Perdido Street Station

Chapter Six

New Crobuzon was a city unconvinced by gravity.

Aerostats oozed from cloud to cloud above it like slugs on cabbages. Militia-pods streaked through the heart of the city to its outlands, the cables that held them twanging and vibrating like guitar strings hundreds of feet in the air. Wyrmen clawed their way above the city leaving trails of defecation and profanity. Pigeons shared the air with jackdaws and hawks and sparrows and escaped parakeets. Flying ants and wasps, bees and bluebottles, butterflies and mosquitoes fought airborne war against a thousand predators, aspises and dheri that snapped at them on the wing. Golems thrown together by drunken students beat mindlessly through the sky on clumsy wings made of leather or paper or fruit-rind, falling apart as they flew. Even the trains that moved innumerable women and men and commodities around New Crobuzon’s great carcass fought to stay above the houses, as if they were afraid of the putrefaction of architecture.

The city thrust upwards massively, as if inspired by those vast mountains that rose to the west. Blistering square slabs of habitation ten, twenty, thirty storeys high punctuated the skyline. They burst into the air like fat fingers, like fists, like the stumps of limbs waving frantically above the swells of the lower houses. The tons of concrete and tar that constituted the city covered ancient geography, knolls and barrows and verges, undulations that were still visible. Slum houses spilt down the sides of Vaudois Hill, Flyside, Flag Hill, St. Jabber’s Mound like scree.

The smoky black walls of Parliament jutted from Strack Island like a shark’s tooth or a stingray’s jag, some monstrous organic weapon rending the sky. The building was knotted with obscure tubes and vast rivets. It throbbed with the ancient boilers deep within. Rooms used for uncertain purposes poked out of the main body of the colossal edifice with scant regard for buttresses or braces. Somewhere inside, in the Chamber, out of reach of the sky, Rudgutter and countless droning bores strutted. The Parliament was like a mountain poised on the verge of architectural avalanche.

It was not a purer realm that loomed vastly over the city. Smokestacks punctured the membrane between the land and the air and disgorged tons of poisonous smog into that upper world as if out of spite. In a thicker, stinking haze just above the rooftops, the detritus from a million low chimneys eddied together. Crematoria vented into the airborne ashes of wills burnt by jealous executors, which mixed with coaldust burnt to keep dying lovers warm. Thousands of sordid smoke-ghosts wrapped New Crobuzon in a stench that suffocated like guilt.

The clouds swirled in the city’s filthy microclimate. It seemed as if all of New Crobuzon’s weather was formed by a massive, gradual crawling hurricane that centred around the city’s heart, the enormous mongrel building that squatted at the core of the commercial zone known as The Crow, the coagulate of miles of railway line and years of architectural styles and violations: Perdido Street Station.

An industrial castle, bristling with random parapets. The westernmost tower of the station was the militia’s Spike, that loomed over the other turrets, dwarfing them, tugged in seven directions by taut skyrails. But for all its height the Spike was only an annex of the enormous station.

The architect had been incarcerated, quite mad, seven years after Perdido Street Station was completed. He was a heretic, it was said, intent on building his own god.

Five enormous brick mouths gaped to swallow each of the city’s trainlines. The tracks unrolled on the arches like huge tongues. Shops and torture chambers and workshops and offices and empty spaces all stuffed the fat belly of the building, which seemed, from a certain angle, in a certain light, to be bracing itself, taking its weight on the Spike, preparing to leap into the enormous sky it so casually invaded.

Isaac did not look with eyes clouded by romance. He saw flight wherever he looked in the city (his eyes were swollen: behind them buzzed a brain wired with new formulae and facts all furnished to slip gravity’s clutches), and he saw that it was not an escape to a better place. Flight was a secular, profane thing: simply a passage from one part of New Crobuzon to another.

He was cheered by this. He was a scientist, not a mystic.

Isaac lay on his bed and gazed out of his window. He followed one flying speck after another with his eyes. Scattered around him on the bed, spilling onto the floor like a paper tide, were books and articles, typewritten notes and long sheaves of his excited scrawl. Classic monographs nestled under the musings of cranks. Biology and philosophy jostled for space on his desk.

He had sniffed his way along a contorted bibliographical trail like a bloodhound. Some titles could not be ignored: On Gravity or The Theory Of Flight. Some were more tangential, like The Aerodynamics Of The Swarm. And some were simply whims that his more respectable colleagues would surely frown at. He had yet, for example, to browse the pages of The Dweomers That Live Above The Clouds And What They Can Tell Us.

Isaac scratched his nose and sipped the beer balancing on his chest through a straw.

Only two days working on Yagharek’s commission, and the city was completely changed for him. He wondered if it would ever change back.

He rolled onto his side, rummaged around underneath him to shift the papers that were making him uncomfortable. He tugged free a collection of obscure manuscripts and a sheaf of the heliotypes he had taken of Teafortwo. Isaac held those prints in front of him, examined the intricacies of the wyrmen musculature that he had made Teafortwo show off.

Hope it’s not too long, Isaac thought.

He had spent the day reading and taking notes, grunting politely when David or Lublamai yelled greetings or questions or offers of lunch up to him. He had munched some bread and cheese and peppers which Lublamai had dumped on his desk in front of him. He had gradually shed layers of clothing as the day grew warmer and the little boilers on all the equipment heated the air. Shirts and kerchiefs littered the floor by his desk.

Isaac was waiting for delivery of supplies. He had realized early in his reading that for the purposes of this commission there was a massive hole in his scientific knowledge. Of all the arcana, biology was his weakest. He was quite at home reading about levitation and countergeotropic thaumaturgy and his beloved unified field theory, but the prints of Teafortwo had made him realize how little he understood the biomechanics of simple flight.

What I need’s some dead wyrmen…no, some live one to do experiments on…Isaac had thought idly, staring at the heliotypes the previous night. No…a dead one to dissect and a live one to watch flying…

The flippant idea had suddenly taken a more serious shape. He had sat and pondered for a while at his desk, before taking off into the darkness of Brock Marsh.

The most notorious pub between the Tar and the Canker lurked in the shadow of a huge Palgolak church. It was a few dank streets back from Danechi’s Bridge, which joined Brock Marsh to Bonetown.

Most of the denizens of Brock Marsh, of course, were bakers or street-sweepers or prostitutes, or any of a host of other professions unlikely ever to cast a hex or look into a test-tube in their lives. Similarly, the inhabitants of Bonetown were, for the most part, no more interested in grossly or systematically flouting the law than most of New Crobuzon. Nevertheless, Brock Marsh would always be the Science Quarter: Bonetown the Thieves’ District. And there where those two influences met-esoteric, furtive, romanticized and sometimes dangerous-was The Moon’s Daughters.

With a sign depicting the two small satellites that orbited the moon as pretty, rather tawdry-looking young women, and a façade painted in deep scarlet, The Moon’s Daughters was shabby but attractive. Inside, its clientele consisted of the more adventurous of the city’s bohemians: artists, thieves, rogue scientists, junkies and militia informants jostling under the eyes of the pub’s proprietor, Red Kate.

Kate’s nickname was a reference to her ginger hair, and, Isaac had always thought, a damning indictment of the creative bankruptcy of her patrons. She was physically powerful, with a sharp eye for who to bribe and who to ban, who to punch and who to ply with free beer. For these reasons (as well, Isaac suspected, as a small proficiency with a couple of subtle thaumaturgical glamours), The Moon’s Daughters negotiated a successful, precarious trail evading any of the competing protection rackets in the area. The militia raided Kate’s establishment only rarely and perfunctorily. Her beer was good. She did not ask what was being discussed in huddles and knots at corner tables.

That night, Kate had greeted Isaac with a brief wave, which he had returned. He had gazed around the smoky room, but the person he had been seeking was absent. He had made his way to the bar.

“Kate,” he shouted over the din. “No sign of Lemuel?”

She shook her head and handed him, unbidden, a Kingpin ale. He paid and turned to face the room.

He was rather thrown. The Moon’s Daughters was Lemuel Pigeon’s office, as near as dammit. He could usually be relied on to be here every night, wheeling, dealing, taking a cut. Isaac guessed he was out on some dubious job or other. He paced through the tables aimlessly, looking for someone he knew.

Over in the corner, grinning beatifically at someone, wearing the yellow robes of his order, was Gedrecsechet, the librarian of the Palgolak church. Isaac brightened and headed towards him.

He was amused to see that the forearms of the scowling youth arguing with Ged were tattooed with the interlocking wheels that proclaimed her a Godmech Cog, doubtless attempting to convert the ungodly. As Isaac drew closer the argument became audible.

“…if you approach the world and God with one iota of the rigour and the analysis you claim, you’d see that your pointless sentientomorphism would simply be untenable!”

Ged grinned at the spotty girl and opened his mouth to reply. Isaac interrupted.

“Pardon me, Ged, for butting in. Just wanted to say to you, young Flywheel, whatever you call yourself…”

The Cog tried to protest, but Isaac cut her off.

“No, shut up. I’ll say this very clearly…piss off. And take your rigour with you. I want to talk to Ged.”

Ged was giggling. His opponent was swallowing, trying to maintain her anger, but she was intimidated by Isaac’s bulk and cheerful pugnacity. She gathered herself to go with a semblance of dignity.

As she stood, she opened her mouth with some parting shot she had clearly been preparing. Isaac pre-empted her.

“Speak and I’ll break your teeth,” he advised amiably.

The Cog closed her mouth and stalked off.

When she was gone from view both Isaac and Ged burst into laughter.

“Why do you put up with them, Ged?” howled Isaac.

Ged, crouched like a frog before the low table, rocked back and forth on his legs and arms, his big tongue flapping in and out of his huge loose mouth.

“I just feel sorry for them,” he tittered. “They’re so…intense”

Ged was generally held to be the most anomolously good-humoured vodyanoi anyone had ever met. He had absolutely none of the glowering snappiness typical of that cantankerous race.

“Anyway,” he continued, calming down a little, “I don’t mind the Cogs nearly as much as some. They don’t have half the rigour they think they do, of course, but at least they’re taking things seriously. And at least they’re not…I don’t know…Compline or Codling Brood, or something.”

Palgolak was a god of knowledge. He was depicted either as a fat, squat human reading in a bath, or a svelte vodyanoi doing the same, or, mystically, both at once. His congregation were human and vodyanoi in roughly equal proportions. He was an amiable, pleasant deity, a sage whose existence was entirely devoted to the collection, categorization, and dissemination of information.

Isaac worshipped no gods. He did not believe in the omniscience or omnipotence claimed for a few, or even the existence of many. Certainly there were creatures and essences that inhabited different aspects of existence, and certainly some of them were powerful, in human terms. But worshipping them seemed to him rather a craven activity. Even he, though, had a soft spot for Palgolak. He rather hoped the fat bastard did exist, in some form or other. Isaac liked the idea of an inter-aspectual entity so enamoured with knowledge that it just roamed from realm to realm in a bath, murmuring with interest at everything it came across.

Palgolak’s library was at least the equal to that of the New Crobuzon University. It did not lend books, but it did allow readers in at any time of the day or the night, and there were very, very few books it did not allow access to. The Palgolaki were proselytizers, holding that everything known by a worshipper was immediately known by Palgolak, which was why they were religiously charged to read voraciously. But their mission was only secondarily for the glory of Palgolak, and primarily for the glory of knowledge, which was why they were sworn to admit all who wished to enter into their library.

Which was what Ged was gently complaining about. The New Crobuzon Palgolak Library had the best collection of religious manuscripts known in the world of Bas-Lag, and it attracted pilgrims from a huge variety of religious traditions and factions. They thronged the northern ends of Brock Marsh and Spit Hearth, all the worshipping races of the world, in robes and masks, sporting whips, leashes, magnifying glasses, the whole gamut of religious paraphernalia.

Some of the pilgrims were less than pleasant. The viciously anti-xenian Codling Brood, for example, was growing in the city, and Ged saw it as his unfortunate sacred duty to assist these racists who spat and called him “toad” and “riverpig” in between tracing passages from their texts.

Compared to them, the egalitarian Godmech Cogs were a harmless sect, even if their belief in the mechanicity of One True God was aggressively asserted.

Isaac and Ged had had many long arguments over the years, mostly theological, but also over literature and art and politics. Isaac respected the friendly vodyanoi. He knew him to be fervent in his religious duty of reading and, accordingly, hugely knowledgeable about any subject Isaac could think of. He was always at first a little circumspect with opinions about the information he shared-”Only Palgolak has enough knowledge to offer analysis” Ged would proclaim piously at the start of an argument-until three or so drinks had obscured his religious non-dogmaticism and he would hold forth at the top of his voice.

“Ged,” Isaac asked. “What can you tell me about the garuda?”

Ged shrugged, and he grinned with pleasure at imparting what he knew.

“Not very much. Bird-people. Live in the Cymek, and the north of Shotek, and the west of Mordiga, reputedly. Maybe also on some of the other continents. Hollow bones.” Ged’s eyes were fixed, focused on the remembered pages of whatever xenthropological work he was quoting. “Cymek garuda are egalitarian…completely egalitarian, and completely individualistic. Hunters and gatherers, no sexual division of labour. No money, no rank, although they do have sort of uninstitutional ranks. Just means you’re worthy of more respect, that sort of thing. Don’t worship any gods, although they do have a devil-figure, which may or may not be a real eidolon. Dahnesch, it’s called. Hunt and fight with whips, bows, spears, light blades. Don’t use shields: too heavy to fly with. So they sometimes use two weapons at once. Have the occasional rumble with other bands or species, probably over resources. You know about their library?”

Isaac nodded. Ged’s eyes glazed with an almost obscene look of hunger.

“Godspit, I’d love to get to that. It’ll never happen.” He looked glum. “Desert’s not really vodyanoi territory. Bit dry…”

“Well, seeing as you know so arsing little about them, I might as well just stop talking to you,” said Isaac.

To Isaac’s astonishment, Ged’s face fell.

“Joke, Ged! Irony! Sarcasm! You know fucking loads about them. At least compared to me. I’ve been browsing Shacrestialchit, and you’ve just exceeded the sum of my knowledge. Do you know anything about…uh…their criminal code?”

Ged stared at him. His huge eyes narrowed.

“What you up to, Isaac? They’re so egalitarian…well…Their society’s all based on maximizing choice for the individual, which is why they’re communistic. Grants the most uninhibited choice to everyone. And as far as I remember the only crime they have is depriving another garuda of choice. And then it’s exacerbated or mollified depending on whether they do it with or without respect, which they absolutely love…”

“How do you steal someone’s choice?”

“No idea. I suppose if you nick someone’s spear, they don’t have the choice of using it…What about if you lie about where some tasty lichen is, so you deprive others of the choice of going for it…?”

“Maybe some choice-thefts are analogies of stuff we’d consider crimes and some have absolutely no equivalent,” said Isaac.

“I’d imagine so.”

“What’s an abstract individual and a concrete individual?”

Ged was gazing at Isaac in wonder.

“My good arse, Isaac…you’ve made friends with some garuda, haven’t you?”

Isaac raised one eyebrow, and nodded quickly.

“Damn!” Ged shouted. People at the surrounding tables turned to him with brief surprise. “And a Cymek garuda…! Isaac, you have to make him-him? her?-come and talk to me about the Cymek!”

“I don’t know, Ged. He’s a bit…taciturn…”

“Oh please oh please…”

“All right, all right, I’ll ask him. But don’t get your hopes up. Now tell me what the difference is between a fucking abstract and concrete individual.”

“Oh, this is fascinating. I suppose you aren’t allowed to tell me what the job is…? No, didn’t think so. Well, put simply, and as far as I understand it, they’re egalitarian because they respect the individual so much, right? And you can’t respect other people’s individuality if you focus on your own individuality in a kind of abstract, isolated way. The point is that you are an individual inasmuch as you exist in a social matrix of others who respect your individuality and your right to make choices. That’s concrete individuality: an individuality that recognizes that it owes its existence to a kind of communal respect on the part of all the other individualities, and that it had better therefore respect them similarly.

“So an abstract individual is a garuda who forgot, for some time, that he or she is part of a larger unit, and owes respect to all the other choosing individuals.”

There was a long pause.

“Are you any wiser, Isaac?” asked Ged gently, and broke off into giggles.

Isaac wasn’t sure if he was or not.

“So look, Ged, if I said to you ‘second-degree choice-theft with disrespect,’ would you know what a garuda had done?”

“No…” Ged looked thoughtful. “No, I wouldn’t. Sounds bad…I think there are some books in the library that might explain, though…”

At that moment, Lemuel Pigeon strode into Isaac’s view.

“Ged, look,” Isaac interrupted hurriedly. “Beg pardon and all that, I really have to have a word with Lemuel. Can I talk to you later?”

Ged grinned without rancour and waved Isaac away.

“Lemuel…a word in your ear. Could be profitable.”

“Isaac! Always a pleasure to deal with a man of science. How’s the life of the mind?”

Lemuel leant back in his chair. He was dressed foppishly. His jacket was burgundy, his waistcoat yellow. He wore a small top hat. A mass of yellow curls burst out from under it in a ponytail they clearly resented.

“The life of the mind, Lemuel, has reached something of an impasse. And that, my friend, is where you come in.”

“Me?” Lemuel Pigeon smiled lopsidedly.

“Yes, Lemuel,” said Isaac portentously. “You too can forward the cause of science.”

Isaac enjoyed bantering with Lemuel, although the younger man made him a little uneasy. Lemuel was a chancer, a snitch, a fence…the quintessential go-between. He had carved a profitable little niche for himself out of being a most efficient middle-man. Packages, information, offers, messages, refugees, goods: anything that two people wanted to exchange without actually meeting, Lemuel would courier. He was invaluable to those like Isaac who wanted to dredge the New Crobuzon underworld without getting their feet wet or their hands dirty. Similarly, the denizens of that other city could use Lemuel to reach into the realm of the more-or-less legal without beaching, flopping helplessly at the militia’s door. Not that all of Lemuel’s work involved both worlds: some was entirely legal or entirely illegal. It was just that crossing the border was his speciality.

Lemuel’s existence was precarious. He was unscrupulous and brutal-vicious when necessary. If the going ever got dangerous, he would leave anyone with him in a trail of his dust. Everyone knew that. Lemuel never hid it. There was a certain honesty about him. He never pretended that you could trust him.

“Lemuel, you young science fiend, you…” Isaac said. “I’m conducting a little research. Now, I need to get hold of some specimens. I’m talking anything that flies. And that is where you come in. See, a man in my position can’t be trogging around New Crobuzon looking for fucking wrens…a man in my position should be able to put the word out and have winged things fall into his lap.”

“Put an ad in the newspapers, Isaac old chum. Why’re you talking to me?”

“Because I’m talking plenty plenty, and I don’t want to know where it comes from. And I’m talking variety. I want to see as many different little flying things as I can, and some of them ain’t easy to come by. Example…if I wanted to get hold of, say, an aspis…I could pay some buccaneer of a ship’s captain top dollar for a mange-ridden half-dead specimen of same…or I can pay you to arrange for one of your honourable associates to liberate some poor stifled little aspis from some fucking gilded cage up in East Gidd or Rim. Capiche?”

“Isaac old son…I begin to understand you.”

“Of course you do, Lemuel. You’re a businessman. I’m looking for rare flying things. I want things I’ve never seen before. I want inventive flying things. I will not be paying top whack for a basket full of blackbirds-although please don’t take that to mean that blackbirds aren’t wanted. Blackbirds are welcome, along with thrushes, jackdaws and what have you. Pigeons, Lemuel, your very own namesake. But what’s even more welcome are, say, dragonfly-snakes.”

“Rare,” said Lemuel, looking intently at his pint.

“Very rare,” agreed Isaac. “Which is why serious amounts of dosh would change hands for a good specimen. You get the idea, Lemuel? I want birds, insects, bats…also eggs, also cocoons, also grubs, anything which is going to turn into a flying thing. That could be even more useful, actually. Anything which looks set to be up to dog-sized. Nothing too much bigger, and nothing dangerous. Impressive as it would be to catch a drud or a wind-rhino, I don’t want it.”

“Who would, Isaac?” agreed Lemuel.

Isaac stuffed a five-guinea note into Lemuel’s top pocket. The two men raised their glasses and drank together.

That had been yesterday evening. Isaac sat back and imagined his request worming its way through New Crobuzon’s criminal alleys.

Isaac had used Lemuel’s services before, when he had needed a rare or forbidden compound, or a manuscript of which there were only a few copies in New Crobuzon, or information on the synthesis of illegal substances. It appealed to Isaac’s sense of humour to think of the hardest elements of the city’s underworld earnestly scrabbling for birds and butterflies in between their gangfights and drugs deals.

It was Shunday the next day, Isaac realized. It had been several days since he had seen Lin. She didn’t even know about his commission. They had a date, he remembered. They were meeting for dinner. He could put his research aside for a little while and tell his lover everything that had happened. It was something he enjoyed, emptying his mind of all its accumulated odds and ends, and offering them to Lin.

Lublamai and David had gone, Isaac realized. He was alone.

He undulated like a walrus, scattering papers and prints all over the boards. He turned his gasjet off and peered up out of the dark warehouse. Through his dirty window he could see the great cold circle of the moon and the slow pirouettes of her two daughters, satellites of ancient, barren rock glowing like fat fireflies as they spun around their mother.

Isaac fell asleep watching the convoluted lunar clockwork. He basked in the moonlight and dreamt of Lin: a fraught, sexual, loving dream.

Chapter Seven

The Clock and Cockerel had spilt out of doors. Tables and coloured lanterns covered the forecourt by the canal that separated Salacus Fields from Sangwine. The smash of glasses and shrieks of amusement wafted over the dour bargemen working the locks, riding the sluicing water up to a higher level, taking off towards the river, leaving the boisterous inn behind.

Lin felt vertiginous.

She sat at the head of a large table under a violet lamp, surrounded by her friends. Next to her on one side was Derkhan Blueday, the art critic for the Beacon. On the other was Cornfed, screaming animatedly at Thighs Growing, the cactacae cellist. Alexandrine; Bellagin Sound; Tarrick Septimus; Importunate Spint: painters and poets, musicians, sculptors, and a host of hangers-on she half-recognized.

This was Lin’s milieu. This was her world. And yet she had never felt so isolated from them as she did now.

The knowledge that she had landed the job, the huge request they all dreamed of, the one work that could see her happy for years, separated her from her fellows. And her terrifying employer very effectively sealed her isolation. Lin felt as if suddenly, without warning, she was in a very different world from the bitchy, game-playing, lively, precious, introspective Salacus Fields round.

She had seen no one since she had returned, shaken, from her extraordinary meeting in Bonetown. She had missed Isaac badly, but she knew that he would be taking the opportunity of her supposed work to be drowning himself in research, and she knew also that for her to venture to Brock Marsh would anger him greatly. In Salacus Fields, they were an open secret. Brock Marsh, though, was the belly of the beast.

So she had sat for a day, contemplating what she had agreed to do.

Slowly, tentatively, she had cast her mind back to the monstrous figure of Mr. Motley.

Godspit and shit! she had thought. What was he?

She had no clear picture of her boss, only a sense of the ragged discordance of his flesh. Snippets of visual memory teased her: one hand terminating in five equally spaced crabs’ claws; a spiralling horn bursting from a nest of eyes; a reptilian ridge winding along goats’ fur. It was impossible to tell what race Mr. Motley had started out as. She had never heard of Remaking so extensive, so monstrous and chaotic. Anyone as rich as he must be could surely afford the best Remakers to fashion him into something more human-or whatever. She could only think that he chose this form.

Either that, or he was a victim of Torque.

Lin wondered if his obsession with the transition zone reflected his form, or if his obsession came first.

Lin’s cupboard was stuffed with her rough sketches of Mr. Motley’s body-hastily hidden on the assumption that Isaac would stay with her tonight. She had made scrawled notes of what she remembered of the lunatic anatomy.

Her horror had ebbed, over the days, leaving her with crawling skin and a torrent of ideas.

This, she had decided, could be the work of her life.

Her first appointment with Mr. Motley was the next day, Dustday, in the afternoon. After that, it was twice a week for at least the next month: probably longer, depending on how the sculpture took shape.

Lin was eager to begin.

“Lin, you tedious bitch!” yelled Cornfed and threw a carrot at her. “Why are you so quiet tonight?”

Lin scrawled quickly on her pad.

Cornfed, sweetheart, you bore me.

Everyone burst into laughter. Cornfed returned to his flamboyant flirtation with Alexandrine. Derkhan bent her grey head towards Lin and spoke softly.

“Seriously, Lin…You’re hardly speaking. Is something up?”

Lin, touched, shook her headbody gently.

Working on something big. Taking up a lot of my mind, she signed at her. It was a relief to be able to speak without writing every word: Derkhan read signing well.

I miss Isaac, Lin added mock-forlornly.

Derkhan creased her face sympathetically. She is, Lin thought, a lovely woman.

Derkhan was pale, tall and thin-though she had gained a small gut as she passed into her middle years. Though she loved the outrageous antics of the Salacus set, she was an intense, gentle woman who avoided being the centre of attention. Her published writing was spiky and merciless: if Derkhan had not liked her work, Lin did not think she could have been Derkhan’s friend. Her judgements in the Beacon were harsh to the point of brutality.

Lin could tell Derkhan that she missed Isaac. Derkhan knew the true nature of their relationship. A little over a year ago, when Lin and Derkhan were strolling together in Salacus Fields, Derkhan had bought drinks. When she handed over her money to pay, she had dropped her purse. She had bent quickly to retrieve it, but Lin had beaten her to it, picking it up and pausing only very slightly when she saw the old, battered heliotype of the beautiful and fierce young woman in a man’s suit that had fallen from it onto the street, the xxx written across the bottom, the lipstick-kiss. She had handed it back to Derkhan, who had replaced it in the purse without hurrying, and without looking Lin in the eyes.

“Long time ago,” Derkhan had said enigmatically, and immersed herself in her beer.

Lin had felt she owed Derkhan a secret. She had almost been relieved a couple of months later when she found herself drinking with Derkhan, depressed after storming out of some stupid row with Isaac. It had given Lin the opportunity to tell Derkhan the truth that she must already have guessed. Derkhan had nodded with nothing but concern for Lin’s misery.

They had been close since then.

Isaac liked Derkhan because she was a seditionist.

Just as Lin thought of Isaac, she heard his voice.

“Godshit, everyone, sorry I’m late…”

She turned and saw his bulk pushing through tables towards them. Her antennae flexed in what she was sure he would recognize as a smile.

A chorus of salutation greeted Isaac as he approached them. He looked straight at Lin and smiled at her privately. He caressed her back as he waved at everyone else, and Lin felt his hand through her shirt clumsily spell out I love you.

Isaac yanked a chair over and forced it between Lin’s and Cornfed’s.

“I’ve just been to my bank, depositing a few sparkly little nuggets. A lucrative contract,” he shouted, “makes a happy scientist with very bad judgement. Drinks on me.” There was a raucous and delighted crowing of surprise, followed by a group yell for the waiter.

“How’s the show going, Cornfed?” said Isaac.

“Oh splendid, splendid!” shouted Cornfed, and then bizarrely added, very loud, “Lin came to see it on Fishday.”

“Right,” said Isaac, nonplussed. “Did you like it, Lin?”

She briefly signed that she had.

Cornfed was only interested in gazing at Alexandrine’s cleavage through her unsubtle dress. Isaac switched his attention to Lin.

“You would not believe what’s been happening…” Isaac began.

Lin gripped his knee under the table. He returned the gesture.

Under his breath, Isaac told Lin and Derkhan, in truncated form, the story of Yagharek’s visit. He implored them to silence, and glanced around regularly to make sure that no one else was listening in. Halfway through, the chicken he had ordered arrived, and he ate noisily while he described his meeting in The Moon’s Daughters, and the cages and cages of experimental animals he expected to arrive at his laboratory any day soon.

When he was finished, he sat back and grinned at them both, before a look of contrition washed over his face, and he sheepishly asked Lin: “How’s your work been going?”

She waved her hand dismissively.

There’s nothing, dear heart, she thought, that I can tell you. Let’s talk about your new project.

Guilt passed visibly over his face at his one-sided conversation, but Isaac could not help himself. He was utterly in the throes of a new project. Lin felt a familiar melancholy affection for him. Melancholy at his self-sufficiency in these moments of fascination; affection for his fervour and passion.

“Look, look,” Isaac gabbled suddenly, and tugged a piece of paper from his pocket. He unfolded it on the table before them.

It was an advertisement for a fair currently in Sobek Croix. The back was crisp with dry glue: Isaac had torn it from a wall.

mr. bombadrezil’s unique and wonderful fair, guaranteed to astound and enthral the most jaded palate. The palace of love; The hall of terrors; The vortex; and many other attractions for reasonable prices. Also come to see the extraordinary freakshow, the circus of weird. monsters and marvels from every corner of Bas-Lag! seers from the fractured land; a genuine weaver’s claw; the living skull; the lascivious snake-woman; ursus rex, the man-king of the Bears; dwarf cactus-people of tiny sizes; a garuda, bird-man chief of the wild desert; the stone men of Bezhek; caged daemons; dancing fish; treasures stolen from the gengris; and innumerable other prodigies and wonders. Some attractions not suitable for the easily shocked or those of a nervous disposition. Entrance 5 stivers. Sobek Croix gardens, 14th Chet to 14th Melluary, 6 to 11 o’clock every night.

“See that?” Isaac barked, and stabbed the poster with his thumb. “They’ve got a garuda! I’ve been sending requests all over the city for dubious bits and bobs, probably going to end up with loads of horrible disease-riddled jackdaws, and there’s a fucking garuda on the doorstep!”

Are you going to go down? signed Lin.

“Damn right!” snorted Isaac. “Straight after this! I thought we could all go. The others,” he said, his voice dropping, “don’t have to know what it is I’m doing there. I mean, a fair’s always fun anyway. Right?”

Derkhan grinned and nodded.

“So are you going to spirit the garuda away, or what?” she whispered.

“Well, presumably I could arrange to take heliotypes of it, or even ask it to come for a couple of days to the lab…I don’t know. We’ll organize something! What do you say? Fancy a fair?”

Lin picked a cherry tomato from Isaac’s garnish and wiped it carefully clean of chicken stock. She gripped it in her mandibles and began to chew.

Could be fun, she signed. Your treat?

“Absolutely my treat!” boomed Isaac, and gazed at her. He stared at her very close for a minute. He glanced round to make sure that no one was watching, and then, clumsily, he signed in front of her.

Missed you.

Derkhan looked away for a moment, tactfully.

Lin broke off the moment, to make sure that she did it before Isaac. She clapped loudly, until everyone at the table was staring at her. She began to sign, indicating Derkhan to translate.

“Uh…Isaac is keen to prove that the talk of scientists being all work and no play is false. Intellectuals as well as dissolute aesthetes like us know how to have a good time, and thus he offers us this…” Lin waved the sheet, and threw it into the centre of the table where it was visible to all. “Rides, spectacles, marvels and coconut shies, all for a mere five stivers, which Isaac has kindly offered to underwrite…”

“Not for everyone, you sow!” Isaac roared in mock-outrage, but he was drowned out by the drunken roar of gratitude.

“…offered to underwrite,” continued Derkhan doggedly. “Accordingly, I move that we drink up and eat up and hightail to Sobek Croix.”

There was loud, chaotic agreement. Those who had finished their food and drink gathered their bags. Others tucked with renewed gusto into their oysters or salad or fried plantain. Trying to organize a group of any size to do anything in synchronicity was an epic struggle, Lin reflected wryly. It would be some time before they set off.

Isaac and Derkhan were hissing to each other across the table in front of her. Her antennae twitched. She could pick up some of their murmurs. Isaac excitedly talking politics. He channelled his diffuse, undirected, pointed social discontent into his discussions with Derkhan. He was posing, she thought with amused pique, out of his depth, trying to impress the laconic journalist.

She could see Isaac pass a coin carefully across the table, and receive a plain envelope in return. Undoubtedly the latest issue of Runagate Rampant, the illegal, radical news-sheet for which Derkhan wrote.

Beyond a nebulous dislike of the militia and the government, Lin was not a political being. She sat back and looked up at the stars through the violet haze of the suspended lantern. She thought about the last time she had been to a fair: she remembered the mad palimpsest of smell, the catcalls and screeches, the rigged competitions and cheap prizes, the exotic animals and bright costumes, all packed together in a seedy, vibrant, exciting whole.

The fair was where normal rules were briefly forgotten, where bankers and thieves mingled to ooh, scandalized and titillated. Even Lin’s less outrageous sisters would come to the fair.

One of her early memories was of creeping past ranks of gaudy tents to stand next to some terrifying, dangerous, multicoloured ride, some giant wheel at the Gallmarch Fair twenty years ago. Someone-she never knew who, some khepri passer-by, some indulgent stallholder-had handed her a toffee-apple, which she had eaten reverentially. One of her few pleasant memories of childhood, that sugared fruit.

Lin sat back and waited for her friends to finish their preparations. She sucked sweet tea from her sponge and thought of that candied apple. She waited patiently to go to the fair.

Chapter Eight

“Come try, come try, come try your luck!”

“Ladies, ladies, tell yer fellers to win you a bouquet!”

“Spin in the Whirligig! It’ll spin your mind!”

“Your likeness affected in only four minutes! No faster portraiture in the world!”

“Experience the hypnagogic mesmerism of Sillion the Extraordinary!”

“Three rounds, three guineas! Stand for three rounds against ‘Iron Man’ Magus and take home three Gs! No cactus-people.”

The night air was thick with noise. The challenges, the shouts, the invitations and temptations and dares sounded around the laughing party like bursting balloons. Gasjets, mixed with select chymicals, burnt red, green, blue and canary yellow. The grass and paths of Sobek Croix were sticky with spilt sugar and sauce. Vermin scampered from the skirts of stalls into the dark bushes of the park clutching choice morsels. Gonophs and cutpurses slipped predatory through the crowds like fish through weeds. Indignant roars and violent cries sounded in their wake.

The crowd was a moving stew of human and vodyanoi, cactus, khepri, and other, rarer breeds: hotchi and strider and stiltspear and races the names of which Isaac did not know.

A few yards out from the fair, the darkness of the grass and trees was absolute. The bushes and boughs were fringed with bunting of ragged paper, discarded and ensnared and slowly shredded by the wind. Paths criss-crossed the park, leading to lakes and flower beds and acres of untended growth, and the old monastic ruins at the centre of the huge common.

Lin and Cornfed, Isaac and Derkhan and all the others strolled past enormous contraptions of bolted steel, garishly painted iron and hissing lights. Delighted squeals sounded from little cars swinging on flimsy-looking chains above them. A hundred different manically cheerful tunes sounded from a hundred engines and organs, an unsettling cacophony that ebbed and flowed around them.

Alex munched honeyed nuts; Bellagin salted meat; Thighs Growing a watery mulch delicious to cactus-people. They threw food at each other, caught it in their mouths.

The park was thronging with punters, throwing hoops over poles, firing children’s bows at targets, guessing under which cup the coin was hidden. Children screamed with pleasure and misery. Prostitutes of all races, sexes and descriptions sashayed exaggeratedly between the stalls or stood by the beerhalls, winking at passers-by.

The party disintegrated slowly as they passed into the heart of the fair. They hovered a minute while Cornfed showed off his archery. He ostentatiously offered his prizes, two dolls, to Alex and a young, beautiful whore who cheered his triumph. The three disappeared arm in arm through the crowd. Tarrick proved adept at a fishing game, pulling three live crabs from a big swirling tub. Bellagin and Spint had their futures read in the cards, squealing in terror when the bored witch turned over The Snake and The Old Crone in succession. They demanded a second opinion from a wide-eyed scarabomancer. She gazed theatrically at the images skittering across the carapaces of her pattern beetles as they bumbled through their sawdust.

Isaac and the others left Bellagin and Spint behind. The remnants of the party turned a corner beside the Wheel of Destiny and a roughly fenced-off section of the park came into view. Inside a line of small tents curved away from view. Above the gateway was a crudely painted legend: the circus of weird.

“Now,” said Isaac ponderously. “Reckon I might have a little look at this…”

“Plumbing the depths of human squalor, ‘Zaac?” asked a young artist’s model whose name Isaac could not remember. Besides Lin, Isaac and Derkhan, only a few others of the original group were left. They looked mildly surprised at Isaac’s choice.

“Research,” Isaac said grandly. “Research. Fancy joining me, Derkhan? Lin?”

The others took the hint with reactions ranging from careless waves to petulant flounces. Before they all disappeared, Lin signed rapidly to Isaac.

Not interested in this. Teratology more your thing. Meet you at the entrance in two hours?

Isaac nodded briefly and squeezed her hand. She signed goodbye to Derkhan and trotted off to catch up with a sound-artist whose name Isaac had never known.

Derkhan and Isaac stared at each other.

“…and then there were two,” sung Derkhan, a snatch of a children’s counting song about a basket of kittens that died, one by one, grotesquely.

There was an additional charge to enter the Circus of Weird, which Isaac paid. Though hardly empty, the freakshow was less crowded than the main body of the fair. The more monied the punters inside looked, the more furtive their air.

The freakshow brought out the voyeur in the populace and the hypocrisy in the gentry.

There seemed to be some kind of tour starting, which promised to view each exhibit in the Circus in turn. The bawls of the showman bade the assembled stick close together and prepare themselves for sights such as mortal eyes were not meant to see.

Isaac and Derkhan hung back a little and followed the troupe. Isaac saw that Derkhan had a notebook out and a pen poised.

The bowler-hatted Master of Ceremonies approached the first tent.

“Ladies and gents,” he whispered loudly and huskily, “in this tent lurks the most remarkable and terrifying creature ever seen by mortal man. Or vodyanoi, or cactus, or whatever,” he added in a normal voice, nodding graciously to the few xenians in the crowd. He returned to his bombastic tones. “Originally described fifteen centuries ago in the travelogues of Libintos the Sage, of what was then just plain ol’ Crobuzon. On his trips south to the burning wastes, Libintos saw many marvellous and monstrous things. But none more terrifying than the awesome…mafadet!”

Isaac had been sporting a sardonic smile. But even he joined the mass gasp.

Have they really got a mafadet? he thought as the MC drew back the curtain from the front of the little tent. He pushed forward to see.

There was another, louder gasp, and people at the front fought to move back. Others shoved to take their place.

Behind thick black bars, tethered by heavy chains, was an extraordinary beast. It lay on the ground, its huge dun body like a massive lion’s. Between its shoulders was a fringe of denser fur from which sprouted an enormous serpentine neck, thicker than a man’s thigh. Its scales glistened an oily, ruddy tan. An intricate pattern wound up the top of that curling neck, expanding to a diamond shape where it curved and became an enormous snake’s head.

The mafadet’s head lolled on the ground. Its huge forked tongue nicked in and out. Its eyes glistened like jet.

Isaac grabbed Derkhan.

“It’s a fucking mafadet,” he hissed in amazement. Derkhan nodded, wide-eyed.

The crowd had drawn back from the front of the cage. The showman grabbed a barbed stick and poked it through the bars, goading the enormous desert creature. It gave forth a deep, rumbling hiss and batted pathetically at its tormentor with a massive forepaw. Its neck coiled and twisted in desultory misery.

There were small screams from the crowd. People surged at the little barrier before the cage.

“Back, ladies and gents, back, I beg of you!” The showman’s voice was pompous and histrionic. “You are all in mortal danger! Don’t anger the beast!”

The mafadet hissed again under his continued torments. It wriggled backwards along the floor, crawling out of range of the vicious spike.

Isaac’s awe was waning fast.

The exhausted animal squirmed in undignified agony as it sought the rear of the cage. Its threadbare tail lashed the stinking goat carcass presumably provided for its nourishment. Dung and dust stained the mafadet’s pelt, along with blood that oozed thickly from numerous sores and nicks. Its sprawled body twitched a little as that cold, blunt head rose on the powerful muscles of the snake-neck.

The mafadet hissed and, as the crowd hissed in turn, its wicked jaws unhinged. It tried to bare its teeth.

Isaac’s face curled.

Broken stubs jutted from the creature’s gums where cruel fangs a foot long should have glinted. They had been smashed out of its mouth, Isaac realized, for fear of its murderous, poisonous bite.

He gazed at the broken monster whipping the air with its black tongue. It laid its head back down.

“Jabber’s arse,” Isaac whispered to Derkhan with pity and disgust. “Never thought I’d feel sorry for something like that.”

“Makes you wonder what state the garuda’s going to be in,” Derkhan replied.

The barker was hurriedly drawing the curtain on the miserable creature. As he did so he told the crowd the story of Libintos’s trial by poison at the hands of the Mafadet King.

Nursery tales, cant, lies and showmanship, thought Isaac contemptuously. He realized that the crowd had only been given a snatch of a view, a minute or less. Less chance anyone will notice how moribund the poor thing is, he mused.

He could not help but imagine the mafadet in full health. The immense weight of that tawny body padding through the hot dry scrub, the lightning strike of the venomous bite.

Garuda circling above, blades flashing.

The crowd were being shepherded towards the next enclosure. Isaac was not listening to the roar of the guide. He was watching Derkhan jot quick notes.

“This for RR?” whispered Isaac.

Derkhan looked around them quickly.

“Maybe. Depends what else we see.”

“What we’ll see,” hissed Isaac furiously, dragging Derkhan with him as he caught sight of the next exhibit, “is pure human viciousness! I fucking despair, Derkhan!”

He had stopped a little way behind a group of dawdlers who were gazing at a child born without eyes, a fragile, bony human girl who cried out wordlessly and waved her head at the sound of the crowd. she sees with inner sight! proclaimed the sign over her head. Some before the cage were cackling and yelling at her.

“Godspit, Derkhan…” Isaac shook his head. “Look at them tormenting that poor creature…”

As he spoke, a couple turned from the exhibited child with disgust in their faces. They turned as they left and spat behind them at the woman who had laughed the loudest.

“It turns, Isaac,” said Derkhan quietly. “It turns quickly.”

The tour guide strode the path between the rows of little tents, stopping here and there at choice horrors. The crowd was breaking apart. Little clots of people milled away under their own volition. At some tents they were stopped by attendants, who waited until a sufficient number had congregated before unveiling their hidden pieces. At others the punters walked right in, and shouts of delight and shock and disgust would emanate from within the grubby canvas.

Derkhan and Isaac wandered into a long enclosure. Above the entrance was a sign rendered in ostentatious calligraphy. A panoply of wonders! Do You dare enter the museum of hidden things?

“Do we dare, Derkhan?” muttered Isaac as they passed into the warm dusty darkness within.

The light ebbed slowly into their eyes from the corner of the makeshift room. The cotton chamber was full of cabinets in iron and glass, stretching out before them. Candles and gasjets burned in niches, filtered through lenses that concentrated them into dramatic spots, illuminating the bizarre displays. Punters meandered from one to another, murmuring, laughing nervously.

Isaac and Derkhan wandered slowly past jars of yellowing alcohol in which broken body parts floated. Two-headed foetuses and sections of a kraken’s arm. A deep red shining jag that could have been a Weaver’s claw, or could have been a burnished carving; eyes that spasmed and lived in jars of charged liquid; intricate, infinitesimal paintings on ladybirds’ backs, visible only through magnifying lenses; a human skull scuttling in its cage on six insectile brass legs. A nest of rats with intertwined tails that took it in turns to scrawl obscenities on a little blackboard. A book made of pressed feathers. Druds’ teeth and a narwhal’s horn.

Derkhan scribbled notes. Isaac gazed avariciously about him at the charlatanism and cryptoscience.

They left the museum. To their right was Anglerina, Queen of the Deepest Sea; to their left Bas-Lag’s Oldest Cactus-Man.

“I’m getting depressed,” said Derkhan.

Isaac agreed.

“Let’s find the Bird-Man Chief of the Wild Desert quickly, and fuck off. I’ll buy you some candyfloss.”

They wound through the ranks of the deformed and obese, the bizarrely hirsute and the small. Isaac suddenly pointed above them, at the sign that had come into view.

king garuda! lord of the air!

Derkhan tugged at the heavy curtain. She and Isaac exchanged glances, and entered.

“Ah! Visitors from this strange city! Come, sit, hear stories of the harsh desert! Stay a while with a traveller from far, far away!”

The querulous voice burst out of the shadows. Isaac squinted through the bars before them. A dark, shambolic figure stood painfully and lurched out of the darkness at the back of the tent.

“I am a chief of my people, come to see New Crobuzon of which we have heard.”

The voice was pained and exhausted, high-pitched and raw, but it made nothing like the alien sounds that burst from Yagharek’s throat. The speaker stepped out of obscurity. Isaac opened his eyes and mouth wide to bellow in triumph and wonder, but his shout mutated as it began and died in an aghast whisper.

The figure before Isaac and Derkhan shivered and scratched its stomach. Its flesh hung heavy off it like a pudgy schoolboy’s. Its skin was pale and pockmarked with disease and cold. Isaac’s eyes wove all over its body in dismay. Bizarre nodes of tissue burst from its bunched toes: claws drawn by children. Its head was swathed in feathers, but feathers of all sizes and shapes, jammed at random from its crown to its neck in a thick, uneven, insulating layer. The eyes that peered myopically at Isaac and Derkhan were human eyes, fighting to open lids encrusted in rheum and pus. The beak was large and stained, like old pewter.

Behind the wretched creature stretched a pair of dirty, foul-smelling wings. They were no more than six feet from tip to tip. As Isaac watched, they half-opened, jerked and twitched spastically. Tiny pieces of organic muck spilt from them as they shuddered.

The creature’s beak opened and, underneath it, Isaac caught a glimpse of lips forming the words, nostrils above. The beak was nothing but a roughly made fixture shoved and sealed into place like a gas-mask over the nose and mouth, he realized.

“Let me tell you of the times I have soared into the air with my prey…” began the pathetic figure, but Isaac stepped forward and held up a hand to cut it off.

“Please gods, enough!” he shouted. “Spare us this…embarrassment…”

The false garuda staggered backwards, blinking in fear.

There was silence for a long time.

“What’s the matter, guvnor?” whispered the thing behind bars eventually. “What’d I do wrong?”

“I came here to see a fucking garuda,” rumbled Isaac. “What d’you take me for? You’re Remade, mate…as any fool can see.”

The big dead beak clicked together as the man licked his lips. His eyes darted left and right nervously.

“Jabber’s sake, squire,” he whispered pleadingly. “Don’t go complaining. This is all I got. You’re obviously a gentleman of education…I’m as close as most get to garuda…all they want’s to hear a bit about hunting in the desert, see the bird-man, and that way I earn.”

“Godspit, Isaac,” whispered Derkhan. “Go easy.”

Isaac was crushingly disappointed. He had been preparing a list of questions in his mind. He knew exactly how he had wanted to investigate the wings, which muscle-bone interaction currently intrigued him. He had been prepared to pay a good rate for the research, had prepared to get Ged to come down to ask questions about the Cymek Library. To be faced instead with a scared, sickly human reading from a script that would have disgraced the lowest playhouse depressed him.

His anger was tempered with pity as he stared at the miserable figure before him. The man behind the feathers nervously clutched and unclutched his left arm with his right. He had to open that preposterous beak to breath.

“ ‘Stail,” Isaac swore softly.

Derkhan had walked up to the bars.

“What did you do?” she asked.

The man looked around again before answering.

“Did thieving,” he said quickly. “Got caught trying to get an old painting of a garuda from some ancient cunt out in Chnum. Worth a fortune. Magister said since I was so impressed with garuda I could-” his breath caught for a moment “-I could be one.”

Isaac could see how the feathers of the face were shoved ruthlessly into the skin, doubtless bonded subcutaneously to make removal too agonizing to consider. He imagined the process of insertion, one by torturing one. When the Remade turned slightly to Derkhan, Isaac could see the ugly knot of hardened flesh on his back where those wings, torn from some buzzard or vulture, had been sealed together with the human muscles.

Nerve endings bonded randomly and uselessly, and the wings moved only with the spasms of a long drawn-out death. Isaac’s nose wrinkled at the stench. The wings were rotting slowly on the Remade’s back.

“Does it hurt?” Derkhan was asking.

“Not so very much any more, miss,” the Remade answered. “Anyway, I’m lucky to have this.” He indicated the tent and the bars. “Keeps me eating. That’s why I’d be obliged more’n I can say if you’d refrain from telling the boss that you clocked me.”

Did most who came here really accept this disgusting charade? wondered Isaac. Were people so gullible as to believe that something as grotesque as this could ever fly?

“We’ll say nothing,” said Derkhan. Isaac nodded curtly in agreement. He was full of pity and anger and disgust. He wanted to leave.

Behind them, the curtain swished and a group of young women entered, laughing and whispering lewd jokes. The Remade looked over Derkhan’s shoulder.

“Ah!” he said loudly. “Visitors from this strange city! Come, sit, hear stories of the harsh desert! Stay a while with a traveller from far, far away!”

He moved away from Derkhan and Isaac, gazing at them pleadingly as he did so. Delighted screams and astonishment burst from the new spectators.

“Fly for us!” yelled one.

“Alas,” heard Isaac and Derkhan as they left the tent, “the weather in your city is too inclement for my kind. I have caught chill and temporarily cannot fly. But tarry and I will tell you of the views from the cloudless Cymek skies…”

The cloth closed behind them. The speech was obscured.

Isaac watched as Derkhan scribbled in her notepad.

“What are you going to turn in?” he asked.

“ ‘Remade Forced by Magister’s Torture into Living as Zoo Exhibit.’ I won’t say which one,” she answered without looking up from her writing. Isaac nodded.

“Come on,” he murmured. “I’ll get that candyfloss.”

“I’m fucking depressed now,” said Isaac heavily. He bit at the sickly-sweet bundle he carried. Wisps of sugar fibres stuck to his stubble.

“Yes, but are you depressed because of what’d been done to that man, or because you didn’t get to meet a garuda?” asked Derkhan.

They had left the freakshow. They munched earnestly as they walked past the garish body of the fair. Isaac pondered. He was a little taken aback.

“Well, I suppose…probably because I didn’t meet a garuda…But,” he added defensively, “I wouldn’t be half so depressed if it’d just been a scam, someone in a costume, something like that. It’s the…fucking indignity of it that really sticks in the craw…”

Derkhan nodded thoughtfully.

“We could look around, you know,” she said. “There’s bound to be a garuda or two here somewhere. Some of the city-bred must be here.” She looked up, uselessly. With all the coloured lights, she could hardly even see the stars.

“Not now,” said Isaac. “I’m not in the mood. I’ve lost my momentum.” There was a long, companionable silence before he spoke again.

“Will you really write something about this place in Runagate Rampanfi”

Derkhan shrugged, looked around briefly to make sure no one was listening.

“It’s a difficult job, dealing with the Remade,” she said. “There’s so much contempt, prejudice against them. Divide, rule. Trying to link up, so people don’t…judge them as monsters…it’s really hard. And it’s not like people don’t know they’ve got fucking horrendous lives, for the most part…it’s that there’s a lot of people who kind of vaguely think they deserve it, even if they pity them, or think it’s Gods-given, or rubbish like that. Oh, Godspit,” she said suddenly, and shook her head.

“What?”

“I was in court the other day, saw a Magister sentence a woman to Remaking. Such a sordid, pathetic, miserable crime…” She winced in remembrance. “Some woman living at the top of one of the Ketch Heath monoliths killed her baby…smothered it or shook it or Jabber knows what…because it wouldn’t stop crying. She’s sitting there in court, her eyes are just…damn well empty…she can’t believe what’s happened, she keeps moaning her baby’s name, and the Magister sentences her. Prison, of course, ten years I think, but it was the Remaking that I remember.

“Her baby’s arms are going to be grafted to her face. ‘So she doesn’t forget what she did,’ he says.” Derkhan’s voice curdled as she mimicked the Magister.

They walked in silence for a while, dutifully munching candyfloss.

“I’m an art critic, Isaac,” Derkhan said eventually. “Remaking’s art, you know. Sick art. The imagination it takes! I’ve seen Remade crawling under the weight of huge spiral iron shells they retreat into at night. Snail-women. I’ve seen them with big squid tentacles where their arms were, standing in river mud, plunging their suckers underwater to pull out fish. And as for the ones made for the gladiatorial shows…! Not that they admit that’s what they’re for…

“Remaking’s creativity gone bad. Gone rotten. Gone rancid. I remember you once asked me if it was hard to balance writing about art and writing for RR? She turned to look at him as they paced through the fair. “It’s the same thing, Isaac. Art’s something you choose to make…it’s a bringing together of…of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person. Even with Remaking a germ of that survives. That’s why the same people who despise the Remade are in awe of Jack Half-a-Prayer, whether or not he exists.

“I don’t want to live in a city where Remaking is the highest art.”

Isaac felt in his pocket for Runagate Rampant. It was dangerous even to hold a copy. He patted it, mentally thumbing his nose to the north-east, at Parliament, at Mayor Bentham Rudgutter and the parties squabbling over how to slice up the cake amongst themselves. The Fat Sun and Three Quills parties; Diverse Tendency, whom Lin called “comprador scum”; the liars and seducers of the Finally We Can See party; the whole pompous bickering brood like all-powerful six-year-olds in a sandpit.

At the end of the path paved with bon-bon wrappers, posters, tickets and crushed food, discarded dolls and burst balloons, stood Lin, lounging by the entrance to the fair. Isaac smiled with unfeigned pleasure at seeing her. As they neared her she stood straighter and waved at them. She sauntered in their direction.

Isaac saw that she had a toffee-apple gripped in her mandibles. Her inner jaw chewed with gusto.

How was it, treasure? she signed.

“An unmitigated arsing disaster,” Isaac huffed miserably. “I’ll tell you all about it.”

He even risked grasping her hand briefly as they turned their backs on the fair.

The three small figures disappeared into the dimly lit streets of Sobek Croix, where gaslight was brown and half-hearted where it existed at all. Behind them the enormous imbroglio of colour, metal, glass, sugar and sweat continued to pour its noise and light pollution into the sky.

Chapter Nine

Across the city, through the shady alleys of Echomire and the hovels of Badside, in the lattice of dust-clogged canals, in Smog Bend and the faded estates of Barrackham, in towers in Tar Wedge and the hostile concrete forest of Dog Fenn, came the whispered word. Someone’s paying for winged things.

Like a god, Lemuel breathed life into the message and made it fly. Small-time hoods heard it from drug dealers; costermongers told it to decayed gentlemen; doctors with dubious records got it from part-time bouncers.

Isaac’s request swept through the slums and rookeries. It travelled the alternative architecture thrown up in the human sumps.

Where putrefying houses loomed over courtyards, wooden walkways seemed to self-generate, linking them together, connecting them to the streets and mews where exhausted beasts of burden hauled third-rate goods up and down. Bridges jutted like splinted limbs across cess-trenches. Isaac’s message was couriered across the chaotic skyline in the paths of the feral cats.

Little expeditions of urban adventurers took the Sink Line train south to Fell Stop and ventured into Rudewood. They walked the deserted train tracks as long as they could, stepping from slat to wooden slat, passing the empty, nameless station in the outlands of the forest. The platforms had surrendered to green life. The tracks were thick with dandelions and foxgloves and wild roses that had shoved pugnacious through the railway gravel and, here and there, bent the tracks. Darkwood and banyan and evergreen crept up on the nervous invaders until they were surrounded, enclosed in a lush trap.

They went with sacks and catapults and big nets. They hauled their clumsy urban carcasses through the tangled roots and thick tree-shadows, yelling and tripping and breaking branches. They tried to pinpoint the birdsong that disoriented them, sounding on every side. They made faltering, useless analogies between the city and this alien realm: “If you can find your way through Dog Fenn,” one might say fatuously and wrongly, “you can find your way anywhere.” They would spin, look for and fail to find the militia tower of Vaudois Hill, out of sight behind the trees.

Some did not return.

Most came back scratching at burrs, stung and torn and angry, empty-handed. They might as well have hunted ghosts.

Occasionally they triumphed, and some frantic nightingale or Rudewood finch would be smothered with rough cloth to a chorus of ludicrously overblown cheers. Hornets buried their harpoons into their tormentors as they were swept into jars and pots. If they were lucky, their captors remembered to pierce airholes in the lids.

Many birds and more insects died. Some survived, to be taken into the dark city just beyond the trees.

In the city itself, children scaled walls to pull eggs from nests in decaying gutters. The caterpillars and maggots and cocoons they kept in matchboxes and bartered for string or chocolate were suddenly worth money.

There were accidents. A girl in pursuit of her neighbour’s racing pigeon fell from a roof, breaking her skull. An old man scrabbling for grubs was stung by bees until his heart stopped.

Rare birds and flying creatures were stolen. Some escaped. New predators and prey briefly joined the ecosystem in New Crobuzon’s skies.

Lemuel was good at his job. Some would only have plumbed the depths: not he. He made sure that Isaac’s desires were communicated uptown: Gidd, Canker Wedge, Mafaton and Nigh Sump, Ludmead and The Crow.

Clerks and doctors, lawyers and councillors, landlords and men and women of leisure…even the militia: Lemuel had often dealt (usually indirectly) with New Crobuzon’s respectable citizenry.

The main differences between them and the more desperate of the city’s inhabitants, in his experience, were the scale of money that interested them and the capacity they had not to get caught.

From the parlours and dining rooms there were cautious murmurings of interest.

In the heart of Parliament a debate was taking place about levels of business taxation. Mayor Rudgutter sat regally on his throne and nodded as his deputy, Montjohn Rescue, bellowed the Fat Sun party’s line, poking his finger aggressively across the enormous vaulted chamber. Rescue paused periodically to rearrange the thick scarf he wore around his neck, despite the warmth.

Councillors dozed quietly in a haze of dust motes.

Elsewhere in the vast building, through intricate corridors and passages that seemed designed to confuse, suited secretaries and messengers brushed busily past each other. Little tunnels and stairs of polished marble bristled from main thoroughfares. Many were unlit and unfrequented. An old man pulled a decrepit trolley along one such passage.

With the bustling noise of Parliament’s main entrance hall receding behind him, he dragged the trolley behind him up steep stairs. The corridor was barely wider than his trolley: it was a long, uncomfortable few minutes until he had reached the top. He stopped and wiped sweat from his forehead and around his mouth, then resumed his trudging plod along the ascending floor.

Ahead of him the air lightened, as sunlight tried to finger its way around a corner. He turned full into it, and his face was splashed with light and warmth. It gushed in from a skylight and, beyond that, from the windows of the doorless office at the corridor’s end.

“Morning, sir,” croaked the old man as he reached the entrance.

“Good morning to you,” came the reply from the man behind the desk.

The office was small and square, with narrow windows of smoked glass that looked out over Griss Fell and the arches of the Sud Line railway. One wall was flush with the looming dark bulk of Parliament’s main edifice. Set into that wall was a small sliding door. A pile of crates teetered in the corner.

The little room was one of the chambers that jutted from the main building, high over the surrounding city. The waters of the Gross Tar surged fifty feet below.

The delivery man unloaded his trolley of parcels and boxes in front of the pale middle-aged gentleman sitting before him.

“Not too many today, sir,” he murmured, rubbing his moaning bones. He went slowly back the way he came, his trolley jouncing lightly behind him.

The clerk sifted through the bundles and rattled out brief notes on his typewriter. He made entries in an enormous ledger labelled “acquisitions,” skimming the pages between sections and recording the date before each item. He opened up the packages and recorded the contents in a typewritten day-list and in the big book.

Militia reports: 17. Human knuckles: 3. Heliotypes (incriminating): 5.

He checked for which department each collection of items was bound, and he separated them into piles. When one pile had grown big enough, he put it in a crate and carried it over to the door in the wall. It was a four-by-four-foot square, which hissed with a rush of siphoned air and opened at the behest of some hidden piston when he tugged a lever. At its side was a little slot for a programme card.

Beyond it a wire cage dangled beneath Parliament’s obsidian skin, with one open side flush with the doorway. It was suspended above and on either side by chains that swung gently, rattled and disappeared into an eddying darkness that loomed off without remission in all directions that the clerk could see. The clerk lugged the crate up into the passageway and slid it along into the cage, which pitched a little under the weight.

He released a hatch which closed sharply, enclosing the crate and its contents with woven wire on all sides. Then he closed the sliding door, reached into his pocket and pulled out the thick programme cards he carried, each clearly marked: Militia; Intelligence; Exchequer, and so on. He slid the relevant card into the slot beside the door.

There would be a whirr. Tiny, sensitive pistons reacted to the pressure. Powered by steam driven up from the vast basement boilers, gentle little cogs rotated the length of the card. Where their spring-loaded teeth found sections cut from the thick board, they slotted neatly inside for a moment, and a minuscule switch was thrown further along the mechanism. When the wheels had completed their brief passage, the combination of on-off switches translated into binary instructions that raced in flows of steam and current along tubes and cables to hidden analytical engines.

The cage jerked free of its moorings and began a swift, swinging passage beneath the skin of Parliament. It would travel the hidden tunnels up or down or sideways or diagonally, changing direction, transferring jerkily to new chains, for five seconds, thirty seconds, two minutes or more, until it arrived, slamming into a bell to announce itself. Another sliding door opened before it, and the crate was pulled out into its destination. Far away, a new cage swung into place outside the clerk’s room.

The Acquisitions clerk worked quickly. He had logged and sent on almost all the assorted oddities before him within fifteen minutes. That was when he saw one of the few remaining parcels shaking oddly. He stopped scribbling and prodded it.

The stamps that adorned it declared it newly arrived from some merchant ship, the name obscured. Neatly printed across the front of the package was its destination: Dr. M. Barbile, Research and Development. The clerk heard a scraping. He hesitated a moment, then gingerly untied the string that bound it and peered inside.

Inside, in a nest of paper shavings that they nudged fitfully, were a mass of fat grubs bigger than his thumb.

The clerk recoiled and his eyes widened behind his glasses. The grubs were astonishingly coloured, beautiful dark reds and greens with the iridescence of peacock feathers. They floundered and wriggled to keep themselves on their stubby, sticky legs. Thick antennae poked from their heads, above a tiny mouthpiece. The hind part of their body was covered in multicoloured hairs that bristled and seemed coated in thin glue.

The fat little creatures undulated blindly.

The clerk saw, too late, a tattered invoice attached to the back of the box, half-destroyed in transit. Any invoiced package he was supposed to record as whatever was listed, and send on without opening.

Shit, he thought nervously. He unfolded the torn halves of the invoice. It was still quite legible.

SM caterpillars x 5. That was all.

The clerk sat back and pondered for a moment, watching the hairy little creatures crawl over each other and the paper they sat in.

Caterpillars? he thought, and grinned fleetingly, anxiously. He kept glancing at the corridor before him.

Rare caterpillars…Some foreign breed, he thought.

He remembered the whispers in the pub, the winks and nods. He’d heard a chap at his local offering money for such creatures…The rarer the better, he’d said…

The clerk’s face wrinkled suddenly in avarice and fear. His hand hovered over the box, darting back and forth inconclusively. He got up and stalked over to his room’s entrance. He listened. There was no sound from the burnished corridor.

The clerk returned to his desk, calculating risk and benefit frantically. He looked closely at the invoice. It was stamped with an illegible crest, but the actual information was handwritten. He fumbled in his desk drawer without giving himself time to think, his eyes darting constantly back to the deserted passage outside his doorway, and brought out a paper-knife and a quill. He scratched with the sharp knife at the straight line on the top and the end of the curl on the bottom of the 5 on the invoice, gently, gently, shaving them away. He blew away paper- and ink-dust, smoothed the roughened paper carefully with the feathered end of his quill. Then he turned it around and dipped the fine point in his inkwell. Meticulously, he straightened the curling base of the digit, converting it into crossing lines.

Eventually, it was done. He straightened up and squinted critically down at his handiwork. It looked like a 4.

That’s the hard bit, he thought.

He felt about him for some container, turned his pockets inside out, scratched his head and thought. His face lit, and he pulled out his glasses case. He opened it and filled it with shredded paper. Then, his face wrinkling with anxious disgust, he pulled the edge of his sleeve down over his hand and reached into the box. He felt the soft edges of one of the big caterpillars between his fingers. As gently and quickly as he could, he plucked it squirming from its fellows and dropped it into his glasses case. Quickly, he closed the case around the frantically twitching little creature and fastened it.

He buried his glasses case at the bottom of his briefcase, behind mint-sweets and papers and pens and notebooks.

The clerk retied the string on the box, then sat back quickly and waited. His heart was very loud, he realized. He was sweating a little. He breathed deeply and squeezed his eyes closed.

Relax, now, he thought soothingly to himself. That’s your bit of excitement over.

Two or three minutes passed, and no one came. The clerk was still alone. His bizarre embezzlement had gone unnoticed. He breathed easier.

Eventually he looked again at his forged invoice. It was, he realized, very good. He opened the ledger and entered, in the section marked R amp;D, the date and the information: 27th Chet, Anno Urbis 1779: From merchant ship X. SM caterpillars: 4.

The last number seemed to glare at him as if it was written in red.

He typed the same information onto his day-sheet before picking up the resealed box and carrying it over to the wall. He opened the sliding doors and leaned into the little metal threshold, pushed the box of grubs into the waiting cage. Gusts of stale, dry air billowed onto his face from the dark cavity between the hide and guts of Parliament.

The clerk pulled the cage shut and closed the door before it. He fumbled for his programme cards, eventually pulling the one marked R amp;D from the little pack with fingers that still trembled, just a little. He slotted it into the information engine.

There was a juddering hiss and a ratcheting sound as the instructions fed along pistons and hammers and flywheels and the cage was pulled vertiginously up, away from the clerk’s office, beyond Parliament’s foothills, into the craggy peaks.

The box of caterpillars swung as it was tugged through the darkness. Oblivious to their journey, the grubs circumscribed their little prison with peristaltic motion.

Quiet engines transferred the cage from hook to hook, changing its direction and dropping it onto rusted conveyor-belts, retrieving it in another part of Parliament’s bowels. The box spiralled invisibly around the building, rising gradually and inexorably towards the high-security East Wing, passing through mechanized veins to those organic turrets and protuberances.

Finally the wire cage dropped with a muted chime onto a bed of springs. The vibrations of the bell ebbed into the silence. After a minute the door to the shaft snapped open and the box of larvae was yanked brusquely into a harsh light.

There were no windows in the long white room, only incandescent gasjets. Every cranny of the room was visible in its sterility. No dust, no dirt invaded here. The cleanliness was hard and aggressive.

All around the perimeter of the room, white-coated figures were huddled in obscure tasks.

It was one of those bright, hidden figures who untied the box’s string and read the invoice. She gently opened the box and peered inside.

She picked up the cardboard box and carried it at arms’ length through the room. At the far end one of her colleagues, a thin cactacae with his spines carefully secured beneath thick white coveralls, had opened the large bolted door for which she was heading. She showed him her security clearance and he stood aside to let her precede him.

They walked carefully down a corridor as white and sparse as the room from which they had come, with a large iron grille at the far end. The cactus saw that his colleague was carrying something gingerly in both hands, and he reached past her and fed a programme card into an input slot in the wall. The slatted gate slid open.

They entered a vast dark chamber.

Its ceiling and its walls were far enough away to be invisible. Weird wails and lowing sounded distantly from all sides. As their eyes adjusted, cages walled with dark wood or iron or reinforced glass loomed at them irregularly in the enormous hall. Some were huge, the size of rooms: others were no larger than a book. All were raised like cabinets in a museum, with charts and books of information slotted before them. White-clad scientists moved through the maze between the blocks of glass like spirits in a ruin, taking notes, observing, pacifying and tormenting the cages’ inhabitants.

Captive things sniffed and grunted and sang and shifted unreally in their dim prisons.

The cactus walked briskly off into the distance and disappeared. The woman carrying the grubs made her way carefully through the room.

Things lunged at her as she walked past and she shuddered with the glass. Something swirled oleaginously through a huge vat of liquid mud: she saw toothy tentacles slapping at her and scouring the tank. She was bathed in hypnotic organic lights. She passed a small cage smothered in black cloth, with warning signs plastered ostentatiously on all sides and instructions on how to deal with the contents. Her colleagues drifted up to her and away again with clipboards and children’s coloured bricks and slabs of putrefying meat.

Ahead, temporary black wooden walls twenty feet high had been thrown up, surrounding a floor-space forty feet square. Even a corrugated iron ceiling had been hammered over the top. At the padlocked entrance to the room-within-a-room stood a white-suited guard, his head braced to take the weight of a bizarre helmet. He carried a flintlock rifle and a back-slung scimitar. At his feet were several more helmets like his.

She nodded to the guard and indicated her desire to enter. He looked at the identification around her neck.

“You know what to do, then?” he asked quietly.

She nodded and put the box carefully on the floor for a moment, after testing that the string was still tight. Then she picked up one of the helmets by the guard’s feet and slipped the unwieldy thing over her head.

It was a cage of brass pipes and screws that slotted around her skull, with one small mirror suspended a foot and a half in front of each of her eyes. She adjusted the chinstrap to keep the heavy contraption steady, then turned her back on the guard and fiddled with the mirrors. She angled them on their swivelling joints until she could see him clearly directly behind her. She switched focus from eye to eye, testing the visibility.

She nodded.

“All right, I’m ready,” she said, and picked up the box, untying it as she did so. She stared intently into the mirrors while the guard unlocked the door behind her. When he opened it he averted his eyes from the interior.

The scientist used her mirrors to walk backwards quickly into the dark room.

She was sweating as she saw the door close in front of her face. She switched her attention again to the mirrors, moved her head slowly from side to side to take in what was behind her.

There was a huge cage of thick black bars filling almost the whole space. From the dark brown light of burning oil and candles she could make out the desultory, dying vegetation and small trees that filled the cage. The gently rotting growth and the darkness in the room were thick enough that she could not see the far side of the room.

She scanned quickly in the mirrors. Nothing was moving.

She backed quickly up to the cage, to where a small tray slotted back and forth through the bars. She reached behind her and tilted her head up such that the mirrors angled down and she could see her hand groping. It was a difficult, inelegant manoeuvre, but she managed to grip the handle and tug the tray out towards her.

She heard a heavy beating in the corner of the cage, like thick rugs being slammed quickly together. Her breath came faster and she fumbled to pour the grubs onto the tray. The four little undulating lozenges slipped in a shower of paper debris onto the metal.

Immediately, something changed in the quality of the air. The caterpillars could smell the inhabitant of the cage, and they were crying out to it for succour.

The thing in the cage was answering.

These cries were not audible. They vibrated in wavelengths other than sonar. The scientist felt the hair all over her body bristle as the ghosts of emotions fleeted through her skull like half-heard rumours. Snippets of alien joy and inhuman terror wafted in her nostrils and ears and behind her eyes, synaesthetically.

With trembling fingers she pushed the tray into the cage.

As she stepped away from the bars, something stroked her leg with a lascivious flourish. She gave a moaning grunt of fear and yanked her trouser out of reach, clamped down on her terror, resisted the instinct to look behind her.

In her head-mounted mirrors, she glimpsed dark brown limbs uncurling in the rough undergrowth, the yellowing bone of teeth, black ocular pits. The ferns and scrub rustled and the thing was gone.

The scientist knocked brusquely on the door as she swallowed, holding her breath until it was opened and she stumbled out nearly into the arms of the guard. She snatched at the clasps under her head, pulling herself free of the helmet. She stared intently away from the guard while she heard him closing and locking the door.

“Is it done?” she whispered eventually.

“Yes.”

She turned back slowly. She could not look up, but kept her eyes firmly on the floor, checking that he told the truth by looking at the base of the door, then slowly and with a rush of relief raising her line of sight to eye-level.

She handed the helmet back to the guard.

“Thanks,” she murmured.

“Was it all right?” he asked.

“Never,” she snapped, and turned.

Behind her, she thought she heard a massive fluttering through the wooden walls.

She walked briskly back through the chamber of strange animals, realizing halfway through that she still clutched the now-empty box in which the grubs had come. She folded it and put it in her pocket.

She pulled the telescoping gate closed behind her on the massive chamber full of shadowy, violent shapes. She returned the length of the scrubbed white corridor and at last back into the Research amp; Development antechamber, through the first heavy door.

She pushed it closed and bolted it, before turning happily to join her white-suited fellows staring into femtoscopes or reading treatises or conferring quietly by the doors that led to other specialist departments. Each had a legend stencilled on it in red and black.

As Dr. Magesta Barbile walked back to her bench to make her report, she glanced briefly over her shoulder at the warnings printed on the door she had taken.

Biohazard. Danger. Extreme Caution Required.

Chapter Ten

“Are you a dabbler in drugs, Ms. Lin?”

Lin had told Mr. Motley many times that it was difficult for her to speak when she was working. He had affably informed her that he got bored when he was sitting for her, or for any portraits. She didn’t have to answer him, he had said. If anything he said really interested her, she could save it up for afterwards and discuss it with him at the end of the session. She really mustn’t mind him, he had said. He couldn’t possibly stay still for two, three, four hours at a time and say nothing. It would drive him mad. So she listened to what he said and tried to remember one or two remarks to bring up later. She was still very careful to keep him happy with her.

“You should give them a try. I’m sure you have, actually. Artist like you. Plumbing the depths of the psyche. Such-like.” She heard a smile in his voice.

Lin had persuaded Mr. Motley to let her work in the attic of his Bonetown base. It was the only place with natural light in the whole building, she had discovered. It was not only painters or heliotypists who needed light: the textures and tactility of surfaces that she evoked so assiduously in her gland-art was invisible by candlelight, and exaggerated in gasjets. So she had wrangled with him nervously until he had accepted her expertise. From then on, she was greeted at the door by the cactus valet and led to the top floor, where a wooden ladder dangled from a trapdoor in the ceiling.

She came and went into the attic alone. Whenever Lin arrived she would find Mr. Motley waiting. He would stand in the enormous space a few feet from where she pulled herself into his view.

The triangular cavity seemed to stretch at least a third the length of the terrace, a study in perspective, with the chaotic agglutination of flesh that was Mr. Motley poised at its centre.

There were no furnishings. There was one door leading to some little corridor outside, but she never saw it open. The attic air was dry. Lin trod over loose boards, risking splinters with every step. But the dirt on the large dormer windows seemed translucent, admitting light and diffusing it. Lin would gently sign for Mr. Motley to position himself below the wash of sun, or cloudlight. Then she would pace around him, reorienting herself, before continuing with her sculpture.

Once she had asked him where he would put a life-size representation of himself.

“It’s nothing for you to worry about,” he had answered with a gentle smile.

She stood before him and watched the lukewarm grey light pick out his features. Every session before she started she would spend some minutes making herself familiar with him again.

The first couple of times she had come here, she had been sure that he changed overnight, that the shards of physiognomy that made up his whole reorganized when no one was looking. She became frightened of her commission. She wondered hysterically if it was like a task in a moral children’s tale, if she was to be punished for some nebulous sin by striving to freeze in time a body in flux, forever too afraid to say anything, starting each day from the beginning all over again.

But it was not long before she learnt to impose order on his chaos. It felt absurdly prosaic to count the razor-sharp shards of chitin that jutted from a scrap of pachyderm skin, just to make sure she had not missed one in her sculpture. It felt almost vulgar, as if his anarchic form should defy accounting. And yet, as soon as she looked at him with such an eye, the work of sculpture took shape.

Lin would stand and stare at him, switching focus rapidly from visual cell to cell, her concentration fleeting across her eyes, gauging the aggregate that was Mr. Motley through the minutely changing parts. She carried dense white sticks of the organic paste she would metabolize to make her art. She had already eaten several before arriving, and as she took the visual measure of him, she would chew rapidly on another, stolidly ignoring the dull, unpleasant taste, and rapidly passing it through her headbody to the sac inside the hindpart of her headthorax. Her headbelly would swell visibly as she stored up her mulch.

She would turn and pick up the beginnings of the work, the three-toed reptile claw that was one of Mr. Motley’s feet, and she would tie it into place on a low bracket. Then she would turn back and kneel, facing her subject, opening the little chitin case protecting her gland and fastening the nether lips at the rear of her head-body with a gentle slup onto the edge of the sculpture behind her.

First, Lin would gently spit a little of the enzyme that broke down the integrity of the already hardened khepri-spit, returning the edge of her work-in-progress to a thick sticky mucus. Then she would focus hard on the section of the leg she was working on, taking in what she could see and remembering the features out of her sight, the exoskeletal jags, the muscular cavities; she would begin gently to squeeze the thick paste from her gland, her sphincter-lips dilating and contracting and extending, rolling and smoothing the sludge into shape.

She used the opalescent nacre of the khepri-spit to good effect. At certain places, though, the hues of Mr. Motley’s bizarre flesh were too spectacular, too arresting, not to be represented. Lin would glance down and grab a handful of the colourberries arrayed on her pallet before her. She would take them in subtle combinations and quickly eat them, a careful cocktail of redberries and cyanberries, say, yellowberries and purpleberries and blackberries.

The vivid juice would be spat through her headguts, down peculiar intestinal byways and into an adjunct of her main thoracic sac, and within four or five minutes she could push the mixed colour into the diluted khepri-spit. She would smear the liquid froth into careful position, slopping astonishing tones in suggestive patches and scabs, where it coagulated quickly into shape.

It was only at the end of hours of work, bloated and exhausted, her mouth foul with berry acid and the musty chalk of the paste, that Lin could turn and see her creation. That was the skill of the gland-artist, who had to work blind.

The first of Mr. Motley’s legs was coming along, she had decided, with some pride.

The clouds just visible through the skylight moiled vigorously, dissolving and recombining in scraps and shards in new parts of the sky. The air in the attic was very still, by comparison. Dust hung motionless. Mr. Motley stood poised against the light.

He was good at staying very still, as long as one of his mouths kept up a rambling monologue. Today he had decided to talk to Lin about drugs.

“What is your poison, Lin? Shazbah? Tusk has no effect on khepri, does it, so that’s out…” He ruminated. “I think artists have an ambivalent relationship with drugs. I mean, the whole project’s about unlocking the beast within, right? Or the angel. Whatever. Opening doors one thought were jammed closed. Now, if you do that with drugs, then doesn’t that make the art rather a let-down? Art’s got to be about communication, hasn’t it? So if you rely on drugs, which are, I do not care what any proselytizing little ponce dropping a fizzbolt with chums at a dancehall tells me, which are an intrinsically individualized experience, then you’ve opened the doors, but can you communicate what you’ve found on the other side?

“Then on the other hand, if you remain stubbornly straight-edged, keep sternly to the mind as she is more usually found, then you can communicate with others, because you’re all speaking the same language, as it were…but have you opened the door? Maybe the best you can do is peer through the keyhole. Maybe that’ll do…”

Lin glanced up to see which mouth he was speaking from. It was a large, feminine one near his shoulder. She wondered why it was that his voice remained unchanged. She wished she could reply, or that he would stop talking. She found it hard to concentrate, but she thought she had already extracted as good a compromise as she would get from him.

“Lots and lots of money in drugs…of course you know that. D’you know what your friend and agent Lucky Gazid is prepared to pay for his latest illicit tipple? Honestly, it would astonish you. Ask him, do. The market for these substances is extraordinary. There’s room for a few purveyors to make quite tidy sums.”

Lin felt that Mr. Motley was laughing at her. Every conversation he had with her wherein he disclosed some hidden details of New Crobulon’s underworld lore, she was embroiled in something she was eager to avoid. I’m nothing but a visitor, she wanted to sign frantically. Don’t give me a streetmap! The occasional shot of shazbah to come up, maybe a jolt of quinner to come down, that’s all I ask…Don’t know about the distribution and don’t want to!

“Ma Francine has something of a monopoly in Petty Coil. She’s spreading her sales representatives further afield from Kinken. D’you know her? One of your kind. Impressive businesswoman. She and I are going to have to come to some arrangement. Otherwise it’s all going to get messy.” Several of Mr. Motley’s mouths smiled. “But I’ll tell you something,” he added softly. “I’m taking a delivery very soon of something that should rather dramatically change my distribution. I may have something of a monopoly myself…”

I’m going to find Isaac tonight, decided Lin nervously. I’m going to take him out to supper, somewhere in Salacus Fields where I can touch his toes with mine.

The annual Shintacost Prize competition was coming up fast, at the end of Melluary, and she would have to think of something to tell him as to why she was not entering. She had never won-the judges, she thought haughtily, did not understand gland-art-but she, along with all her artist friends, had entered without fail for the last seven years. It had become a ritual. They would have a grand supper on the day of the announcement, and send someone to pick up an early copy of the Salacus Gazetteer, which sponsored the competition, to see who had won. Then they would drunkenly denounce the organizers for tasteless buffoons.

Isaac would be surprised that she was not taking part. She had decided to hint at some monumental work-in-progress, something to keep him from asking questions for some time.

Of course, she reflected, if his garuda thing’s still going on, he won’t really notice if I enter or not.

There was a sour note to her thoughts. She was not being fair, she realized. She was prone to the same kind of obsessing: she found it difficult, now, not to see the monstrous shape of Mr. Motley hovering at the corner of her vision at every hour. It was just bad timing that Isaac should be obsessed at the same time as her, she thought desultorily. This job was swallowing her up. She wanted to come home every night to freshly mixed fruit salad and theatre tickets and sex.

Instead, he scribbled avidly in his workshop, and she came home to an empty bed in Aspic Hole, night after night. They met once or twice a week, for a hurried supper and a deep, unromantic sleep.

Lin looked up and saw that the shadows had moved some way since she had come into the attic. Her mind felt foggy. Her delicate forelegs cleaned her mouth and eyes and antennae in quick passes. She chewed what she had decided would be the day’s last clutch of colourberries. The tartness of the blueberries was tempered by the sweet pinkberries. She was mixing carefully, adding an unripe pearlberry or a nearly fermenting yellowberry. She knew exactly the taste she was striving for: the sickly, cloying bitterness of a colour like vivid, greying salmon, the colour of Mr. Motley’s calf muscle.

She swallowed and squeezed juice through her headgullet. It squirted eventually onto the shimmering sides of the drying khepri-spit. It was a little too liquid: it spattered and dribbled as it emerged. Lin worked with it, rendering the muscle tone in abstract streaks and drips, a spur-of-the-moment rescue.

When the spit was dry she disengaged. She felt a sticky seal of mucus stretch and snap as she pulled her head away from the half-finished leg. She leaned to one side and tensed, pushing the remaining paste through her gland. The ribbed underbelly of her headbody squeezed itself out of its distended shape, into more usual dimensions. A fat white glop of khepri-spit dropped from her head and curled on the floor. Lin stretched her gland-tip forwards and cleaned it with her rear legs, then carefully closed the little protective case below her wingtips.

She stood and stretched. Mr. Motley’s amiable, cold, dangerous little pronouncements broke off sharply. He had not realized she was finished.

“So soon, Ms. Lin?” he cried with theatrical disappointment.

Losing my edge if not careful, she signed slowly. Takes a lot out of you. Got to stop.

“Of course,” said Mr. Motley. “And how is the meisterwork?”

They turned together.

Lin was pleased to see that her impromptu recovery from the watery colourberry juice had created a vivid, suggestive effect. It was not entirely naturalistic, but none of her work was: instead, Mr. Motley’s muscle seemed to have been thrown violently onto the bones of his leg. An analogy perhaps close to the truth.

The translucent colours spilt in uneven grots down the white that glinted like the inside of a shell. The slabs of tissue and muscle crawled over each other. The intricacies of the many-textured flesh were vivid. Mr. Motley nodded approvingly.

“You know,” he ventured quietly, “my sense of the grand moment makes me wish there was some way I could avoid seeing anything more of this until it’s finished. I think it is very fine so far, you know. Very fine. But it’s dangerous to offer praise too early. Can lead to complacency…or to the opposite. So please don’t be downhearted, Ms. Lin, if that is the last word I say, positive or negative, on the matter, until the very end. Are we agreed?”

Lin nodded. She was unable to take her eyes from what she had created, and she rubbed her hand very gently over the smooth surface of the drying khepri-spit. Her fingers explored the transition from fur to scales to skin below Mr. Motley’s knee. She looked down at the original. She looked up at his head. He returned her gaze with a pair of tiger’s eyes.

What…what were you? she signed at him. He sighed.

“I wondered when you’d ask that, Lin. I did hope that you wouldn’t, but I knew it was unlikely. It makes me wonder if we understand each other at all,” he hissed, sounding suddenly vicious. Lin recoiled.

“It’s so…predictable. You’re still not looking the right way. At all. It’s a wonder you can create such art. You still see this-” he gesticulated vaguely at his own body with a monkey’s paw “-as pathology. You’re still interested in what was and how it went wrong. This is not error or absence or mutancy: this is image and essence…” His voice rang around the rafters.

He calmed a little and lowered his many arms.

“This is totality.”

She nodded to show that she understood, too tired to be intimidated.

“Maybe I’m too hard on you,” Mr. Motley said reflectively. “I mean…this piece before us makes it clear that you have a sense of the ruptured moment, even if your question suggests the opposite…So maybe,” he continued slowly, “you yourself contain that moment. Part of you understands without recourse to words, even if your higher mind asks questions in a format which renders an answer impossible.”

He looked at her triumphantly.

“You too are the bastard-zone, Ms. Lin! Your art takes place where your understanding and your ignorance blur.”

Fine, she signed as she gathered her things. Whatever. Sorry I asked.

“So was I, but not any more, I think,” he replied.

Lin folded her wooden case around her stained pallet, around the remaining colourberries (she needed more, she saw) and the blocks of paste. Mr. Motley continued with his philosophical ramblings, his ruminations on mongrel theory. Lin was not listening. She tuned her antennae away from him, felt the tiny ructions and rumblings of the house, the weight of the air on the window.

I want a sky above me, she thought, not this ancient dusty brace of beams, this tarred, brittle roof. I’m walking home. Slowly. Through Brock Marsh.

Her resolution increased as her thoughts progressed.

I’ll stop at the lab and nonchalantly ask Isaac to come with me, and I’ll steal him away for a night.

Mr. Motley continued sounding.

Shut up, shut up, you spoilt child, you damn megalomaniac with your crackpot theories, thought Lin.

When she turned to sign goodbye, it was with only the faintest semblance of politeness.

Chapter Eleven

A pigeon hung cruciform on an X of darkwood on Isaac’s desk. Its head bobbed frantically from side to side, but despite its terror, it could only emit a bathetic cooing.

Its wings were pinned with thin nails driven through the tight spaces between splayed feathers and bent hard down to pinion the wingtip. The pigeon’s legs were tied to the lower quarters of the little cross. The wood beneath it was spattered with the dirty white and grey of birdshit. It spasmed and tried to shake its wings, but it was held.

Isaac loomed over it brandishing a magnifying glass and a long pen.

“Stop fucking about, you vermin,” he muttered, and prodded the bird’s shoulder with the tip of the pen. He gazed through his lens at the infinitesimal shudders that passed through the tiny bones and muscles. He scribbled without looking at the paper beneath him.

“Oy!”

Isaac looked round at Lublamai’s irritated call, and left his desk. He paced to the balcony’s edge and peered over.

“What?”

Lublamai and David were standing shoulder to shoulder on the ground floor, their arms folded. They looked like a small chorus line about to burst into song. Their faces were furrowed. There was silence for some seconds.

“Look,” began Lublamai, his voice suddenly placatory, “Isaac…We’ve always agreed that this is a place we can all do the research we want to do, no questions asked, back each other up, that sort of thing…right?”

Isaac sighed and rubbed his eyes with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.

“For Jabber’s sake, boys, let’s not play old soldiers,” he said with a groan. “You don’t have to tell me we’ve been through thick and thin, or what have you, I know you’re arsed off, and I don’t blame you…”

“It smells, Isaac,” said David bluntly. “And we’re treated to the dawn chorus every minute of the day.”

As Lublamai spoke, the old construct wheeled its way uncertainly behind him. It stopped and its head rotated, its lenses taking in the two poised men. It hesitated a moment, then folded its stubby metal arms in clumsy imitation of their poses. Isaac gesticulated at it.

“Look, look, that stupid thing’s losing it! It’s got a virus! You’d better have it trashed or it’ll self-organize; you’ll be having existential arguments with your mechanical skivvy before the year’s out!”

“Isaac, don’t change the fucking subject,” said David irritably, glancing round and shoving the construct, which fell over. “We all have a bit of leeway when it comes to inconveniences, but this is pushing it.”

“All right!” Isaac threw up his hands. He looked slowly around. “I suppose I sort of underestimated Lemuel’s abilities to get things done,” he said ruefully.

Circumscribing the entire warehouse, the whole length of the raised platform was crammed with cages filled with flapping, crying, crawling things. The warehouse was loud with the sounds of displaced air, the sudden shifts and fluttering of beating wings, the spatter of droppings, and loudest of all, the constant screech of captive birds. Pigeons and sparrows and starlings registered their distress with their coos and calls: feeble on their own, but a sharp, grating chorus en masse. Parrots and canaries punctuated the avian wittering with squawked exclamation marks that made Isaac wince. Geese and chickens and ducks added a rustic air to the cacophony. Hard-faced aspises flung themselves through the air the short distance of their cages, their little lizard bodies banging against the chickenwire fronts. They licked their wounds with their tiny lions’ faces and roared like aggressive mice. Huge glass tanks of flies and bees and wasps, mayflies and butterflies and flying beetles sounded a vivid aggressive drone. Bats hung upside down and regarded Isaac with fervent little eyes. Dragonfly-snakes rustled their long elegant wings and hissed loudly.

The floors of the cages had not been cleaned and the acrid smell of birdshit was very strong. Sincerity, Isaac saw, was wobbling up and down the room shaking her striped head. David saw where Isaac was looking.

“Yeah,” he shouted. “See? The stink’s making her miserable.”

“Fellows,” said Isaac, “I appreciate your forbearance, I really do. It’s give and take, isn’t it? Lub, remember when you were doing those experiments in sonar and you had that chap in banging that huge drum for two days?”

“Isaac, it’s already been nearly a week! How long’s it going to be? What’s the schedule? At the very least clean their mess up!”

Isaac looked down at the irate faces below him. They were very pissed off, he realized. He thought quickly for a compromise.

“Fine, look,” he eventually said, “I’ll clean them out tonight-I promise. And I’ll work flat fucking out…I know! I’ll work hard on the loud ones first. I’ll try and get rid of them within…two weeks?” he finished lamely. David and Lublamai expostulated, but he interrupted their jeers and catcalls. “I’ll pay a little extra rent for the next month! How’s that?”

The rude noises died down instantly. The two men stared at him calculatedly. They were scientific comrades, the Brock Marsh bad boys, friends; but their existence was precarious, and there was limited room for sentimentality where money was concerned. Knowing that, Isaac tried to forestall any temptation they might have to seek alternative space. He, after all, couldn’t afford the rent here alone.

“What are we talking?” asked David.

Isaac pondered.

“Two extra guineas?”

David and Lublamai looked at each other. It was generous.

“And,” said Isaac casually, “while we’re on the subject, I’d appreciate a hand. I don’t know how to manage some of these…uh…scientific subjects. Didn’t you do some ornithological theory once, David?”

“No,” said David tartly. “I was an assistant to someone who did. I was bored shitless. And stop being so transparent, ‘Zaac. I’m not going to resent your pestilential pets any less if you involve me in your projects…” He laughed with a trace of genuine humour. “Have you been taking Introductory Empathic Theory, or something?”

But despite his scorn, David was ascending the stairs, with Lublamai behind him.

He paused at the top and took in all the jabbering captives.

“Devil’s Tail, Isaac!” he whispered, grinning. “How much has this lot set you back?”

“Haven’t entirely settled with Lemuel yet,” said Isaac dryly. “But my new boss should see me all right.”

Lublamai had joined David on the top step. He gesticulated at a collection of variegated cages in the far corner of the walkway.

“What’s over there?”

“That’s where I keep the exotica,” said Isaac. “Aspises, lasifly…”

“You’ve got a lasifly?” exclaimed Lublamai. Isaac nodded and grinned.

“Don’t have the heart to do any experiments with the beautiful thing,” he said.

“Can I see it?”

“ ‘Course, Lub. It’s over there behind the cage with the batkin in it.”

As Lublamai trooped over between the tightly packed cases, David looked briskly about him.

“So where’s your ornithological problem, then?” he asked and rubbed his hands.

“On the desk.” Isaac indicated the miserable, trussed pigeon. “How do I make that thing stop wriggling. I wanted it to at first, to see the musculature, but now I want to move the wings myself.”

David stared levelly at him as if at a halfwit.

“Kill it.”

Isaac shrugged hugely.

“I tried. It wouldn’t die.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake…” David laughed exasperatedly, and strode over to the desk. He wrung the pigeon’s neck.

Isaac winced ostentatiously and held up his massive hands.

“They’re just not subtle enough for that sort of work. My hands are too clumsy, my sensibilities too damned delicate,” he declared airily.

“Right,” agreed David sceptically. “What are you working on?”

Isaac was instantly enthusiastic.

“Well…” He strode over to the desk. “I’ve had fuck-all luck with the garuda in the city. I heard rumours about a couple living in St. Jabber’s Mound and Syriac, and I sent word that I was willing to pay good moolah for a couple of hours’ time and some heliotypes. I’ve had absolutely nil response. I’ve whacked a couple of posters up in the university as well, asking for any garuda student ready and willing to drop by here, but my sources tell me there’s been no intake this year.”

“ ‘Garuda aren’t…adept at abstract thought.’ ” David imitated the sneering tone of the speaker from the sinister Three Quills party, which had held a disastrous rally in Brock Marsh the previous year. Isaac and David and Derkhan had gone along to disrupt proceedings, hurling abuse and rotten oranges at the man on stage to the delight of the xenian demonstration outside. Isaac barked in recollection.

“Absolutely. So anyway, short of going to Spatters, at the moment I can’t work with actual garuda, so I’m looking at the various flight mechanisms you…uh…see around you. Amazing variation, actually.”

Isaac sheafed through piles of notes, holding up diagrams of finches’ and bluebottles’ wings. He untied the dead pigeon and delicately traced the movement of its wings through a rolling arc. He pointed wordlessly at the wall around his desk. It was covered with carefully rendered diagrams of wings. Close-up sections of the rotating joint at the shoulder, pared-down representations of forces, beautifully shaded studies of feather patterns. Here too were heliotypes of dirigibles, with arrows and question marks scrawled on them in dark ink. There were suggestive sketches of the mindless men-o’-war, and hugely enlarged pictures of wasps’ wings. Each was carefully labelled. David moved his eyes slowly over the hours and hours of work, the comparative studies of the engines of flight.

“I don’t think my client’s too fussy about what his wings-or whatever-look like, as long as he can get airbound as and when.” David and Lublamai knew about Yagharek. Isaac had asked them for secrecy. He trusted them. He had told them in case Yagharek visited when they were in the warehouse, although so far the garuda had managed to avoid them on his fleeting visits.

“Have you thought about just, y’know, sticking some wings back on?” said David. “Remaking him?”

“Well, absolutely, that’s my main line of enquiry, but there’re two problems. One is what wings? I’ll have to build them. Second is, do you know any Remakers prepared to do that on the quiet? The best bio-thaumaturge I know is the despised Vermishank. I’ll go to him if I fucking have to, but I’ll be sorely desperate before I do that…So at the moment I’m doing preliminary stuff, trying to work out the size and shape and power-source of something that would hold him up at all. If I go that way, eventually.”

“What else have you got in mind? Physico-thaumaturgy?”

“Well, you know, UFT, my old favourite…” Isaac grinned and shrugged self-deprecatingly. “I have a feeling his back’s too messed up for easy Remaking, even if I could get the wings sorted out. I’m wondering about combining two different energy fields…Shit, David, I don’t know. I’ve got the beginnings of an idea…” He pointed vaguely at a roughly labelled drawing of a triangle.

“Isaac?” Lublamai’s yell sailed over the relentless squawks and screeches. Isaac and David looked over at him. He had wandered on past the lasifly and the pair of gild-parakeets. He was pointing at a smaller set of boxes and cases and vats. “What’s all this?”

“Oh, that’s my nursery,” shouted Isaac with a grin. He strode towards Lublamai, pulling David with him. “I thought it might be interesting to see how you progress from something that can’t fly to something that can, so I managed to get hold of a bunch of neonates and unborns and baby things.”

He stopped by the collection. Lublamai was peering into a small hutch at a clutch of vivid cobalt eggs.

“Don’t know what they are,” said Isaac. “Hope it’s something pretty.”

The hutch was on the top of a pile of similar open-fronted boxes, in each of which a clumsy little hand-made nest contained between one and four eggs. Some were astonishing colours, some a drab beige. A little pipe coiled away behind the hutches and disappeared over the railings into the boiler below. Isaac nudged it with his foot.

“I think they prefer it warm…” he muttered. “Don’t really know…”

Lublamai was bending down to peer into a glass-fronted tank.

“Wow…” he breathed. “I feel like I’m ten again! Trade you these for six marbles.”

The tank’s floor writhed with little green caterpillars. They munched voraciously and systematically on the leaves stuffed rudely around them. The stems were crawling with little bodies.

“Yeah, that’s quite interesting. Any day now they should go into their cocoons, and then I think I’m going to ruthlessly cut them open at various stages to see how they transmogrify themselves.”

“Life as a lab assistant is cruel, isn’t it?” murmured Lublamai into the tank. “What other disgusting grubs do you have?”

“Bunch of maggots. Easy to feed. That’s probably the smell that’s got Sincerity upset.” Isaac laughed. “Some other grubs that promise to turn into butterflies and moths, horribly aggressive water-things that I am told turn into damask-flies and what have you…” Isaac pointed at a tank full of dirty water, behind the others.

“And,” he said, swaggering over to a little mesh cage some feet away, “something rather special…” He jabbed his thumb at the container.

David and Lublamai crowded round. They gazed with open mouths.

“Oh, now that is splendid…” whispered David, after a while.

“What is it?” hissed Lublamai.

Isaac peered over their heads at his star caterpillar.

“Frankly, my friends, I have not an arsing clue. All I know is that it’s huge, pretty, and not very happy.”

The grub waved its thick head blindly. It shifted its massive body sluggishly around the wire prison. It was at least four inches long and one inch thick, with bright colours slapped randomly around its chubby cylindrical body. Spiky hairs sprouted from its rump. It shared its cage with browning lettuce leaves, little snips of meat, slices of fruit, paper strips.

“See,” said Isaac, “I’ve tried to feed the thing everything. I’ve put in as many herbs and plants as exist, and it doesn’t want any of them. So I tried it on fish and fruit and cake, bread, meat, paper, glue, cotton, silk…it just roots aimlessly around being hungry, staring at me accusingly.”

Isaac leaned in, planting his face between David’s and Lublamai’s.

“It obviously wants to eat,” he said. “Its colour’s fading, which is worrying, both aesthetically and physiologically…I’m at a loss. I think the beautiful thing’s going to sit there and die on me.” Isaac sniffed matter-of-factly.

“Where did you get it from?” asked David.

“Oh, you know how this stuff works,” said Isaac. “I got it from a cove who got it from a man who got it from a woman who got it…and so on. I’ve no idea where it came from.”

“You’re not going to cut this open, are you?”

“ ‘Stail, no. If it lives to build a cocoon, which I’m afraid I doubt, I’ll be very interested to see what comes out. I might even donate it to the Science Museum. You know me. Public-spirited…So anyway, this thing’s not really much use to me for research. Can’t even make it eat, let alone metamorphose, let alone fly. So everything else you see around you-” he spread his arms wide, wriggled his wrists to take in the room “-is grist to my counter-gravitational mill. But this little geezer-” he pointed at the listless caterpillar “-this is social work.” He grinned widely.

There was a creaking from below. The door was being pushed open. All three men lurched dangerously over the side of the walkway and peered down, expecting to see Yagharek the garuda, with his false wings under his cloak.

Lin peered up at them.

David and Lublamai started in confusion. They were embarrassed at Isaac’s sudden cry of irritated welcome. They found something else to look at.

Isaac was scurrying down the stairs.

“Lin,” he bellowed. “Good to see you.” When he reached her he spoke quietly.

“Sweetheart, what are you doing here? I thought I was going to see you later in the week.”

As he spoke he saw her antennae quivering miserably, tried to temper his nervous irritation. It was clear that Lub and David understood what was going on-they’d known him a long time: he did not doubt that his evasion and hints about his love life had left them guessing reasonably close to the truth. But this was not Salacus Fields. This was too close to home. He might be seen.

But then, Lin was clearly miserable.

Look, she signed rapidly, want you to come home with me, don’t say no. Miss you. Tired. Difficult job. Sorry for coming here. Needed to see you.

Isaac felt anger and affection jostle. This is a dangerous precedent, he thought. Fuck!

“Hang on,” he whispered. “Give me a minute.”

He raced up the stairs.

“Lub, David, I’d forgotten I’m supposed to be out with friends this evening, so someone’s been sent to fetch me. I promise I’ll muck out all my little charges tomorrow. On my honour. They’re all fed, that’s taken care of…” He was looking around him rapidly. He forced himself to meet their eyes.

“Right,” said David. “Have a nice evening.”

Lublamai waved him away.

“Right,” said Isaac heavily, looking around him. “If Yagharek comes back…uh…” He realized he had nothing to say. He grabbed a notebook from the desk and bounced downstairs without looking behind him. Lublamai and David studiously did not watch him go.

He seemed to carry Lin with him as if he was a gale, billowing her helplessly with him through the door and into the darkening streets. It was only as they left the warehouse, when he looked at her clearly, that he felt his own irritation diminish to a low burn. He saw her in all her exhausted dejection.

Isaac hesitated a moment, then took her arm. He slipped his notebook into her bag, which he snapped closed.

“Let’s have us a night,” he whispered.

She nodded and leaned her headbody against him, briefly, held him tight.

They disengaged, then, for fear of being watched. They walked to Sly Station together slowly, at a lovers’ pace, a few careful feet apart.

Chapter Twelve

If a murderer stalked the mansions of Flag Hill or Canker Wedge, would the militia waste any time or spare resources? Why, no! The hunt for Jack Half-a-Prayer proves it! And yet, when the Eyespy Killer strikes in Smog Bend, nothing happens! Another eyeless victim was fished from the Tar last week-bringing the number killed to five-and not a word from the blue-clad bullies in the Spike. We say: it’s one law for the rich, another for the poor!

Around New Crobuzon the posters are appearing demanding your vote-should you be lucky enough to have one! Rudgutter’s Fat Sun huffs and puffs, Finally We Can See spout weasel-words, the Diverse Tendency lies to the oppressed xenians, and the human dust of the Three Quills spread their poison. With this sorry crew as the “choice,” Runagate Rampant calls on all “winners” of the vote to spoil their ballots! Build a party from below and denounce the Suffrage Lottery as a cynical ploy. We say: votes for all and vote for change!

The vodyanoi stevedores of Kelltree are discussing strike action after vicious attacks on wages by the dock authorities. Disgracefully, the Guild of Human Dockers has denounced their actions. We say: towards an all-race union against the bosses!

Derkhan looked up from reading as a couple entered the carriage. Casually and surreptitiously, she folded her copy of Runagate Rampant and slipped it into her bag.

She sat at the very front end of the train, facing backwards, so she could see the few people in her carriage without appearing to spy on them. The two young people who had just entered swayed as the train left Sedim Junction and sat quickly. They were dressed simply but well, which marked them out from the majority of those travelling to Dog Fenn. Derkhan pegged them as Veruline missionaries, students from the university up the road in Ludmead, descending piously and sanctimoniously into the depths of Dog Fenn to improve the souls of the poor. She sneered at them mentally as she took out a little mirror.

Glancing up again to ensure she was not observed, Derkhan looked critically at her face. She adjusted her white wig minutely, and pressed at her rubber scar to make sure it was solid. She was dressed carefully. Dirty and torn clothes, no hint of money to attract unwanted attention in the Fenn, but not so fouled as to attract the opprobrious wrath of travellers in The Crow, where she had started her journey.

Her notebook was on her lap. She was taking some time during her journey to make preparatory notes on the Shintacost Prize. The first round was taking place sometime at the end of the month, and she had in mind a piece for the Beacon about what did and did not get through the early stages. She intended to make it funny, but with a serious point about the politics of the judging panel.

She stared at her lacklustre beginning and sighed. Now, she decided, is not the time.

Derkhan stared out of the window to her left, across the city. On this branch of the Dexter Line, between Ludmead and the industrial zone of New Crobuzon’s south-east, the trains passed at about the midpoint of the city’s tussle with the sky. The mass of roofs was pierced by militia towers in Brock Marsh and Strack Island, and far away in Flyside and Sheck. Sud Line trains passed south beyond the Gross Tar.

The bleached Ribs came and went beside the tracks, towering over the carriage. Smoke and grime built up in the air until the train seemed to ride on a smog tide. The sounds of industry increased. The train flew through clutches of vast, sparse chimneys like blasted trees as the train passed through Sunter. Echomire was a savage industrial zone a little way to the east. Somewhere below and a little to the south, realized Derkhan, a vodyanoi picket is probably massing. Good luck, brothers.

Gravity pulled her to the west as the train turned. It broke off from the Kelltree Line and veered away to the east, gearing up to leap the river.

The masts of tall ships in Kelltree swung into view as the train turned. They teetered and swayed gently in the water. Derkhan glimpsed the furled sails, the massive paddles and yawning smokestacks, the excited, tightly reined seawyrms of trading ships from Myrshock and Shankell and Gnurr Kett. The water boiled with submersibles carved from great nautili shells. Derkhan turned her head to stare as the train arced.

She could see the Gross Tar over the roofs to the south, wide and relentless and bristling with vessels. Antique ordinances stopped the large ships, the foreign ships, half a mile downriver of the confluence of Canker and Tar. They collected beyond Strack Island, in the docklands. For a mile and a half or more, the north bank of the Gross Tar thronged with cranes loading and unloading constantly, bobbing like massive feeding birds. Swarms of barges and tugs took the transferred cargos upriver to Smog Bend and Gross Coil and the mean slum-industries of Creekside; they hauled crates along New Crobuzon’s canals, linking minor franchises and failing workshops, finding their way through the maze like laboratory rats.

The clay of Kelltree and Echomire was gouged by fat square docks and reservoirs, huge culs-de-sac of water that jutted into the city, linked by deep channels to the river, thronging with ships.

There had once been an attempt to replicate the Kelltree docks in Badside. Derkhan had seen what remained. Three massive stinking troughs of malarial slime, their surfaces broken with half-sunk wrecks and twisted girders.

The rattle and boom of the tracks beneath the iron wheels changed suddenly as the steaming engine hauled its charges onto the great girders of Barley Bridge. It veered a little from side to side, slowing on the unkempt tracks as it rose as if with distaste over Dog Fenn.

A few grey blocks rose from the streets like weeds in a cesspool, their concrete seeping and rotten. Many were unfinished, with splayed iron supports fanning out from the ghosts of roofs, rusting, bleeding with the rain and the damp, staining the skin of the buildings. Wyrmen swirled like carrion crows over these monoliths, squatting on the upper floors and fouling their neighbours’ roofs with dung. The outlines of Dog Fenn’s slum landscape bloated and burst and changed every time Derkhan saw them. Tunnels were dug into the undercity that stretched in a network of ruins and sewers and catacombs below New Crobuzon. Ladders left against a wall one day were hammered into place the next, reinforced after that, and within a week had become the stairwells to a new storey, thrown precariously between two drooping roofs. Wherever she looked, Derkhan could see people lying or running or fighting on the roofscape.

She stood wearily as the smell of the Fenn seeped into the slowing carriage.

As usual, there was no one to take her ticket at the station exit. Had it not been for the profound consequences of discovery, however small the possibility, Derkhan would never have bothered buying one. She flung it down on the counter and descended.

The doors of Dog Fenn Station were always open. They had rusted into position, and ivy had anchored them against the walls. Derkhan stepped out into the squalls and stench of Silverback Street. Barrows were thrown against walls slick with fungus and rotting paste. All manner of wares-some of surprisingly high quality-were available here. Derkhan turned and walked deeper into the slum. She was surrounded with a constant hubbub of shouts, advertising that sounded more like riotous assembly. For the most part, it was food that was announced.

“Onions! Who’ll buy my fine onions?”

“Whelks! Stick to whelks!”

“Broth to warm yer!”

Other goods and services were plainly available on every streetcorner.

Whores congregated in wretched, raucous gangs. Filthy petticoats and tawdry flounces of stolen silk, faces smeared white and scarlet over bruises and broken veins. They laughed with mouths full of broken teeth and sniffed tiny stains of shazbah cut with soot and rat-poison. Some were children who played with little paper dolls and wooden quoits when no one watched them, pouted lasciviously and tongued the air whenever a man walked by.

The Dog Fenn streetwalkers were the lowest of a despised breed. For decadent, inventive, obsessive, fetishized corruption and perversion of the flesh, the connoisseur looked elsewhere, in the red-light zone between The Crow and Spit Hearth. In Dog Fenn, the quickest, simplest, cheapest relief was available. The clients here were as poor and dirty and diseased as the tarts.

At the entrances to clubs already ejecting comatose drunks, industrial Remade worked as bouncers. They teetered aggressively on hooves and treads and massive feet, flexing metal claws. Their faces were brutalized, defensive. Their eyes would lock at the taunts from a passer-by. They took gobs of spit in the face, unwilling to risk their jobs. Their fear was understandable: to Derkhan’s left a cavernous space opened in an arch below the railway. From the darkness came the reek of shit and oil, the mechanical clank and human groans of Remade dying in a starving, drunken, stinking huddle.

A few ancient, tottering constructs staggered through the streets, clumsily ducking the rocks and mud thrown by ragged street-children. Graffiti covered every wall. Rude poems and obscene drawings jostled with slogans from Runagate Rampant and anxious prayers:

Half-a-Prayer’s coming!

Against the Lottery!

Tar and Canker spread like legs | City wonders where her Lover went | Cos now she’s being Ravished blind | lay the Prick that is the Government!

The walls of churches were not spared. The Veruline monks stood in a nervous group and wiped at the scrawled pornography that had appeared on their chapel.

There were xenians in the crowds. Some were being harassed, notably the few khepri. Others laughed and joked and swore with their neighbours. On one corner a cactus was arguing fiercely with a vodyanoi, and the mainly human crowd was catcalling equally for both sides.

Children hissed and called for stivers from Derkhan as she walked past. She ignored them, did not pull her bag closer to herself and identify herself as a victim. She stomped aggressively into the heart of Dog Fenn.

The walls around her suddenly sealed over her head as she passed under rickety bridges and ersatz rooms thrown up as if by aggregated filth. The air in their shadow dripped and creaked ominously. A whoop sounded from behind her, and Derkhan felt a rush of air on her neck as a wyrman dived acrobatically through the short tunnel and took off again into the sky, cackling madly. She stumbled as he passed and fell against a wall, adding her voice to the chorus of abuse that travelled in the wyrman’s wake.

The architecture she passed seemed governed by rules quite distinct from those in the rest of the city. There was no functional sense here. Dog Fenn seemed born of struggles in which the inhabitants were unimportant. The nodes and cells of brick and wood and palsied concrete had gone rogue, spreading like malignant tumours.

Derkhan turned into a mildewed brick cul-de-sac and looked around her. A Remade horse stood by the far end, its hind legs enormous piston-driven hammers. Behind it, a covered cart was backed nearly to the wall. Any one of the dead-eyed figures loitering around could be militia informers. It was a risk she would have to take.

She walked around to the back of the cart. Six pigs had been loaded out of the cart into a makeshift pen open on the side nearest the wall. Two men were chasing the pigs comically around the little space. The pigs squealed and screeched like babies as they ran. The pen led onto a semicircular opening about four feet high set into the wall at ground level. Derkhan peered through this space into a foetid hole ten feet below, barely lit with gas-jets that flickered unreliably. The burrow boomed and hissed and gleamed red in the gaslight. Figures came and went below her, bent double under dripping burdens like souls in some lurid hell.

A doorless opening to her left led Derkhan down steep stairs towards the sunken slaughterhouse.

The spring warmth was magnified here as if by infernal energy. Derkhan sweated and picked her way through swinging carcasses and slicks of congealing blood. At the back of the room a raised belt dragged heavy meathooks along the ceiling in a remorseless circuit, disappearing into the darker bowels of the charnel-house.

Even the glints of light from knives seemed filtered through ruddy gloom. Derkhan held a posset to her nose and mouth and tried not to gag at the rancid, heavy stench of blood and warm meat.

At the far end of the room, she saw three men congregated below the open arc she had seen from the street. In this dark and stinking place, the Dog Fenn light and air that spilt through from above was like bleach.

At some unspoken signal, the three slaughtermen stood back. The pig-men in the alley above had got hold of one of the animals, and in the midst of a rising wave of curses and grunts and terrified sounds, they hurled her enormous weight through the opening. The pig screamed as she pitched into the darkness. She was rigid with terror as she hurtled towards the waiting knives.

There was a sick-making crack and snap as the sow’s stiff little legs shattered on flagstones slimy with blood and shit. She collapsed on legs bleeding from bone-shards, thrashing and screeching, unable to run or fight. The three men moved forward with practised precision. One leaned on the pig’s rump in case she jack-knifed, another pulled back her head by those lolling ears. The third man split the skin of her throat with his knife.

Her cries ebbed quickly with the gouts and wash of blood. The men hauled her huge, twitching body onto a waiting table by which a rusted saw leaned. One man saw Derkhan. He nudged another.

“Ay ay, Ben, you dark horse, you rogue! It’s your fancy tart!” he shouted good-naturedly, loud enough for Derkhan to hear. The man he spoke to turned and waved at her.

“Five minutes,” he yelled. She nodded. Her posset was clamped to her mouth as she swallowed back bile and spew.

Again and again the massive, terrified pigs dropped from the alley in a flailing organic mess, legs folded in unnatural angles against their guts, again and again they were cut open and bled dry on ancient wooden stands. Tongues and flaps of ragged skin dangled, dripping. The channels cut in the abattoir floor burst their banks as a swamp of dirty blood lapped against buckets of giblets and bleached, boiled cows’ heads.

Eventually, the last pig had fallen. The exhausted men swayed where they stood. They were awash with gore, and steaming. There was a brief conference and raucous laughter, and the one called Ben turned away from his fellows and approached Derkhan. Behind him, the two remaining men split the first carcass and swept innards into a huge trough.

“Dee,” said Flex quietly, “I’ll not kiss you hello.” He gestured briefly at his saturated clothes, his bloody face.

“I’m obliged,” she replied. “Can we get out of here?”

They ducked under the jerkily progressing meathooks and picked their way towards the dark exit. They took stairs up towards ground level. The light became less livid as the blue-grey tint of the sky filtered through dirty skylights in the narrow corridor’s ceiling, a long way above.

Benjamin and Derkhan turned into a windowless room filled with a tub, a pump and several buckets. Some tough robes hung behind the door. Derkhan watched quietly as he stripped off his fouled clothes and threw them in a pail with water and powdered soap. He scratched himself and stretched luxuriously, then pumped water vigorously into the tub. His naked body was streaked with oily blood as if he was newborn. He shook some of the soap under the sputtering pump, swirled the cold water to make suds.

“Your mates are very understanding about you just up and taking a fuck-break, aren’t they?” said Derkhan mildly. “What have you told them? Did I steal your heart, you mine, or are we in a purely business arrangement?”

Benjamin sniggered. He spoke with a strong Dog Fenn accent, in distinction to Derkhan’s uptown tones.

“Well, I’ve been working an extra shift, ain’t I? I’m already working over my time. I told them you’d be along. Far as they’re concerned you’re just a tart who’s taken to me, and I to you. That wig, afore I forget, is a marvel.” He grinned lopsidedly. “Suits you, Dee. You look a smasher.”

He stood in the tub, slowly lowered himself into it, goose-bumps peppering him. He left a thick scum of blood on the surface of the water. Gore and grime lifted slowly from his skin and billowed lazily towards the surface. He closed his eyes a minute.

“I won’t be long, Dee, I promise,” he whispered.

“Take your time,” she replied.

His head slid below the bubbles, leaving thin fronds of hair to coil on the surface and be sucked slowly under. He held his breath a moment, then began to scrub his submerged body vigorously, coming up and sucking air, then ducking below again.

Derkhan filled a bucket with water and stood behind the bath. As he broke the surface she poured it slowly over his head, rinsing him free of bloody soap stains.

“Oooh, lovely,” he muttered. “More, I beg you.”

She obliged him.

Eventually he stepped out of the bath, which looked like the site of violent murder. He tipped the slimy residue into a sluice hammered into the floor. They heard it slosh through the walls.

Benjamin stepped into a rough robe. He wagged his head at Derkhan.

“Shall we get down to business, love?” He winked at her.

“Just tell me what services you require, squire,” she replied.

They left the room. At the end of the passage, picked out in the wash from the skylight, was the little room where Benjamin slept. He closed and locked the door behind them. The room was like a well, far taller than it was wide. Another grubby window was set into the square ceiling space. Derkhan and Benjamin stepped over the flimsy mattress to the ramshackle old wardrobe at its foot, a relic with a decaying grandeur at odds with the slum setting.

Benjamin reached inside and swept a few greasy shirts out of the way. He reached into the fingerholds drilled strategically in the wardrobe’s wooden back, and with a little grunt, lifted it away. He turned it gently sideways and laid it on the cabinet’s floor.

Derkhan looked into the small brick doorway Benjamin had uncovered while he reached onto a little shelf in the wardrobe and took down a matchbox and a candle. He lit the candle in a burst of sulphur, shielding it from the cool air that wafted from the hidden room. With Derkhan behind him, he stepped through the wardrobe and lit up the office of Runagate Rampant.

Derkhan and Benjamin lit the gaslamps. The room was large, dwarfing the adjoining bedroom. The air inside was heavy and sluggish. There was no natural light. High above, the frame of a skylight was visible, but the glass was painted over in black.

Around the room were dotted tumbledown chairs and a couple of desks, all covered in paper and scissors and typewriters. On one chair sat an inactive construct, its eyes dim. One of its legs was crushed and ruined, bleeding copper wire and splinters of glass. The wall was papered with posters. Stacks of mouldering Runagate Rampants lined the room. Against one damp wall was the unwieldy-looking press, a huge iron thing coated in grease and ink.

Benjamin sat at the largest desk and tugged a chair over next to him. He lit a long, drooping cigarillo. It smoked profusely. Derkhan joined him. She jerked her thumb at the construct.

“How’s that old thing?” she asked.

“Too bloody noisy to use during the day. I have to wait till the others have gone, but then the press is hardly silent itself, so that makes no difference. And it ain’t half a relief not to have to spin that damn wheel over and over and over all fucking night, once a fortnight. I just chuck a bit of coal in his innards, point him at it, and have a snooze.”

“How’s the new issue?”

Benjamin nodded slowly and pointed at a bound pile beside his chair.

“Not too bad. Going to print off a few more. We’re running a little thing about your Remade in the freakshow.”

Derkhan waved her hand.

“It’s not a big story.”

“No, but it’s…y’know…toothy…We’re leading on the election. ‘Fuck the Lottery,’ in slightly less strident terms.” He grinned.

“I know it’s pretty much the same as last issue, but that’s the time of year.”

“You weren’t a lucky winner in the lotto this year, were you?” asked Derkhan. “Your number come up?”

“Nah. Only once in me life, years ago. Ran out to the ballot clasping me prize voucher proudly and voted Finally We Can See. Youthful enthusiasm.” Ben sniggered. “You don’t qualify automatically, do you?”

“Devil’s Tail, Benjamin, I don’t have that kind of money! I’d give a damn sight more to RR if I did. No, and I didn’t win this year, either.”

Benjamin split the string on the pile of papers. He shoved a handful at Derkhan. She picked up the top copy and glanced at the front. Each copy was a single large sheet of paper folded in half and half again. The font on the front page was about the same size as that used in the Beacon or the Quarrel or any other of New Crobuzon’s legal press. However, inside the folds of Runagate Rampant stories and slogans and exhortations jostled with each other in a thicket of tiny print. It was ugly but efficient.

Derkhan pulled out three shekels and pushed them across to Benjamin. He took them with a murmur of thanks and put them in a tin at the front of his desk.

“When are the others coming?” asked Derkhan.

“I’m meeting a couple in the pub in an hour or so, then the rest this evening and tomorrow.” In the oscillating, violent, disingenuous and repressive political atmosphere of New Crobuzon, it was a necessary defence that except in a few cases, the writers for Runagate Rampant did not meet. That way the chances of infiltration by the militia was minimized. Benjamin was the editor, the only person on the constantly shifting staff whom everyone knew, and who knew everyone.

Derkhan noticed a pile of roughly printed sheets on the floor by her seat. Runagate Rampant’s fellow seditionist papers. Halfway between comrades and rivals.

“Anything good?” she asked, and indicated the stack. Benjamin shrugged.

“The Shout’s rubbish this week. Decent lead in Forge about Rudgutter’s dealings with the shipping companies. I’ll get someone to chase it, actually. Apart from that it’s slim pickings.”

“What do you want me to get onto?”

“Well…” Benjamin flicked through papers, consulted his notes. “If you can just keep your ear to the ground about the dock strike…Canvass opinion, try and get a few positive responses, a few quotes, you know. And how about five hundred words on the history of the Suffrage Lottery?”

Derkhan nodded.

“What else’ve we got coming up?” she asked.

Benjamin pursed his lips.

“There’s some rumour about Rudgutter having some illness, dubious cures: that’s something I’d like to chase, but you can tell it’s been filtered by Jabber knows how many mouths. Still, keep an ear open. There’s something else as well…very tentative at this stage, but interesting. I’m talking to someone who claims they’re talking to someone who wants to blow the whistle on links between Parliament and mob crime.”

Derkhan nodded slowly and appreciatively.

“Sounds very tasty. What are we talking? Drugs? Prostitutes?”

“Shit, sure as eggs Rudgutter’s got fingers in every fucking pie you can think of. They all have. Churn out the commodity, grab the profit, get the militia to tidy up your customers afterwards, get a new crop of Remade or slave-miners for the Arrowhead pits, keep the jails full…nice as you like. I don’t know what this grass has in mind particularly, and they’re fucking nervous, apparently, ready to do a bunk. But you know me, Dee. Softly softly.” He winked at her. “I won’t let this one get away.”

“Keep me posted, won’t you?” Derkhan said. Benjamin nodded.

Derkhan bundled her collection of papers into a bag, hiding them under assorted detritus. She stood.

“Right. I have my orders. That three shekels, by the way, includes fourteen copies of Double-R sold.”

“Good stuff,” said Benjamin, and found a particular notebook among the many on his desk to record the fact. He stood and gestured Derkhan through the doorway and the wardrobe. She waited in his tiny bedroom as he shut off the lights in the press.

“Is Grimwhatsisname still buying?” he asked through the hole. “That scientist geezer?”

“Yes. He’s quite good.”

“I heard a funny rumour about him the other day,” said Benjamin, emerging through the wardrobe, wiping his oily hands on a rag. “Is he the same one who’s after birds?”

“Oh, yes, he’s doing some experiment or other. You been listening to criminals, Benjamin?” Derkhan grinned. “He’s collecting wings. I think he makes it a point of principle never to buy things officially when he can go through illicit channels.”

Benjamin shook his head appreciatively.

“Well, the cove’s good at it. He knows how to get word out.”

As he spoke, he was leaning into the wardrobe and tugging the wooden rear back into position. He fastened it and turned to Derkhan.

“Righto,” he said. “We’d best get into character.”

Derkhan nodded curtly, and ruffled her white wig somewhat. She undid her intricate shoelaces. Benjamin untucked his shirt. He held his breath and swung his arms from side to side, until he went deep red. He exhaled in a sudden burst, and breathed hard. He squinted at Derkhan.

“Come on,” he said imploringly. “Cut me some slack. What of me reputation? You could at least look tired…”

She grinned at him and, sighing, rubbed her face and eyes.

“Oooh, Mr. B,” she squeaked absurdly. “You’re the best I ever had!”

“More like it…” he muttered, and winked.

They unlocked the door and stepped out into the corridor. Their preparations had been unnecessary. They were alone.

Far below, the sound of meat-grinders could be heard.

Chapter Thirteen

When Lin woke with Isaac’s head next to hers, she stared at it for a long time. She let her antennae flutter in the wind from his breath. It had, she thought, been much too long since she had enjoyed the sight of him like this.

She rolled slightly to her side and stroked him. He muttered and his mouth set. His lips pursed and popped open as he breathed. She ran her hands over his bulk.

She was pleased with herself, pleased and proud at what she had effected last night. She had been miserable and lonely, and she had taken a risk, angering Isaac by coming unbidden to his side of town. But she had managed to make the evening work.

Lin had not intended to play on Isaac’s sympathy, but his anger had turned so quickly to concern at her demeanour. She had realized with a vague satisfaction that she was visibly exhausted and low, that she did not have to convince him of her need for mollycoddling. He was even recognizing emotions in the movement of her headbody.

There was one positive side to Isaac’s attempts not to be seen as her lover. When they walked the streets together, without touching, at a gentle pace, it mimicked the shyness of young humans courting.

There was no equivalent for khepri. Headsex for procreation was an unpleasant chore carried out for demographic duty. Male khepris were mindless scarabs like the females’ headbodies, and to feel them crawling and mounting and rutting one’s head was something Lin was glad not to have experienced for years. Sex for fun, between females, was a boisterous, communal business, but rather ritualized. The signs of flirtation, rejection and acceptance between individuals or groups were as formal as dances. There was nothing of the tongue-tied nervous eroticism of young humans.

Lin had steeped herself enough in human culture to recognize the tradition that Isaac was pulled back to when they walked together through the city. She had been enthusiastic about sex with her own kind before her illicit cross-affair, and intellectually she scorned the wasteful, pointless stammered conversations she heard from humans in snatches around New Crobuzon. But to her surprise, she felt that same coy and uncertain companionship from Isaac sometimes-and she rather liked it.

It had grown the previous night, as they walked cool streets towards the station, and rode across the top of the city towards Aspic Hole. One of the best effects, of course, was to make the sexual release, when it was finally possible, all the more charged.

Isaac had grabbed her as the door closed, and she had squeezed him back, wrapping her arms around him. Lust came quickly. She had held him back, opened her carapace and made him stroke her wings, which he did, with trembling fingers. She made him wait while she enjoyed his devotion, before pulling him to her bed. She rolled with him, till he lay on his back. She threw off her clothes and tugged his from him. She mounted him and he stroked her hard headbody, ran his hands down her body, over her breasts, clutching at her hips as they moved.

Afterwards he made her supper. They ate and talked. Lin told him nothing of Mr. Motley. She was uneasy when he asked her why she was so melancholy that night. She began to tell him a half-truth about a vast, difficult sculpture that she could show no one, that meant she would not compete in the Shintacost Prize, that was draining her away to nothing, in a space in the city she had found and could not tell him.

He was attentive. Perhaps it was studied. He knew Lin was sometimes offended by his absent-mindedness when he was on a project. He begged to know where she was working.

Of course, she would not tell him.

They went to bed wiping away crumbs and seeds. Isaac clutched her in his sleep.

When she woke, Lin spent long slow minutes enjoying Isaac’s presence, before rising and frying bread for his breakfast. When he rose to the smell, he kissed her neck and headbelly playfully. She stroked his cheeks with her headlegs.

Do you have to work this morning? she signed at him from across the table, while her mandibles chewed grapefruit.

Isaac peered up from his bread a little uneasily.

“Uh…yeah. I really do, sweety.” He munched at her.

What?

“Well…I’ve got all this stuff at home, all these birds and whatnot, but it’s a bit ridiculous. See, I’ve studied pigeons, robins, merlins, Jabber knows what else, but I’ve not yet seen a fucking garuda up close. So I’m going to go hunting. I’ve put it off, but I think the time’s come. I’m going to Spatters.” Isaac grimaced and let that sink in. He took another big bite. When he had swallowed, he looked at her from under his brows. “I don’t suppose…D’you want to come?”

Isaac, she signed immediately, don’t say that if you don’t mean it because I do want to come and I’ll say yes if you’re not careful. Even to Spatters.

“Look…I really…I do mean it. I’m serious. If you’re not working on your magnum opus this morning, come and knock about.” The conviction in his voice strengthened as he spoke. “Come on, you can be my mobile lab assistant. No, I know what you can do: you can be my heliotypist for the day. Bring your camera. You need a break.”

Isaac was getting bolder. He and Lin left the house together, without him displaying any signs of unease. They wandered a little way north-west along Shadrach Street, towards the Salacus Fields Station, but Isaac became impatient and hailed a cab on the way. The hirsute driver raised his eyebrows at Lin, but he kept any objections quiet. He inclined his head while he murmured to his horse, indicating Isaac and Lin inside.

“Where to, guv?” he asked.

“Spatters, please.” Isaac spoke rather grandly, as if making up in his tone of voice for his destination.

The driver turned to him incredulously. “You’ve got to be joking, squire. I ain’t going into Spatters. I’ll take you as far as Vaudois Hill, but that’s your lot. Ain’t worth my while. Down Spatters way, they’ll have the wheels off me cab while I’m still driving.”

“Fine, fine,” said Isaac irritably. “Just get us as close as you dare.”

As the rickety hansom cab rolled across the cobbles through Salacus Fields, Lin caught Isaac’s attention.

Is it really dangerous? she signed nervously.

Isaac glanced round, then answered her with signs himself. He was much slower and less fluent than her, but using signing he could be ruder to the cabdriver.

Well…just fuck poor. They’ll nick whatever’s going, but not especially violent. Arsehole here’s just cowardly. Reads too many…Isaac faltered and screwed up his face with concentration.

“Don’t know the sign,” he murmured. “Sensational. Reads too many sensational papers.” He sat back and looked out of the window at the skyline of Howl Barrow that wobbled unsteadily to his left.

Lin had never been to Spatters. She knew it only by its notoriety. Forty years previously, the Sink Line had been extended southwest of Lichford, past Vaudois Hill and into the spur of Rudewood that abutted the southern reaches of the city. The planners and money-men had built the tall shells of residential blocks: not the monoliths of nearby Ketch Heath, but impressive nonetheless. They had opened the railway station, Fell Stop, and had started building another in Rudewood itself, before anything more than a narrow strip around the railway had been cleared. There had been plans for another station beyond that, and the tracks had extended into the forest accordingly. There had even been tentative, absurdly hubristic schemes to extend the rails hundreds of miles south or west, to link New Crobuzon to Myrshock or Cobsea.

Then the money had run out. There had been some financial crisis, some speculative bubble had burst, some trade network had collapsed under the weight of competition and a plethora of too-cheap products no one could buy, and the project had been killed in its infancy. The trains had still visited Fell Stop, pointlessly waiting a few minutes before returning to the city. Rudewood quickly reclaimed the land south of the empty architecture, assimilating the nameless empty station and the rusting tracks. For a couple of years, the trains at Fell Stop waited empty and silent. And then, a few passengers had started appearing.

The empty integuments of grand buildings began to fill. Rural poor from Grain Spiral and the Mendican Foothills began to creep into the deserted borough. The word spread that this was a ghost sector, beyond Parliament’s ken, where taxes and laws were as rare as sewage systems. Rough frameworks of stolen wood filled the empty floors. In the outlines of stillborn streets shacks of concrete and corrugated iron blistered overnight. Inhabitation spread like mould. There were no gaslamps to take the edge off the night, no doctors, no jobs, yet within ten years the area was dense with ersatz housing. It had acquired a name, Spatters, that reflected the desultory randomness of its outlines: the whole stinking shantytown seemed to have dribbled like shit from the sky.

The suburb was beyond the reach of New Crobuzon’s municipality. There was an unreliable alternative infrastructure: a self-appointed network of postal workers, sanitary engineers, even a kind of law. But these systems were inefficient and partial at best. For the most part, neither the militia nor anyone else went in to Spatters. The only visitors from outside were the regular trains appearing at the incongruously well-maintained Fell Stop Station, and the gangs of masked gunmen who appeared sometimes at night to terrorize and murder. The Spatters street-children were particularly vulnerable to the ferocious barbarism of the murder-squads.

The slum-dwellers of Dog Fenn and even Badside considered Spatters beneath their dignity. It was simply not part of the city, nothing but a strange little town that had grafted itself onto New Crobuzon without a by-your-leave. There was no money to entice industry, legal or illicit. The crimes in Spatters were nothing but small-scale acts of desperation and survival.

There was something else about Spatters, something that brought Isaac to visit its unwelcoming alleys. For the past thirty years, it had been New Crobuzon’s garuda ghetto.

Lin watched the huge towerblocks of Ketch Heath. She could see tiny figures riding the updrafts that they created, swirling above them. Wyrmen, and maybe a couple of garuda. The cab was passing under the skyrail that dipped gracefully out of the militia tower that loomed near to the blocks.

The cab pulled to.

“All right, guv, this is where I stop,” said the driver.

Isaac and Lin disembarked. On one side of the cab was a row of neat white houses. Each was fronted with a small garden, most of which were assiduously maintained. The street was lined with shaggy banyan trees. Opposite the houses, on the other side of the cab, was a long thin park, a strip of greenery three hundred or so yards wide that sloped steeply down and away from the street. This thin slip of grass acted as a no-man’s-land between the polite houses of Vaudois Hill inhabited by clerks and doctors and lawyers, and the crumbling chaos beyond the trees, at the bottom of the hill: Spatters.

“It’s no fucking wonder Spatters isn’t the most popular place, is it?” breathed Isaac. “Look, it’s ruined the view for all these nice people up here…” He gave an evil grin.

In the distance, Lin could see that the edge of the hill was split with the Sink Line. The trains passed through a chasm cut into the parkland of the hill’s western flank. The red brick of Fell Stop Station loomed out over the quagmire of Spatters. In this corner of the city, the tracks were only fractionally above the level of the houses, but it did not take much architectural grandeur for the station to tower over the surrounding makeshift dwellings. Of all Spatters’ buildings, only the refitted towerblock shells were taller.

Lin felt Isaac nudge her. He pointed at one clutch of blocks, close to the railway.

“See that?” She nodded. “Look up top.”

Lin followed his fingers. The bottom half of the big buildings looked deserted. From the sixth or seventh floor up, however, wooden boughs poked at odd angles out of crevices. The windows were covered with brown paper, unlike the empty sockets. And way up on the flat roofs, at nearly the same level as Lin and Isaac, little figures were visible.

Lin followed Isaac’s gesture up into the air. She felt a jolt of excitement. Winged creatures were visible sporting in the sky.

“Those are garuda,” Isaac said.

Lin and Isaac walked down the hill towards the railway lines, bearing slightly to their right to arrive at the garudas’ looming makeshift eyries.

“Almost all the garuda in the city live in those four buildings. There probably aren’t two thousand in the whole of New Crobuzon. That makes them about…uh…nought point fucking nought three per cent of the population…” Isaac grinned. “I’ve been doing my research, see?”

But they don’t all live here. What about Krakhleki?

“Oh sure, I mean, there are garuda that get out. I taught one once, nice geezer. There’s probably a couple in Dog Fenn, three or four in Murkside, six in Gross Coil. Jabber’s Mound and Syriac each have a handful, I’ve heard. And once or twice a generation, someone like Krakhleki makes it big. I’ve never read his stuff, by the way. Is he any good?” Lin nodded. “Right, so you’ve got people like him, and others…you know, what’s the name of that fucker…the one in the Diverse Tendency…Shashjar, that’s the one. They stick him in to prove the DTs are for all xenians.” Isaac made a rude noise. “ ‘Specially the rich ones.”

But most of them are here. And when you’re here, it must be difficult to get out…

“I’d suppose so. Bit of an understatement, in fact…”

They crossed a brook and slowed as they approached the out-lands of Spatters. Lin crossed her arms and shook her headbody.

What am I doing here? she signed sardonically.

“You’re expanding your mind,” said Isaac cheerfully. “Important to learn how other races live in our fair city.”

He tugged at her arm until, mock-protesting, Lin allowed him to drag her out of the shade of the trees and into Spatters.

To get into Spatters, Isaac and Lin had to cross rickety bridges, planks thrown across the eight-foot ditch that separated the township from Vaudois Hill park. They walked in single file, their arms sometimes outstretched for balance.

Five feet below them, the trench was filled with a noisome gelatinous soup of shit and pollutants and acid rain. The surface was broken with bubbles of fell gas and bloated animal corpses. Here and there bobbed rusting tins and knots of fleshy tissue like tumours or aborted foetuses. The liquid undulated rather than rippled, contained by a thick surface tension so oily and strong that it would not break: the pebbles that fell from the bridge were swallowed without the slightest splash.

Even with one hand clapped over his mouth and nose against the stench, Isaac could not contain himself. Halfway across the plank he let out a bark of revulsion that turned into a retch. He controlled himself before he puked. To stagger on that bridge, to lose one’s balance and fall, was too utterly vile a thought to consider.

The taste of the slurry in the air made Lin feel nearly as queasy as Isaac. By the time they stepped onto the other side of the wooden slats, both Lin’s and Isaac’s good humour had entirely worn off. They trudged in silence into the maze.

Lin found it easy to orient herself with such low buildings: the copse of blocks they sought was clearly visible just before the station. Sometimes she walked ahead of Isaac, sometimes he ahead of her. They picked their way over channels of sewage that ran between houses. They were unmoved. They were beyond disgust.

The inhabitants of Spatters came to stare.

Sour-faced men and women, and hundreds of children, all dressed in bizarre combinations of rescued clothes and sewn sackcloth. Little hands and fingers clutched at Lin as she passed. She slapped at them, walked in front of Isaac. Voices all around them started murmuring, and then a clamouring for money started up. No one made any attempt to stop them.

Isaac and Lin trudged stolidly through the twisted streets, keeping the towerblocks in their sights. They trailed a crowd. As they grew closer, the shapes of the garuda fleeting through the air above became clear.

A fat man nearly as large as Isaac stepped out in front of them.

“Squire, bugger,” he shouted curtly, nodding at both of them. His eyes were quick. Isaac nudged Lin, indicated her to stop.

“What d’you want?” said Isaac impatiently.

The man spoke very quickly.

“Well, visitors being unco down the Spatters I was chewing on whether you’d fancy a little helpster, like.”

“Don’t be an arse, man,” Isaac roared. “I’m not a visitor. Last time I was here I was the guest of Savage Peter,” he continued ostentatiously. He paused for the whispers that the name invoked. “Now, at the present I’m after a little chinwag with them.” He jerked his finger at the garuda. The fat man recoiled slightly.

“You’re for conflabbing with the bird-boys? What’s that about, squire?”

“None of your sodding business! Question is, do you want to take me to their mansion?”

The man held up his hands, conciliatory.

“Shouldn’t have pried, squire, none of my concerns. Smiley to take you to the bird-boxes, for a measly little recompo.”

“Oh, for Jabber’s sake. Don’t worry, you’ll be taken care of. Just don’t” yelled Isaac at everyone in the staring crowd, “be arsing around with ideas of muggery and thievery. I’ve just enough to pay a decent guide on me, not a stiver more, and I know that Savage will be screaming fucking livid if anything happened to an old mate on his turf.”

“Please, guwo, you’re insultering the Spatterkin. Not another sound, just be tracing on me tail, how’s that?”

“Lead on, man,” said Isaac.

As they wound through the dripping concrete and rusted iron roofs, Lin turned to Isaac.

What in Jabber’s name was all that? Who’s Savage Peter?

Isaac signed as he walked.

Load of bollocks. Came here once with Lemuel on a…dubious errand, met Savage. Local big man. Didn’t even know for sure he was still alive! Wouldn’t remember me.

Lin was exasperated. She could not believe the Spatterkin were taken in by Isaac’s preposterous routine. But they were definitely being led towards the garudas’ tower. Maybe what she’d witnessed was more like a ritual than any real confrontation. Maybe, alternatively, Isaac had kidded and scared no one at all. Maybe they were helping him out of pity.

The makeshift hovels lapped up against the bases of the towerblocks like little waves. Lin’s and Isaac’s guide beckoned them enthusiastically and gesticulated at the four blocks positioned in a square. In the shadowy space between them a garden had been planted, with twisted trees desperately reaching for direct light. Succulents and hardy weeds burst from the scrubland. Garuda circled under the cloud-cover.

“There’s your aim, squire!” said the man proudly.

Isaac hesitated.

“How do I…I don’t want to just plough on up unannounced…” he faltered. “Uh…how can I attract their attention?”

The guide held out his hand. Isaac stared at him a minute, then fumbled for a shekel. The man beamed at it and put it in his pocket. Then he turned and stepped a little way back from the building’s walls, put his fingers to his mouth and whistled.

“Oy!” he yelled. “Bird-bonce! Squire wants to parley!”

The crowd that still surrounded Isaac and Lin took up the yells enthusiastically. A raucous yelling announced to the garuda above that they had visitors. A contingent of the flying shapes congregated in the air above the Spatters crowd. Then with an invisible adjustment of the wings, three of them plummeted spectacularly towards the ground.

There was a gasp and appreciative whistling.

The three garuda dropped like the dead towards the waiting crowd. Twenty feet from the ground they twitched their outstretched wings and broke their precipitous falls. They beat the air heavily, sending massive gusts of wind and dust into the faces and eyes of the humans below them as they hovered up and down, sinking a little, then rising, just out of reach.

“What you all shouting for?” screeched the garuda on the left.

“It’s fascinating,” whispered Isaac to Lin. “His voice is avian, but nothing like as difficult to understand as Yagharek…Ragamoll must be his native language, he’s probably never spoken anything else.”

Lin and Isaac stared at the magnificent creatures. The garuda were nude to the waist, their legs covered in thin brown pantaloons. One had black feathers and skin; the other two were dark tan. Lin gazed at those enormous wings. They stretched and beat with a massive span, at least twenty feet.

“This squire here…” began the guide, but Isaac interrupted him.

“Good to meet you,” he yelled up. “I’ve got a proposal for you. Any chance we could have a chat?”

The three garuda looked at each other.

“What you want?” yelled the black-feathered one.

“Well, look-” Isaac gesticulated at the crowd “-this isn’t really how I was envisaging this discussion. Is there anywhere private we could go?”

“You bet!” said the first one. “See you up there!”

The three pairs of wings boomed in concert and the garuda disappeared into the sky, leaving Isaac wailing behind them.

“Wait!” he shouted. It was too late. He looked around for the guide.

“I don’t suppose,” Isaac asked him, “the lift’s working in there, is it?”

“Never got put in, squire.” The guide grinned wickedly. “Best be getting started.”

“Dear sweet Jabber’s arse, Lin…go on without me. I’m dying. I’m just going to lie here and die.”

Isaac lay on the mezzanine between the sixth and seventh floors. He hissed and wheezed and spat. Lin stood over him, her hands on her hips with exasperation.

Get up, you fat bastard, she signed. Yes, exhausting. Me too. Think of the gold. Think of the science.

Moaning as if he were being tortured, Isaac staggered to his feet. Lin chivvied him to the edge of the concrete stairs. He swallowed and braced himself, then staggered on up.

The stairwell was grey and unlit except by light filtering round corners and through cracks. Only now, as they emerged onto the seventh floor, did the stairs look as if they had ever been used. Rubbish began to build up around their feet. The stairs were grubby rather than thick in fine dust. At each floor were two doors, and the harsh sounds of garuda conversations were audible through the splintered wood.

Isaac settled into a slow, miserable pace. Lin followed him, ignoring his declarations of imminent heart attack. After several long, painful minutes, they had reached the top floor.

Above them was the door onto the roof. Isaac leaned against the wall and wiped his face. He was drenched in sweat.

“Just give me a minute, sweetheart,” he murmured, and even managed to grin. “Oh gods! For the sake of science, right? Get your camera ready…All right. Here we go.”

He stood and breathed slowly, then strode slowly up the last flight to the door, opened it and walked out into the flat light on the roof. Lin followed, her camera in her hands.

Khepri eyes needed no time to adjust from light to darkness and back again. Lin stepped out onto a rough concrete roof littered with rubbish and broken concrete and saw Isaac desperately shielding his eyes and squinting. She looked coolly around her.

A little way to the north-east rose Vaudois Hill, a sinuous wedge of high land which rose up as if trying to block the view to the centre of the city. The Spike, Perdido Street Station, Parliament, the Glasshouse dome: all were visible, butting their way over that raised horizon. Opposite the hill, Lin saw miles and miles of Rudewood disappear over uneven ground. Here and there little rock knolls broke free of the leaf-cover. Off to the north there was a long uninterrupted line of sight over to the middle-class suburbs of Serpolet and Gallmarch, the militia tower of St. Jabber’s Mound, the raised tracks of the Verso Line cutting through Creekside and Chimer. Lin knew that just beyond those soot-stained arches two miles away was the twisting course of the Tar, bearing barges and their cargo into the city from the steppes of the south.

Isaac lowered his hands as his pupils tightened.

Whirling over their heads acrobatically were hundreds of garuda. They began to drop, to spiral neatly out of the sky and drop to their clawed feet in rows around Lin and Isaac. They fell thickly from the air like overripe apples.

There were two hundred at least, Lin estimated. She moved a little closer to Isaac nervously. The garuda averaged at least a couple of inches over six feet, not counting the magnificent peaks of their folded wings. There was no difference in height or musculature between men and women. The females wore thin shifts, the males wore loincloths or cut-off trousers. That was all.

Lin stood five feet tall. She could see no further than the first circle of garuda who surrounded her and Isaac at arms’ length, but she could see more and more dropping from the sky; she had the sense of the numbers building up around her. Isaac patted her shoulder absently.

A few shapes still swept and hunted and played in the air around them. When the garuda had stopped landing on the roof, Isaac broke the silence.

“Righto,” he yelled. “Thanks very much for inviting us up here. I want to make a proposition to you.”

“To who?” came a voice from the crowd.

“Well, to all of you,” he replied. “See, I’m doing some work on…well, on flight. And you are the only creatures in New Crobuzon who can fly and have brains in your bonces. Wyrmen aren’t renowned for their conversational skills,” he said jovially. There was no reaction to his joke. He cleared his throat and continued.

“So, anyway…uh…I’m wondering whether any of you would be willing to come and do a couple of days’ work with me, show me some flight, let me take a few prints of your wings…” He took hold of Lin’s hand that contained the camera and waved it around. “Obviously I’ll pay for your time…I’d really appreciate some help…”

“What you doing?” The voice came from one of the garuda in the front row. The others looked to him when he spoke. This, thought Lin, is the boss man.

Isaac looked at him carefully.

“What am I doing? You mean…”

“I mean what for d’you need pics? What you up to?”

“It’s…uh…research into the nature of flight. See, I’m a scientist and…”

“Horsecrap. How we know you don’t kill us?”

Isaac started in surprise. The congregated garuda nodded and cawed in agreement.

“Why by damn would I want to kill you…?”

“Just fuck off, mister. No one here wants to help you.”

There were a few mutterings of unease. It was clear that a few of the assembled might, in fact, have been prepared to take part. But none of them challenged the speaker, a tall garuda with a long scar linking his nipples.

Lin watched as Isaac opened his mouth slowly. He was trying to turn the situation round. She saw his hand go to his pocket and come away again. If he flashed money on the spot, he could seem like a spiv or a wide-boy.

“Listen…” he said hesitantly. “I really didn’t realize there’d be a problem with this…”

“No, well, see, that may or may not be true, mister. Might be you’re militia.” Isaac snorted derisorily, but the big garuda continued in his sneering tone. “Might be that the murder squads’ve found a way to get to us bird-boys. ‘Just come along to do research…’ Well, none of us is interested, ta.”

“You know,” said Isaac, “I understand that you’re concerned at my motives. I mean, you don’t know me from Jabber and…”

“Ain’t none of us going with you, mister. Simple.”

“Look. I can pay well. I’m prepared to pay a shekel a day for anyone prepared to come to my lab.”

The big garuda stepped forward and prodded Isaac aggressively in the chest.

“Want us to come to your lab to cut us open, see what makes us tick?” The other garuda stepped back as he circled Lin and Isaac. “You and your bugger friend want to cut me into pieces?”

Isaac was expostulating and trying to deny the charge. He turned slightly away and looked over at the surrounding crowd.

“So am I to understand that this gent speaks for all of you, or would someone here like to earn a shekel a day?”

There were a few mutterings. Garuda looked shiftily and uneasily at each other. The big garuda facing Isaac threw up his hands and shook them as he spoke. He was incensed.

“I speak for all!” He turned and stared slowly at his kin. “Any dissenters?”

There was a pause, and a young male stepped forward slightly.

“Charlie…” He spoke directly to the self-appointed leader. “Shekel’s a lot of moolah…what say a bunch of us go down, make sure there’s no monkey-business, keep it sweet…”

The garuda called Charlie strode over as the other male was speaking and punched him hard in the face.

There was a communal shriek from the congregation. With a tumult of wings and feathers, great numbers of the garuda burst up and out from the roof like an explosion. Some circled briefly and returned to watch warily, but many others disappeared into the upper floors of other blocks, or off into the cloudless sky.

Charlie stood over his stunned victim, who had fallen to one knee.

“Who’s the big man?” shouted Charlie in a strident bird-call. “Who’s the big man?”

Lin tugged at Isaac’s shirt, began to pull him towards the stairwell door. Isaac resisted half-heartedly. He was visibly appalled at the turn his request had taken, but he was also fascinated to see the confrontation. She dragged him slowly away from the scene.

The fallen garuda looked up at Charlie.

“You the big man,” he muttered.

“I’m the big man. I’m the big man ‘cause I take care of you, right? I make sure you’re all right, don’t I? Don’t I? And what’d I always tell you? Steer clear of groundcrawlers! And steer clearest of the anthros. They’re the worst, they’ll tear you up, take your wings away, kill you dead! Don’t trust any of ‘em! And that includes fatboy with the fat wallet over there.” For the first time in his tirade he looked up at Isaac and Lin. “You!” he shouted, and pointed at Isaac. “Fuck off out of it ‘fore I show you exactly what it’s like to fly…straight fucking down!”

Lin saw Isaac open his mouth, attempt one last conciliatory explanation. She stamped in irritation and pulled him hard through the door.

Learn to read a damned situation, Isaac. Time to go, Lin signed furiously as they descended.

“All right Lin, Jabber’s arse, I get the idea!” He was angry, stamping his great bulk down the stairs without any complaints this time. He was energized by his blistering irritation and bewilderment.

“I just don’t see,” he continued, “why they were so fucking antagonistic…”

Lin turned to him in exasperation. She made him stop, would not let him pass.

Because they’re xenian and poor and scared, you cretin, she signed slowly. Big fat bastard waving money comes to Spatters, for Jabber’s sake, not much of a haven but all they’ve got, and starts trying to get them to leave it for reasons he won’t explain. Seems to me that Charlie’s bang-on right. Place like this needs someone to look after its own. If I was garuda, I’d listen to him, I tell you.

Isaac was calming down, even looking a little shamed.

“Fair enough, Lin. I take your point. I should’ve scouted it out first, gone through someone who knows the area or whatever…”

Yes, and you’ve blown that now. You can’t, it’s too late…

“Yes, quite, thanks ever so for pointing that out…” He scowled. “Godspit fuck damn! I ballsed it up, didn’t I?”

Lin said nothing.

They did not speak much as they returned through Spatters. They were watched from bottle-glass windows and open doors as they came back the way they’d come.

As they retraced their paths over the foul pit of nightsoil and rot, Lin glanced back at the tumbledown towers. She saw the flat roof where they had stood.

Isaac and she were being followed by a small swirling mass of garuda youth, sullenly trailing them in the sky. Isaac turned and his face lightened briefly, but the garuda did not come close enough to talk. They gesticulated rudely from on high.

Lin and Isaac walked back up Vaudois Hill towards the city.

“Lin,” Isaac said after minutes of silence. His voice was melancholy. “Back there you said if you’d been garuda you’d have listened to him, right? Well, you’re not garuda, but you are khepri…When you were ready to leave Kinken, there must’ve been plenty of people telling you to stick to your own, that humans couldn’t be trusted, and whatnot…And the thing is, Lin, you didn’t listen to them, did you?”

Lin thought quietly for a long time, but she did not answer.

Chapter Fourteen

“Come on old thing, old plum, old bugger. Eat something, for Jabber’s sake…”

The caterpillar lay listlessly on its side. Its flaccid skin rippled occasionally, and it waved its head, looking for food. Isaac clucked over it, murmured at it, prodded it with a stick. It wiggled uncomfortably, then subsided.

Isaac straightened up and tossed the little stick to one side.

“I despair of you, then,” he announced to the air. “You can’t say I haven’t tried.”

He walked away from the little box with its mouldering piles of foodstuffs.

Cages were still piled high on the warehouse’s raised walkway; the discordant symphony of squawks and hisses and avian screams still sounded; but the store of creatures was much depleted. Many of the pens and hutches lay open and empty. Less than half of the original store remained.

Isaac had lost some of his experimental subjects to disease; some to fights, both in- and inter-species; and some to his own research. A few stiff little bodies were nailed in various poses to boards around the walkway. A vast number of illustrations were plastered to his walls. His initial sketches of wings and flight had multiplied by a massive factor.

Isaac leaned against his desk. He ran his fingers over the diagrams that littered its surface. At the top was a scribbled triangle containing a cross. He closed his eyes against the continuing cacophony.

“Oh shut up, all of you,” he yelled, but the animal chorus went on as before. Isaac held his head in his hands, his frown growing more and more piercing.

He was still stinging from his disastrous journey to Spatters the day before. He could not help running over the events again and again in his mind, thinking about what he could and should have done differently. He had been arrogant and stupid, wading in like an intrepid adventurer, flailing his money as if it were a thaumaturgic weapon. Lin was right. It was no wonder he had managed to alienate probably the city’s entire garuda population. He had approached them as a gang of rogues to be wowed and bought off. He had treated them like cronies of Lemuel Pigeon. They were not. They were a poor, scared community scrabbling for survival and maybe a scrap of pride in a hostile city. They watched their neighbours picked off by vigilantes as if for sport. They inhabited an alternative economy of hunting and barter, foraging in Rudewood and petty pilfering.

Their politics were brutal, but totally understandable.

And now he had blown it with the city’s garuda. Isaac looked up at all the pictures and heliotypes and diagrams he had made. Just like yesterday, he thought. The direct approach isn’t working. I was on the right track at the very start. It’s not about aerodynamics, that’s not how to proceed…The squalls of his captives intruded on his thoughts.

“Right!” he shouted suddenly. He stood up straight, and glared at the trapped animals, as if daring them to continue with their noise. Which, of course, they did.

“Right!” he shouted again, and strode over to the first cage. The brace of doves inside puffed and billowed explosively from one side to the other as he tugged them over to a large window. He left the box facing the glass and fetched another, within which a vivid dragonfly-snake undulated like a sidewinder. He placed that one on top of the first. He grabbed a gauze cage of mosquitoes, and another of bees, and dragged them over too. Isaac woke cantankerous bats and aspises basking in the sun, pulled them over to the window overlooking the Canker.

He cleared all his remaining menagerie over to that pile. The animals looked out at the Ribs, which curved cruelly over the eastern city. Isaac piled all the boxes containing living things into a pyramid in front of the glass. It looked like a sacrificial pyre.

Eventually the job was done. Predators and prey fluttered and screeched next to each other, separated only by wood or thin bars.

Isaac reached awkwardly into the thin space in front of the cages and swung the great window open. It hinged horizontally, opening at the top of its five-foot height. As it opened onto the warm air, a great rush of city sounds washed in with the evening heat.

“Now,” yelled Isaac, beginning to enjoy himself. “I wash my hands of you!”

He looked around and strode back to the desk for a moment, returning with a long cane he had used many years before to point at blackboards. He poked it at the cages, knocking hooks out of eyes, fumbling till he undid latches, ripping holes in wire as thin as silk.

The fronts to the little prisons began to fall away. Isaac speeded up, opening all the doors, using his fingers where the cane was not delicate enough.

At first, the creatures within were bewildered. For many, it was weeks since they had flown. They had eaten badly. They were bored and frightened. They did not understand the sudden vista of freedom, the twilight, the smell of the air before them. But after those long moments, the first of the captives bolted for freedom.

It was an owl.

It hurled itself through the open window and sailed off towards the east, where the sky was darkest, out towards the wooded lands by Iron Bay. It glided between the Ribs on wings that hardly moved.

The escape was a signal. There was a storm of wings.

Falcons, moths, batkin, aspises, horseflies, parakeets, beetles, magpies, creatures of the upper air, little water-top skimmers, creatures of the night, the day and the gloaming burst from Isaac’s window in a shimmering explosion of camouflage and colour. The sun had sunk on the other side of the warehouse. The only light that caught the clouds of feather, fur and chitin was from streetlamps and shards of sunset reflected on the dirty river.

Isaac basked in the glory of the sight. He exhaled as if at a work of art. For a moment he looked around for a box-camera, but then he turned back and was contented just to stare.

A thousand silhouettes eddied in the air by his warehouse-home. They swirled together, aimless for a moment, then felt the currents of the air and were whisked away. Some went with the wind. Some tacked and fought the gusts and wheeled over the city. The peace of that first confused moment broke down. Aspises flew through the shoals of disoriented insects, their tiny leonine jaws closing on fat little bodies with a crunch. Hawks skewered pigeons and jackdaws and canaries. Dragonfly-snakes corkscrewed in thermals and bit at prey.

The flight-styles of the liberated animals were as distinct as their silhouetted forms. One dark shape flitted chaotically around the sky, sinking towards a streetlamp, unable to resist the light: a fell-moth. Another rose with a majestic simplicity and arced into the night: some bird of prey. This one opened momentarily like a flower then squeezed and jetted away with a squirt of discoloured air: one of the small wind-polyps.

Bodies of the exhausted and the dying fell out of the air with a little patter of flesh. The ground below would be discoloured with blood and ichor, Isaac realized. There were gentle splashes as the Canker claimed victims. But there was more life than death. For a few days, a few weeks, Isaac mused, the sky over New Crobuzon would be more colourful.

Isaac sighed beatifically. He looked around and ran over to the few boxes of cocoons and eggs and grubs. He shoved them over to the window, leaving only the big, dying, multicoloured caterpillar undisturbed.

Isaac grabbed handfuls of eggs and hurled them out of the window after the fleeing shapes. He followed them with caterpillars that twisted and jack-knifed as they fell towards the paved ground. He shook cages that rattled with delicate pupating shapes, and emptied them out of the window. He poured out a tank of water-born larvae. For these young, it was a cruel liberation, a few seconds of freedom and rushing air.

Eventually, when the last tiny shape had disappeared below, Isaac closed the window. He turned back and surveyed the warehouse. He heard a faint drone of wings, and saw a few airborne shapes circulating the lamps. An aspis, a handful of moths or butterflies, and a couple of small birds. Well, he thought, they’ll find their own way out, or they wont last long and I can clear them out when they starve.

Littering the floor in front of the window were some of the runts and the dying, the weaklings, that had fallen before they could fly. Some were dead. Most crawled feebly this way and that. Isaac set to cleaning them out.

“You have the advantage that you are (a) rather beautiful; and (b) rather interesting, old chum,” he said to the huge, sickly grub as he worked. “No, no, don’t thank me. Just consider me a philanthrope. And also, I don’t understand why you don’t eat. You’re my project,” he said, jettisoning a dustpan full of feebly crawling bodies into the night air. “I doubt you’ll last the night, but fuck it, you’ve appealed to my pity and my curiosity and I’ll have one last stab at rescuing you.”

There was a shuddering bang. The door to the warehouse had been hurled open.

“Grimnebulin!”

It was Yagharek. The garuda stood in the dimly lit space, legs apart and arms clutching at his cloak. The jutting shape of his wooden wing disguise swayed unrealistically from side to side. It was not properly attached. Isaac leaned over the rail and frowned.

“Yagharek?”

“Have you forsaken me, Grimnebulin?”

Yagharek was shrieking like a tortured bird. His words were almost impossible to understand. Isaac gesticulated at him to calm down.

“Yagharek, what the fuck are you talking about…?”

“The birds, Grimnebulin, I saw the birds! You told me, you showed me, they were for your research…what has happened, Grimnebulin? Are you giving up?”

“Hang on…how in the name of Jabber’s arse did you see them fly away? Where’ve you been?”

“On your roof, Grimnebulin.” Yagharek was quietening. He was calmer. He radiated a massive sadness. “On your roof, where I perch, night after night, waiting for you to help me. I saw you release all the little subjects. Why have you given up, Grimnebulin?”

Isaac beckoned him up the stairs.

“Yag, old son…Damn, I don’t know where to start.” Isaac stared up at the ceiling. “What the arse were you doing on my roof? How long have you hung about up there? ‘Stail, you could’ve kipped down here, or something…that is absurd. Not to say a bit eerie, thinking of you up there while I work or eat or shit or whatnot. And-” he held up his hand to cut off Yagharek’s response “-and I have not given up on your project.”

He was silent for a while. He let the words sink in. He waited for Yagharek to calm, to return from the miserable little hollow he had carved for himself.

“I haven’t given up,” he repeated. “What’s happened is quite good, actually…We’ve entered a new phase, I think. Out with the old. That line of research has been…ah…terminated.”

Yagharek bowed his head. His shoulders shuddered slightly as he breathed out lengthily.

“I do not understand.”

“Right, well, look, come over here. I’m going to show you something.”

Isaac led Yagharek over to the desk. He paused momentarily to tut at the huge caterpillar that sagged on its side in the box. It stirred weakly.

Yagharek did not spare it a glance.

Isaac pointed to the various bundles of paper that propped up overdue library books and teetered on his desk. Drawings, equations, notes and treatises. Yagharek began to sift slowly through them. Isaac guided him.

“Look…See all the damn sketches everywhere. Wings, for the most part. Now, the starting point for the research was the wing. Seems sensible, don’t it? So what I’ve been about is understanding that particular limb.

“The garuda who live in New Crobuzon are useless for us, by the way. I put up notices in the university, but apparently there’re no garuda students this year. I even tried to argue for the sake of science with a garuda…uh…community leader…and it was a bit of a disaster. Let’s put it that way.” Isaac paused, remembering, then blinked himself back to the discussion. “So instead, let’s look to the birds.

“Now, that leads us to a whole new problem. The little beggars, the humming birds and wrens and whatnot are all interesting and useful in terms of…y’know…broad background, the physics of flight and what have you, but basically we’re looking at the big boys. Kestrels, hawks, eagles if I’d got hold of any. Because at this stage I’m still thinking analogously. But I don’t want you to think I’m close-minded…I’m not studying the mayfly or whatever just out of interest, I’m trying to work out if I can apply it.

“I mean, I’m presuming you’re not fussy, right, Yag? I’m presuming that if I graft onto your back a pair of bat or bluebottle wings, or even a wind-polyp’s flightgland, you’re not going to be fussy. Might not be pretty, but it’s just about getting you into the air, right?”

Yagharek nodded. He was listening fiercely, sifting through the papers on the desk as he did so. He was intent on understanding.

“Right. So it seems reasonable, even given all that, that it’s the big birds we should be looking at. But of course…” Isaac rummaged among the papers, grabbed some pictures from the wall, handed sheafs of the relevant diagrams to Yagharek. “Of course, that turns out not to be so. I mean, you can get so far on the aerodynamics of birds, all useful stuff, but it’s actually very misleading to be looking at them. Because the aerodynamics of your body are so fucking different, basically. You ain’t just an eagle with a scrawny human body attached. I’m sure you never thought you were…I don’t know how your maths and physics are, but on this sheet here-” Isaac found it and passed it over “-are some diagrams and equations which show you why big birds’ flight ain’t the direction to be looking. Lines of force all wrong. Not strong enough. That sort of thing.

“So, I turn to the other wings in the collection. What if we tacked on dragonfly wings or what have you? Well, first of all there’s the problem of getting hold of insect wings big enough. The only insects big enough already aren’t going to just hand ‘em over. And I don’t know about you but I don’t fancy fucking off into the mountains or wherever to ambush an assassin beetle. Get our arses kicked.

“What about building them to our specifications? Then we can get the size right and the shape. We can compensate for your…awkward form.” Isaac grinned and continued. “Trouble is, material science being what it is, we might be able to make them exact enough, and light enough, and strong enough, but I honestly doubt it. I’m working on designs that might work, but might not. I don’t think the odds are good enough.

“Also, you’ve got to remember that this whole project is dependent on you getting Remade by a virtuoso. I’m glad to say I don’t know any Remakers, which is the first thing, and the second is they’re usually more interested in humiliation, industrial power or aesthetics than in something as intricate as flight. There are shit-loads of nerve endings, loads of muscles, ripped-up bones and the like floating around in your back, and they’d have to get every one exactly right if you were going to have the slightest chance of getting airborne.”

Isaac had steered Yagharek into a chair. He pulled up a stool and sat opposite him. The garuda was completely silent. He gazed at Isaac with powerful concentration, then at the diagrams he held. This was how he read, Isaac realized, with this intensity and focus. He was not like a patient waiting for a doctor to get to the point: he was taking in every single word.

“I should say that I’m not totally finished with this. There’s one person I know who’s adept at the sort of bio-thaumaturgy you’d need to have working wings grafted to you. So I’m going to go round and pick his brains about the chances of success.” Isaac grimaced and shook his head. “And let me tell you, Yag old son, that if you knew this geezer you’d know how damn noble that is. There’s no sacrifice I won’t make it for you…” He paused lengthily.

“So there’s the chance this chap could say ‘Yes, wings, no problem, bring him round and I’ll do it on Dustday afternoon.’ That is possible, but you employ me for my scientificnous, and I’m telling you that it’s my professional opinion that that won’t happen. I think we have to think laterally.

“My first forays down this route were to look at the various things that fly without wings. Now, I’ll spare you the details of my schemes. Most of the plans are…here, if you’re interested. A subcutaneous self-inflating mini-dirigible; a transplant of mutant wind-polyp glands; integrating you with a flying golem; even something as prosaic as teaching you basic physical thaumaturgy.” Isaac indicated the notes on each of these plans as he mentioned them. “All unworkable. Thaumaturgy’s unreliable and exhausting. Anyone can learn some basic hexes, given application, but constant countergeotropy on demand would take a damn sight more energy and skill than most people have got. Do you have powerful sortilege in the Cymek?”

Yagharek shook his head slowly. “Some whispers to call prey to our claws; some symbols and passes that encourage bones to knit and blood to clot: that is all.”

“Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me. So best not to rely on that. And trust me when I tell you that my other…er…offbeat plans were unworkable.

“So I’ve been spending all my time working on stuff like this, and getting nowhere, and I realized that whenever I stop for a minute or two and just have a think, the same thing comes into my head. Watercraeft.”

Yagharek frowned, drawing his already heavy brows into an overhanging crag of almost geological aspect. He shook his head to show his confusion.

“Watercraeft,” Isaac repeated. “You know what that is?”

“I have read something of it…The skill of the vodyanoi…”

“Bang on, old son. You’ll see the dockers doing it sometimes, in Kelltree or Smog Bend. A whole gang of them can shape quite a bit of the river. They dig holes in the water down to where spilt cargoes lie on the bottom, so the cranes can hook them. Fucking amazing. In rural communities they use it to cut trenches of air through rivers, then drive fish into them. They just fly out of the flat side of the river and flop onto the ground. Brilliant.” Isaac pursed his lips in appreciation. “Anyway, these days it’s mostly just used to arse about, make little sculptures. They have little competitions and whatnot.

“The point is, Yag, that what you’ve got there is water behaving very much as it shouldn’t. Right? And that’s what you want. You want heavy stuff, this thing here, this body-” he poked Yagharek gently in the chest-“to fly. Are you with me? Let’s turn our minds to the ontological conundrum of persuading matter to break habits of aeons. We want to make elements misbehave. This isn’t a problem of advanced ornithology, it’s philosophy.

“ ‘Stail, Yag, this is stuff I’ve been working on for years! It’d almost turned into a kind of hobby. But then this morning I looked again at some notes I’d made early on in your case, and I linked it up with all my old ideas, and I saw that this was the way to go. And I’ve been wrestling with it all day.” Isaac shook a piece of paper at Yagharek, a piece of paper on which was a triangle containing a cross.

Isaac grabbed a pencil and wrote words at the three points of the triangle. He turned the diagram to face Yagharek. The top point was labelled Occult/thaumaturgical; the bottom left Material; the bottom right Social/sapiential.

“Righto, now, don’t get too bogged down with this diagram, Yag old son, it’s supposed to be an aid to thought, nothing more. What you’ve got here is a depiction of the three points within which all scholarship, all knowledge, is located.

“Down here, there’s material. That’s the actual physical stuff, atoms and the like. Everything from fundamental femtoscopic particles like elyctrons, up to big fuck-off volcanos. Rocks, elyctromagnetism, chymical reaction…All that sort of thing.

“Opposite, that’s social. Sentient creatures, of which there’s no shortage on Bas-Lag, can’t just be studied like stones. By reflecting on the world and on their own reflections, humans and garuda and cactacae and whatnot create a different order of organization, right? So it’s got to be studied in its own terms-but at the same time it’s also obviously linked to the physical stuff that makes everything up. That’s what this nice line is here, connecting the two.

“Up top is occult. Now we’re cooking. Occult: ‘hidden.’ Takes in the various forces and dynamics and the like that aren’t just to do with physical bits and bobs interacting, and aren’t just the thoughts of thinkers. Spirits, daemons, gods if you want to call them that, thaumaturgy…you get the idea. That’s up at that end. But it’s linked to the other two. First off, thaumaturgic techniques, invocation, shamanism and so on, they all affect-and are affected by-the social relations that surround them. And then the physical aspect: hexes and charms are mostly the manipulation of theoretical particles-the ‘enchanted particles’-called thaumaturgons. Now, some scientists-” he thumped his chest “-think they’re essentially the same sort of thing as protons and all the physical particles.

“This…” said Isaac slyly, his voice slowing right down, “is where stuff gets really interesting.

“If you think of any arena of study or knowledge, it lies somewhere in this triangle, but not squarely on one corner. Take sociology, or psychology, or xenthropology. Pretty simple, right? It’s down here, in the ‘Social’ corner? Well, yes and no. That’s definitely its closest node, but you can’t study societies without thinking about the questions of physical resources. Right? So straight away, the physical aspect is kicking in. So we have to move sociology along the bottom axis a little bit.” He slid his finger a fraction of an inch to the left. “But then, how can you understand, say, cactacae culture without understanding their solar-focus, or khepri culture without their deities, or vodyanoi culture without understanding shamanic channelling? You can’t” he concluded triumphantly. “So we have to shift things up towards the occult.” His finger moved a little, accordingly.

“So that’s roughly where sociology and psychology and the like are. Bottom right-hand corner, little bit up, little bit along.

“Physics? Biology? Should be right over by material sciences, yeah? Only, if you say that biology has an effect on society, the reverse is also true, so biology’s actually a tiny bit to the right of the ‘Material’ corner. And what about the flight of wind-polyps? The feeding of soul trees? That stuff’s occult, so we’ve moved it again, up this time. Physics includes the efficacy of certain substances in thaumaturgic hexes. You take my point? Even the most ‘pure’ subject’s actually somewhere between the three.

“Then there’s a whole bunch of subjects that define themselves by their mongrel nature. Socio-biology? Halfway along the bottom and a little bit up. Hypnotology? Halfway up the right flank. Social/psychological and occult, but with a bit of brain chymistry thrown in, so that’s over a bit…”

Isaac’s diagram was now covered in little crosses where he located the various disciplines. He looked at Yagharek and drew a neat, final, careful x in the very centre of the triangle.

“Now what are we looking at right here? What’s bang in the middle?

“Some people think that’s mathematics there. Fine. But if maths is the study that best allows you to think your way to the centre, what’re the forces you’re investigating? Maths is totally abstract, at one level, square roots of minus one and the like; but the world is nothing if not rigorously mathematical. So this is a way of looking at the world which unifies all the forces: mental, social, physical.

“If the subjects are located in one triangle, with three nodes and one centre, then so are the forces and dynamics they study. In other words, if you think this way of looking at things is interesting or helpful, then there’s basically one kind of field, one kind of force, being studied in its various aspects here. That’s why this is called ‘Unified Field Theory.’ ”

Isaac smiled, exhausted. Godspit, he realized suddenly, I’m doing rather a good job of this…Ten years of research have improved my teaching…Yagharek was watching him carefully.

“I…understand…” the garuda finally said.

“I’m glad to hear it. There’s more, old son, so gird your loins. UFT’s not very accepted as a theory, you know. It’s probably about the status of the Fractured Land Hypothesis, if that means anything to you.” Yagharek nodded. “Fine, you know what I mean, then. Just about respectable, but a bit crackpot. However, to shred the last vestiges of credibility I might have been able to muster, I subscribe to a minority view among UFT theorists. That’s over the nature of the forces under investigation.

“I’ll try and keep this simple.” Isaac squeezed his eyes closed for a minute and gathered his thoughts. “Right. The question is whether it’s pathological for a dropped egg to fall.”

He paused and let the image hang for a minute.

“See, if you think that matter and therefore the unified force under investigation are essentially static, then falling, flying, rolling, changing your mind, casting a spell, growing older, moving, are basically deviations from an essential state. Otherwise, you think that motion is part of the fabric of ontology, and the question’s how best to theorize that. You can tell where my sympathies lie. Staticists would say I’m misrepresenting them, but fuck it.

“So I’m a MUFTI, a Moving Unified Field Theorist. Not a SUFTI, a Static Unified…you get the idea. But then, being a MUFTI raises as many problems as it solves: if it moves, how does it move? Steady gait? Punctuated inversion?

“When you pick up a piece of wood and hold it ten feet above the ground, it has more energy than when it’s on the ground. We call that potential energy, right? That’s not controversial among any scientist. Potential energy’s the energy that gives the wood the power to hurt you or mark the floor, a power it doesn’t have when it’s just resting on the ground. It has that energy when it’s motionless, like it was before, but when it could fall If it does, the potential energy turns into kinetic energy, and you break your toe or whatever.

“See, potential energy’s all about placing something in a situation where it’s teetering, where it’s about to change its state. Just like when you put enough strain on a group of people, they’ll suddenly explode. They’ll go from grumpy and quiescent to violent and creative in one moment. The transition from one state to another’s affected by taking something-a social group, a piece of wood, a hex-to a place where its interactions with other forces make its own energy pull against its current state.

“I’m talking about taking things to the point of crisis!”

Isaac sat back for a minute. To his surprise, he was loving this. The process of explaining his theoretical approach was consolidating his ideas, making him formulate his approach with a tentative rigour.

Yagharek was a model pupil. His attention was totally unwavering, his eyes as sharp as stilettos.

Isaac took a long breath and continued.

“This is major shit we’re dealing with here, Yag mate. I’ve been nibbling at crisis theory for arsing years. In a nutshell: I’m saying it’s in the nature of things to enter crisis, as part of what they are. Things turn themselves inside out by virtue of being things, understand? The force that pushes the unified field on is crisis energy. Stuff like potential energy, that’s one aspect of crisis energy, one tiny partial manifestation. Now, if you could tap the reserves of crisis energy in any given situation, you’re talking about enormous power. Some situations are more crisis-ridden or -prone than others, yes, but the point of crisis theory is that things are in crisis just as part of being. There’s loads of sodding crisis energy flowing around all the time, but we haven’t yet learnt how to tap it efficiently. Instead it bursts over unreliably and uncontrollably every so often. Terrible waste.”

Isaac shook his head at the thought.

“The vodyanoi can tap crisis energy, I think. In a tiny, tiny way. It’s paradoxical. You tap the existing crisis energy in the water to hold it in a shape it fights against, so you put it in more crisis…but then there’s nowhere for the energy to go, so the crisis resolves itself by breaking down into its original form. But what if the vodyanoi used water they’d already…uh…watercraefted, and used it as a constituent for some experiment that drew on the increased crisis energy…Sorry. I’m digressing. The point is, I’m trying to work out a way for you to tap into your crisis energy, and channel it to flight. See, if I’m right, it’s the only force that’s always going to be…suffusing you. And the more you fly, the more you’re in crisis, the more you should be able to fly…That’s the theory, anyway…

“But to be honest, Yag, this is much bigger than that. If I can really unlock crisis energy for you, then your case becomes, frankly, a pretty paltry concern. We’re talking about forces and energy that could totally change…everything…”

The incredible idea stilled the air. The dirty environs of the warehouse seemed too small and mean for this conversation.

Isaac stared out of the window into the grubby New Crobuzon night. The moon and her daughters were dancing sedately above him. The daughters, smaller than their mother but bigger than stars, shone hard and cold above him. Isaac thought about crisis.

Eventually Yagharek spoke.

“And if you are right…I will fly?”

Isaac burst into laughter at the bathetic demand.

“Yes, yes, Yag old son. If I’m right, you’ll fly again.”

Chapter Fifteen

Isaac could not persuade Yagharek to stay in the warehouse. The garuda would not explain his objections. He simply slipped away into the evening, a wretched outcast for all his pride, to sleep in some ditch or chimney or ruin. He would not even accept food. Isaac stood at the door to the warehouse and watched him go. Yagharek’s dark blanket swung loosely from that wooden framework, those false wings.

Eventually, Isaac closed the door. He returned to his ledge and watched lights slide along the Canker. He rested his head on his fists and listened to the tick of his clock. The feral sounds of New Crobuzon at night inveigled their way through his walls. He heard the melancholy lowing of machines and ships and factories.

In the room below him, David and Lublamai’s construct seemed to cluck gently in time to the clock.

Isaac collected his drawings from the walls. Some that he thought were good he stuffed into an obese portfolio. Many he squinted at critically and threw away. He got onto his big belly and rooted under the bed, bringing out a dusty abacus and a slide-rule.

What I need, he thought, is to get to the university and liberate one of their difference engines. It would not be easy. The security for such items was neurotic. Isaac realized suddenly that he would have the chance to scope out the guard systems for himself: he was going to the university the next day, to talk to his much-loathed employer, Vermishank.

Not that Vermishank employed him much these days. It had been months since he had received a letter in that tight little hand telling him his services were required to research some abstruse and perhaps pointless bywater of theory. Isaac could never refuse these “requests.” To do so would have been to risk his access privileges to the university’s resources, and hence to a rich vein of equipment he plundered more or less at his leisure. Vermishank did not make any move to restrict Isaac’s privileges, despite their attenuating professional relationship, and despite probably noticing a correlation between disappearing resources and Isaac’s research schedule. Isaac did not know why. Probably to try to keep power over me, he thought.

It would be the first time in his life he had sought out Vermishank, he realized, but Isaac had to go and see him. Even though he felt committed to his new approach, his crisis theory, he could not entirely turn his back on more mundane technologies such as Remaking without asking one of the city’s foremost biothaumaturges’ opinions on Yagharek’s case. It would have been unprofessional.

Isaac made himself a ham roll and a cup of cold chocolate. He steeled himself at the thought of Vermishank. Isaac disliked him for a huge variety of reasons. One of them was political. Biothaumaturgy after all, was a polite way to describe an expertise one of whose uses was to tear at and recreate flesh, to bond it in unintended ways, to manipulate it within the limits dictated only by imagination. Of course, the techniques could heal and repair, but that was not their usual application. No one had any proof, of course, but Isaac would not be at all surprised if some of Vermishank’s research had been carried out in the punishment factories. Vermishank had the skill to be an extraordinary sculptor in flesh.

There was a thump on his door. Isaac looked up in surprise. It was nearly eleven o’clock. He put down his supper and hurried down the stairs. He opened the door on a debauched-looking Lucky Gazid.

What the fuck is this? he thought.

“ ‘Zaac, my brother, my…bumptious, bungling…beloved…” Gazid screamed as soon as he saw Isaac. He groped for more alliteration. Isaac pulled him into the warehouse as lights went on across the road.

“Lucky, you fucking arse, what do you want?”

Gazid was pacing from side to side much too quickly. His eyes were stretched wide open, and virtually spiralling in his head. He looked hurt by Isaac’s tone.

“Steady on, guv, ease up, ease up, no need for nastiness, now is there? Eh? I’m looking for Lin. She here?” He giggled abruptly.

Ah, thought Isaac carefully. This was tricky. Lucky was a Salacus Fields man, he knew the unstated truth about Isaac and Lin. But this was not Salacus Fields.

“No, Lucky, she’s not here. And if she were here, for some reason, you’d have absolutely no right to come crashing round here in the middle of the night. What do you want her for?”

“She’s not at home.” Gazid turned and walked up the ladder, speaking to Isaac without turning his head. “Just been round there, but I s’pose she’s hard at art, eh? She owes me money, owes me commission, for getting her the plumb job and setting her up for life. Guess that’s where she is now, eh? I want some dosh…”

Isaac banged his head in exasperation and leapt up the stairs behind Gazid.

“What the fuck are you talking about? What job? She’s doing her own stuff right now.”

“Oh yes, course, righto, yup, that’s the size of it,” agreed Gazid with peculiar absent-minded fervour. “Owes me money, though. I’m fucking desperate, ‘Zaac…Stand me a noble…”

Isaac was getting angry. He grabbed Gazid and held him still. Gazid had the junkie’s scrawny arms. He could only struggle pathetically in Isaac’s grip.

“Listen, Lucky, you little puke. How can you be hurting, you’re so strung out now you can hardly stand. How dare you crash round my house, you fucking junkie…”

“Oy!” Gazid shouted suddenly. He sneered up at Isaac, breaking his flow. “Lin isn’t here now, but I’m hungry for something, and I want you to help me or I don’t know what I might end up saying, if Lin won’t help me, you can, you’re her knight in shining armour, her love-bug, she’s your ladybird…”

Isaac drew back a fat meaty fist and smashed Lucky Gazid in the face, sending the little man yards through the air.

Gazid squealed in astonishment and terror. He scraped his heels on the bare wood and scrabbled towards the stairs. A star of blood radiated out from below his nose. Isaac shook blood from his knuckles and stalked towards Gazid. He was cold with rage.

Think I’m going to let you talk like that? Think you can blackmail me, you little shit? he thought.

“Lucky, you should leave right fucking now if you don’t want me to take your head off.”

Gazid crawled to his feet and burst out crying.

“You’re fucking crazy, Isaac, I thought we were friends…”

Snot and tears and blood dripped onto Isaac’s floor.

“Yeah, well, you thought wrong, didn’t you, old son? You’re nothing but a fucking dreg, and I…” Isaac broke off from his contumely and stared in astonishment.

Gazid was leaning against the empty cages on which the caterpillar’s box lay. Isaac could see the fat grub wriggling, jack-knifing in excitement, twisting desperately against the wire front, squirming with sudden reserves of energy towards Lucky Gazid.

Lucky hovered, terrified, waiting for Isaac to finish.

“What?” he wailed. “What are you going to do?”

“Shut up,” hissed Isaac.

The caterpillar was thinner than it had been on its arrival, and its extraordinary peacock-feather colours were dulled, but it was undoubtedly alive. It rippled its way around its little cage, feeling through the air like a blind person’s finger, faltering towards Gazid.

“Don’t move,” hissed Isaac, and edged closer. The terrified Gazid obeyed. He followed Isaac’s line of sight and his eyes widened at the sight of the huge grub rooting its way around the little cage, trying to find a way towards him. He snatched his hand from the box with a little cry and started backwards. Instantly, the caterpillar changed direction, trying to follow him.

“This is fascinating…” said Isaac. As he watched, Gazid reached up and clutched his head, shaking it suddenly and violently as if it was full of insects.

“Oh, what is happening in my head?” Gazid stuttered.

As he drew closer, Isaac could feel it too. Snatches of alien sensation slithered like lightning-quick eels through his cerebellum. He blinked and coughed slightly, in thrall suddenly and briefly to the sensation of emotions that were not his clogging up his throat. Isaac shook his head and squeezed his eyes hard shut.

“Gazid,” he snapped. “Walk slowly round it.”

Lucky Gazid did as he was told. The caterpillar toppled over in its eager attempts to right itself, to follow him, to track him down.

“Why does the thing want me?” moaned Lucky Gazid.

“Well I don’t know, Lucky,” said Isaac tartly. “The poor thing’s hurting. Looks like it wants whatever you’ve got, Lucky old son. Empty your pockets slowly. Don’t worry, I’m not going to nick anything.”

Gazid began to pull strips of paper and handkerchiefs from the folds of his soiled jacket and trousers. He hesitated, then reached inside and pulled two fat packets from his inner pockets.

The grub went berserk. The disorienting shards of synaesthetic feeling whirled through Isaac’s and Gazid’s heads again.

“What the fuck’ve you got?” said Isaac through clenched teeth.

“This one’s shazbah,” said Gazid hesitantly and waved the first packet at the cage. The grub did not react. “This one’s dreamshit.” Gazid held the second envelope over the caterpillar’s head, and it all but balanced on its rear end to reach it. Its piteous wails were not quite audible, but they were acutely sensible.

“There we go!” said Isaac. “That’s it! The thing wants dreamshit!” Isaac held out his hand to Gazid and clicked his fingers. “Give it to me.”

Gazid hesitated, then handed over the packet.

“Lot of stuff there, man…that’s a lot of moolah there, man…” he whimpered. “You can’t just take it, man…”

Isaac hefted the pouch. It weighed about two or three pounds, he estimated. He pulled it open. Again the emotional wails burst piercingly up from the caterpillar. Isaac winced at the poignant and inhuman begging.

The dreamshit was a mass of brown, sticky pellets that smelt like very burnt sugar.

“What is this stuff?” Isaac asked Gazid. “I’ve heard of it, but I know arse-all about it.”

“New thing, ‘Zaac. Expensive stuff. Been around a year or so. It’s…heady stuff…”

“What does it do?”

“Couldn’t describe it really. Want to buy some?”

“No!” said Isaac sharply, then hesitated. “Well…Not for me, anyway…How much would this packet cost, Lucky?”

Gazid hesitated, doubtless wondering how much he could exaggerate.

“Uh…about thirty guineas…”

“Oh fuck off, Lucky…You’re such a piss-artist, old son…I’ll buy this off you for…” Isaac hesitated. “For ten.”

“Done,” said Gazid instantly.

Shit, thought Isaac. I’ve been stung. He was about to quibble, when he suddenly thought better of it. He looked carefully at Gazid, who was beginning to swagger again, even with his face slick and ugly with gore and mucus.

“Righto, then. Deal. Listen, Lucky,” said Isaac evenly, “I might want more of this stuff, you know what I mean? And if we stay on good terms, there’s no reason not to keep you on as my…exclusive supplier. Know what I mean? But if anything came up to spread discord in our relationship, distrust and the like, I’d have to go elsewhere. Understand?”

“ ‘Zaac, my man, say no more…Partners, that’s what we are…”

“Absolutely,” said Isaac heavily. He was not so foolish as to think he could trust Lucky Gazid, but at least this way Isaac could keep him vaguely sweet. Gazid was unlikely to bite the hand that fed him, at least not for a while.

This can’t last, thought Isaac, but it’ll do for now.

Isaac plucked one of the moist, sticky lumps from the packet. It was the size of a large olive, coated in a thick and rapidly drying mucus. Isaac pulled back the lid of the caterpillar’s box an inch or two and dropped the nugget of dreamshit inside. He squatted down to watch the larva through the wire front.

Isaac’s eyelids flickered as if static coursed through him. For a moment, he could not focus his vision.

“Woah…” moaned Lucky Gazid behind him. “Something’s fucking with my head…”

Isaac felt briefly nauseous, then aflame with the most consuming and uncompromised ecstasy he had ever felt. After less than half a second the inhuman sensations spewed instantaneously out of him. He felt as if they left by his nose.

“Oh by Jabber…” Isaac yelped. His vision fluctuated, then sharpened and became unusually clear. “This little fucker’s some sort of empath, ain’t it?” he murmured.

He gazed at the caterpillar feeling like a voyeur. The creature was rolling around the drug pellet as if it were a snake crushing its prey. Its mouthpart was clamped hugely onto the top of the dreamshit, and it was chewing it with a hunger that seemed lascivious in its intensity. Its side-split jaws oozed with spit. It was devouring its food like a child eating toffee-pudding at Jabber’s Feast. The dreamshit was rapidly disappearing.

“Hell’s Ducks,” said Isaac. “It’s going to want a lot more than that.” He dropped another five or six little lozenges into the cage. The grub rolled happily around in the sticky collection.

Isaac stood up. He regarded Lucky Gazid, who watched the caterpillar eating and smiled beatifically, swaying.

“Lucky, old son, seems like you might’ve saved my little experiment’s bacon. Very much obliged.”

“I’m a lifesaver, aren’t I, ‘Zaac?” Gazid spun slowly in an ugly pirouette. “Lifesaver! Lifesaver!”

“Yes, that’ll do, that’s what you are, old son, hush now.” Isaac glanced at the clock. “I really have to get a bit more work done, so do the decent thing and push off, eh? No hard feelings, Lucky…” Isaac hesitated and thrust out his hand. “Sorry about your nose.”

“Oh.” Gazid looked surprised. He prodded his bloody face experimentally. “Well…whatever…”

Isaac strode away towards his desk.

“I’ll get your moolah. Hang on.” He rummaged in the drawers, eventually finding his wallet and drawing out a guinea. “Hold on, I’ve more somewhere. Bear with me…” Isaac knelt by the bed and began to throw piles of paper aside, collecting the stivers and shekels he unearthed.

Gazid reached into the packet of dreamshit which Isaac had left on the caterpillar’s box. He looked thoughtfully at Isaac, who was scrabbling under the bed with his face on the floor. Gazid plucked two dreamshit pellets from the sticky morass and glanced over to Isaac, to see if he was watching. Isaac was saying something in a conversational tone, his words muffled by the bed above him.

Gazid sauntered slowly over towards the bed. He took a sweet wrapper from his pocket and twisted it around one of his dreamshit doses, dropped it into his pocket. An idiot grin grew and blossomed across his face as he stared at the second lump.

“Should know what you’re prescribing, ‘Zaac,” he whispered. “That’s ethical…” He giggled with delight.

“What’s that?” shouted Isaac. He began to wriggle his way out from under the bed. “I’ve found it. I knew there was some money in the pocket of one of these trousers…”

Lucky Gazid quickly peeled off the top of the ham roll that lay half-eaten on the desk. He slipped the dreamshit into a mustard-covered space under a lettuce leaf. He replaced the top of the roll and stepped away from the desk.

Isaac stood and turned to him, dusty and smiling. He clutched a fan of notes and some loose change.

“That’s ten guineas. ‘Stail, you bargain like a fucking pro…”

Gazid took the proffered money and backed down the stairs quickly.

“Thanks then ‘Zaac,” he said. “Appreciate it.”

Isaac was somewhat taken aback.

“Right then. I’ll contact you if I need any more dreamshit, all right?”

“Yeah, you do that, big brother…”

Gazid was all but scurrying out of the warehouse, pulling the door behind him with a cursory wave. Isaac heard a peal of absurd giggles from the retreating form, a thin wittering cluck that tailed out in the darkness.

Devil’s Tail! he thought. I fucking hate dealing with junkies. What a screwed-up mess he is…Isaac shook his head and wandered back to the caterpillar’s cage.

The grub was already starting on the second lump of sticky drug. Unpredictable little waves of insect happiness spilt over into Isaac’s mind. The sensation was unpleasant. Isaac backed away. As he watched, the grub broke off eating and delicately cleaned itself of the sticky residue. Then it resumed eating, soiling itself again, then preening again.

“Fastidious little bugger, eh?” muttered Isaac. “Is that good, eh? You enjoying that? Hmmm? Lovely.”

Isaac wandered over to his desk and picked up his own supper. He turned back to watch the twisting little multicoloured form as he took a bite of his hardening roll and sipped the chocolate.

“So what the fuck are you going to turn into, then?” he muttered to his experiment. Isaac ate the rest of his roll, grimacing at the slightly stale bread and the musty salad. At least the chocolate was good.

He wiped his mouth and returned to the caterpillar’s cage, steeling himself against the peculiar little empathic waves. Isaac squatted down and watched the starving creature gorge itself. It was difficult to be sure, but Isaac thought the grub’s colours were brighter already.

“You’ll be a good little sideline to keep me from getting obsessed with crisis theory, eh? Won’t you, you little squirming bugger? Not in any of the textbooks, are you? Shy? Is that it?”

A blast of twisted psyche hit Isaac like a crossbow bolt. He staggered and fell over.

“Ow!” he screeched, and writhed to get away from the cage. “I can’t hack your empathic bleating, old son…” He picked himself up and walked towards the bed, rubbing his head. Just as he reached it, another spasm of alien emotions pulsed violently in his head. His knees buckled and he fell by the bed, clawing at his temples.

“Oh shit!” He was alarmed. “That’s too much, you’re getting way too strong…”

Suddenly he could not speak. He snapped totally still as a third intense attack flooded his synapses. These were different, he realized, these were not the same as the querulous little psychic wails from the weird grub ten feet from him. His mouth was suddenly arid, and tasted of musty salad. Mulch. Compost. Old fruitcake.

Lumpy mustard.

“Oh no…” he muttered. His voice shook as realization gripped him. “Oh no, no, no, oh Gazid, you fucking prick, you shit, I’ll fucking kill you…”

He clutched the edge of the bed with hands that trembled violently. He was sweating and his skin looked like stone.

Get into bed, he thought desperately. Get under the covers and ride it out, thousands of people do this every day for pleasure for Jabber’s sake…

Isaac’s hand crawled like a drugged tarantula across the folds of the blanket. He couldn’t work out the best way of getting under the covers, because of the way they folded in on themselves and around the sheet: both sets of cloth ripples were so similar that Isaac was suddenly convinced that they were all part of the same big undulating cloth unity and that to bisect it would be ghastly, so he rolled his bulk on top of the covers and found himself swimming in the intricate twisting folds of cotton and wool. He swam up and down, waving his arms in an energetic, childish doggy paddle, hacking and spitting and smacking his lips with a prodigious thirst.

Look at you, you cretin, spat one section of his mind in contempt. How dignified is this?

But he paid no attention. He was content to swim gently in place on the bed, panting like a dying animal, tensing his neck experimentally and prodding his eyes.

He felt a build-up of pressure in the back of his mind. He watched a big door, a big cellar door, set into the wall of the most ignored corner of his cerebellum. The door was rattling. Something was trying to get out.

Quick, thought Isaac. Bolt it…

But he could feel the increasing power of whatever was fighting to escape. The door was a boil, bursting with pus, ready to rupture, a hugely muscled blank-faced dog, straining ominously and silently against chains, the sea pounding relentlessly against a crumbling harbour wall.

Something in Isaac’s mind burst open.

Chapter Sixteen

sun pouring in like a waterfall and I rejoice in it as blooms burst from my shoulders and my head and chlorophyll rushes invigoratingly through my skin and I raise great spined arms

don’t touch me like that I’m not ready you pig

Look at those steamhammers! I’d like them if they didn’t make me work so!

is this

I am proud to be able to tell you that your father has consented to our match

is this a

and here I swim under all this dirty water towards the looming dark bulk of the boat like a great cloud I breathe filthy water that makes me cough and my webbed feet push towards

is this a dream?

light skin food air metal sex misery fire mushrooms webs ships torture beer frog spikes bleach violin ink crags sodomy money wings colourberries gods chainsaw bones puzzles babies concrete shellfish stilts entrails snow darkness

Is this a dream?

But Isaac knew this was not a dream.

A magic lantern was flickering in his head, bombarding him with a succession of images. This was no zoetrope with an endlessly repeated little visual anecdote: this was a juddering bombardment of infinitely varied moments. Isaac was strafed with a million scintillas of time. Every fractioned life juddered as it segued into the next and Isaac would eavesdrop on other creatures’ lives. He spoke the chymical language of the khepri crying because her broodma had chastised her and then he snorted derisorily as he the head stableman listened to some half-arsed excuse from the new boy and he closed his translucent inner eyelid as he slipped beneath the cold fresh waters of the mountain streams and kicked towards the other vodyanoi coupling orgiastically and he…

“Oh Jabber…” He heard his voice from deep inside that cacophonous emotional onslaught. There were more and more and more and they came so fast, they overlapped and blurred at the edges, until two or three or more moments of life were occurring at once.

The light was bright, when lights were on, some faces were sharp and others blurred and invisible. Each separate splinter of life moved with portentous, symbolic focus. Each was ruled by oneiric logic. In some analytical pocket of his mind Isaac realized that these were not, could not be, grots of history coagulated and distilled into that sticky resin. Setting was too fluid. Awareness and reality intertwined. Isaac had not come unstuck in others’ lives, but in others’ minds. He was a voyeur spying on the last refuge of the stalked. These were memories. These were dreams.

Isaac was spattered by a psychic sluice. He felt fouled. There was no more succession, no one two three four five six invading mindset moments clicking briefly into place to be illuminated by the light of his own consciousness. Instead he swam in mire, a glutinous cesspit of dreamjuice that flowed in and out of each other, that had no integrity, that bled logic and images across lifetimes and sexes and species until he could hardly breathe, he was drowning in the sloshing stuff of dreams and hopes, recollections and reflections he had never had.

His body was nothing but a boneless sac of mental effluent. Somewhere way away, he heard it moan and rock on the bed with a liquid gurgling.

Isaac reeled. Somewhere in the flickering onslaught of emotion and bathos he discerned a thin, constant stream of disgust and fear that he recognized as his own. He struggled towards it through the sludge of imagined and replayed dramas of consciousness. He touched the tentative dribble of nausea that was indisputably what he was feeling at that moment, held fast, centred himself in it…Isaac clung to it with radical fervour.

He held to his core, buffeted by the dreams around him. Isaac flew over a spiky town, a six-year-old girl laughing delightedly in a language he had never heard but momentarily understood as his own; he bucked with inexpert excitement as he dreamed the sex dream of a pubescent boy; he swam through estuaries and visited strange grottoes and fought ritualistic battles. He wandered through the flattened veldt of the daydreaming cactacae mind. Houses morphed around him with the dreamlogic that seemed to be shared by all the sentient races of Bas-Lag.

New Crobuzon appeared here and there, in its dream form, in its remembered or imagined geography, with details highlighted and others missing, great gaps between streets that were traversed in seconds.

There were other cities and countries and continents in these dreams. Some were doubtless dreamlands born behind flickering eyelids. Others seemed references: oneiric nods to solid places, cities and towns and villages as real as New Crobuzon, with architecture and argots that Isaac had not seen or heard.

The sea of dreams in which he swam, Isaac realized, contained drops from very far afield.

Less of a sea, he thought drunkenly from the bottom of his unstuck mind, and more of a consomme. He imagined himself chewing stolidly on the gristle and giblets of alien minds, lumps of rancid dream sustenance floating in a thin gruel of half-memories. Isaac retched mentally. I’ll throw up in here I’ll turn my head inside out, he thought.

The memories and dreams came in waves. Tides carried them in thematic washes. Even adrift in the wash of random thoughts, Isaac was carried across the vistas inside his head on recognizable currents. He succumbed to the tugging of money dreams, a trend of recollections of stivers and dollars and head of cattle and painted shells and promise-tablets.

He rolled in a surf of sex dreams: cactacae men ejaculating across the earth, across the rows of eggbulbs planted by the women; khepri women rubbing oil across each other in friendly orgies; celibate human priests dreaming out their guilty, illicit desires.

Isaac spiralled in a little whirlpool of anxiety dreams. A human girl about to enter her exams, he found himself walking nude to school; a vodyanoi watercraefter whose heart raced as stinging saline water poured back from the sea into his river; an actor who stood dumb on stage, unable to recall a single line of his speech.

My mind’s a cauldron, Isaac thought, and all these dreams are bubbling over.

The slop of ideas came quicker and thicker. Isaac thought of that and tried to latch onto the rhyme, focusing on it and investing it with portent, repeating it quicker and quicker and thicker and thicker and quicker, trying to ignore the barrage, the torrent, of psychic effluvia.

It was no use. The dreams were in Isaac’s mind, and there was no escape. He dreamed that he dreamed other people’s dreams, and realized that his dream was true.

All he could do was try, with a febrile, terrified intensity, to remember which of the dreams was his own.

There was a frantic chirruping coming from somewhere close by. It wound its way through a skein of the images that gusted through Isaac’s head, then grew in intensity until it ran through his mind as the dominant theme.

Abruptly, all the dreams stopped.

Isaac opened his eyes too quickly and swore with the pain that gushed into his head with the light. He reached his hand up and felt it lolling against his head like a big, vague paddle. He laid it heavily across his eyes.

The dreams had stopped. Isaac peeked through his fingers. It was day. It was light.

“By…Jabber’s…arse…” he whispered. The effort made his head ache.

This was absurd. He had no sense of time lost. He remembered everything clearly. If anything, his immediate recollection seemed heightened. He had a clear sense of having lolled and sweated and wailed under the influence of the dreamshit for about half an hour, no longer. And yet it was…he struggled with his eyelids, squinted at the clock…it was half past seven in the morning, hours and hours since he had fought his way onto the bed.

He propped himself on his elbows and examined himself. His dark skin was slick and grey. His mouth reeked. Isaac realized that he must have lain almost motionless for the whole night: the covers were a little rucked, that was all.

The terrified birdsong that had woken him started again. Isaac shook his head in irritation and looked for its source. A tiny bird circled desperately in the air around the inside of the warehouse. Isaac realized that it was one of the previous evening’s reluctant escapees, a wren, obviously afraid of something. As Isaac looked around to see what had the bird so nervous, the lithe reptilian body of an aspis flew like a crossbow bolt from one corner of the eaves to the other. It plucked the little bird from the air as it passed. The wren’s calls were cut short abruptly.

Isaac stumbled inexpertly out of bed and circled confusedly. “Notes,” he told himself. “Make notes.”

He snatched paper and pen from his desk and began to scribble down his recollections of the dreamshit.

“What the fuck was that?” he whispered out loud as he wrote. “Some cove’s doing a damn good job of reproducing the biochymistry of dreams, or tapping it at source…” He rubbed his head again. “Lord, what sort of thing is it that eats this…” Isaac stood briefly and glanced at his captive caterpillar.

He was quite still. His mouth gaped idiotically, then worked up and down and finally shaped words.

“Oh. My. Good. Arse.”

He stumbled slowly, nervously across the room, seeming to hang back, chary of seeing what he was seeing. He approached the cage.

Inside, a colossal mass of beautifully coloured grub-flesh wriggled unhappily. Isaac stood uneasily over the enormous thing. He could feel the odd little vibrations of alien unhappiness in the aether around him.

The caterpillar had at least tripled in size overnight. It was a foot long, and correspondingly fat. The faded magnificence of its coloured patches had returned to their initial, burnished brilliance. With interest. The sticky-looking hairs on its tail-end were wicked-looking bristles. It had no more than six inches of space around it on all sides. It nudged weakly against the sides of the hutch. “What happened to you?” hissed Isaac.

He recoiled and gazed at the thing, which waved its head in the air blindly. He thought quickly, pictured the number of dreamshit lozenges he had given the grub to eat. He looked around and saw the envelope containing all the remains where he had left it, untouched. The thing hadn’t got out and gorged itself. There was no way, Isaac realized, that the little pellets of drug he had left in that hutch contained anything like the number of calories that the caterpillar had used on growth over the night. Even if it had just piled on weight ounce for ounce with what it had eaten, it would not have represented an increase in this league.

“Whatever energy you’re getting out of your supper,” he whispered, “it’s not physical. What in Jabber’s name are you?”

He had to get the thing out of the cage. It looked so miserable, flailing pointlessly in that little space. Isaac hung back, slightly afraid and a little disgusted at the idea of touching the extraordinary thing. Eventually he picked up the box, staggering under the massively increased weight, and held it just above the ground in a much larger cage left over from his experiments, a chicken-wire-fronted mini-aviary five feet high that had contained a small family of canaries. He opened the front of the hutch and tipped the fat grub into the sawdust, then quickly closed and latched the front grille.

He stood back to gaze at his rehoused captive.

It looked directly at him, now, and he felt its childish pleas for breakfast.

“Oh steady on,” he said, “I haven’t even eaten yet.”

He backed uneasily away, then turned and made for his parlour.

Over his breakfast of fruit and iced buns, Isaac realized that the effects of the dreamshit were wearing off very quickly. It might be the worst hangover in the world, he thought wryly, but it’s gone within the hour. No wonder the punters come back.

From across the room, the foot-long caterpillar scrabbled around the floor of its new cage. It nosed miserably around the dirt, then reared up again and waved its head in the direction of the packet of dreamshit.

Isaac slapped his hand over his face.

“Oh, Hell’s Donkeys,” he said. Vague emotions of unease and experimental curiosity combined in his mind. It was a childish excitement, like that of boys and girls who burnt insects with magnified sun. He stood and reached into the envelope with a big wooden spoon. He carried the congealed lump over to the caterpillar, which almost danced with excitement as it saw, or smelt, or somehow sensed, the dreamshit approaching. Isaac opened a little feeding hatch at the back of the crate and tipped the doses of drug in. Immediately the caterpillar raised its head and slammed it down on the lumpy mess. Its mouth was large enough now that its workings could easily be seen. It slid open and gnawed voraciously at the powerful narcotic.

“That,” said Isaac, “is as big a cage as you’re going to get, so ease up on the growing, right?” He backed away to his clothes, without taking his eyes from the feeding creature.

Isaac picked up and sniffed the various clothes strewn around the room. He put on a shirt and trousers with no smell and a minimum of stains.

Better sort out a “things to do” list, he thought grimly. Top of which is “Beat Lucky Gazid to death.” He stomped to his desk. The triangular Unified Field Theory diagram he had drawn for Yagharek was at the top of the papers that covered it. Isaac pursed his lips and stared at it. He picked it up and looked thoughtfully over to where the caterpillar gnawed happily. There was something else he should do that morning.

There’s no point putting it off, he thought reluctantly. Maybe I can clear the decks for Yag and learn a little about my friend here…maybe. Isaac sighed heavily and rolled up his sleeves, then sat down at a mirror for a rare and perfunctory preen. He poked inexpertly at his hair, found another, cleaner shirt into which he changed, oozing resentment.

He scribbled a note for David and Lublamai, checked that his giant caterpillar was secure and unlikely to escape. Then he descended the stairs and, pinning his message to the door, walked out into a day full of sharp clear blades of light.

Isaac sighed and set off to find an early cab to take him to the university and the best biologist, natural philosopher and bio-thaumaturge he knew: the odious Montague Vermishank.

Chapter Seventeen

Isaac entered New Crobuzon University with a mixture of nostalgia and discomfort. The university buildings were little changed since his time as a teacher. The various faculties and departments dotted Ludmead with a grandiose architecture that overshadowed the rest of the area.

The quad before the enormous and ancient Science Faculty building was covered with trees shedding their blossom. Isaac walked footpaths worn by generations of students through a blizzard of garish pink petals. He strode busily up the scrubbed steps and pushed open the great doors.

Isaac was brandishing faculty identification that had expired seven years previously, but he need not have bothered. The porter behind the desk was Sedge, an old, entirely witless man, whose tenure at the faculty long predated Isaac’s own, and looked set to continue for ever. He greeted Isaac as he always did, on these irregular visits, with an incoherent mutter of recognition. Isaac shook his hand and enquired after his family. Isaac had reason to be grateful to Sedge, before whose milky eyes he had liberated numerous expensive pieces of laboratory equipment.

Isaac strode up the steps past groups of students, smoking, arguing, writing. Overwhelmingly male and human, there were, nonetheless, the occasional defensive tight-knit group of young xenians or women or both. Some students conducted theoretical debates at ostentatious volume. Others made occasional marginal notes in their textbooks and sucked at rolled cigarillos of pungent tobacco. Isaac passed a group squatting at the end of a corridor, practising what they had just learned, laughing delightedly as the tiny homunculus they had made from ground liver stumbled four steps before collapsing in a pile of twitching mulch.

The number of students around him decreased as he continued up stairs and along corridors. To his irritation and disgust, Isaac found that his heart was speeding up as he approached his erstwhile boss.

He walked the plush darkwood panelling of the Science Faculty’s administration wing, and approached the office at the far end, on the door of which was written in gold leaf: Director. Montague Vermishank.

Isaac paused outside and fiddled nervously. He was emotionally confused, striving to maintain a decade’s anger and dislike along with a conciliatory, non-confrontational tone. He breathed deeply once, then turned and knocked briskly, opened the door and walked in.

“What do you think…” shouted the man behind the desk, before stopping abruptly when he recognized Isaac. “Ah,” he said, after a long silence. “Of course. Isaac. Do sit down.”

Isaac sat.

Montague Vermishank was eating his lunch. His pale face and shoulders leaned sharply over his enormous desk. Behind him was a small window. It looked out, Isaac knew, over the wide avenues and large houses of Mafaton and Chnum, but a grubby curtain was pulled across it and the light was stifled.

Vermishank was not fat, but he was coated from his jowls down in a slight excess layer, a swaddling of dead flesh like a corpse’s. He wore a suit too small for him, and his necrotic white skin oozed from his sleeves. His thin hair was brushed and styled with a neurotic fervour. Vermishank was drinking lumpy cream soup. He dipped doughy bread into it regularly and sucked at the resulting mess, chewing but not biting off, gnawing and worrying at the saliva-fouled bread that dripped wan yellow onto his desk. His colourless eyes took Isaac in.

Isaac stared uneasily and was thankful for his tight bulk and his skin the colour of smouldering wood.

“Was going to shout at you for failing to knock or make an appointment, but then I saw it was you. Of course. Normal rules do not apply. How are you, Isaac? Are you after money? Need some research work?” asked Vermishank in his phlegmy whisper.

“No, no, nothing like that. I’m not bad, actually, Vermishank,” said Isaac with strained bonhomie. “How’s all your work?”

“Oh, good, good. Doing a paper on bio-ignition. I’ve isolated the pyrotic flange in a fire-bes.” There was a long silence. “Very exciting,” whispered Vermishank.

“Sounds it, sounds it,” enthused Isaac. They stared at each other. Isaac could not think of any more small talk. He loathed and respected Vermishank. It was an unsettling combination.

“So, uh…anyway…” said Isaac. “I’m here, to be frank, to ask your help.”

“Oh ho.”

“Yeah…See, I’m working on something that’s a bit off my track…I’m more of a theoretician than a practical researcher, you know…”

“Yes…” Vermishank’s voice dripped an indiscriminate irony.

You ratfuck, thought Isaac. I gave you that for free…

“Right,” he said slowly. “Well, this is…I mean this could be, though I doubt it…a problem of bio-thaumaturgy. I wanted to ask your professional opinion.”

“Ah ha.”

“Yes. What I wanted to know was…can someone be Remade to fly?”

“Ooh.” Vermishank leaned back and dabbed soup from around his mouth with bread. Briefly, he wore a moustache of crumbs. He clasped his hands in front of him and waggled his fat fingers. “Fly, eh?”

Vermishank’s voice picked up an air of excitement previously lacking in his cold tones. He may have wanted to sting Isaac with his heavy contempt, but he could not help being enthused by problems of science.

“Yeah. I mean, has that been done?” said Isaac.

“Yes…It has been done…” Vermishank nodded slowly without taking his eyes from Isaac, who sat up in his chair and snatched a notebook from his pocket.

“Oh, has it?” said Isaac.

Vermishank’s eyes lost focus as he thought harder.

“Yes…Why, Isaac? Has someone come to you and asked to fly?”

“I really can’t…uh, divulge…”

“Of course you can’t, Isaac. Of course you can’t. Because you are a professional. And I respect you for that.” Vermishank smiled idly at his guest.

“So…what were the details?” ventured Isaac. He set his teeth before he spoke, to control his shaking indignation. Fuck you, you patronizing game-playing pig, he thought furiously.

“Oh ho…Well…” Isaac twisted with impatience as Vermishank raised his head ponderously to remember. “There was a bio-philosopher, years ago, at the end of the last century. Calligine, name of. Had himself Remade.” Vermishank smiled fondly and cruelly and shook his head. “Mad thing, really, but it did seem to work. Huge mechanical wings that unfolded like fans. He wrote a pamphlet about it.” Vermishank strained his head over his lardy shoulder, glanced vaguely at the shelves of volumes that covered his walls. He waved with a limp hand that could have signalled anything at all about the whereabouts of Calligine’s pamphlet. “Don’t you know the rest? Not heard the song?” Isaac narrowed his eyes quizzically. Appallingly, Vermishank sang a few bars in a reedy tenor. “So Cally flew high | On um-ber-ella wings | Headed into the sky | Waved his love bye-bye | Went West with a sigh | Disappeared in the land of the Horrible Things…”

“Of course I’ve heard that!” said Isaac. “I never knew it was about someone real…”

“Well, you never took Introductory Bio-Thaumaturgy, did you? As I remember, you did about two terms of the Intermediate course, much later. You missed my first lecture. That’s the story I use to entice our jaded young knowledge-hunters onto the road of this noble science.” Vermishank spoke in a completely deadpan voice. Isaac felt his distaste return with interest. “Calligine disappeared,” Vermishank continued. “Went off flying south-west, towards the Cacotopic Stain. Never seen again.”

There was another long silence.

“Uh…is that the whole story?” said Isaac. “How did they get the wings on him? Did he keep experimental notes? What was the Remaking like?”

“Oh, horribly difficult, I’d imagine. Calligine probably got through a few experimental subjects before getting his sums right…” Vermishank grinned. “Probably called in a few favours with Mayor Mantagony. I suspect a few felons sentenced to death had a few more weeks of life than they’d expected. Not part of the process that he advertised. But it stands to reason, doesn’t it, that it’s going to take a few tries before you get it right. I mean, you’ve got to connect up the mechanism to bones and muscles and whatnot that haven’t a clue what they’re supposed to be doing…”

“But what if the muscles and bones did know what they were doing? What about if a…a wyrman or something, had its wings cut off. Could they be replaced?”

Vermishank gazed passively at Isaac. His head and eyes did not move.

“Ha…” he said faintly, eventually. “You’d have thought that was easier, wouldn’t you? It is, in theory, but it’s even harder in practice. I’ve done some of this with birds and…well, with winged things. First off, Isaac, in theory it’s perfectly possible. In theory, there is almost nothing which can’t be done with Remaking. It’s all just a question of wiring things up right, a bit of flesh-moulding. But flight’s horribly hard because you’re dealing with all sorts of variables that have to be exactly right. See, Isaac, you can Remake a dog, sew a leg back on, or mould it on with a clayflesh hex, and the animal’ll limp along happily. Won’t be pretty, but it’ll walk. Can’t do that with wings. Wings have to be perfect or they won’t do the trick. It’s harder to teach muscles that think they know how to fly to do the same trick differently than it is to teach muscles that haven’t any idea in the first place. Your bird or what have you, its shoulders get all confused by this wing which is just a tad the wrong shape, or the wrong size, or based on different aerodynamics, and it ends up being totally stymied, even assuming you’ve reconnected everything up right.

“So the answer, I suppose I’m saying, Isaac, is that yes it can be done. This wyrman, or whatever, can be Remade to fly again. But it isn’t likely. It’s too damn hard. There’s no bio-thaumaturge, no Remaker, who could promise a result. Either you’re going to have to find Calligine, get him to do it,” hissed Vermishank in conclusion, “or I wouldn’t risk it.”

Isaac finished scribbling notes and flipped his notebook closed.

“Thanks, Vermishank. I was sort of…hoping you’d say that. That’s your professional opinion, eh? Well, I’ll just have to pursue my other line of enquiry, of which you wouldn’t approve at all…” His eyes bulged like a naughty boy’s.

Vermishank nodded very slightly and a sickly little smile grew and died on his mouth like a fungus.

“Ha,” he said faintly.

“Right, well, thanks for your time…Appreciate it…” Isaac flustered as he stood to go. “Sorry to be so fleeting…”

“Not at all. Any other opinions needed?”

“Well…” Isaac paused with his arm half into his jacket. “Well. Have you heard of something called dreamshit?”

Vermishank raised an eyebrow. He leaned back in his chair and chewed his thumb, looking at Isaac with half-closed eyes.

“This is a university, Isaac. Do you think a new and exciting illicit substance would sweep the city and none of our students would be tempted? Of course I’ve heard of it. We had our first expulsion for selling the drug less than half a year ago. Very bright young psychonomer, of predictably avant-garde theoretical persuasion.

“Isaac, Isaac…for all your many, uh, indiscretions…” a little simper pretended unconvincingly to rob the insult of its barb “-I wouldn’t have had you down as a…a drug person.”

“No, Vermishank, nor am I. However, living and operating in the quagmire of corruption that I’ve chosen, surrounded by lowlifes, and vile degenerates, I tend to be faced with things like drugs at the various sordid orgies I attend.” Isaac told himself off for losing his patience at the same moment that he decided there was nothing to be gained from further diplomacy. He spoke loudly and sarcastically. He rather enjoyed his ire.

“So anyway,” he continued, “one of my disgusting friends was using this bizarre drug and I wanted to know more about it. Obviously shouldn’t have asked someone so high-minded.”

Vermishank was chuckling soundlessly. He laughed without opening his mouth. His face remained set in a sour smirk. He kept his eyes on Isaac. The only sign that he was laughing was the little shucking motion of his shoulders and his slight rocking back and forth.

“Ha,” he said eventually. “Touchy-touchy, Isaac.” He shook his head. Isaac patted his pockets and fastened his jacket, ostentatiously getting ready to go, refusing to feel silly. He turned his back and walked to the door, debating the merits of a parting shot.

Vermishank spoke while he considered.

“Dreamsh…Ah, that substance is not really my area, Isaac. Pharmacology and whatnot something of a biological backwater. I’m sure one of your old colleagues might be able to tell you more. Good luck.”

Isaac had decided against saying anything. He did, however, wave behind him in a pusillanimous motion that he could convince himself was contemptuous, but could just about pass for gratitude and farewell. You arsing coward, he scolded himself. But there was no getting away from it, Vermishank was a useful repository of knowledge. Isaac knew it would take a lot for him to be really, unrepentantly rude to his former boss. That was just too much expertise to close the door on.

So Isaac forgave himself his half-hearted retaliation and grinned, instead, at his own floundering reaction to the awful man. At least he had learnt what he had come there to learn. Remaking was not an option for Yagharek. Isaac was pleased, and he was honest enough to recognize the ignobility of the reasons. His own research had been reinvigorated by the problem of flight, and if the prosaic flesh-sculpting of applied bio-thaumaturgy had won out over crisis theory, his research would have stalled. He did not want to lose his new momentum.

Yag old son, he reflected, it’s just as I thought. I’m your best shot, and you’re mine.

Before the city there were canals that wound between rock formations like silicate tusks, and patches of corn in the thin soil. And before the scrub there were days of glowering stone. Gnarled granite tumours that had sat heavy in the belly of the land since its birth, their thin earth-flesh stripped from them by air and water in a mere ten thousand years. They were ugly and terrifying as innards always are, those rock promontories, those crags.

I walked the path of the river. It was nameless between the hard ridged hills: in days it would become the Tar. I could see the freezing heights of real mountains miles to the west, colossi of rock and snow that reared as imperiously over the local jags of scree and lichen as those lower peaks reared over me.

Sometimes I thought the rocks shaped like looming figures, with claws and fangs and heads like clubs or hands. Petrified giants; unmoving stone gods; mistakes of the eye or the wind’s chance sculptures.

I was seen. Goats and sheep poured scorn on my stumbling. Screaming birds of prey shouted their contempt. Sometimes I passed shepherds who stared at me, suspicious and rude.

There were darker shapes at night. There were colder watchers under the water.

The rock teeth broke earth so slowly and slyly that I was walking that gouged valley for hours before I knew it. Before that were days and days of grass and scrub.

The earth was easier on my feet, and the massive sky easier on my eye. But I would not be fooled. I would not be seduced. It was not the desert sky. It was a pretender, a surrogate, that tried to lull me. Drying vegetation stroked me with every wash of wind, lusher by far than my home. In the distance was the forest that I knew extended north to the edge of New Crobuzon, east to the sea. In secret places among its thick trees jutted vast, obscure, forgotten machines, pistons and gears, iron trunks among the wood, rust their bark.

I did not approach them.

Behind me where the river forked were marshlands, a kind of aimless inland estuary that promised, vaguely, to dissolve into the sea. There I stayed in the raised longhuts of the stiltspear, that quiet, devout race. They fed me and sang me crooning lullabies. I hunted with them, spearing cayman and anacondas. It was in the wetlands that I lost my blade, breaking it off in the flesh of some rushing, sucking predator that loomed at me suddenly from out of the slime and sodden reeds. It reared and screamed like a kettle on a fire, disappeared into the muck. I do not know if it died.

Before the wetland and the river were days of drying grass and foothills, that I was warned were ravaged by gangs of bandit fReemade run from justice. I saw none.

There were villages that bribed me in with meat and cloth and begged me to intercede on their behalf to their harvest gods. There were villages that kept me out with pikes and rifles and screaming klaxons. I shared the grass with herds and occasionally with riders, with birds I considered cousins and with animals I had thought myth.

I slept alone, hidden in folds of stone or in copses, or in bivouacs I threw up when I smelt rain. Four times something investigated me when I slept, leaving hoofmarks and the smell of herbs or sweat or meat.

Those sprawling downs were where my anger and misery changed shape.

I walked with temperate insects investigating my unfamiliar smells, trying to lick my sweat, taste my blood, trying to pollinate the spots of colour in my cloak. I saw fat mammals among that ripe green. I picked flowers that I had seen in books, tall-stemmed blooms in subtle colours as if seen through thin smoke. I could not breathe for the smell of the trees. The sky was rich with clouds.

I walked, a desert creature, in that fertile land. I felt harsh and dusty.

One day I realized that I no longer dreamed of what I would do when I was whole again. My will burned to reach that point, and then suddenly was nothing. I had become nothing more than my desire to fly. I had adjusted, somehow. I had evolved in that unfamiliar region, plodding my stolid way to where the scientists and Remakers of the world congregated. The means had become the end. If I regained my wings, I would become someone new, without the desire that defined me.

I saw in that spring damp as I walked endlessly north that I was not looking for fulfilment but for dissolution. I would pass my body on to a newborn, and rest.

I had been a harder creature when I first stepped onto those hills and plains. I left Myrshock, where my ship had landed, without spending even one night there. It is an ugly port town containing enough of my kind that I felt oppressed.

I hurried through the city seeking nothing but supplies and assurance that I was right to go to New Crobuzon. I bought cold cream for my raw and seeping back, found a doctor honest enough to admit that I would find no one who could help me in Myrshock. I gave my whip to a merchant who let me ride his cart for fifty miles into the dales. He would not accept my gold, only my weapon.

I was eager to leave the sea behind me. The sea was an interlude. Four days on a sluggish, oily paddleship crawling across the Meagre Sea, when I had stayed below, knowing only by the lurches and the wet sounds that we were sailing. I could not walk the deck. I would be more confined deckbound under that huge ocean sky than at any time in those stifling days in my stinking cabin. I huddled away from the seagulls and the ospreys and the albatrosses. I stayed close to the brine, in my dirty wooden bolthole, behind the privy.

And before the waters, when I was still burning and raging, when my scars were still wet with blood, was Shankell, the cactus city. The many-named town. Sun-jewel. Oasis. Borridor. Salthole. The Corkscrew Citadel. The Solarium. Shankell, where I fought and fought in the fleshpits and the hookwire cages, tearing skin and being torn, winning far more than I lost, rampaging like a fighting cockerel at night and hoarding pennies by day. Until the day I fought the barbarian prince who wanted to make a helmet of my garuda skull and I won, impossibly, even as I shed blood in frightening gouts. Holding my intestines in with one hand, I clawed his throat out with the other. I won his gold and his followers, whom I freed. I paid myself to health, bought passage on a merchant ship.

I set out across the continent to become whole.

The desert came with me.