsed the worldweb itself, and had sensed the proximity of that mighty arachnid spirit.

“Isaac!” hissed Derkhan, running past him. She pulled him with her. He had been standing still in the street, gazing skyward, desperately trying to find his way into that awareness again. He tried to whisper to her, to let her know what he had realized, as he stumbled after her, but he could not be clear and she could not listen. She dragged him with her through the dark streets.

After a twisting journey, ducking out of sight of patrols and glancing up at the glowering glass sky, they halted before a clutch of dark buildings, at the intersection of two deserted streets. Yagharek waited until they were all close enough to hear him, before turning and gesturing.

“From that top window there,” he said.

The swooping dome bore down inexorably on the tail of the terrace, destroying the rooftops and reducing the mass of the street’s houses to ever-more-squat piles of rubble. But Yagharek was pointing at the end furthest from the wall, where the buildings were mostly intact.

The three floors below the attic were occupied. Glimmers of light spilt from the edges of curtains.

Yagharek ducked back around the edge of a little alley and pulled the others in after him. Way off to the north, they could still hear the consternated shouting from the confused patrols, desperate to decide what to do.

“Even if it wasn’t too risky to get the cactacae on our side,” hissed Isaac, “we’d be fucked if we tried to get them to help us now. They’re in a damn frenzy. One sniff of us and they’ll go berserk, hack us up with those rivebows faster’n you can say ‘knife.’ ”

“We must go past the rooms where the cactus people sleep,” said Yagharek. “We must get to the top of the house. We must find where the slake-moths come from.”

“Tansell, Penge,” said Shadrach decisively, “you watch the door.” They looked at him for a moment, then both nodded. “Prof? I reckon you’d best come in with me. And these constructs…you think they’ll be helpful, yes?”

“I think they’ll be damn well essential,” said Isaac. “But listen…I think the…I think there’s a Weaver here.”

Everyone stared at him.

Derkhan and Lemuel looked incredulous. The adventurers were quite impassive.

“What makes you say that, prof?” asked Pengefinchess mildly.

“I…I could sort of…sense it. We’ve dealt with it before. It said it might see us again…”

Pengefinchess glanced at Tansell and Shadrach. Derkhan spoke hurriedly.

“It’s true,” she said. “Ask Pigeon. He saw the thing.” Reluctantly, Lemuel nodded that yes, he had.

“But there’s not much we can do about it,” he said. “We can’t control the bugger, and if he comes for us or them, we’re pretty much at the mercy of events. He might do nothing. You said it yourself, ‘Zaac: he’ll do whatever he wants.”

“So,” said Shadrach slowly, “we’re still going in. Any arguments?” There were none. “Right. You, garuda. You’ve seen them. You saw where they came from. You should come. So it’s me, the prof, the bird-man and the constructs. The rest of you stay here, and do exactly what Tansell and Penge tell you. Understood?”

Lemuel nodded, uncaring. There was a glowering moment with Derkhan, as she swallowed her resentment. Shadrach’s hard, commanding tone was impressive. She might not like him, she might think him worthless scum, but he knew his business. He was a killer, and that was what they needed right now. She nodded.

“First sign of any trouble you get out of here. Back to the sewers. Disappear. Regroup at the dump tomorrow, if need be. Understood?” This time he was speaking to Pengefinchess and Tansell. They nodded brusquely. The vodyanoi was whispering to her elemental and checking through her quiver. Some of her arrows were complicated affairs, with thin, spring-loaded blades that would whip out on contact to slice almost with the savagery of a rivebow.

Tansell was checking his guns. Shadrach hesitated a moment, then unbuckled his blunderbuss and handed it to the taller man, who accepted it with a nod of thanks.

“I’ll be at close quarters,” said Shadrach. “I’ll not need it.” He drew his carved pistol. The daemonic face at the end of the muzzle seemed to move in the half-light. Shadrach whispered; it seemed as if he was speaking to his gun. Isaac suspected that the weapon was thaumaturgically enhanced.

Shadrach, Isaac and Yagharek walked slowly away from the group.

“Constructs!” Isaac hissed. “With us.” There was a pistoned hissing and the shudder of metal as the five compact little simian bodies came away with them.

Isaac and Shadrach looked over at Yagharek, then tested their mirror-helms to make sure their reflected vision was clear.

Tansell was standing before the little huddling group, making notes in a little book. He looked up, pursed his lips and stared at Shadrach, his head on one side. He looked up at the torches above them, took in the angle of the roofs that loomed over them. He scrawled obscure formulae.

“I’m going to try and get a veil-hex going,” he said. “You’re too visible. There’s no point asking for trouble.” Shadrach nodded. “Shame we can’t get the constructs as well, really.” Tansell motioned the automated apes out of the way. “Penge, will you help?” he said. “Channel a bit of puissance my way, will you? This shit is draining.”

The vodyanoi crept over a little and placed her left hand in Tansell’s right. Both of them concentrated, their eyes closing. There was no movement or sound for a minute; then, as Isaac watched, both their eyes fluttered blearily open at the same moment.

“Extinguish those damn lights,” hissed Tansell, and Pengefinchess’s mouth moved silently with his. Shadrach and the others looked around, unsure what he was referring to, when they saw him glaring at the flaming streetlamps above them.

Quickly, Shadrach beckoned Yagharek. He strode over to the nearest lamp and linked his hands, making a step. He braced his legs.

“Use your cloak,” he said. “Get up there and smother the flame.”

Isaac was probably the only person to see Yagharek’s infinitesimal hesitation. He realized the bravery he was seeing as Yagharek obeyed, preparing to tangle up and ruin his last disguise. Yagharek undid the clasp at his throat and stood before them all, his beaked and feathered head uncovered, the enormous emptiness behind his back shriekingly visible, his scars and stubs covered with a thin shirt.

Yagharek clutched Shadrach’s linked hands as gently as he could with those great taloned feet. He stood up. Shadrach lifted the hollow-boned garuda with ease. Yagharek swung his heavy cloak over the sticky, spitting torch. It snuffed with a burst of black smoke. Shadows fell on them like predators as the light went out.

He stepped down and Shadrach and he moved quickly to the left, to the other flame that illuminated the cul-de-sac they crouched in. They repeated their operation, and the little brick gully was doused with darkness.

When he stepped down, Yagharek opened out his ruined cloak, charred and split and foul with tar. He paused for a moment and tossed it away from him. He looked tiny and forlorn in his dirty shirt. His weapons dangled in full view.

“Move into the deepest shadow,” hissed Tansell, his voice grating. Again, Pengefinchess’s mouth mirrored his own, and emitted not a sound.

Shadrach stepped backwards, finding a little alcove in the brick, tugging Yagharek and Isaac in with him, flattening them against the old wall.

They pushed themselves down, settled themselves and were still.

Tansell moved his left arm out stiffly and slung the end of a roll of thick copper wire towards them. Shadrach reached out and caught it easily. He wrapped it around his own neck, then looped it quickly over his companions. Then he slipped back into the darkness. At the other end, Isaac saw, the wire was attached to a handheld engine, some clockwork motor, the catch of which Tansell released, letting the momentum take the mechanism, unwinding and dynamic.

“Ready,” Shadrach said.

Tansell began to hum and whisper, spitting out weird sounds. He was almost invisible. As Isaac watched him, he could see nothing more than a figure shrouded in obscurity, trembling with effort. The murmuring increased.

A shock snapped through him. Isaac spasmed a little and felt Shadrach hold him where he was. Isaac’s skin crawled and he felt a stinging current trickle in through his pores, where the wire touched his skin.

The sensation continued for a minute, and then dissipated as the engine wound down.

“All right,” croaked Tansell. “Let’s see if it’s worked.”

Shadrach stepped out of the hollow into the street.

The shadows came with him.

Enveloping him was an indistinct aura of darkness, the same one that had covered him as he stood in the deep shade. Isaac stared at him, saw the patch of deep black in Shadrach’s eyes and below his chin. Shadrach stepped slowly forward, and into the light shed by torches in the junction a little way off.

The shadows on his face and body did not alter. They remained fixed in the conjuncture they had assumed as he crouched in the coal darkness, exactly as if he stood still hidden from the flickering glow, beside the wall. The shadows that clung to him extended perhaps an inch from his skin, discolouring the air that surrounded him like a caliginous halo.

There was something else, an untimely stillness that crept with him even as Shadrach moved. It was as if the frozen furtiveness of his concealment in the bricks suffused the shadows that coated him. He stalked forward, yet the sense of it was that he was still. He confused the eye. You could follow his progress if you knew he was there and were determined to watch, but it was easier not to notice him.

Shadrach motioned Isaac and Yagharek to join him.

Am I like him? thought Isaac as he crept out into the lighter darkness. Do I slip around the corners of your eye? Am I half invisible, bringing my shadow-cover with me?

He looked over at Derkhan, and saw by her wide-mouthed stare that he was. To his left, Yagharek too was an indistinct figure.

“First sign of sun-up, go,” whispered Shadrach to his companions. Tansell and Pengefinchess nodded. They had disengaged, and shook their heads in exhaustion. Tansell raised his hand in a gesture of good luck.

Shadrach beckoned Isaac and Yagharek, and stepped out of the darkened alley into the sputtering firelight in front of the houses. After them came the monkeys, moving slowly, as silently as they could. They stood beside the two humans and the garuda, and the red light glinted violently from their battered metal shells. The same light slipped off the three hexed intruders like thin oil off a blade. It could find no purchase. The three unclear figures stood before the five quietly clattering constructs, and moved across the deserted street towards the house.

The cactacae did not lock their doors. It was easy enough to gain entrance to the house. Shadrach began to creep up the stairs.

As Isaac followed him, he sniffed at the exotic, unfamiliar smell of cactacae sap and strange food. Pots of sandy soil were placed all around the entrance hall, sporting a variety of desert plants, mostly unhealthy and dwindling in the interior of the house.

Shadrach turned and took in Isaac and Yagharek with a look.

Very slowly, he put his finger to his lips. Then he continued to climb.

As they approached the first floor, they heard a quiet argument in deep cactus voices. Yagharek translated what he understood in a tiny whisper, something about being afraid, an exhortation to trust the elders. The corridor was bare and unadorned. Shadrach paused and Isaac peered over his shoulder, saw that the door to the cactus-people’s room was wide open.

Inside he saw a large room with a very high ceiling, wrought, he realized as he saw the fringe of planking that skirted the walls seven feet up, by tearing out the floor of the rooms above. A gaslight was turned on low. A little way from the door, Isaac saw several sleeping cactacae, standing with their legs locked, immobile and impressive. Two figures next to each other were still awake, leaning in slightly, whispering.

Very slowly, Shadrach stalked like a predatory creature up the last of the stairs and past the door. He paused just before he reached it, and looked back and pointed at one of the monkey-constructs, then beside himself. He repeated the gesture. Isaac understood. He pulled himself close to the aural inputs of the construct and whispered instructions to it.

It scampered up the stairs with a quiet clatter that made Isaac wince, but the cactacae did not notice it. The construct squatted quietly down beside Shadrach, blocked from sight inside the room by his dark-drenched form. Isaac sent another construct to follow it, then signalled Shadrach to move.

At a slow, steady crawl, the big man crept in front of the doorway, shielding the constructs with his body. Their forms still caught the light, would glint as they passed the threshold. Shadrach moved without pause past the line of sight of the cactacae talking within, with the constructs creeping beside him hidden from the light, then on past the edge of the doorway into the darkness of the corridor beyond.

And then it was Isaac’s turn.

He indicated two more constructs hide behind his bulk, then began to crawl along the wooden floor. His belly hung down as he shuffled along with the constructs.

It was a frightening feeling, to move out from behind the wall and emerge in full view of the cactacae couple talking quietly as they stood ready to sleep. Isaac was huddled against the banisters on the hallway, as far from the door as he could go, but there were still several intolerable seconds when he crept through the dim cone of light towards the safety of the dark corridor beyond.

He had time to stare at the big cactus people standing in the hard dirt on the floor, whispering. Their eyes passed over him as he crept before their door, and he held his breath, but his thaumaturgic shadows augmented the darkness of the house, and he went unseen.

Then Yagharek, his scrawny form doing its best to hide the last of the constructs, crept past the light.

They regrouped before the next stairs.

“This section is easier,” whispered Shadrach. “There’s no one on the floor above, it’s just the ceiling of this one. And then above that…that’s where our slake-moths hide.”

Before they reached the fourth floor, Isaac tugged at Shadrach and pulled him to a stop. Watched by Shadrach and Yagharek, Isaac whispered again to one of the monkey-constructs. He held Shadrach still as the thing crept with mechanical stealth over the lip of the stairs, and disappeared into the dark room beyond.

Isaac held his breath. After a minute, the construct emerged and waved its arm jerkily, indicated them to come up.

They rose slowly into a long-deserted attic room. A window looked out onto the junction of the streets, a window without glass, whose dusty frame was scuffed with a variety of bizarre markings. It was through this little rectangle that light came in, a wan and changing exudation of the torches below.

Yagharek pointed at the window slowly.

“From there,” he said. “It came from there.”

The floor was littered with ancient rubbish, and thick in dust. The walls were scratched with unsettling random designs.

The room was traversed by a discomfiting river of air. It was a faint current, almost undetectable. In the motionless heat of the dome, it was unsettling and remarkable. Isaac looked around, trying to trace its source.

He saw it. Even sweating in the night-heat, he shivered slightly.

Directly opposite the window, the plaster of the wall lay in shredded layers across the floor. It had fallen from a hole, a hole that looked newly created, an irregular cavity in the bricks that raised to the height of Isaac’s thighs.

It was a glaring, looming wound in the wall. The breeze connected it and the window, as if some unthinkable creature breathed out in the bowels of the house.

“It’s in there,” said Shadrach. “That must be where they’re hiding. That must be the nest.”

Inside the hole was a complex and broken tunnel, carved into the substance of the house. Isaac and Shadrach squinted into its darkness.

“It doesn’t look wide enough for one of those bastards,” said Isaac. “I don’t think they work quite according to…uh…regular space.”

The tunnel was four feet or so wide, rough-hewn and deep. Its interior was quickly invisible. Isaac kneeled before it and sniffed deeply of the darkness. He looked up at Yagharek.

“You have to stay here,” he said. Before the garuda could protest, Isaac pointed to his head. “Me and Shad here, we’ve got the helmets that the Council gave us. And with this-” he patted his bag “-we might be able to get close to whatever, if anything, is in there.” He reached in and brought out a dynamo. It was the same engine the Council had used to amplify Isaac’s mindwaves, attracting his erstwhile pet. He also brought out a large tangle of metal-sheathed piping, coiled around his hand.

Shadrach kneeled next to him and lowered his head. Isaac slotted an end of piping into place on the helmet’s outlet, and twisted the bolts that held it.

“According to the Council, channellers use a setup like this for some technique called…displacement-ontolography,” mused Isaac. “Don’t ask me. Point is, these exhaust pipes will flush out our…uh…psychic effluvia…and discharge it out here.” He glanced up at Yagharek. “No mindprint. No taste, no trail.” He spun the last bolt firmly and rapped Shadrach’s helmet gently. He lowered his own head and Shadrach began to repeat the operation. “See, if there is a moth down there, Yag, and you go anywhere near it, it’ll taste you. But it shouldn’t taste us. That’s the theory.”

When Shadrach was done, Isaac stood and threw the ends of the piping to Yagharek.

“Each of those is about…twenty-five, thirty feet. Hang on to it till it’s taut, then let us go on with it trailing behind. All right?” Yagharek nodded. His stood stiff, angry at being left, but understanding without question that there was no choice.

Isaac took two coiling wires and attached them first to the motor he held, then slotted the other end of each into a valve on his and Shadrach’s helmets.

“There’s a little antacidic chymical battery in there,” he said, waving the engine. “It works in conjunction with a metaclockwork design pinched from the khepri. Are we ready?” Quickly, Shadrach checked his gun, touched each of his other weapons in turn, then nodded. Isaac felt for his flintlock and the unfamiliar knife at his belt. “All right then.”

He snapped the little lever on the dynamo. A little humming hiss emerged from the engine. Yagharek held the outlets dubiously, peered into them. He felt some vague sensation, some weird little wash, trembling through him from the rims of the pipes. A little tremble passed through him from the hands up, a tiny tremor of fear that was not his own.

Isaac pointed at three of the monkey-constructs.

“Go in,” he said. “Four feet ahead of us. Move slowly. Halt for danger. You-” he pointed at another “-go behind us. One stay with Yag.”

Slowly, one by one, the constructs trooped into the darkness.

Isaac briefly laid a hand on Yagharek’s shoulder.

“Back soon, old son,” he said quietly. “Watch out for us.”

He turned away and kneeled, preceded Shadrach into the shaft of shattered brick, crouching and working his way into the stygian hole.

The tunnel was part of a subversive topography.

It crept at bizarre angles between the walls of the terrace, tight and close, sending the sound of his breath and the clanking of the monkeys’ bouncing into Isaac’s ears. His hands and knees ached from the crushing pressure of the sharp stone-shards under him. Isaac estimated that they were moving back through the terraced houses. They were shuffling downwards, and Isaac remembered how the curve of the dome had decapitated the houses at a lower and lower point as they approached the glass. The closer the houses were to the edge of the dome, he realized, the lower they would be, the more filled with old wreckage.

They were shuffling their way along the little stub of the street, towards the glass dome, down through deserted floors in an interstitial burrow. Isaac shivered for a moment in the dark. He was sweating from heat and from fear. He was terribly frightened. He had seen the slake-moths. He had seen them feed. He knew what might be before them in the depths of this wedge of rubble.

After a short time of crawling Isaac felt a moment’s drag on him, then a release. He had reached the full extent of his piping, and Yagharek had let it go to drag behind him.

Isaac did not speak. He could hear Shadrach behind him, breathing deeply and grunting. The two men could not move more than five feet apart, because the wires connected their helmets to a single motor.

Isaac threw up his face and swung it around him, desperately searching for light.

The monkey-constructs swung their way up. Every few moments, one would momentarily turn on the lights in its eyes, and for a minuscule fraction of a second, Isaac would see a stark crawl-way of littered brick and the metal gleam of the constructs’ bodies. Then the lights would go out. Isaac would try to negotiate by the ghost image that slowly ebbed from his eyes.

In the absolute dark, it was easy to sense the slightest glimmer. Isaac knew that he was crawling towards a source of light when he looked up and saw the grey outline of the tunnel ahead. Something pressed Isaac’s chest. He started massively, then recognized the pewter fingers and dark bulk of a construct. Isaac hissed to Shadrach to stop.

The construct gesticulated to Isaac with exaggerated jerky gestures. It pointed forward, towards its two fellows that hovered at the edge of the visible shaft, where the tunnel turned a sharp corner upwards.

Isaac indicated that Shadrach should wait. Then he crept forward at an almost motionless pace. Glacial dread was beginning to creep through his system, from the stomach out. He breathed deep and slow. He shifted his feet slowly, inching along, until he felt his skin prickle as it emerged into a shaft of faint light.

The tunnel ended in a wall of brick five feet high, on three sides of him. A wall rose behind him, above the tunnel mouth. Isaac looked up and saw a ceiling way above him. A pestilential stench began to dribble into the hole. Isaac screwed up his face.

He was crouching in a hole, by the wall, embedded in the cement floor of a room. He could see nothing of the chamber above and beyond him. But he could hear faint sounds. A slight rustle, like wind against discarded paper. The softest sound of liquid adhesion, like fingers sticky with glue meeting and parting.

Isaac swallowed three times and whispered to himself, gearing himself up to bravery, forcing himself on. He turned his back on the bricks before him, on the room beyond them. He saw Shadrach watching him on all fours, his face set. Isaac looked intently into his mirrors. He tugged briefly at the pipe attached to the top of his helmet, that twisted its way backwards into the tunnel and disappeared below Shadrach’s body into the depths, diverting his telltale thoughts.

Then Isaac began to stand, very slowly. He stared with violent fervour into the mirrors, as if trying to prove himself to some testing god-See! I’m not looking behind me, you damn well see if I do! The top of Isaac’s head breached the lip of the hole, and more light fell across him. The foul smell grew stronger still.

His terror was very strong. His sweat was no longer warm.

Isaac tilted his head and stood a little taller, until he saw the room itself in the sepia light that fought its way through one filthy, tiny window.

It was a long, thin room. Eight or so feet wide, and about twenty feet long. Dusty and long-deserted, with no visible entrance or exit, no hatches or doors.

Isaac did not breathe. At the furthest end of the room, sitting and seeming to stare directly at him, the lattice of its complex killing arms and limbs moving in baffling antiphase, its wings half-open in languorous threat, was a slake-moth.

It took a moment for Isaac to realize that he had not moaned. It took another few seconds of staring into the vile thing’s twitching antennaed sockets to realize that it had not sensed him. The moth shifted and turned a little, moving until it was three-quarters on to him.

Absolutely silently, Isaac exhaled. He twitched his head fractionally, to see the rest of the room.

When he saw its contents, he had to fight all over again not to make a sound.

Lying at irregular intervals the whole length of the floor, the room was littered with the dead.

That, Isaac realized, was the source of that unspeakable stench. He turned his head and put his hand over his mouth as he saw that near him lay a decomposing cactacae child, its rotting flesh falling from fibrous hardwood bones. A little way away was the stinking carcass of a human, and beyond that Isaac saw another, fresher human corpse, and a bloated vodyanoi. Most of the bodies were cactus.

Some, he saw with misery and without surprise, were still breathing. They lay discarded: husks; empty bottles. They would drool and piss and shit their last imbecilic days or hours out in this stifling hole, until they died of hunger and thirst and rotted as mindlessly as they had lived at the end.

They could not be in paradise or Hell, thought Isaac despondently. Their spirits could not roam in spectral form. They had been metabolized. They had been drunk and shat out, converted by vile oneirochymical processes and become fuel for a slake-moth flight.

Isaac saw that in one of its crooked hands, the moth was dragging the body of a cactus elder, sash still dangling portentous and absurd about its shoulders. The moth was sluggish. It raised its arm indolently and let the mindless cactus man fall heavily across the mortar floor.

Then the slake-moth moved a little and reached underneath it with its hind legs. It shuffled forward a little, its heavy, uncanny body slipping across the dusty floor. From below its abdomen, the slake-moth pulled out a great, soft globe. It was about three feet across, and as Isaac squinted into his mirror to see it more clearly, he thought he recognized the thick, mucal texture and drab chocolate colour of dreamshit.

His eyes widened.

The slake-moth measured the thing with its back legs, spreading them to encompass the fat globule of slake-moth milk. That’s got to be worth fucking thousands…Isaac thought. No, cut it to make it palatable, there’s probably millions of guineas there! No wonder everyone’s trying to get these damn things back…

Then, as Isaac watched, a piece of the slake-moth’s abdomen unfolded. A long organic syringe emerged, a tapering segmented extrusion that bent backwards from the slake-moth’s tail on some chitinous hinge. It was nearly as long as Isaac’s arm. As he watched, his mouth slack with revulsion and horror, the slake-moth prodded it against the ball of raw dreamshit, paused a moment, then plunged it deep into the centre of the sticky mass.

Under the armour that had unfolded, where the soft part of the underbelly was visible, from where the long probe had emerged, Isaac saw the abdomen of the slake-moth convulse peristaltically, squirting some unseen thing the length of the bony shaft into the depths of the dreamshit.

Isaac knew what he was seeing. The dreamshit was a food source, to give starving hatchlings reserves of energy. The protruding jag of flesh was an ovipositor.

The slake-moth was laying its eggs.

Isaac slipped back below the surface of the wall. He was hyperventilating. Urgently, he beckoned Shadrach.

“One of the godsdamned things is right there and it’s laying its eggs so we have to damn well take it right now…” he hissed. Shadrach smacked his hand over Isaac’s mouth. He held Isaac’s eyes until the older man had calmed a little. Shadrach turned his back as Isaac had done, then stood slowly and gazed for himself onto the grisly scene. Isaac sat with his back to the bricks, waiting.

Shadrach dropped down again to Isaac’s level. His face was set.

“Hmmm,” he murmured. “I see. Right. Did you say the moth-thing can’t sense constructs?” Isaac nodded.

“As far as we know,” he said.

“Right then. You’ve done a damn fine job programming these constructs. And they’re an extraordinary design. Do you really mean it, that they’ll know when to attack, if we give them instructions? They can understand variables that complicated?”

Isaac nodded again.

“Then we have a plan,” said Shadrach. “Listen to me.”

Chapter Forty-Five

Slowly, trembling almost uncontrollably, the memory of Barbile’s quasi-death vivid in him, Isaac climbed out of the hole.

He kept his eyes rigidly on the mirrors before him. He was dimly aware of the discoloured wall behind them. The vile shape of the slake-moth shook in the mirrors as his head moved.

As Isaac emerged, the slake-moth stopped moving suddenly. Isaac stiffened. It turned its head upwards and flickered its enormous tongue through the air. The vestigial antennae in its ocular sockets waved uneasily from side to side. Isaac moved again, creeping towards the wall.

The slake-moth moved its head uneasily. There was obviously some leakage, Isaac thought, from the edge of his helmet, some trickles of thought that wafted tantalizingly through the aether. But nothing clear enough for the slake-moth to find him.

When Isaac had made his way to the wall, Shadrach followed him up and into the room. Again, his presence discomfited the slake-moth a little, but nothing more than that.

After Shadrach, three monkey-constructs pulled themselves into view, leaving one to guard the tunnel. They began to walk slowly towards the slake-moth. It turned towards them, seemed to watch them without eyes.

“I think it can sense their physical shape and their movement, and ours as well,” whispered Isaac. “But without any mental trail, it doesn’t see any…either of us as sapient life. We’re just moving physical stuff, like trees in the wind.”

The slake-moth was turning to face the oncoming constructs. They separated and began to approach the moth from different directions. They did not move fast, and the slake-moth did not seem concerned. But it was a little wary.

“Now,” whispered Shadrach. He and Isaac reached out and began slowly to haul in the metal piping that extended from the top of their helmets.

As the open ends of the pipes drew closer, the slake-moth grew agitated. It skittered back and forth, returning to protect its eggs, then stalking forward a few feet, its teeth chattering in a terrible rictus.

Isaac and Shadrach looked at each other and counted silently together.

On three, they pulled the ends of their pipes out into the open room. In a single movement, as swiftly as they could, they whipped the metal around and sent the open ends into the corner, fifteen feet from them.

The slake-moth went berserk. It hissed and screeched in a loathsome register. It hunched up its body, increasing its size, and a host of exoskeletal jags flicked out of hollows in its flesh in organic threat.

Isaac and Shadrach stared into their mirrors, awed by its monstrous majesty. It had spread its wings and turned to face the corner where the pipe ends coiled. Its wing-patterns pulsed with misdirected, hypnotic energy.

Isaac was frozen. The slake-moth’s wings eddied with uncanny patterns. It stalked towards the pipe-ends in a low, predatory crouch, now on four legs, now six, now two.

Quickly, Shadrach pulled Isaac towards the dreamshit ball.

They walked forward, passing the incensed, hungry slake-moth, almost close enough to touch. They saw it approaching in their mirrors, a massive looming animal weapon. As they passed it, both men turned smoothly on their heels, walking backwards towards the dreamshit at one moment, then forwards the next. That way, they kept the slake-moth behind them, visible in the mirrors.

The moth walked straight past the constructs, knocking one aside without even noticing, as a serrated spine swung sideways in quivering, ravenous rage.

Isaac and Shadrach walked carefully, checking in their mirrors that the ends of their mental exhaust-pipes remained where they had been thrown, acting as slake-moth bait. Two of the monkey-constructs followed the slake-moth at a small distance, the third approaching the eggs.

“Quickly,” hissed Shadrach, and pushed Isaac to the floor. Isaac fumbled with the knife at his belt, wasting seconds with the clip. Then he had it out. He hesitated a moment, and then pushed it smoothly into the big, sticky mass.

Shadrach watched intently in his mirrors. The slake-moth, shadowed by the hovering constructs, pounced absurdly on the snaking ends of the pipes.

As Isaac drew his knife down the surface of the egg-case, the moth flailed with fingers and tongue to find the enemy whose mind remained tauntingly conscious.

Isaac wound the ends of his shirt around his hands and began to tug at the split he had made in the mass of dreamshit. With a big effort, he pulled the yielding ball apart.

“Quickly,” said Shadrach again.

The dreamshit-raw, uncut, distilled and pure-seeped through the cloth around Isaac’s hands and made his fingers tingle. He gave one last tug. The centre of the dreamshit ball was laid open, and there in the centre was a little clutch of eggs.

Each was translucent and oval, smaller than a hen’s. Through its semi-liquid skin, Isaac could see some faint, coiling shape. He looked up and beckoned the monkey-construct that stood nearby.

At the far end of the room, the slake-moth had picked up one of the metal tubes, putting its face in the flow of emotion from its open end. It shook it in confusion. It opened its mouth and unrolled its obscene, intrusive tongue. It licked the end of the pipe once, then plunged its tongue into it, eagerly seeking the source of this tempting flow.

“Now!” said Shadrach. The slake-moth’s hands moved along the coiled metal, seeking purchase. Shadrach’s face went suddenly white. He spread his legs and braced himself. “Now, dammit, do it now!” he shouted. Isaac looked up in alarm.

Shadrach was staring intently into his mirrors. With his left hand, he was aiming behind him, pointing his thaumaturgic pistol at the slake-moth.

Time slowed down as Isaac looked into his own mirrors and saw the dull metal pipe in the hands of the moth. He saw Shadrach’s hand, steady as the dead, clutching his flintlock, pointing it behind his own back. He saw the monkey-constructs waiting for their order to attack.

He looked down again at the vile clutch of eggs, seeping and glutinous below him.

He opened his mouth to shout to the constructs, and as he inhaled to yell, the slake-moth leaned forward a moment then pulled at the piping with all its horrendous strength.

Isaac’s voice was drowned by Shadrach’s wail and the explosion from his flintlock. He had waited a moment too long before firing. The enhanced ball smacked with a boom into the substance of the wall. Shadrach was pulled through the air. The leather strap attaching his helmet to his head snapped. The helmet flew away from him and arced at speed on the end of the pipe, tugging the connections from Isaac’s engine, shattering against the wall. Shadrach’s perfect curving trajectory collapsed as he was untethered. He tumbled in an ugly broken arc, his gun flying away from him, until he landed heavy and unwieldy on the concrete floor. His head smacked against the rough concrete floor, sending blood spattering out across the dust.

Shadrach screamed and moaned, rolled, clutching his head, trying to right himself.

His weltering mindwaves suddenly burst into the open. The slake-moth turned, growling.

Isaac shouted at the constructs. As the slake-moth began to stamp horribly quickly towards Shadrach, the two that stood behind it leapt up at it simultaneously. Flame burst from their mouths, flaring across the slake-moth’s body.

It screeched, and a clutch of skin-whips flailed across its smouldering back, battering against the constructs. The moth did not stop bearing down on Shadrach. A tentacular growth snapped around one of the construct’s necks and tugged it from the slake-moth’s back with awesome ease. It sent the metal body crunching against the wall as brutally as it had the helmet.

There was a terrible sound of rending as the construct burst apart, spreading shattered metal and flaming oil across the floor. It roared a little way from Shadrach, melting metal and cracking the concrete.

The construct by Isaac spat a gobbet of strong acid across the clutch of eggs. Instantly, they began to smoke, to split and hiss and dissolve.

The slake-moth let out an unholy, merciless, terrible scream.

Instantly it turned from Shadrach and tore across the room towards its brood. Its tail lashed violently from side to side, catching Shadrach as he lay moaning, sending him sprawling through his own blood.

Isaac stamped once, savagely, on the liquefying egg-clutch, then stumbled back and out of the slake-moth’s path. His foot slithered with the glabrous mess. He half ran, half crawled towards the wall, clutching his knife in one hand, the precious engine that kept his mindwaves hidden in the other.

The construct still clinging to the slake-moth’s back breathed fire all across its skin once again, and it screeched in pain. The segmented arms flew back and clutched for purchase on the construct’s skin. Without pausing, the moth got a grip under the construct’s arms and tore the thing from its skin.

It hammered it against the floor, shattering its glass lenses and bursting the metal casing of its head, sending valves and wire spewing in its wake. It flung the broken body away from it in a heap of rubbish. The last construct drew back, trying to gain range from which to spray its enormous, maddened enemy.

Before the construct could spit its acid, two massive flanges of serrated bone snaked out faster than a whiplash and shattered it effortlessly into two.

Its top half twitched and tried to drag itself across the floor. The acid it had carried pooled beneath it in the dust in an acrid smoking sump, corroding the dead cactacae around it.

The slake-moth ran its hands through the viscid scum that had been its eggs. It hooted and crooned.

Isaac crept away from the moth, gazing at it in his mirrors, feeling his way along the wall towards Shadrach, who lay moaning, crying out, befuddled with pain.

In the mirrors before his eyes, Isaac saw the slake-moth turn. It hissed, its tongue flickering. It spread its wings, and bore down on Shadrach.

Isaac tried desperately to reach the other man, but he was too slow. The slake-moth stamped past him again, and Isaac turned smoothly once more, always keeping the terrible predator in his mirrors.

As he watched in horror, Isaac saw the slake-moth pull Shadrach upright. Shadrach’s eyes rolled. He was concussed and in pain, coated in blood.

He began to slide down the wall again. The slake-moth spread his arms wide and then, so fast that it was completed before Isaac realized it had started, it thrust at him with two of its long, jagged claws, slamming them through Shadrach’s wrists and into the brick and concrete behind them, physically pinning him to the wall.

Shadrach and Isaac cried out together.

With its two bone-spears wedged in place, the moth reached out with its quasi-human hands and coaxed at Shadrach’s eyes. Isaac moaned at him to beware, but the big warrior was confused and in agony, and desperately looking around to see what it was that hurt him so.

Instead, he saw the slake-moth’s wings.

He quietened suddenly, and the slake-moth, its back still smouldering and cracking with the heat from the construct’s attack, leaned forward to feed.

Isaac looked away. He turned his head carefully, so that he would not see that probing tongue suck the sentience from Shadrach’s brain. Isaac swallowed and began to walk slowly across the room, towards the hole and the tunnel. His legs shook and he clenched his jaw. His only hope was to leave. That way, he might survive.

He was careful to ignore the slobbering, sucking noises, the liquid grunts of pleasure and the drip-drip-drip of saliva or blood that came from behind him. Isaac made his careful way towards the only exit in the room.

As he neared it, he saw the end of the metal pipe that attached to his helmet still lying undisturbed by the wall. He breathed a prayer. His mental essence was still leaking into the room. The slake-moth must know that there was another sentient being in there with it. The closer Isaac came to the tunnel, the closer he would be to the pipe’s outlet. It would no longer be misleading about his location.

And yet, and yet, it seemed that he was lucky. The slake-moth was so intent on drinking its fill and, judging by the sounds of ripping tissue, of wreaking revenge on poor Shadrach’s wracked body, that it was paying no attention to the terrified presence behind it. Isaac was able to walk on, past it, away, right to the lip of the burrow.

But there, as he stood poised, ready to drop quietly into the dark where the construct still waited and creep his way out into the dome and away from this nightmare nest, he felt a trembling beneath his feet.

He looked down.

The sound of frantic clawing feet was skittering through the tunnel towards him. He stepped back, utterly aghast. He felt the brickwork tremble deep inside.

With an almighty crash, the monkey-construct came catapulting from the tunnel to slam against the wall of bricks. It tried to push back with its arms, to somersault up into the room, but its momentum took it far too fast, and both its arms snapped neatly off at the shoulder.

It tried to raise itself, smoke and fire gouting from its mouth, but a slake-moth tore out of the tunnel and trod on its head, bursting its intricate machinery.

The moth leapt up into the room, and for a long merciless moment, Isaac was staring directly at it, with its wings outstretched.

It was only after several moments of terror and despair that Isaac realized the newcomer was ignoring him, was hurling itself past him across the bodies in the room towards the ruined eggs.

And as it ran, it turned its head on its long, sinuous neck, and chattered its teeth in something like fear.

Isaac flattened himself against the wall again, peering into his mirrors at both the slake-moths.

The second moth forced open its teeth and spat out some high, gibbering sound. The first moth gave a last almighty suck and let Shadrach’s spent and ruined body fall. Then it moved back with its sibling, towards the glutinous ruins of the dreamshit and the eggs.

The two moths spread their wings. They stood wingtip to wingtip, their various armoured limbs extended, and waited.

Isaac crept slowly into the hole, not daring to wonder what was happening, why they were ignoring him. Behind him, the metal exhaust pipe snaked like an idiotic tail. As Isaac stared in bewilderment into his mirrors, unable to make sense of the scene behind him, the space around the tunnel entrance rippled for a moment. It buckled and suddenly flowered, and there in the pit with him stood the Weaver.

Isaac gaped in awe. The enormous arachnid creature loomed over him, looked down through a clutch of glinting eyes. The slake-moths bristled.

…GRIM AND NEBULOUS GRIMY AND NEBULAR YOU ARE YOU AREE…came that unmistakable voice, crooning into Isaac’s ears-especially his missing ear.

“Weaver!” He almost sobbed.

The vast spider presence leapt up, landing square on its four hind legs. It gesticulated intricately in the air with its knife hands.

…FOUND THE REAVER TEARING WORLDWEAVE OVER THE BLISTERING GLASS AND WE DANCED A BLOODTHIRSTY DUET EACH SAVAGE MOMENT MORE VIOLENT I CANNOT WIN WHEN THESE FOUR DASTARDLY CORNERS SQUARE UP TO ME…the Weaver said, and advanced on its prey. Isaac could not move. He gazed into the shards of mirror at the extraordinary contest behind him…HIDE LITTLE ONE YOU ARE A SKILFUL ONE FIXING THE RUCKS AND TEARS IT COMES AROUND YOU ONE HAS GONE TRAPPED INTO TRAPPING YOU AND CRUSHED LIKE WHEAT AND IT IS TIME TO FLEE BEFORE THE BEREFT BROTHERSISTER INSECTS ARRIVE TO MOURN THE MULCH YOU HELPED MELT…

They were coming, Isaac realized. The Weaver was warning him that they had sensed the death of the eggs, and were returning, too late, to protect the nest.

Isaac gripped hold of the edges of the tunnel, prepared to disappear into its folds. But he was held for a few seconds, his mouth hanging open in awe, his breathing shallow and amazed, by the sight of the slake-moths and the Weaver joining battle.

It was an elemental scene, something way beyond human ken. It was a flickering vision of horn blades moving much too fast for a human to see, an impossibly intricate dance of innumerable limbs across several dimensions. Gouts of blood sprayed in various colours and textures across the walls and floor, fouling the dead. Behind the unclear bodies, silhouetting them, the chymical fire hissed and rolled across the concrete floor. And all the while it fought, the Weaver sang its ceaseless monologue.

…OH HOW IT DOES HOW IT BRINGS ME TO THE BOIL I BUBBLE AND EFFERVESCE I AM DRUNK INTOXICATED ON THE JUICE OF ME THAT THESE MAD-WINGERS FERMENT…it Sang.

Isaac stared in astonishment. Extraordinary things were happening. The slashing and the punishing thrusts continued with fervour, but now the slake-moths were whipping their vast tongues back and forth through the air. They ran them at lightning speed over the body of the Weaver as it shuddered in and out of the material plane. Isaac saw their stomachs distend and contract, saw them lick the length of the Weaver’s abdomen then reel back as if drunk, then come back hard and attack again.

The Weaver slipped in and out of sight, was one minute focused and brutal and would then become giddy, hop for a moment on the point of one leg, singing without words, before snapping back to become a voracious killer again.

Unthinkable patterns flitted across the slake-moths’ wings, utterly unlike any Isaac had seen them produce before. They licked hungrily as they slashed and stabbed at their enemy. The Weaver spoke calmly to Isaac as it fought.

…NOW LEAVE THIS PLACE AND REGROUP WHILE I THE DRINKARD AND THESE MY BREWERS BICKER AND GASH BEFORE THESE TWO BECOME A TRIUMVIRATE OR WORSE AND I SCAMPER FOR SAFETY GO NOW DOMEWARD AND OUT WE WILL SEE THEE AND ME WE WILL COMMUNE GO NAKED GO NAKED AS A DEAD MAN ON THE RIVER’S DAWN AND I WILL FIND YOU EASY AS CAKE WHAT A PATTERN WHAT COLOURS WHAT INTRICATE THREADS THAT WILL BE WEAVE WELL AND PRETTY NOW RUN FOR YOUR SKIN…

The mad inebriated fight continued. As Isaac watched, he saw the Weaver being forced back, its energy always ebbing and flowing, moving like a vicious wind, but gradually retreating. Isaac’s terror suddenly returned. He ducked into the brick burrow and crawled away.

There was a frantic minute in the dark, as Isaac felt his way at speed along the broken floor of the tunnel. The skin on his hands and knees was flayed by stone.

Light glimmered ahead of him, around a corner and he sped up. He cried out in pain and astonishment as his palms slapped down onto a patch of smooth, scorching metal. He hesitated, groped around him with his ragged sleeve over his hand. The wall and floor and ceiling was plated with a buffed surface of what, in the faint light, looked like a band of pressed steel four feet wide. His face creased in incomprehension. He braced himself, then slid quickly over the metal, hot as a kettle on a fire, trying to keep his skin from its surface.

He breathed out so fast and hard he moaned. He hauled himself through the exit, collapsing across the floor in the dark room where Yagharek waited.

Isaac passed out for three or four seconds. He came to with Yagharek crying out to him, dancing from foot to foot. The garuda was tense but focused. He was utterly controlled.

“Wake,” spat Yagharek. “Wake.” He was shaking Isaac by his collar. Isaac opened his eyes wide. The shadows that caked Yagharek’s face were ebbing away, he realized. Tansell’s hex must be wearing off.

“You are alive,” said Yagharek. His voice was curt, pared down and bare of emotion. He spoke to save time and effort, to conserve himself. “As I waited, through the window came the blunt snout then the body of a slake-moth. I turned and watched through these mirrors. It was racing, confused. I was ready with my whip and I hit backwards at it, stinging it across its skin, making it shriek. I thought that would mean my death, but the thing raced past me and the ape-construct into the hole, folding its wings away into an impossible space. It ignored me. It looked behind it as if it were chased. I felt a rucking motion in space following it, something moving below the skin of the world, disappearing into the tunnel after the slake-moth. I sent the monkey-thing after it. I heard a crumpling sound, the whiplash of straining metal. I do not know what happened.”

“The godsdamn Weaver melted the construct…” he said, his voice shaking. “Gods only fucking know why.” He stood quickly.

“Where is Shadrach?” said Yagharek.

“He got fucking taken, didn’t he? He got fucking drunk up!” Isaac scrambled to the window and leaned out, looking out at the torchlit streets. He heard the heavy, ponderous sound of cactacae running. As torches were carried along surrounding alleys, the shadows slid and shifted like oil in water. Isaac turned back to face Yagharek.

“It was fucking horrible,” he said, his voice hollow. “There was nothing I could do…Yag, listen. The Weaver was in there and it told me to get the godsdamn out because the moths can smell the trouble…Shit, listen. We burnt its eggs.” He spat the words with hard satisfaction. “The fucking thing had laid and we got past it and burnt the damn things, but the other moths could sense it and they’re heading back here right now…We’ve got to get out.”

Yagharek was still for a moment, thinking quickly. He looked at Isaac and nodded.

They retraced their steps quickly down the dark stairs. They slowed as they approached the first floor, remembering the couple talking quietly on their mattresses, but they saw in the flickering light through the open door that the room was deserted. All the cactacae who had been sleeping were up and out, in the streets.

“Godsdamn!” swore Isaac. “We’ll be seen, we’ll be fucking seen. The dome must be fucking crawling. We’re losing our shadows.”

They hovered at the front door. Yagharek and Isaac peered around the corner into the street. There was a crackling susurrus from the raised torches on all sides. Across the street was the little alley, its torches still doused, in which their companions lurked. Yagharek strained to see into its dark, but could not.

At the end of the street by the dome wall, under the stubby, boarded-up remnants of the house in which, Isaac realized, was the slake-moths’ nest, stood a gang of cactacae. Opposite them, where the road joined others and moved towards the temple at the dome’s centre, little groups of cactus warriors rushed by in either direction.

“Godspit, they must’ve heard all that ruckus,” hissed Isaac. “We have to damn well move, or we’re dead. One at a time.” He grabbed Yagharek and braced his arms behind the garuda’s back. “You first, Yag. You’re quicker and harder to see. Go. Go.” He pushed Yagharek out into the street.

Yagharek was not wrong-footed. He sprinted lightly, increasing speed. It was not panicked flight which might attract attention. He kept his pace just low enough that if one of the cactus people glimpsed motion, they might think it one of their own people. The shadows and stillness still varnished his fleeting figure.

It was forty feet to the darkness. Isaac held his breath, watching the muscles move beneath Yagharek’s scarred back.

The cactus people were jabbering in their harsh pidgin, arguing over who was to go in. Two swung huge hammers, taking turns to batter the bricked-up entrance to the last low house where, for all Isaac knew, the slake-moths and the Weaver still danced lethally together.

The darkness of the alley accepted Yagharek.

Isaac breathed deep, then stepped out into the alley himself.

He strode quickly away from the doorway, into the open street, willing his uncanny shade-covering to deepen. He began to jog towards the alleyway.

As he reached the midway point of the junction, there was a buffeting, a storm of wings. Isaac looked back and up at the window, on the vertex of the wedge of architecture.

Scrabbling at it with a repulsive desperation, the third slake-moth pushed its way through into the interior, returning home.

His breath caught, but the beast was ignoring him, its fervour reserved for its ruined spawn.

As Isaac turned his face again, he realized that the cactacae at the far end of the street had also heard the sound. From where they stood, they could not see the window, could not see the monstrous form infiltrating the house. But they could see Isaac running from them, fat and furtive.

“Oh shit!” breathed Isaac, and broke into a full, lumbering run. There was a confusion of yells. One voice rose above the shouting and snapped orders. Several cactus warriors broke away from the congregation by the door and ran straight for Isaac.

They were not fast, but neither was he. They carried their massive weapons expertly, unimpeded as they ran. Isaac sprinted as best he could.

“I’m on your damn side!” he shouted uselessly as he ran. His words were inaudible. Even if they had heard him, it was inconceivable that the cactus warriors, frightened and bewildered and pugnacious, would have paid any heed before killing him.

The cactacae were yelling, screaming for other patrols. There were answering shouts from neighbouring streets.

An arrow snapped from the alley before Isaac, whipping past him and thudding into some flesh behind. There was a gasp and a curse of pain from one of his pursuers. Isaac made out shapes in the darkness of the alley. Pengefinchess resolved from shadows, drawing back her bowstring once more. She bellowed at him to hurry. Behind her, Tansell stood with the blunderbuss drawn, aiming it uncertainly over her head. His eyes were scanning desperately behind Isaac. He shouted something.

Derkhan and Lemuel and Yagharek were crouched a little way behind, ready to run. Yagharek held his whip coiled and ready. Isaac raced into the darkness. “Where’s Shad?” screamed Tansell again. “Dead,” shouted Isaac. Instantly, Tansell screamed with horrible anguish. Pengefinchess did not look up, but her arm spasmed and she almost dropped her arrow. She paused and aimed again. Tansell shot wildly over her head. The blunderbuss boomed and he staggered with the recoil. A great cloud of buckshot sprayed harmlessly over the heads of the cactus people.

“No!” shouted Tansell. “Oh Jabber no!” He was staring at Isaac, begging to be told that it was not true.

“I’m sorry, mate, truly, but we have to fucking go,” said Isaac urgently.

“He’s right, Tan,” said Pengefinchess, her voice desperately steady. She fired another arrow, with the spring-loaded blade that sliced a great gouge of cactus flesh. She stood, notching a third missile. “Let’s go, Tan. Don’t think, just move.”

There was a high-pitched whirring, and a cactacae chakri slammed into the brick by Tansell’s head. It embedded itself deep, sending a painful explosion of mortar-shards around it.

The cactacae squadron were approaching fast. Their faces were visible, twisted in rage.

Pengefinchess began to back away, tugging at Tansell.

“Come on!” she shouted. Tansell moved with her, muttering and moaning. He had dropped the gun, was crooking his hands like claws.

Pengefinchess ran, dragging Tansell. The others followed her, turning into the intricate maze of backstreets through which they had arrived.

The air behind them hummed with projectiles. Chakris and thrown axe-knives whistled past them.

Pengefinchess ran and leapt at an amazing speed. She turned occasionally and fired behind her, hardly aiming, before resuming her run.

“Constructs?” she shouted at Isaac.

“Fucked,” he wheezed. “You know how to get back to the sewers?”

She nodded and turned a corner sharply. The others followed her. As Pengefinchess plunged into the decrepit alleyways near the canal where they had hidden, Tansell turned suddenly back. His face was deep red. As Isaac watched, some little vein burst in the corner of Tansell’s eye.

He wept blood. He did not blink. He did not wipe it away.

Pengefinchess turned from the end of the street and howled at him not to be stupid, but he ignored her. His hands and limbs were trembling violently. He raised his gnarled hands and Isaac saw that his veins were protruding hugely, like a map across his skin.

Tansell began to pace back along the street, towards the turnoff where the cactacae would emerge.

Pengefinchess screamed for him one last time, then leapt mightily over a crumbling wall. She shouted for the others to follow her.

Isaac backed quickly towards the shattered brick, his eyes fixed on Tansell’s retreating figure.

Derkhan was scrambling up a little stairway of broken brick, hesitating and leaping down into the hidden yard where the vodyanoi wrestled with the manhole cover. It took Yagharek less than two seconds to scale the wall and drop to the other side. Isaac reached up and looked behind him again. Lemuel was running quickly down the alley, ignoring the desperate figure of Tansell behind him.

Tansell stood at the entrance to the alleyway. He shook with effort, his body coursing with thaumaturgic flow. His hair stood on end. Isaac saw little ebony sparks burst outwards from his body, snapping arcs of energy. The puissant charge that snapped and burst out from under his skin was absolutely dark. It glowed negatively, with unlight.

The cactacae turned the corner and were upon him. The vanguard of the group were startled by this strange, darkly shining figure with hands crooked like a vengeful skeleton, making the air crackle with charged thaumaturgons. Before they could react, Tansell let out a growl, and sizzling bolts of the black energy burst out of his body towards them.

They rolled like ball-lightning through the air and smacked into several cactacae. The hex strokes burst against their victims, dissipating across their skin in crackling veins. The cactus people flew yards backwards, slamming hard against the cobbles. One lay still. The others writhed, shouting in pain.

Tansell raised his arms higher, and a warrior stepped forward, his war-cleaver held way behind his shoulder. He swung it in an enormous, powerful arc.

The heavy weapon smashed into Tansell’s left shoulder. Instantly, at the touch of his skin, it conducted the null-charge that sizzled through Tansell’s body. Tansell’s attacker spasmed mightily and was knocked back by the force of the current, spraying sap from his shattered arm; but the momentum of his massive blow sent the cleaver slicing and cutting through layers of fat and blood and bone, gashing Tansell open from his shoulder down to below his sternum, a huge rend in his flesh a foot and a half long. The cleaver remained embedded above his stomach, quivering.

Tansell called out once like an astonished dog. The dark null-charge fizzled out through the huge wound, which began to spew blood in a vast gouting torrent. Tansell fell to his knees, and onto the ground. The cactacae surged around him, kicking and striking out at the quickly dying man.

Isaac let out an anguished cry and reached the top of the wall. He gesticulated to Lemuel. He looked down into the dark yard. Derkhan and Pengefinchess had opened the way to the undercity.

The cactus people had not given up. Some not stamping on Tansell’s corpse were still running forward, waving their weapons at Isaac and Lemuel. As Lemuel reached the wall a rivebow sounded hard. There was a meaty thwack. Lemuel screamed and fell.

A massive serrated chakri was embedded deep in his back, in the spine just above his buttocks. Its silver edges poked out of the wound, which oozed blood copiously.

Lemuel looked up into Isaac’s face and screamed piteously. His legs shuddered. He flailed with his hands, sending brickdust up around him.

“Oh Jabber Isaac help me please!” he screamed. “My legs…Oh Jabber, oh gods…” He coughed up a great welling gob of blood which rolled horribly down his chin.

Isaac was transfixed with horror. He stared down at Lemuel, whose eyes were awash with terror and agony. He looked up briefly, and saw the cactacae bearing down on the crippled man, whooping in triumph. They were barely thirty feet away. As he watched, one saw Isaac watching and raised her rivebow, taking careful aim at his head.

Isaac ducked down, scrambled half down off the wall into the little yard. The open manhole wafted up noisome stenches from below.

Lemuel stared at him in disbelief.

“Help me!” he shrieked. “Jabber, fuck, no, oh Jabber no…Don’t go! Help me!”

He swung his arms like a child in a tantrum, the cactus people descending on him, his nails breaking and his fingers scraping raw as he tried frantically to claw his way up the wall pulling his useless legs behind him. Isaac stared at him in mortification, knowing that there was nothing at all he could do, that there was no time to go down for him, that the cactus people were almost on him, that his wounds would kill him even if Isaac could pull him across the wall, and knowing that even so, Lemuel’s last thoughts as he looked up were of Isaac’s betrayal.

From behind the mouldering concrete of the wall, Isaac heard Lemuel’s screams as the cactacae reached him.

“He’s nothing to do with it!” he shouted out in a rage of grief. Pengefinchess, her face set, dropped out of sight into the sewer that toiled below. “He’s nothing to do with it at all!” screamed Isaac, desperate for Lemuel’s wails to stop. Derkhan followed the vodyanoi, her face white, her ruined ear-hole bleeding. “Let him go you fucks, you shits, you stupid cactus bastards!” Isaac shrieked over Lemuel’s cacophony. Yagharek descended to his shoulders and gripped Isaac’s ankle fiercely, gesticulating at him to come, his inhuman beak clattering as he snapped in agitation. “He was helping you…” shouted Isaac with exhausted horror.

As Yagharek disappeared, Isaac gripped the edge of the manhole and lowered himself in. He squeezed his tight fat bulk past the metal lips and scrabbled with the lid, preparing to replace it as he dropped out of sight.

Lemuel continued to shout, in pain and fear, from over the wall. The brutal sounds of the terrified, triumphant cactacae punishing the intruder went on and on.

It’ll stop, thought Isaac desperately as he descended. They’re frightened and confused, they don’t know what’s going on. They’ll put a chakri or a knife or a bullet in his head any moment, finish this, put an end to this. They’ve no reason to keep him alive, he thought, they’ll kill him because they think he’s with the moths, they’ll do their bit to cleanse the dome, they’ll finish this, they’re panicking, they’re not torturers, he thought, they just want to stop the horror…They’ll end this any second, he thought in misery. This will stop now.

Yet the sound of Lemuel’s screams continued as he disappeared into the stinking darkness, and as he pulled the metal seal over his head. And even then they filtered tinny and absurd through the lid, even as Isaac fell into the stream of warm, faecal water, and staggered along the tunnels following the other survivors. He thought he could hear them even as he crawled through the dripping, trickling, reverberating water-sounds, underneath the liquid rush, along ancient channels like rutted veins, away from the Glasshouse, in a confused, random flight towards the relative safety of the mammoth night-city.

It was a long time before they were silent.

The night is unthinkable. We can only run. We make animal sounds as we rush to escape what we have seen. Dread and revulsion and alien emotions cling to us and cloy our movements. We cannot clean them off.

We scrabble our wounded way up and out from the undercity and reach the railside hovel. We shiver even in the awful heat, nodding mutely to the clattering trains that shake our walls. We stare warily at each other.

Except Isaac, who looks at nothing.

Do I sleep? Does anyone sleep? There are moments when the numbness overwhelms me and clogs up my head so that I cannot see or think. Perhaps these fugues, these broken zombie moments, are sleep. Sleep for the new city. Perhaps that is all we can hope for any more.

No one speaks, for a long, long time.

Pengefinchess the vodyanoi is the first to speak.

She begins quietly, murmuring things hardly recognizable as words. But she is addressing us. She sits, her back against the wall, her fat thighs splayed. The idiot undine winds around her body, washing her clothes, keeping her wet.

She tells us about Shadrach and Tansell. The three had met in some ill-defined episode she glosses over, some mercenary escapade in Tesh, City of the Crawling Liquid. They had run together for seven years.

The window of our shack is fringed with ragged stubs of glass. At dawn, they snag ineffectually at the sunlight. Under a sharp rafter of the insect-fouled light, Pengefinchess talks in a gentle monotone of her times with her dead companions: poaching in the Wormseye Scrub; thievery in Neovadan; tombrobbing in the Ragamoll forest and steppe.

They had never been three equally united, she says, without spite or rancour. Always she, then Tansell and Shadrach together, who found in each other something, some calm passionate connection she could not and did not want to touch.

Tansell was mad with grief at the end, she says, unthinking, exploding, a mindless eruption of thaumaturgic misery. But had he been clear in his brain, she says, he would have done no different.

So she is on her own again.

Her testimony ends. It demands response, like some ritual liturgy.

She ignores Isaac, cosseted in agony. She looks to Derkhan and to me.

We fail her.

Derkhan shakes her head, wordless and sad.

I try. I open my beak and the story of my crime and my punishment and my exile wells up in my throat. It almost emerges, it almost bursts through the crack.

But I batten it down. It is not connected. It is not for tonight.

Pengefinchess’s history is one of selfishness and plunder, yet it is made by the telling into a valedictory for dead comrades. My history of selfishness and exile resists transmutation. It cannot but be a base story of base things. I am silent.

But then, as we prepare to give up on words and let what happen will, Isaac raises his sluggish head and speaks.

First he demands food and water that we do not have. Slowly his eyes narrow and he begins to talk like a sentient creature. In a remote misery, he describes the deaths he has seen.

He tells us about the Weaver, the dancing mad god, and its fight with the moths, the eggs that burnt, the weird sing-song declamations of our unlikely and untrustworthy champion. In cold and clear words Isaac tells us what he thinks the Construct Council is become, and what it wants and what it might be (and Pengefinchess gulps deep in her throat in her astonishment, her protuberant eyes bulging more as she learns what has happened to the constructs in the city’s dump).

And the more he talks the more he talks. He talks of plans. His voice hardens. Something has come to an end in him, some waiting, some soft patience that died with Lin and now is buried, and I feel myself become stone as I hear him. He inspires me to rigour and purpose.

He talks of betrayals and counter-betrayals, of mathematics and lies and thaumaturgy, dreams and winged things. He expounds theories. He talks to me of flight, something I had half forgotten I might ever have, which I want again, as he mentions it, I want with all of me.

As the sun crawls like a sweating man to the apex of the sky, we remnants, we dregs, examine our weapons and our collected debris, our notes and our stories.

With reserves we did not know we could summon, with an astonishment I feel as if through a veil, we make plans. I coil my whip around my hand tight and sharpen my blade. Derkhan cleans her guns, and murmurs to Isaac. Pengefinchess sits back and shakes her head. She will go, she warns us. There is nothing that might incite her to stay. She will sleep a little, then bid us farewell, she says.

Isaac shrugs. He pulls compact valved engines from where he has stashed them in the piled-up rubbish of the shed. He pulls sheafs and sheafs of notes, sweat-stained, smeared, barely legible, from inside his shirt.

We begin to work, Isaac more fervently than any of us, scribbling frantically.

He looks up after hours of muttered oaths and hissing breakthroughs. We cannot do this, he says. We would need a focus.

And then another hour or two hours pass and he looks up again.

We have to do this, he says, and still, we need a focus.

He tells us what we must do.

There is silence, and then we debate. Quickly. Anxiously. We raise candidates and discard them. Our criteria are confused-do we choose the doomed or the loathed? The decrepit or the vile? Do we judge?

Our morality becomes rushed and furtive.

But the day is more than half gone, and we must choose.

Her face set hard but breaking with misery, Derkhan readies herself. She is charged with the vile task.

She takes what money we have, including the last nuggets of my gold. She cleans some of the undercity’s filth from her, changing her accidental disguise, becoming only a low vagabond, then sets out to hunt for what we need.

Outside it begins to darken, and still Isaac works. Tiny confined figures and equations fill every space, every tiny part of white space, on his few sheets of paper.

The thick sun illumines the smears of cloud from below. The sky grows drab with dusk.

None of us fear the night’s crop of dreams.