Perdido Street Station

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Something uncomfortable and insistent prodded Benjamin Flex awake. His head rocked nauseously, his stomach plunged.

He was sitting strapped to a chair in a small, antiseptic white room. On one wall was a window of frosted glass, admitting light but no sights, no clue at all as to what lay outside. A white-coated man stood over him, poking him with a long shard of metal attached by wires to a humming engine.

Benjamin looked up into the man’s face and saw his own. The man wore a mask of perfectly smooth, rounded mirror, a convex lens that sent Benjamin’s distorted face back at him. Even bowled and ridiculous, the bruises and blood that discoloured Benjamin’s skin shocked him.

The door was open slightly and a man was standing half in, half out of the room. He held the door and faced back the way he had come, speaking to someone in the corridor or main room beyond.

“…glad you like it,” Benjamin heard. “…off to the playhouse with Cassandra tonight, so you never know…no, these eyes are still killing me…” The man laughed briefly in response to some unheard pleasantry. He waved. Then he turned and entered the little room.

He turned towards the chair, and Benjamin saw a figure that he recognized from rallies, from speeches, from massive heliotypes plastered around the city. It was Mayor Rudgutter.

The three figures in the room were still, regarding each other.

“Mr. Flex,” said Rudgutter eventually. “We must talk.”

“Got word from Pigeon.” Isaac waved the letter as he returned to the table he and David had set up in Lublamai’s corner of the ground floor. It was where they had spent the hours of the previous day uselessly scrabbling for plans.

Lublamai lay and drooled and shat in a cot a little way away.

Lin sat with them at the table, listlessly eating slices of banana. She had arrived the previous day, and Isaac, stumbling and semi-coherent, had told her what had happened. Both he and David had seemed in shock. It had been some minutes before she had noticed Yagharek, skulking against a wall in the shadows. She had not known whether to greet him, and had waved a brief introduction that he had not acknowledged. When the four of them ate a miserable supper, he had drifted over to join them, his enormous cloak draped over what she knew to be fake wings. Not that she would tell him she knew him to be engaged in a masquerade.

At one point in that long, miserable evening, Lin had reflected that something had finally happened to make Isaac acknowledge her. He had held her hands on arrival. He had not even ostentatiously thrown up a duplicitous spare bed when she had agreed to stay. It was not a triumph, though, not the final great vindication of love that she would have chosen. The reason for his change was simple.

David and he were worried about more important things.

There was a slightly sour part of her mind which, even now, did not believe his conversion to be complete. She knew that David was an old friend, of similarly libertarian principles, who would understand-if he were even thinking about them-the difficulties of the situation, and who could be relied on to be discreet. But she did not allow herself to dwell on this, feeling mean-spirited and selfish to be thinking of herself with Lublamai…ruined.

She could not feel Lublamai’s affliction as deeply as his two friends, of course, but the sight of that dribbling, mindless thing in the cot shocked and frightened her. She was glad that something had happened to Mr. Motley to give her a few hours or days with Isaac, who seemed broken with guilt and misery.

Occasionally he would flare into angry, useless action, shouting “Right!” and clasping his hands decisively, but there was nothing to be decided, no action he could take. Without some lead, some hint, the start of some trail, there was nothing to be done.

That night, she and Isaac had slept together upstairs, he clutching her miserably, without a hint of arousal. David had gone home, promising to return early in the morning. Yagharek had refused a mattress, had curled into a peculiar, hunched, cross-legged crouch in the corner, obviously designed to keep from crushing his supposed wings. Lin did not know if he was maintaining his illusion for her sake, or if he truly slept, still, in the pose he had used since childhood.

The next morning they sat around the table, drinking coffee and tea, eating stolidly, wondering what to do. When he checked the post, Isaac was quick to discard the rubbish and return with Lemuel’s note: unstamped, hand-delivered by some minion.

“What does he say?” asked David quickly.

Isaac held the paper so that David and Lin could read over his shoulder. Yagharek hung back.

Have tracked down source of Peculiar Caterpillar in my records. One Josef Cuaduador. Acquisitions clerk for Parliament. Not wanting to waste time, and remembering promise of Fat Fee, have already been to speak to Mr. Cuaduador along with my Large Associate Mr. X. Exerted some little pressure for cooperation. At first Mr. C. thought I was militia. Reassured him otherwise, then ensured his loquacity with X’s friend Flintlock. Seems our Mr. C. liberated caterpillar from official shipment or some-such. Been regretting it ever since. (I did not even pay him much for it.) No knowledge of purpose or source of grub. No knowledge of fate of others from original group-took only one. One lead only: (Useless? Useful?) Recipient of packet named Dr. Barbell? Barrier? Berber? Barlime? etc. in R amp;D.

Am keeping track of services rendered, Isaac. Itemized bill to follow.

Lemuel Pigeon

“Fantastic!” Isaac exploded, on finishing the letter. “A fucking lead…”

David looked utterly aghast.

“Parliament?” he said, a strangled gasp. “We’re fucking about with Parliament? Oh dear Jabber, do you have any idea of the scale of shit we’re messed up in? What the fuck d’you mean ‘Fantastic!’ you fucking cretin, Isaac? Oh, marvellous! We just have to ask Parliament for a list of all those in the top secret Research and Development department whose names begin with a B, then find them one by one and ask if they know anything about flying things that scare their victims comatose, specifically how to catch them. We’re home free”

No one spoke. A pall settled slowly on the room.

At its south-westerly corner, Brock Marsh met Petty Coil, a dense knot of chancers, crime and architecture of decayed splendour wedged into a kink in the river.

A little over a hundred years previously, Petty Coil had been an urban hub for the major families. The Mackie-Drendas and the Turgisadys; Dhrachshachet, the vodyanoi financier and founder of the Drach Bank; Sirrah Jeremile Carr, the merchant-farmer: all had their great houses in Petty Coil’s wide streets.

But industry had exploded in New Crobuzon, much of it bankrolled by those very families. Factories and docks budded and proliferated. Griss Twist, just across the river, enjoyed a short-lived boom of small machinofacture, with all the noise and stink that that entailed. It became the site of massive riverside tips. A new landscape of ruin and refuse and industrial filth was created, in a speeded-up parody of geological process. Carts dumped load after load of broken machines, rotting paper, slag, organic offal and chymical detritus into the fenced-off rubbish tips of Griss Twist. The rejected matter settled and shifted and fell into place, affecting some shape, mimicking nature. Knolls, valleys, quarries and pools bubbling with foetid gas. Within a few years the local factories had gone but the dumps remained, and the winds that blew in from the sea could send a pestilential stench over the Tar into Petty Coil.

The rich deserted their homes. Petty Coil degenerated in a lively fashion. It became noisier. Paint and plaster bubbled, desquamating grotesquely, as the massive houses became homes for more and more of New Crobuzon’s swelling population. Windows broke, were fixed roughly, broke again. As small food-shops and bakers and carpenters moved in, Petty Coil fell willing prey to the city’s ineluctable capacity for spontaneous architecture. Walls and floors and ceilings were called into question, amended. New and inventive uses were found for deserted constructions.

Derkhan Blueday made her way hurriedly towards this mess of abused, misused grandeur. She carried a bag close. Her face was set and miserable.

She came up over Cockscomb Bridge, one of the city’s most ancient edifices. It was narrow and roughly cobbled, with houses built into the very stones. The river was invisible from the centre of the bridge. On either side, Derkhan could see nothing but the squat, rough-edged skyline of houses nearly a thousand years old, their intricate marble façades crumbled long ago. Lines of washing stretched across the width of the bridge. Raucous shouted conversations and arguments bounced back and forth.

In Petty Coil itself, Derkhan walked quickly under the raised Sud Line and bore north. The river she had passed over bent sharply back on itself, veering towards her in an enormous S, before righting its course and heading east and down to meet the Canker.

Petty Coil was blurring with Brock Marsh. The houses were smaller, the streets narrower and more intricately twisted. Mildewing old houses tottered overhead, their steeply slanting roofs like capes slung over narrow shoulders, making them furtive. In their cavernous front rooms and central courtyards, where trees and bushes died as filth encroached, rude signs were plastered advertising scarabomancy and automatic reading and enchantment therapy. Here, the poorest or most unruly of Brock Marsh’s delinquent chymists and thaumaturges fought for space with charlatans and liars.

Derkhan checked the directions she had been given, and found her way to St. Sorrel’s Mews. It was a tight little passage ending in a collapsed wall. To her right, Derkhan saw the tall, rust-coloured building described in the note. She entered through the doorless threshold and picked her way over building debris, through a short unlit passage that virtually dripped with damp. At the end of the corridor, she saw the bead curtain she had been told to look for, strings of broken glass on wire, swaying gently.

She steeled herself, drawing the vicious shards back gently, drawing no blood. Derkhan entered the little parlour beyond.

Both of the room’s windows had been covered: thick material was glued to them in great fibrous clumps that clotted the air with heavy shadow. The furnishings were minimal. The same shade of brown as the darkened atmosphere, they seemed half invisible. Behind a low table, sipping tea in an absurdly dainty manner, a plump, hairy woman basked in a sumptuous decaying armchair.

She eyed Derkhan.

“What can I do for you?” she asked evenly, in a tone of resigned irritation.

“You’re the communicatrix?” said Derkhan.

“Umma Balsum.” The woman inclined her head. “Got some business for me?”

Derkhan made her way across the room and hovered nervously by a bursting sofa until Umma Balsum indicated that she should sit. Derkhan did so abruptly, and fumbled in her bag.

“I need…uh…to talk to Benjamin Flex.” Her voice was taut. She spoke in little bursts, gearing up to each announcement, then spitting it out. She pulled out a little pouch of the detritus she had found at the site of the abattoir.

She had gone to Dog Fenn the previous evening, as news of the militia’s crushing of the dock strike washed over New Crobuzon. It swept along with rumours in its wake. One of the rumours concerned a subsidiary attack on a seditious newspaper in Dog Fenn.

It had been late when Derkhan had arrived, disguised as always, in the dank streets in the south-east of the city. It had rained; warm, fat drops bursting like rotting things on the rubble in the cul-de-sac. The entrance was blocked, so Derkhan had entered through the low portal through which meat and animals were slung. She had clung to the noisome stones, dangling over the lip into the butchers’ den, stained with shit and gore from a thousand terrified animals, and dropped the few feet into the bloody darkness of the deserted charnel-house.

She had crawled over the ruined conveyor-belt, snagged herself on the meathooks that littered the floor. The sanguinary slick in which she stumbled was cold and sticky.

Derkhan had fought her way past the stones that had burst from walls, over the ruined stairs, up towards Ben’s room, the centre of the destruction. Her way was paved with ripped and ruined shards of printing machinery, and smoke-charred pieces of cloth and paper.

The room itself was little more than a hole full of rubbish. Chunks of masonry had crushed the bed. The wall between Ben’s bedroom and the hidden printing press was almost completely destroyed. Languorous summer drizzle had been falling through the burst skylight onto the shattered skeleton of the press.

Derkhan’s face had hardened. She had searched with a fervent intensity. She had unearthed small pieces of evidence, small proofs that this was once where a man had lived. She brought them out now, put them on the table before Umma Balsum.

She had found his razor, with a little stubble and bloodrust still staining its blade. The torn remnants of a pair of trousers. A piece of paper discoloured with his blood from where she had rubbed and rubbed it against a red stain on the wall. The last two issues of Runagate Rampant that she had found under the ruins of his bed.

Umma Balsum watched the pathetic collection emerge.

“Where is he?” she asked.

“I…I think he’s in the Spike,” said Derkhan.

“Well, that’s going to cost you an extra noble straight off,” said Umma Balsum tartly. “Don’t like tangling with the law. Talk me through this stuff.”

Derkhan showed her each of the pieces she had brought. Umma Balsum nodded at each briefly, but seemed particularly interested in the issues of RR.

“He wrote for this, did he?” she asked keenly, fingering the papers.

“Yes.” Derkhan did not volunteer the information that he edited it. She was nervous of breaking the taboo against naming names, even though she had been assured that the communicatrix was trustworthy. Umma Balsum’s livelihood depended for the most part on contacting people in the militia’s possession. Selling out her clients would be a financial miscalculation. “This-” Derkhan turned to the central column, with the headline What We Think”-he wrote this.”

“Ahhh…” said Umma Balsum. “Shame you don’t have it in his original scripture. But this ain’t bad. Got anything else peculiar on him?”

“He has a tattoo. Above his left bicep. Like this.” Derkhan brought out the sketch she had made of the ornate anchor decoration.

“Sailor?”

Derkhan smiled mirthlessly.

“Got discharged and banged up without setting foot on a ship. Got drunk when he joined up and insulted his captain before the tattoo was even dry.” She remembered him telling the story.

“Righto,” said Umma Balsum. “Two marks for the attempt. Five marks connection fee if I get him, then two stivers a minute while we’re linked. And a noble on account of he’s in the Spike. Acceptable?” Derkhan nodded. It was expensive, but this kind of thaumaturgy was not just a question of learning a few passes. With enough training, anyone could effect the odd fumbling hex, but this kind of psychic channelling took a prodigious birth-talent and years of arduous study. Appearances and surroundings notwithstanding, Umma Balsum was no less a thaumaturgic expert than a senior Remaker or chimerist. Derkhan fumbled for her purse. “Pay after. We’ll see if we get through first.” Umma Balsum rolled up her left sleeve. Her flesh dimpled and wobbled loosely. “Draw me that tattoo. Make it as like the original as you can.” She nodded, indicating Derkhan to a stool in the corner of the room on which rested a palette with a collection of brushes and coloured inks.

Derkhan brought the materials over. She began to sketch onto Umma Balsum’s arm. She cast her mind back desperately, trying to get the colours exactly right. It took her about twenty-five minutes to finish her attempt. The anchor she had drawn was a little more garish than Benjamin’s (partly a consequence of the quality of the inks), and perhaps somewhat squatter. Nonetheless, she was sure that anyone who knew the original would recognize hers as a copy of it. She sat back, tentatively satisfied.

Umma Balsum waved her arm like a fat chicken’s wing, drying the inks. She fiddled with the remnants of Benjamin’s bedroom.

“…bloody unhygenic bloody way to make a living…” she murmured, just loud enough for Derkhan to hear. Umma Balsum picked up Benjamin’s razor and, holding it with a practised grip, nicked herself slightly on the chin. She rubbed the bloodstained paper against her cut. Then she lifted up her skirt and pulled the trouser leg as far onto her fat thighs as it would go.

Umma Balsum reached under the table and brought out a leather and darkwood box. She set it on the table and opened it.

Inside was a tight, interlocking tangle of valves and tubes and wires, looping over and under each other in an incredibly dense engine. At its top was a ridiculous-looking brass helmet, with a kind of trumpet attachment jutting from the front. The helmet was tethered to the box by a long coiled wire.

Umma Balsum reached out and extracted the helmet. She hesitated, then placed it on her head. She fastened the leather straps. From some hidden place inside the box she pulled out a large handle, which slotted neatly into a hexagonal hole at the side of the boxed engine. Umma Balsum placed the box at the edge of the table nearest Derkhan. She attached the engine to a chymical battery.

“Righto,” said Umma Balsum, dabbing absentmindedly at her still-dripping chin. “Now, you’ll have to get this going by winding that handle. Once the battery kicks in, you keep an eye on it. If it starts to play up, start winding that handle again. You let that current falter, we lose the connection, and without careful disengagement your mate risks losing his mind, and what’s worse so do I. So watch it close…Also, if we make contact, tell him not to move around or I’ll run out of cable.” She rattled the wire which attached her helmet to the engine. “Got me?” Derkhan nodded. “Right. Give me that thing he wrote. I’m going to get into character, try and harmonize. Start winding, and don’t stop till the battery takes over.”

Umma Balsum stood and picked up her chair, shoving it back against the wall, puffing. Then she turned and stood in the relatively open space. She visibly braced herself, then drew a stopwatch out of her pocket, pressed the stud which turned it on and nodded at Derkhan.

Derkhan began to wind the handle. It was mercifully smooth. She felt oiled gears inside the box begin to connect and catch, calculated tension biting against her arm, powering up the esoteric mechanisms. Umma Balsum had dropped the stopwatch on the table, was holding RR in her right hand, reading Benjamin’s words in an inaudible whisper, her lips moving quickly. She held her left hand slightly raised, and its fingers danced a complicated quadrille, inscribing some thaumaturgic symbols in the air.

When she reached the end of his article she simply returned to the beginning and began it again, in an endless quick loop.

The current flowed around and around the coiled wire, visibly jolting Umma Balsum, setting her head vibrating very slightly for a few seconds. She dropped the paper, continuing to recite Benjamin’s words sotto voce from memory. She turned slowly, her eyes quite vacant, shuffling her feet. As she turned, there was a second when the trumpet at the front of her helmet was directly pointed at Derkhan. For a split second, Derkhan felt a pulse of weird sethereo-mental waves buffet her psyche. She reeled slightly, but continued to turn the handle, until she felt another force take it and move it on, and she gently released her hand and watched it go. Umma Balsum moved until she was facing the north-west, until she was aligned with the Spike, out of sight in the centre of the city.

Derkhan watched the battery and the engine, made sure it maintained a steady circuit.

Umma Balsum closed her eyes. Her lips moved. The air in the room seemed to sing like a wine glass stroked on its rim.

Then, suddenly, her body jerked violently. She shuddered. Her eyes snapped open.

Derkhan stared at the communicatrix.

Umma Balsum’s lank hair twisted like a boxful of bait worms. It slid back from her forehead and snaked backwards, into an approximation of the greased-down backwards sweep that Benjamin affected when he was not working. A ripple passed through Umma Balsum, from her feet up. It was as if a lightning tide swept along her subcutaneous fat, altering it slightly as it passed. When it had passed out through the crown of her head, her whole body had changed. She was no fatter, and no thinner, but the distribution of tissue had subtly modified her shape. She looked a little broader in the shoulders. Her jawline was more pronounced, and her ample jowls were somehow minimized.

Bruises flowered on her face.

She stood for a second, then collapsed suddenly onto all fours. Derkhan let out a little cry, but she saw that Umma Balsum’s eyes were still open and focused.

Umma Balsum sat suddenly with her legs splayed out, her back leaning against the sofa’s arm.

Her eyes moved slowly up as a furrow of incomprehension ploughed her face. She looked up at Derkhan, still frantically staring. Umma Balsum’s mouth (now firmer and thinner lipped) opened in what looked like astonishment.

“Dee?” she hissed in a voice that oscillated with a deeper echo.

Derkhan gawped at Umma Balsum idiotically.

“Ben…?” she faltered.

“How did you get in here?” hissed Umma Balsum, rising quickly. She squinted at Derkhan in awe. “I can see through you…”

“Ben, listen to me.” Derkhan realized she had to calm him down. “Stop moving. You’re seeing me through a communicatrix who’s harmonized with you. She’s shut herself down into a totally passive recipient state so I can talk straight to you. D’you understand?”

Umma Balsum, who was Ben, nodded quickly. She stopped moving, and sank again to her/his knees. “Where are you?” she whispered.

“In Brock Marsh, down by the Coil. Ben, we don’t have much time. Where are you? What happened? Have they…have they…hurt you?” Derkhan exhaled tremulously, her tension and despair sweeping through her.

Two miles away Ben shook his head miserably, and Derkhan saw it in front of her.

“Not yet,” whispered Ben. “They’ve left me alone…for a while…”

“How did they know where you were?” hissed Derkhan again.

“Jabber, Dee, they’ve always known, haven’t they? I had fucking Rudgutter in here earlier, and he…and he was laughing at me. Telling me they’d always known where RR was, just couldn’t be bothered to pick us up.”

“It was the strike…” said Derkhan miserably. “They decided we’d gone too far…”

“No.”

Derkhan looked up sharply. Ben’s voice, or the approximation that emerged from Umma Balsum’s mouth, was hard and clear. The eyes that gazed at her were steady and urgent.

“No, Dee, it ain’t the strike. Dammit, I only wish we had the kind of impact on the strike that worried them. No, that’s a fucking cover story…”

“So what…?” began Derkhan hesitantly. Ben interrupted her.

“I’ll tell you what I know. After I got here, Rudgutter comes in and he’s waving Double-R at me. And you know what he’s pointing at? That really fucking tentative story we had in the second section. ‘Rumours of Fat Sun Deal With Top Mobster.’ You know, the one from that contact I had that was saying the government sold some shit or other, some failed science project, to some crim. Nothing! We had nothing! It was just shit-stirring we were doing! And Rudgutter’s waving it around, and he…he’s shoving it in my face…” Umma Balsum’s eyes slid away into reverie for a moment as Ben remembered. “He’s on and on at me. ‘What d’ye know about this, Mr. Flex? Who’s your source? What do you know about the moths?’ Seriously! Moths, as in butterflies! ‘What do you know about Mr. M.’s recent problems?’ ”

Ben shook Umma Balsum’s head slowly. “Did you get all that? Dee, I dunno what the fuck we’re onto here, but we’ve opened up some story which…Jabber!…which’s got Rudgutter crapping himself. That’s why he took me! He kept saying ‘If you know where the moths are, it’d be best to tell me.’ Dee…” Ben staggered carefully to his feet. Derkhan opened her mouth to warn him about moving away, but her words died as he moved carefully towards her on Umma Balsum’s legs. “Dee, you have to chase this. They’re scared, Dee. They’re really scared. We’ve got to use this. I didn’t have a fucking clue what he was on about, but I think he thought I was acting, and I started milking it, ‘cause it was making him uncomfortable.”

Tentatively, carefully, nervously, Ben reached out with Umma Balsum’s hands towards Derkhan. Derkhan’s throat caught as she saw that Ben was crying. Tears rolled down his face without him making a sound. She bit her lip.

“What’s that whirring noise, Dee?” asked Ben.

“It’s the motor to the communicating engine. It has to keep going,” she said.

Umma Balsum’s head nodded.

Her hands touched Derkhan’s. Derkhan trembled at the touch. She felt Ben clutch her free hand, kneeling before her.

“I can feel you…” Ben smiled. “You’re only half visible, like a fucking spook…but I can feel you.” He stopped smiling and groped for words. “Dee…I…they’re going to kill me. Oh Jabber…” he breathed out. “I’m scared. I know these…scum…will use pain on me…” His shoulders shuddered up and down as he lost control of his sobs. He was silent for a minute, looking down, weeping silently for fear. When he looked up, his voice was solid.

“Fuck ‘em! We’ve got the bastards running scared, Dee. You’ve got to chase it! I hereby appoint you editor of fucking Runagate Rampant…” He grinned fleetingly. “Listen. Go to Mafaton. I’ve only met her twice, in cafes near there, but I think that’s where she lives, the contact-we met late, and I doubt she’d have wanted to find her way back across the city on her own after, so I’m figuring she’s from round there. Her name’s Magesta Barbile. She hasn’t told me much. Just that some project she was working on in R amp;D-she’s a scientist-the government terminated and sold off to a crime boss. I thought it could all be a wind-up; I published out of fucking mischief more than ‘cause it was a real story. But my gods, the reaction vindicates it.”

Now Derkhan was crying, a little. She nodded.

“I’ll chase it, Ben. Promise.”

Ben nodded. There was a moment of silence.

“Dee…” said Ben eventually. “I…I don’t suppose there’s anything you could do with that communico-wossname that would…I don’t suppose…you can’t kill me, can you?”

Derkhan let out a gasp of shock and grief.

She looked around desperately and shook her head.

“No, Ben. I could only do that by killing the communicatrix…”

Ben nodded sadly.

“I really don’t know as I’m going to be able to…hold back from letting some stuff slip…Jabber knows I’ll try, Dee…but they’re experts, you know? And I…well…might as well get it all over with, know what I mean?”

Derkhan was holding her eyes closed. She wept for Ben, and with him.

“Oh gods, Ben, I’m so sorry…”

He was suddenly, ostentatiously brave. Stiff-jawed. Pugnacious. “I’ll do me best. Just you make damn sure you chase Barbile, all right?”

She nodded.

“And…thanks,” he said with a wry smile. “And…goodbye.”

He bit his lip, looked down, then up again and kissed her on the cheek for a long time. Derkhan held him close with her left arm.

And then Benjamin Flex broke away and stepped back, and with some mental reflex invisible to the distraught Derkhan, he told Umma Balsum that it was time for them to disengage.

The communicatrix rippled again, quivered and staggered, and with an almost palpable gust of relief her body collapsed back into its own shape.

The battery continued winding the little handle until Umma Balsum righted herself and walked closer, laid a peremptory hand on it. She stopped the watch on the table, and said: “That’s it, dear.”

Derkhan stretched out and laid her head on the table. She wept in silence. Across the city, Benjamin Flex was doing the same. Both of them alone.

It was only two or three minutes before Derkhan sniffed sharply and sat up. Umma Balsum was sitting in her chair, calculating sums on a scrap of paper with great efficiency.

She glanced over at the sound of Derkhan’s brisk attempts to reassert control over herself.

“Feeling better, deario?” she asked breezily. “I’ve worked out your charge.”

There was a moment when Derkhan felt sick at the woman’s callousness, but it came and went quickly. Derkhan did not know if Umma Balsum could recall what she heard and said when she was harmonized. And then even if she did, Derkhan’s was only one tragedy in the hundreds and thousands throughout the city. Umma Balsum made her money as a go-between, and her mouth had told story after faltered story of loss and betrayal and torture and misery.

There was a certain obscure, lonely comfort for Derkhan in realizing that hers and Ben’s was not a special, not an unusual suffering. Ben’s would not be a special death.

“Look.” Umma Balsum was waving her piece of paper at Derkhan. “Two marks plus five for connection is seven. I was there for eleven minutes, which makes twenty-two stivers: that’s two and tuppence, brings it to nine marks two. Plus a noble for Spike danger money, and you’re looking at one noble nine and two.”

Derkhan gave her two nobles and left.

She walked quickly, without thinking, tracing her way through the streets of Brock Marsh. She re-entered the inhabited streets, where the people she passed were more than shifty-looking figures skulking hurriedly from shadow to shadow. Derkhan shouldered through stallholders and vendors of cheap and dubious potions.

She realized that she was making her way towards Isaac’s laboratory-house. He was a close friend, and something of a political comrade. He had not known Ben-had not even heard his name-but he would understand the scale of what had happened. He might have some idea of what to do…and if not, well, Derkhan would make do with a strong coffee and some comforting.

His door was locked. There was no answer from within. Derkhan almost wailed. She was about to wander off into lonely misery when she remembered Isaac’s enthusiastic descriptions of some vile pub that he frequented on the river’s bank, The Dead Child or something. She turned down the little alley beside the house and looked up and down the pathway by the water, flagstones broken and erupting with tenacious grass.

The dirty lapping waves tugged organic filth gently towards the east. Across the Canker, the opposite bank was choked in snarls of bramble and thickets of serpentine weeds. A little way to the north on Derkhan’s side, some tumbledown establishment huddled by the trail. She walked towards it tentatively, speeding up when she saw the stained and peeling sign: The Dying Child.

Inside, the dark was foetid and warm and unnervingly damp; but in the far corner, past the slouching, collapsed human and vodyanoi and Remade wrecks, sat Isaac.

He was talking in an animated whisper with another man who Derkhan vaguely remembered, some scientist friend of Isaac’s. Isaac looked up as Derkhan stood in the door, and after a double-take, he stared at her. She almost ran towards him.

“Isaac, Jabber and fuck…I’m so glad I found you…”

As she gabbled at him, her hand nervously clenching the cloth of his jacket, she realized with a mortifying lurch that he looked at her without welcome. Her little speech faltered out.

“Derkhan…my gods…” he said. “I…Derkhan, there’s a crisis…Something’s happened, and I…” He looked uneasy.

Derkhan stared at him miserably.

She sat suddenly, collapsed onto the bench beside him. It was like a surrender. She leant on the table, kneaded her eyes which were brimming suddenly and irrevocably.

“I’ve just seen a dear friend and comrade get ready to be tortured to death and half my life’s been crushed and exploded and stamped on and I don’t know why and I’ve got to find a Doctor fucking Barbile somewhere in the city to find out what’s going on, and I come to you…for…because you’re supposed to be my friend and what, you’re…busy…?”

Tears oozed from beneath her fingertips and scored their way across her face. She wiped her hands violently across her eyes and sniffed, glancing up for a moment, and she saw that Isaac and the other man were staring at her with an extraordinary, absurd intensity. Their eyes gaped.

Isaac’s hand crept across the table and gripped her by the wrist.

“You’ve got to find who?” he hissed.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“Well,” said Bentham Rudgutter carefully, “I couldn’t get anything out of him. Yet.”

“Not even the name of his source?” asked Stem-Fulcher.

“No.” Rudgutter pursed his lips and shook his head slowly. “He just shuts down. But I don’t think that’ll be too hard to find out. After all, there aren’t a huge number of people it can be. It’s got to be someone in R amp;D, it’s probably someone on the SM project…We may well know more when the inquisitors have interrogated him.”

“So…” said Stem-Fulcher. “Here we are.”

“Indeed.”

Stem-Fulcher, Rudgutter and Montjohn Rescue were standing, surrounded by an elite militia guard unit, in a tunnel deep under Perdido Street Station. Gaslamps made fitful impressions on the murk. The little points of grubby light went on as far as they could see before them. A little way behind them was the lift-cage they had just left.

At Rudgutter’s signal, he, his companions and their escort began to walk down into the darkness. The militia marched in formation.

“Right,” said Rudgutter. “You’ve both got the scissors?” Stem-Fulcher and Rescue nodded. “Four years ago it was chess sets,” Rudgutter mused. “I remember when the Weaver changed its tastes, it took about three deaths before we worked out what it wanted.” There was an uneasy pause. “Our research is quite up to date,” said Rudgutter with gallows humour. “I spoke to Doctor Kapnellior before meeting you. He’s our resident Weaver ‘expert’…something of a misnomer. Just means that unlike the rest of us, he’s only extremely damn ignorant about them, rather than totally. He reassures me that scissors are still very much the object of desire.”

After a moment, he spoke again.

“I’ll do the talking. I’ve dealt with it before.” He was unsure himself whether that was an advantage or a disadvantage.

The corridor had come to an end, terminating in a thick door of iron-banded oak. The man at the head of the militia unit slid a huge key into the lock and turned it smoothly. He tugged the door open, bracing himself at its weight, and trooped into the dark room beyond. He was well trained. His discipline was like steel. He must, after all, have been extremely frightened.

The rest of the officers followed him, then Rescue and Stem-Fulcher, and finally Bentham Rudgutter. He pulled the door closed behind them.

As they passed into the room, all felt a moment of dislocation, a wispy unease that prickled across their skin with a quasi-physical momentum. Long threads, invisible filaments of spun aether and emotion, were draped in intricate patterns around the room, and were rippling and sticking to the intruders.

Rudgutter twitched. From the corner of his eye he glimpsed threads that folded out of existence when he looked them full on.

The room was as obscure as if it were shrouded in cobwebs. On every wall, scissors were attached in bizarre designs. Scissors chased each other like predatory fish; they sported on the ceiling; they coiled around and through each other in convoluted, unsettling geometric designs.

The militia and their charges stood still against one wall of the room. No sources of light were visible, but they could still see. The atmosphere in the room seemed monochrome, or disturbed in some way, the light etiolated and cowed.

They stood still for a long time. There were no sounds.

Slowly and silently, Bentham Rudgutter reached into the bag he carried and brought out the large grey scissors he had had an aide buy in an ironmonger’s on the lowest commercial concourse of Perdido Street Station.

He parted the scissors without a noise, held them up in the cloying air.

Rudgutter brought the razor edges together. The room reverberated with the unmistakable sound of blade sliding along sharpened blade, and snapping shut with an inexorable division.

The echoes trembled like flies in a funnelweb. They slid into a dark dimension at the room’s heart.

A gust of cold sent gooseflesh dancing across the backs of those congregated.

The echoes of the scissors came back.

As they returned and crept up from below the threshold of hearing, they metamorphosed, becoming words, a voice, melodious and melancholy, that first whispered and then grew more bold, spinning itself into existence out of the scissor-echoes. It was not quite describable, heartbreaking and frightening, it tugged the listener close; and it sounded not in the ears but deeper inside, in the blood and bone, in the nerve-clusters.

…FLESHSCAPE INTO THE FOLDING INTO THE FLESHSCAPE TO SPEAK A GREETING IN THIS THE SCISSORED REALM I WILL RECEIVE AND BE RECEIVED…

In the fearful silence, Rudgutter gesticulated at Stem-Fulcher and Rescue, until they understood, and they raised their scissors as he had done, opened and sharply shut them, slicing the air with an almost tactile sound. He joined in, the three of them opening and closing their blades in macabre applause.

At the sound of that snapping susurration, the unearthly voice resonated into the room again. It moaned with an obscene pleasure. Each time it spoke, it was as if what faded into audibility was only a snatch of an unceasing monologue.

…AGAIN AGAIN AND AGAIN DO NOT WITHHOLD THIS BLADED SUMMONS THIS EDGED HYMN I ACCEPT I AGREE YOU SLICE SO NICE AND NICELY YOU LITTLE ENDOSKELETAL FIGURINES YOU SNIP AND SHAVE AND SLIVER THE CORDS OF THE WOVEN WEB AND SHAPE IT WITH AN UNCOUTH GRACE

From out of shadows cast by some unseen shapes, shadows that seemed stretched-out and taut, tethered from corner to corner of the square room, something stalked into view.

Into existence. It bulked suddenly where there had been nothing. It stepped out from behind some fold in space.

It picked its way forward, delicate on pointed feet, vast body bobbing, lifting multiple legs high. It looked down at Rudgutter and his fellows from a head that loomed colossally above them.

A spider.

Rudgutter had trained himself rigorously. He was an unimaginative man, a cold man who ruled himself with industrial discipline. He could no longer feel terror.

But, gazing at the Weaver, he came close.

It was worse, more frightening by far than the ambassador. The Hellkin were appalling and awesome, monstrous powers for which Rudgutter had the most profound respect. And yet, and yet…he understood them. They were tortured and torturing, calculating and capricious. Shrewd. Comprehensible. They were political.

The Weaver was utterly alien. There could be no bargaining and no games. It had been tried.

Rudgutter conquered himself, angry, judging himself harshly, studying the thing before him in an attempt to itemize and metabolize the sight.

The Weaver’s bulk was mostly its huge teardrop abdomen that welled up and hung downwards behind it from its neck-waist, a tight, bulbous fruit seven feet long and five wide. It was absolutely taut and smooth, its chitin a shimmering black iridescence.

The creature’s head was the size of a man’s chest. It was suspended from the front of the abdomen a third of the way from the top. The fat curve of its body loomed above it like skulking black-clad shoulders.

The head swivelled slowly to take in its visitors.

The top as smooth and spare as a human skull in black: multiple eyes a single, deep blood-red. Two main orbs as large as new-borns’ heads sat in sunken sockets at either side; between them a much smaller third; above it two more; above them three more still. An intricate, precise constellation of glints on dark crimson. An unblinking array.

The Weaver’s complicated mouthparts unhinged, its inner jaw flexing, something between a mandible and a black ivory trap. Its wet gullet flexed and vibrated deep within.

Its legs, thin and bony as human ankles, sprouted from the thin band of segmented flesh that linked its headpiece and abdomen. The Weaver walked on its hindmost four legs. They shot up and out at a forty-five-degree angle, hinging in knees a foot or more above the Weaver’s hunkered head, higher than the top of its abdomen. The legs rebounded from the joints almost straight down ten feet, culminating in a point as featureless and sharp as a stiletto.

Like a tarantula, the Weaver picked one leg up at a time, lifting it very high and placing it down with the delicacy of a surgeon or an artist. A slow, sinister and inhuman movement.

From the same intricate fold as that great quadrupedal frame emerged two sets of shorter legs. One pair, six feet long, rested pointing upwards at the elbows. Each thin, hard shaft of chitin ended in an eighteen-inch talon, a cruel, polished shard of russet shell edged like a scalpel. At the base of each weapon sprouted a curl of arachnid-bone, a sharpened hook to snag and slice and hold prey.

Those organic kukris jutted up like wide horns, like lances. An ostentatious display of murderous potential.

And in front of them, the final, shorter pair of limbs hung down. At their tips, held midway between the Weaver’s head and the ground, a pair of thin and tiny hands. Five-fingered and slender, only smooth fingertips without nails and skin the alien, nacreous black of pure pitch distinguished them from the hands of human children.

The Weaver bent its elbows up a little and held these hands together, clasping and rubbing them together slowly and incessantly. It was a furtive, disturbingly human motion, like that of an untrustworthy, simpering priest.

The spearpoint feet crept closer. The red-black claws swivelled a little and glinted in the non-light. The hands stroked each other.

The Weaver’s body rocked back and alarmingly forward again.

…WHAT OFFERING WHAT BOON THE HINGED SPLITTERS YOU BRING ME…it said, and suddenly held out its right hand. The militia officers tensed at the quick movement.

Without hesitation Rudgutter stepped forward and placed his scissors into its palm, taking a little care not to touch its skin. Stem-Fulcher and Rescue did the same. The Weaver stepped back with unsettling speed. It looked at the scissors it held, threaded its fingers through the handles and worked each pair rapidly open and shut. Then it moved to the back wall and, moving quickly, it pressed each pair of scissors into a position on the cold stone.

Somehow, the lifeless metal stayed where it was put, clinging to the damp-patterned stone. The Weaver adjusted its design minutely.

“We’re here to ask you about something, Weaver.” Rudgutter’s voice was steady.

The Weaver turned ponderously back to face him.

…THE WEFT OF THREADS SURROUND ABOUND ABOUT YOUR TOTTERING TITTERING CARCASSES YOU TUG AND SHRUG UNRAVEL AND REKNIT YOU TRIUMVIRATE OF POWER ENCASED IN THE BLUE-CLAD BRISTLING WITH SPARKING FLINT BLACK POWDER IRON YOU STILL-POINT THREE HAVE CAUGHT HANGNAIL-SOULS ON THE FABRIC SNAGS THE FIVE WINGED RIPPERS RENDING UNWIND SYNAPSE AFTER GANGLIOL SPIRIT SUCK ON MINDFIBRES…

Rudgutter looked sharply over at Rescue and Stem-Fulcher. All three of them were straining to follow the dream-poetics that was the Weaver tongue. One thing had come across clear.

“Five?” whispered Rescue, looking over at Rudgutter and Stem-Fulcher. “Motley bought only four moths…”

…FIVE DIGITS OF A HAND TO INTERFERE TO STRIP WORLD-FABRIC FROM THE BOBBINS OF THE CITY-KIND FIVE AIR-TEARING INSECTS FOUR FINELY FORMED NOBLE BERINGED WITH SHIMMERING DECORATION ONE SQUAT THUMB THE RUNT THE RUINED EMPOWERING ITS IMPERIOUS SIBLING FINGERS FIVE A HAND…

The militia guard tensed as the Weaver stalked its slow ballet over to Rescue. It spread out the fingers of one hand, held it up in front of Rescue’s face, pushed it closer and closer to him. The air around the humans thickened at the Weaver’s approach. Rudgutter fought down an impulse to wipe his face, to clean it of that unseen clinging silk. Rescue set his jaw. The militia murmured with dithering impotence. Their uselessness was brought home.

Rudgutter watched the little drama uneasily. The last but one time he had spoken to the Weaver, it had illustrated a point it was making, a figure of speech of some kind, by reaching out to the militia captain flanking Rudgutter, lifting him into the air and filleting him slowly, drawing one of its talons through his armour up the side of his abdomen and around under the chin, drawing out bone after steaming bone. The man had screamed and flopped and screamed as the Weaver eviscerated him, its mournful voice resonating in Rudgutter’s head as it explained itself in its oneiric riddles.

Rudgutter knew that the Weaver would do anything that it considered improved the worldweave. It might pretend to be dead or reshape the stone of the floor into a statue of a lion. It might pluck out Eliza’s eyes. Whatever it took to shape the pattern in the fabric of the aether that only it could see, whatever it took to Weave the tapestry into shape.

The memory of Kapnellior discussing Textorology-the science of Weavers-flitted in and out of Rudgutter’s mind. Weavers were fabulously rare, and only intermittent inhabitants of conventional reality. Only two Weaver corpses had been procured by New Crobuzon’s scientists since the city’s birth. Kapnellior’s was hardly an exact science.

No one knew why this Weaver chose to stay. It had announced in its elliptical way to Mayor Dagman Beyn, more than two hundred years ago, that it would live below the city. Over the decades, one or two administrations had left it alone. Most had been unable to resist the pull of its power. Its occasional interactions-sometimes banal, sometimes fatal-with mayors and scientists were the main source of information for Kapnellior’s studies.

Kapnellior himself was an Evolutionist. He held to the view that the Weavers were a species of conventional spider that had been subjected by some Torquic or thaumaturgic fluke-thirty, forty thousand years ago, probably in Sagrimai-to a sudden, short-lived evolutionary acceleration of explosive velocity. Within a few generations, he had explained to Rudgutter, the Weavers evolved from virtually mindless predators into aestheticians of astonishing intellectual and materio-thaumaturgic power, superintelligent alien minds who no longer used their webs to catch prey, but were attuned to them as objects of beauty disentanglable from the fabric of reality itself. Their spinnerets had become specialized extradimensional glands that Wove patterns in with the world. The world which was, for them, a web.

Old stories told how Weavers would kill each other over aesthetic disagreements, such as whether it was prettier to destroy an army of a thousand men or to leave it be, or whether a particular dandelion should or should not be plucked. For a Weaver, to think was to think aesthetically. To act-to Weave-was to bring about more pleasing patterns. They did not eat physical food: they seemed to subsist on the appreciation of beauty.

A beauty unrecognized by humans or other denizens of the mundane plane.

Rudgutter was praying fervently that the Weaver did not decide that slaughtering Rescue would make a pretty pattern in the aether.

After tense seconds, the Weaver retreated, still holding up its hand with splayed fingers. Rudgutter exhaled with relief, heard his colleagues and the militia guard do the same.

…FIVE…whispered the Weaver.

“Five,” agreed Rudgutter evenly. Rescue paused and nodded slowly.

“Five,” he whispered.

“Weaver,” said Rudgutter. “You’re right, of course. We wanted to ask about the five creatures loose in the city. We’re…concerned about them…as, it sounds, are you. We want to ask if you will help us clear them out of the city. Root them out. Flush them out. Kill them. Before they damage the Weave.”

There was a moment of silence, and then the Weaver danced suddenly and quickly from side to side. There was a soft, very fast drumming as its sharp feet pattered on the floor. It jigged bizarrely.

…WITHOUT YOU ASK THE WEAVE IS TIGHT RUCKED COLOURS BLEED TEXTURES WEARING THREADS FRAY WHILE I KEEN FUNERAL SONGS FOR SOFT POINTS WHERE WEBSHAPES FLOW I WISH I WILL I CAN COILS OF MONSTERS SHADE SLATESCAPES WINGS MOIL SUCK WORLDWEAVE COLOURLESS DRAB IT IS NOT TO BE I READ RESONANCE PRANCE FROM POINT TO POINT ON THE WEB TO EAT SPLENDOUR REAR AND LICK CLEAN RED KNIFENAILS I WILL SNIP FABRICS AND RETIE THEM I AM I AM A SUBTLE USER OF COLOUR I WILL BLEACH YOUR SKIES WITH YOU I WILL SWEEP THEM CLEAN AND KNOT THEM TIGHT…

It took several moments for Rudgutter to realize that the Weaver had agreed to help them.

Cautiously, he grinned. Before Rudgutter could speak again, the Weaver pointed straight up with its front four arms…I’M TO FIND WHERE PATTERNS GO AMOK WHERE COLOURS RUN WHERE VAMPIR INSECTS SUCK BOBBIN-CITIZENS DRY AND I AND I WILL BE BY BY-AND-BY…

The Weaver stepped sideways and was gone. It had peeled away from physical space. It was running acrobatically along the span of the worldweb.

The wisps of aetherwebs that crawled invisible across the room and human skin began, slowly, to fade.

Rudgutter turned his head slowly from side to side. The militia were straightening their backs, releasing sighs, relaxing from the combat positions they had unconsciously held. Eliza Stem-Fulcher caught Rudgutter’s eye.

“So,” she said. “It’s hired, right?”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The wyrmen were cowed. They told stories of monsters in the sky.

They sat at night around their rubbish-fires in the city’s great dumps and cuffed their children to quiet them. They took turns telling of sudden squalls of disturbed air and glimpses of terrible things. They had seen convoluted shadows in the sky. They had felt drips of acrid liquid spatter them from above.

Wyrmen were being taken.

At first they were just stories. Even through their fear, the wyrmen half-relished the yarns. But then they started to know the protagonists. Their names were ululated through the city at night, when their dribbling, idiot bodies were found. Arfamo and Sideways; Minty; and most frighteningly, Buggerme, the boss-boy of the eastern city. He never lost a fight. Never backed down. His daughter found him, head lolling, oozing mucus from mouth and nose, eyes fat and pale and as alert as poached eggs, in the scrubland by a rusting gas tower in Abrogate Green.

Two khepri matrons were found sat slack and vacant in the Plaza of Statues. A vodyanoi lolled at the edge of the river in Murkside, his capacious mouth pouting in a moronic leer. The number of humans found with their minds gone rose steadily into double figures. The increase did not slow.

The elders of the Riverskin Glasshouse would not say if any cactus had been afflicted.

The Quarrel ran a story on its second page, entitled “Mystery Epidemic of Imbecility.”

It was not only the wyrmen who were seeing things that should not have been there. First two or three, then more and slowly more hysterical witnesses claimed to have been in the company of one of those whose mind was taken. They were confused, they had been in some trance, they said, but they gabbled descriptions of monsters, insect devils without eyes, dark hunched bodies unfolding in a nightmare conjunction of limbs. Protruding teeth and hypnotic wings.

The Crow spread out around Perdido Street Station in an intricate confusion of thoroughfares and half-hidden alleys. The main arteries-LeTissof Street, Concubek Pass, Boulevard Dos Gherou-burst out in all directions around the station and BilSantum Plaza. They were wide and packed, a confusion of carts and cabs and pedestrian crowds.

Every week new and elegant shops opened amid the throng. Huge stores that took up three floors of what had been noble houses; smaller, no less thriving establishments with windows full of the very latest in gaslight produce, lamps of intricately twisting brass and extension-valve fittings; food; luxury snuff-boxes; tailored clothes.

In the smaller branches that spread from these massive streets like capillaries, the offices of lawyers and doctors, actuaries, apothecaries and benevolent societies jostled with exclusive clubs. Patrician men in immaculate suits patrolled these roads.

Tucked into more or less obscure corners of The Crow, pockets of penury and diseased architecture were judiciously ignored.

Spit Hearth, to the south-east, was bisected from above by the skyrail connecting the militia tower at the point of Brock Marsh to Perdido Street Station. It was part of the same boisterous zone as Sheck, a wedge of smaller shops and houses made of stone and patched with brick. Spit Hearth had a twilight industry: Remaking. Where the borough met the river, subterranean punishment factories emitted wails of pain, sometimes, and hastily smothered screams. But for the sake of its public face, Spit Hearth was able to ignore that hidden economy with only a slight show of distaste.

It was a busy place. Pilgrims made their way through it to the Palgolak temple at the northern edge of Brock Marsh. For centuries, Spit Hearth had been a haven for dissenting churches and religious societies. Its walls were held together with the paste from a thousand mouldering posters advertising theological debates and discussions. The monks and nuns of peculiar contemplative sects walked the streets hurriedly, avoiding eye contact. Dervishes and hieronomers argued on corners.

Wedged gaudily between Spit Hearth and The Crow was the city’s worst-kept secret. A grubby, guilty stain. It was a little region, in the city’s terms. A few streets where the ancient houses were narrow and close, could easily be joined by walkways and ladders. Where the constricted slivers of pavement between tall and strangely adorned buildings could be a protective maze.

The brothel quarter. The red-light zone.

It was late in the evening as David Serachin walked through the northern reaches of Spit Hearth. He might have been walking home to Skulkford, due west under the Sud Line and the skyrails, through Sheck, past the massive militia tower to Skulkford Green. It was a long but not implausible walk.

But when David passed under the arches of Spit Bazaar Station, he took advantage of the darkness to turn and gaze back the way he had come. The people behind him were only passers-by. He was not followed. He hesitated a moment, then emerged from beneath the railway lines, as a train whistled above and sent booms reverberating around the brick caverns.

David turned north, following the path of the railway line, into the outer reaches of the whoretown.

He dug his hands deep into his pockets and thrust his head down. This was his shame. He simmered in self-disgust.

At the outer reaches of the red-light zone the wares catered for orthodox tastes. There were some dollymops, streetwalkers poaching custom, but the freelancers that thronged elsewhere in New Crobuzon were the outsiders here. This was the borough for more languorous indulgence, under the roofs of the establishment houses. Peppered with little general stores which even here catered for everyday needs, the still-elegant buildings of this quarter were illuminated by gaslamps flaring behind the traditional red filters. In the doorways of some, young women in clinging bodices called softly to the foot-traffic. The streets here were less full than in the outside city, but they were hardly empty. The men here were mostly well dressed. This merchandise was not for the poor.

Some of the men kept their heads high, pugnaciously. Most walked as David did, carefully alone.

The sky was warm and dirty. The stars shimmered unclearly. In the air above the roofscape, there was a whispering and then a rush of wind as a pod passed by. It was a municipal irony that above the very centre of the fleshpits stretched a militia skyrail. On rare occasions the militia would raid the corrupt, sumptuous houses of the red-light zone. But for the most part, as long as payments were made and violence did not spill out of the rooms in which it had been paid for, the militia kept out.

The wafts of night air brought with them something unsettling, some brimming sense of unease. Something more profound than any usual anxiety.

In some of the houses, large windows were illuminated through soft, diffusing muslin. Women in shifts and tight nightgowns rubbed themselves lasciviously, or looked up at the passers-by through coy lashes. Here were also the xenian brothels, where drunken youths cheered each other on to rites of passage, fucking khepri or vodyanoi women or other more exotic breeds. Seeing these establishments, David thought of Isaac. He tried not to.

David did not stop. He did not take in the women around him. He plunged deeper.

He turned a corner into a row of lower, meaner houses. In the windows here were unsubtle hints as to the nature of the wares within. Whips. Cuffs. A girl of seven or eight in a baby’s crib, squalling and snotty.

David tracked on and on. The crowds thinned further, although David was never alone. The night air teemed with faint noises. Rooms full of conversation. Music, played well. Laughter. Cries of pain and the barks or howls of animals.

There was a tumbledown cul-de-sac near the heart of the sector, a little still place in the maze. David turned onto its cobbles with a faint shudder. There were men at the doors of these establishments. They stood, heavy and surly in cheap suits, vetting the miserable men that came to them.

David shuffled up to one of the doors. The massive bouncer stopped him, one hand impassive on his chest.

“Mrs. Tollmeck sent me,” muttered David. The man let him pass.

Inside, the lampshades were thick and dirty brown. The hall seemed glutinous with shit-coloured light. Behind a desk sat a severe, middle-aged woman in a drab floral dress that matched the lampshades. She looked up at David through half-moon spectacles.

“Are you new to our establishment?” she asked. “Have you an appointment?”

“I’m due in room seventeen at nine o’clock. The name is Orrel,” said David. The woman behind the desk raised her eyebrows very slightly and inclined her head. She glanced down at a book before her.

“I see. Well, you’re…” she glanced at the wall-clock. “You’re ten minutes early, but you might as well go up. You know the way? Sally’s waiting for you.” She looked up at him and-horrendously, monstrously-gave him a complicitous little wink and smirk. David felt sick.

He turned from her quickly and headed up the stairs.

His heart was going very quickly as he climbed, as he emerged in the long corridor at the top of the house. He remembered when first he came here. At the end of the walkway was room seventeen.

David began to walk towards it.

He hated this floor. He hated the slightly blistering wallpaper, the peculiar smells that emanated from the rooms, the unsettling sounds that floated through the walls. Most of the doors on the corridor were open, by convention. Those that were closed were occupied by punters.

The door to room seventeen was kept shut, of course. It was an exception to the house rule.

David walked slowly along the foul carpet, approaching the first door. Mercifully, it was closed, but the wooden door could not contain the noises; peculiar, muffled, desultory cries; a creak of tightening leather; a hissing, hate-filled voice. David turned his head away and found himself gazing directly into the opposite room. He caught a glimpse of the nude figure on the bed. She stared up at him, a girl of no more than fifteen. She crouched on all fours…her arms and legs were hairy and pawed…dog’s legs.

His eyes lingered on her in hypnotic, prurient horror as he walked past, and she leapt to the floor in clumsy canine motion, turned awkwardly, an unpracticed quadruped, looked over her shoulder at him hopefully as she pushed out her arse and pudenda.

David’s mouth hung slightly open and his eyes were glazed.

This was where he shamed himself, in this brothel of Remade whores.

The city crawled with Remade prostitutes, of course. It was often the only strategy available to Remade women and men to keep themselves from starving. But here in the red-light district, peccadilloes were indulged in the most sophisticated manner.

Most Remade tarts had been punished for unrelated crimes: their Remaking was usually little more than a bizarre hindrance for their sex-work, pushing their prices way down. This district, on the other hand, was for the specialist, the discerning consumer. Here, the whores were Remade specifically for the profession. Here were expensive bodies Remade into shapes to indulge dedicated gourmets of perverted flesh. There were children sold by their parents and women and men forced by debt to sell themselves to the flesh-sculptors, the illicit Remakers. There were rumours that many had been sentenced to some other Remaking, only to find themselves Remade by the punishment factories according to strange carnal designs and sold to the pimps and madams. It was a profitable sideline run by the biothaumaturges of the state.

Time was stretched out and sickly in this endless corridor, like rancid treacle. At every door, every station along the way, David could not help but glance inside. He willed himself to look away but his eyes would not obey.

It was like a nightmare garden. Each room contained some unique flesh-flower, blossom of torture.

David paced past naked bodies covered in breasts like plump scales; monstrous crablike torsos with nubile girlish legs at both ends; a woman who gazed at him with intelligent eyes above a second vulva, her mouth a vertical slit with moist labia, a meat-echo of the other vagina between her splayed legs. Two little boys gazing bewildered at the massive phalluses they sprouted. A hermaphrodite with many hands.

There was a thump inside David’s head. He felt groggy with exhausted horror.

Room seventeen was before him. David did not turn back. He imagined the eyes of the Remade behind him, on him, staring from their prisons of blood and bone and sex.

He knocked on the door. After a moment, he heard the chain being lifted from within and the door opened a little. David entered, his gorge rising, leaving that shameful corridor into his own private corruption. The door was closed.

A suited man sat waiting on a dirty bed, smoothing down his tie. Another man, who had opened and closed the door, stood behind David with folded arms. David glanced at him briefly and turned all his attention to the seated man.

The man indicated a chair at the foot of the bed, bade David pull it up in front of him.

David sat.

“Hello ‘Sally,’ ” he said quietly.

“Serachin,” said the man. He was thin and middle-aged. His eyes were calculating and intelligent. He looked wildly out of place in this crumbling room, this vile house, and yet his face was quite composed. He had waited as patient and comfortable among the Remade whores as he would in the corridors of Parliament.

“You asked to see me,” said the man. “It’s been quite a time since we’ve heard from you. We had designated you a sleeper.”

“Well…” said David uneasily. “Not much to report. Till now.” The man nodded judiciously and waited.

David licked his lips. He found it hard to speak. The man looked at him oddly, frowned.

“The rate is still the same, you know,” the man said. “A little more, even.”

“No, gods, I…” David stuttered. “I’m just…You know…Out of practice.” The man nodded again.

Very out of practice, thought David helplessly. Been six years since the last time and I swore I wouldn’t do it again. Got myself out of it. You got bored of blackmail and I didn’t need the money…

The very first time, fifteen years ago, they had entered this very room as David spent himself in one of the mouths of some ruined, cadaverous Remade girl. The suited men had shown him their camera. They had told him they would send their pictures to the newspapers and the journals and the university. They had offered him a choice. They paid well.

He had informed. Freelance only; once, maybe twice a year. And then he had stopped for a long time. Until now. Because now he was frightened.

David breathed in deeply and began.

“Something big’s going on. Oh, Jabber, I don’t know where to start. You know the disease that’s going round? The mindlessness thing? Well, I know where it started. I thought we could just get on with things, I thought it’d all be…containable…but Devil’s Tail! It just gets bigger and bigger and…and I think we need help.” (Somewhere deep inside his guts some small part of him spat disgust at this, this cowardice, this self-delusion, but David spoke quickly, kept talking.) “It’s all down to Isaac.”

“Dan der Grimnebulin?” said the man. “Who you share your workspace with? The renegade theorist. The guerrilla scientist with a talent for self-importance. What’s he been up to?” The man smiled coldly.

“Right, listen. He got commissioned by…well, he got commissioned to look into flight, and he got hold of shitloads of flying things to do research on. Birds, insects, aspises, fucking everything. And one of the things he gets is this big caterpillar. Damn thing looks like it’s going to die for the longest time, then ‘Zaac must’ve worked out how to keep the thing alive, because suddenly it starts growing. Huge. Fucking…this big.” He held out his hands in a reasonable estimate of the grub’s size. The man opposite him was looking intently at him, face set, hands clenched.

“Then it pupates, right, and we were all sort of curious about what’d come out. So we get home one day and Lublamai-the other guy in the building, you know-Lublamai’s lying there, drooling. Whatever the fucking thing was that hatched out, it fucking ate his mind…and…and it got away and the damn thing’s loose.

The man jerked his head in a decisive nod, quite different from his earlier casual invitations to information. “So you thought you’d better keep us informed.”

“Shit, no! I didn’t think…even then I thought we could deal with it. I mean Jabber, I was pissed off with Isaac, I was completely at a loss, but I thought maybe we could find some way of tracking the damn thing down, fixing Lub…Well, first off there starts being more and more of these things, these stories about people’s…minds going…But the main thing was that we tracked down who got these things to ‘Zaac. It’s some fucking clerk nicking them from R amp;D in the sodding Parliament. And I’m thinking ‘Fuck, I don’t want to muck about with the government.’ ” The man on the bed nodded at David’s judgement. “So then I’m thinking we’re way, way out of our depth…”

David paused. The man on the bed opened his mouth and David cut him off.

“No, listen! It doesn’t stop there! ‘Cause I heard about the riot down in Kelltree, and I know you’ve banged up the editor of Runagate Rampant, right?” The man waited, flicked imaginary lint from his jacket in an automatic motion. The fact had not been advertised, but the ruined abattoir left no doubt that some pit of sedition had been raided in Dog Fenn, and rumours abounded. “So one of Isaac’s friends is a writer on the damn thing, and she’s contacted the editor-I don’t know how, some fucking thaumaturgy-and he’s told her two things. One is that the inquisitors…your lot…think he knows something he doesn’t, and the other is that they’re asking him about some story in Double-R and the contact for the story, who presumably does know whatever they think he does, is called Barbile. So get this! That’s who our clerk nicked the monster caterpillar from!”

David paused at this, waited for it to impact on the man, then continued.

“So it’s all connecting and I do not know what’s going on. And I don’t want to. I can just see that we’re…treading on your toes. Maybe it’s a coincidence but I can’t see it myself…I don’t mind chasing monsters but I am not getting on the wrong side of the fucking militia, and the secret police, and the government and everything. You have to clear this shit up.”

The man on the bed clasped his hands. David remembered something else.

“Damn, yeah, listen! I’ve been racking my brains, trying to work out what’s going on, and…well, I don’t know if this is right, but is it something to do with crisis energy?”

The man shook his head very slowly, his face guarded, not comprehending. “Go on,” he said.

“Well, at one point during the run-up to all this, Isaac lets slip…sort of hints…that he’s built a…a working crisis engine…d’you know what that means?”

The man’s face was set hard and his eyes were very wide.

“I am a liaison for those who report from Brock Marsh,” he hissed. “I know what it would mean…it cannot…is it…Wait a minute, that would make no sense…is it…is it true?” For the first time, the man seemed truly rattled.

“I don’t know,” said David hopelessly. “But he wasn’t boasting…he sort of mentioned it in passing…I just…have no idea. But I know that’s what he’s been working on, on and off, for years and fucking years…”

There was a long time of silence, when the man on the bed looked thoughtfully into the far corner of the room. His face ran a quick gamut of emotions. He looked thoughtfully at David. “How do you know all this?” he said.

“ ‘Zaac trusts me,” said David (and that place inside him winced again, and he ignored it again). “At first this woman…”

“Name?” interrupted the man.

David hesitated.

“Derkhan Blueday,” he muttered eventually. “So Blueday, at first she’s really chary of talking in front of me, but Isaac…he vouches for me. He knows my politics, we’ve done demos together…” (again that wince: you have no politics, you fucking traitor) “It’s just that at a time like this…” he hesitated, unhappy. The man waved peremptorily. He had no interest in David’s guilt, or his rationalizations. “So Isaac tells her she can trust me and she tells us everything.”

There was a long time of silence. The man on the bed waited. David shrugged.

“That’s all I know,” he whispered.

The man nodded and stood.

“Right,” he said. “That’s all…extremely useful. We’ll probably have to bring your friend Isaac in. Don’t worry,” he added with a reassuring smile. “We’ve no interest in disposing of him, I promise. We may just need his help. You’re right, obviously. There is a…circle to be squared, connections to be made, and you’re not in a position to do it, and we might be. With Isaac’s help.

“You’re going to have to stay in touch,” said the man. “You’ll receive written instructions. Be sure to obey them. Obviously I don’t have to stress that, do I? We’ll make sure der Grimnebulin doesn’t know where our information comes from. We may not move for a few days…don’t panic. That’s our affair. Just you stay quiet, and try to keep der Grimnebulin doing what he’s doing. All right?”

David nodded miserably. He waited. The man looked at him sharply.

“That’s all,” he said. “You can go.”

With a guilty, grateful haste, David stood and hurried to the door. He felt as if he was swimming in mire, his own shame engulfing him like a mucal sea. He was longing to walk away from this room, and forget what he had said and done, and not think of the coins and notes that would be sent to him, and think only of how loyal he felt to Isaac, and tell himself it was all for the best.

The other man opened the door for him, released him, and David rushed gratefully away, almost ran down along the passageway, eager to escape.

But hurry as he would through the streets of Spit Hearth, guilt clung to him, tenacious as quicksand.

Chapter Thirty

One night the city lay sleeping with reasonable peace.

Of course, the usual interruptions oppressed it. Men and women fought each other and died. Blood and spew fouled the old streets. Glass shattered. The militia streaked overhead. Dirigibles sounded like monstrous whales. The mutilated, eyeless body of a man who would later be identified as Benjamin Flex washed ashore in Badside.

The city tossed uneasily through its nightland, as it had for centuries. It was a fractured sleep, but it was all the city had ever had.

But the next night, when David performed his furtive task in the red-light zone, something had changed. New Crobuzon night had always been a chaos of jarring beats and sudden violent chords. But a new note was sounding. A tense, whispering undertone that made the air sick.

For one night, the tension in the air was a thin and tentative thing, that inveigled its way into the minds of the citizens and sent shadows across their sleeping faces. Then day, and no one remembered anything more than a moment’s nocturnal unease.

And then as the shadows dragged out and the temperature dropped, as the night returned from under the world, something new and terrible settled on the city.

All around the city, from Flag Hill in the north to Barrackham below the river, from the desultory suburbs of Badside in the east to the rude industrial slums of Chimer, people thrashed and moaned in their beds.

Children were the first. They cried out and dug their nails into their hands, their little faces crunching down into hard grimaces; they sweated heavily, with a cloying stench; their heads oscillated horrendously to and fro; and all without waking.

As the night wore on the adults also suffered. In the depths of some other, innocuous dream, old fears and paranoias suddenly crashed through mental firewalls like invading armies. Successions of ghastly images assaulted the afflicted, animated visions of deep fears, and absurdly terrifying banalities-ghosties and goblins they need never face-they would have laughed at when awake.

Those arbitrarily spared the ordeal were woken suddenly in the depths of the night by the moans and screams from their sleeping lovers, or their heavy despairing sobs. Sometimes the dreams might be dreams of sex or happiness, but heightened and feverish and become terrifying in their intensity. In this twisted night-trap, bad was bad and good was bad.

The city rocked and shivered. Dreams were become a pestilence, a bacillus that seemed to leap from sleeper to sleeper. They even inveigled their way into the minds of the waking. Nightwatch-men and militia agents; late-night dancers and frantic students; insomniacs: they found themselves losing their trains of thought, drifting into fantasies and ruminations of weird, hallucinatory intensity.

All over the city the night was fissured by cries of nocturnal misery.

New Crobuzon was gripped in an epidemic, an outbreak, a plague of nightmares.

The summer was clotting over New Crobuzon. Stifling it. The night air was as hot and thick as an exhaled breath. Way above the city, transfixed between the clouds and the sprawl, the great winged things drooled.

They spread out and flapped their vast irregular wings, sending fat gusts of air rolling with each sweeping motion. Their intricate appendages-tentacular and insectile, anthropoid, chitinous, numerous-trembled as they passed in febrile excitement.

They unhinged their disturbing mouths and long feathered tongues unrolled towards the rooftops. The very air was thick with dreams, and the flying things lapped eagerly at the succulent juices. When the fronds that tipped their tongues were heavy with the invisible nectar, their mouths gaped and they rolled up their tongues with an eager smacking. They gnashed their huge teeth.

They soared. As they flew they shat, exuding all the sewage from their previous meals. The invisible spoor spread out in the sky, psychic effluent that slid, lumpy and cloying, through the interstices of the mundane plane. It oozed its way through aether to fill the city, saturating the minds of the inhabitants, disturbing their rest, bringing forth monsters. The sleeping and the wakeful felt their minds churn.

The five went hunting.

Amid the vast swirling broth of the city’s nightmares, each of the dark things could discern individual snaking trails of flavour.

Usually, they were opportunistic hunters. They would wait until they scented some strong mental tumult, some mind particularly delicious in its own exudations. Then the intricate dark flyers would turn and dive, bear down on the prey. They used their slim hands to unlock top-floor windows, and paced across moonlit attics towards shivering sleepers to drink their fill. They clutched with a multitude of appendages at lonely figures walking the riverside, figures who screeched and screeched as they were taken into a night already full of plaintive cries.

But when they had discarded the flesh-husks of their meals to twitch and loll slack-mouthed on boards and shadowed cobbles, when their stabs of hunger had been assuaged and meals could be taken more slowly, for pleasure, the winged creatures became curious. They tasted the faint drippings of minds they had tasted before, and, like inquisitive, coldly intelligent hunting beasts, they pursued them.

Here was the tenuous mental thread of one of the guards, who had stood outside their cage in Bonetown and fantasized about his friend’s wife. His flavoursome imaginings wafted up to wrap around a twitching tongue. The creature that tasted that wheeled around in the sky, in the chaotic arc of a butterfly or a moth, and dived towards Echomire, following his prey’s scent.

Another of the great airborne shapes pulled up suddenly in a vast figure of eight, rolling over its own tracks, seeking out the familiar flavour that had flitted across its tastebuds. It was a nervous aroma that had permeated the cocoons of the pupating monsters. The great beast hovered over the city, saliva dissipating in various dimensions below it. The emissions were obscured, frustratingly tenuous, but the creature’s sense of taste was fine, and it bore down towards Mafaton, licking its way along the enticing trail of the scientist who had watched it grow, Magesta Barbile.

The twisted one, the malnourished runt that had liberated its fellows, found a taste-trail that it, too, remembered. Its mind was not so developed, its tastebuds less exact: it could not follow the flickering scent through the air. But, uncomfortably, it tried. The full taste of the mind was so familiar…it had surrounded the twisted creature during its flourishing into consciousness, during its pupation and self-creation in the silk shell…It lost and found the scent, lost it again, floundered.

The smallest and weakest of the night-hunters, stronger by far than any man, hungry and predatory, licked its way through the sky, trying to regain the trail of Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin.

Isaac, Derkhan and Lemuel Pigeon fidgeted on the streetcorner, in the smoky glare of the gaslight.

“Where the fuck’s your mate?” hissed Isaac.

“He’s late. Probably can’t find it. I told you, he’s stupid,” said Lemuel calmly. He took out a flick-knife and began to clean his nails.

“Why do we need him?”

“Don’t come the fucking innocent, Isaac. You’re good at waving enough brass at me to get me to do all sorts of jobs that go against my better judgement, but there are limits. I’m not getting involved in anything which irritates the damn government without protection. And Mr. X is that, in spades.”

Isaac swore silently, but he knew Lemuel was right.

He had been very uneasy at the notion of involving Lemuel in this adventure, but events had rapidly conspired to give him no choice. David had clearly been reluctant to help him find Magesta Barbile. He seemed paralysed, a mass of helpless nerves. Isaac was losing patience with him. He needed support, and he wanted David to get off his arse and do something. But now was not the time to confront him.

Derkhan had inadvertently provided the name that seemed key to the interlocking mysteries of the presence in the skies and the militia’s enigmatic interrogation of Ben Flex. Isaac sent word, got the name and what information they had-Mafaton, scientist, R amp;D-to Lemuel Pigeon. He included money, several guineas (and realized as he did so that the gold Yagharek had given him was slowly dwindling), and begged for information, and help.

That was why he contained his anger at Mr. X’s late show. For all that he pantomimed impatience, that kind of protection was precisely what he had approached Lemuel for.

Lemuel himself had not taken much persuasion to accompany Isaac and Derkhan to the address in Mafaton. He affected an insouciant disregard for particulars, a mercenary desire simply to be paid for his efforts. Isaac did not believe him. He thought that Lemuel was growing interested in the intrigue.

Yagharek was adamant he would not come. Isaac had tried to persuade him, quickly and fervently, but Yagharek had not even replied. What the fuck are you doing here then? Isaac felt like asking, but he swallowed his irritation and let the garuda be. Perhaps it would take a little time before he would behave as if he were part of any collective at all. Isaac would wait.

Lin had left just before Derkhan’s arrival. She had been reluctant to leave Isaac in his despondency, but she had also seemed somewhat distracted. She had stayed only one night, and when she had gone she had promised Isaac she would return as soon as she could. But then the next morning Isaac had received a letter in her cursive hand, couriered across the city with an expensive guaranteed delivery.

Dear Heart,

I am afraid you might feel angry and betrayed at this, but please be forbearing. Waiting for me here was another letter from my employer, my commissioner, my patron, if you will. Hot on the heels of his missive telling me I would not be needed for the foreseeable future, came another message saying I was to return.

I know the timing of this could not be worse. I ask only that you believe that I would disobey if I could, but that I cannot. I cannot, Isaac. I will try to finish my job with him as quickly as possible-within a week or two, I hope-and return to you.

Wait for me.

With my love, Lin

So, waiting on the corner of Addley Pass, camouflaged by the chiaroscuro of full moon through the clouds and the shadows of the trees in Billy Green, were only Isaac, Derkhan and Lemuel.

All three were shifting uneasily, looking up at passing shades, starting at imagined noises. From the streets around them there came intermittent sounds of horrendously disturbed sleep. At each savage moan or ululation, the three would catch each other’s eyes.

“Godsdamrat,” hissed Lemuel in irritation and fear. “What is going on?”

“There’s something in the air…” murmured Isaac, and his voice petered out as he stared blindly up.

To cap the tension, Derkhan and Lemuel, who had met the previous day, had quickly decided they despised each other. They did their best to ignore one another.

“How did you get the address?” asked Isaac, and Lemuel shucked his shoulders irritably.

“Connections, ‘Zaac, contacts, and corruption. How d’you think? Doctor Barbile vacated her own rooms a couple of days ago and has since been seen at this less salubrious location. It’s only about three streets away from her old house, though. The woman has no imagination. Hey…” He batted Isaac’s arm and pointed across the gloomy street. “There’s our man.”

Opposite them, a vast figure tugged free of the shadows and lumbered towards them. He glowered at Isaac and Derkhan, before nodding at Lemuel in the most absurdly jaunty fashion.

“All right, Pigeon?” he said, too loud. “What we up to, then?”

“Voice down, man,” said Lemuel tersely. “What you carrying?”

The massive man pushed his finger across his lips to show he understood. He held open one side of his jacket, displaying two enormous flintlock pistols. Isaac started slightly at their size. Both he and Derkhan were armed, but neither with any such cannons. Lemuel nodded approvingly at the sight.

“Right. Probably won’t be needed, but…y’know. Right. Don’t talk.” The big man nodded. “Don’t hear either, right? You have no ears tonight.” The man nodded again. Lemuel turned to Isaac and Derkhan. “Listen. You know what you want to ask the geezer. Wherever possible, we’re just shadows. But we have reason to think the militia are interested in this, and that means we can’t fuck about. If she’s not forthcoming, we’re giving her a helpful push, right?”

“Is that gangsterese for torture?” hissed Isaac. Lemuel looked at him coldly.

“No. And don’t fucking preach at me: you’re paying for this. We don’t have time to arse around, so I’m not going to let her arse around. Any problems?” There was no answer. “Good. Wardock Street is down here to the right.”

They did not pass any other late-night walkers as they picked their way along the backstreets. They walked variously: Lemuel’s sidekick stolidly and without fear, seemingly unaffected by the ambient nightmare quality in the air; Lemuel himself with many glances into dark doorways; and Isaac and Derkhan with a nervous, miserable haste.

They halted at Barbile’s door on Wardock Street. Lemuel turned and indicated for Isaac to go forward, but Derkhan pushed to the front.

“I’ll do it,” she whispered furiously. The others fell back. When they stood half out of sight at the edge of the doorway, Derkhan turned and pulled the bell cord.

For a long time, nothing happened. Then, gradually, footsteps slowly descended stairs and approached the door. They halted just beyond it, and there was silence. Derkhan waited, hushing the others with her hands. Eventually a voice called out from behind the door.

“Who’s that?”

Magesta Barbile sounded utterly fearful.

Derkhan spoke softly and quickly.

“Dr. Barbile, my name’s Derkhan. We need to speak to you very urgently.”

Isaac glanced around him to see if any of the lights in the street were coming on. So far they seemed unobserved.

From behind the door, Magesta Barbile was being difficult.

“I…I’m not sure about that…” she said. “It’s not really a good time…”

“Dr. Barbile…Magesta…” said Derkhan quietly. “You’re going to have to open this door. We can help you. Just open the fucking door. Now.”

There was another moment of dithering, then Magesta Barbile unlocked the door and pushed it open a crack. Derkhan was about to seize the moment by pushing past her into the house, when she started and stood quite still. Barbile was holding a rifle. She looked horribly uncomfortable. But however unpractised she was, the weapon was still levelled at Derkhan’s gut.

“I don’t know who you are…” began Barbile querulously, but before she could continue Lemuel’s huge friend, Mr. X, reached easily and without speed around Derkhan, grabbing the rifle and shoving the heel of his hand over the firing-pan, blocking the path of the hammer. Barbile began to keen, and she pulled the trigger, eliciting a mild hiss of pain from Mr. X as the hammer snapped onto his flesh. He shoved the rifle backwards, sending Barbile flying onto the stairs behind her.

As she flopped and scrambled to right herself he stepped into the house.

The others followed. Derkhan did not protest at Barbile’s treatment. Lemuel was right. They did not have time.

Mr. X was standing holding the woman. He held her patiently as she flopped and snapped back and forth, emitting terrible crooning moans from behind his hand. Her eyes were wide and white and hysterical with fear.

“Dear gods,” breathed Isaac. “She thinks we’re going to kill her! Stop!”

“Magesta,” said Derkhan loudly, kicking the door closed without looking. “Magesta, you have to stop this. We’re not militia, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m a friend of Benjamin Flex.”

At that Barbile opened her eyes wider and her struggles slowed.

“Right,” said Derkhan. “And Benjamin’s been taken. I suppose you know that.” Barbile watched her and nodded quickly. Lemuel’s enormous employee dropped his hand from Barbile’s mouth experimentally. She did not scream.

“We’re not the militia,” repeated Derkhan slowly. “We’re not going to take you like they took him. But you know…you know…if we could trace you, if we could suss out who was Ben’s contact, that they’re going to be able to.”

“I…That’s why I…” Barbile glanced over at the discarded rifle. Derkhan nodded.

“All right, listen, Magesta,” she said. She spoke very clearly, her eyes on Barbile’s all the time. “We don’t have much time…Let go of her, you arse! We don’t have much time, and we have to know exactly what’s going on. There is some mighty godsdamned weird stuff going on. And an awful lot of threads seem to converge on you. So let me suggest something. Why don’t you take us upstairs, before the militia come, and explain to us what’s going on?”

“I only just found out about Flex,” said Magesta. She was sitting huddled on her sofa, clutching a cold cup of tea. Behind her a large mirror took up most of the wall. “I don’t really follow the news. I had a meeting scheduled with him a couple of days ago, and when he didn’t come, I got really scared that he’d…I don’t know…told on me, or something.” He probably has, thought Derkhan, and said nothing. “And then I heard some rumours about what happened in Dog Fenn when the militia put down that riot…”

There was no godsdamn riot, Derkhan nearly shouted, but she controlled herself. Whatever reason Magesta Barbile may have had for giving information to Ben, political dissidence was clearly not one of them.

“So these rumours…” Barbile continued. “Well, I put two and two together, you know? And then…and then…”

“And then you hid,” said Derkhan. Barbile nodded.

“Look,” said Isaac suddenly. He had been silent until now, his face twisted tensely. “Can you not fucking feel it? Can’t you taste it?” He shook his hands in claws around his face, as if the air was a tangible thing he could grip and wrestle. “It’s as if the damn night air’s gone rancid. Now, maybe it’s just blind damn coincidence, but so far every bad thing that’s happened for the last month seems to be tied in to some fucking conspiracy, and I’m damn well betting that this ain’t an exception.”

He leaned in close towards Barbile’s pathetic figure. She gazed at him, timid and terrified.

“Doctor Barbile,” he said levelly. “Something that eats minds…including my friend’s mind; a militia raid on Runagate Rampant; the very fucking air around our ears turning into some rotten soup…What is going on? What’s the connection with dreamshit?”

Barbile began to cry. Isaac nearly howled with irritation, turning from her and throwing up his hands in exasperation. But then he turned back. She was speaking through her snivels.

“I knew it was a bad idea…” she said. “I told them we should keep control of the experiment…” Her words were almost unintelligible, broken and interrupted with a slew of snotty tears. “It hadn’t been going long enough…They shouldn’t have done it…”

“Done what?” said Derkhan. “What did they do? What was Ben talking to you about?”

“About the transfer,” sobbed Barbile. “We hadn’t finished the project but we suddenly heard it was being wound down, but…but someone found out what was really happening…Our specimens were being sold…to some criminal…”

“What specimens?” said Isaac, but Barbile was ignoring him. She was unburdening herself in her own time and her own order.

“It wasn’t quick enough for the sponsors, you know? They were getting…impatient…The applications they thought there might be…military, psychodimensional…they weren’t coming. The subjects were incomprehensible, we weren’t making progress, and…and they were uncontrollable, they were just too dangerous…” She raised her eyes and her voice, still crying. She paused, then continued, quieter again.

“We might have got somewhere, but it was taking too long. And then…the money people must’ve got nervous. So the project director told us it was over, that the specimens had been destroyed, but that was a lie…Everyone knew it. This wasn’t the first project, you know…” Isaac and Derkhan’s eyes widened sharply, but they were silent. “We already knew one sure way to make money from them…

“They must’ve sold them to the highest bidder…to someone who could use them for the drug…That way the sponsors made their money back and the director could keep the project going for himself, co-operating with the drug-man he sold them to. But it wasn’t right…It wasn’t right that the government should make money from drugs and it wasn’t right that they should steal our project…” Barbile had stopped crying. She just sat, rambling. They let her talk.

“The others were just going to leave it, but I was angry…I hadn’t seen them hatch, I hadn’t learnt what I needed to learn, for nothing. And now they were going to be used for…for some villain to make money…”

Derkhan could scarcely believe the naivety. So this was Ben’s contact. This stupid minor scientist piqued at having her project stolen. For that, she had given evidence of the government’s illicit deals, she had brought the wrath of the militia onto her own head.

“Barbile,” said Isaac again, much quieter and calmer this time. “What are they?”

Magesta Barbile looked up at him. She looked slightly unhinged.

“What are they?” she said dazedly. “The things that’ve escaped? The project? What are they?”

“Slake-moths.”

Chapter Thirty-One

Isaac nodded as if this revelation made sense. He prepared to ask her another question, but her eyes were no longer on him.

“I knew they’d escaped because of the dreams, you know?” she said. “I could tell they were out. I don’t know how they escaped. But it shows that their damn sell-off was a bad idea, doesn’t it?” Her voice was strained with desperate triumph. “That’s one in the eye for Vermishank.”

At the sound of the name, Isaac felt himself spasm. Of course, a part of his mind thought, calmly. Makes sense that he’d be in on this. Another part of him was screaming internally. The strands of his life were throttling him like some unforgiving net.

“What’s Vermishank got to do with this?” he said carefully. He saw Derkhan look at him sharply. She did not recognize the name, but she could tell that he did.

“He’s the boss,” said Barbile, surprised. “He’s the head of the project.”

“But he’s a bio-thaumaturge, not a zoologist, not a theorist…Why’s he in charge?”

“Bio-thaumaturgy’s his specialism, not his only area. He’s mainly an administrator. He’s in charge of all the biohazard stuff: Remaking, experimental weapons, hunter organisms, diseases…”

Vermishank was in charge of sciences at the University of New Crobuzon. It was a high-profile, prestigious position. It would be unthinkable to award such an honour to someone antagonistic to the government: that was obvious. But Isaac realized now that he had underestimated Vermishank’s involvement with the state. He was more than just a yes-man.

“Vermishank sold off the…slake-moths?” Isaac said. Barbile nodded. A wind had picked up outside, and the shutters were rattling and banging violently. Mr. X looked around at the noise. No one else took their attention from Barbile.

“I was in touch with Flex because I thought it wasn’t right,” she said. “But something happened…the moths are out. They’ve escaped. Gods only know how.” I know how, thought Isaac grimly. It was me. “Do you know what it means that they’re out? We’re all…we’re going to be hunted. And the militia must’ve read Runagate Rampant and…and thought that Flex had something to do with it…and if they think Flex did then soon…soon they’ll think that I did…” Barbile began to snivel again and Derkhan looked away in disgust, thinking of Ben.

Mr. X walked over to the window to rearrange the shutters.

“So, look…” Isaac tried to collate his thoughts. There were a hundred thousand things he wanted to ask, but one was absolutely pressing. “So Doctor Barbile…how do we catch them?”

Barbile looked up at him and began to shake her head. She glanced up briefly, between Isaac and Derkhan who loomed over her like anxious parents, past Lemuel who stood to the side, studiously ignoring her. Her eyes found Mr. X, who was standing by the uncovered window. He had opened it a little, was reaching out to pull in the shutters.

He was standing quite still, looking out.

Magesta Barbile looked over his shoulder at a nickering wash of midnight colours.

Her eyes glazed. Her voice froze.

Something was battering at the window, trying to reach the light.

Barbile rose, as Lemuel and Isaac and Derkhan flocked to her in concern, asking what was wrong, unable to understand her little cries. Her hand rose, shaking, to point to the paralysed figure of Mr.X.

“Oh Jabber…” she whispered. “Oh dear Jabber, it’s found me, it’s tasted me…”

And then she shrieked, and spun on her heels.

“The mirror!” she screamed as she did so. “Look in the mirror!”

Her tone was fraught and utterly commanding. They obeyed her. She spoke with such desperate authority that not one of them succumbed to the instinct to turn and see.

The four of them gazed into the mirror behind the tattered sofa. They watched transfixed.

Mr. X was stepping backwards with the mindless tramp of a zombie.

Behind him, there was a dark flurry of colour. A terrible shape squeezed and folded in on itself to push its organic folds and spines and bulk through the little window. A blunt eyeless head poked itself through the opening and turned slowly from side to side. The impression was of an impossible birth. The thing that loomed through the space in the glass had made itself small and intricate by contracting in invisible, impossible directions. It shimmered unreally under the strain, hauling its glistening carcass through the opening, arms emerging from its dark bulk to push and strain against the window frame.

Behind the glass those half-hidden wings boiled.

The creature pushed suddenly and the window disintegrated. There was only a small, dry sound, as if the air was leeched of substance. Nuggets of glass sprayed the room.

Isaac watched, transfixed. He trembled.

At the edge of his vision he saw Derkhan and Lemuel and Barbile in the same state. This is madness! he thought. We’ve got to get out of here! He reached out and plucked at Derkhan’s sleeve, began to pick his way towards the door.

Barbile seemed paralysed. Lemuel pulled at her.

None of them knew why she had said to look in the mirror, but none of them turned around.

And then as they faltered towards the door, they froze again, because the thing in the room stood.

In a sudden flowering motion it rose behind them, filling the mirror into which they gazed, aghast.

They could see the back of Mr. X, who stood and gazed at the patterns on those wings, patterns that rolled with hypnagogic haste, the colour cells under the creature’s skin pulsing in weird dimensions.

Mr. X stepped back to see the wings better. They could not see his face.

The slake-moth held him in thrall.

It was taller than a bear. A clutch of sharp extrusions like dark cartilaginous whips blossomed from its sides and flickered out towards him. Other, smaller, sharper limbs flexed like claws.

The creature stood on legs like monkey’s arms. Three pairs jutted from its trunk. It stood now bipedally, now on four legs, now on six.

It reared up on its lower legs and a sharp tail slithered forward from between its legs for balance. Its face-

(Always those huge irregular wings, curving in strange directions, shifting in shape to fit the room, each as random and inconstant as oil on water, each a perfect reflection of the other, kept gently moving, their patterns changing, flickering in a seductive tide.)

It had no eyes that they could recognize, only two deep sunken hollows sprouting thick, flexing antennae like stubby fingers, above rows of huge slab-teeth. As Isaac watched, it cocked its head and opened that unimaginable mouth, and from it a huge, prehensile, slavering tongue unrolled.

It waved quickly through the air. Its end was coated in clumps of gossamer alveoli that pulsed as the enormous thing flailed like an elephant’s trunk.

“It’s trying to find me,” wailed Barbile, and broke, and ran for the door.

Instantly the slake-moth flickered its tongue towards the movement. There was a succession of motions far too quick to see. Some cruel organic jag snapped out and passed through Mr. X’s head as if through water. Mr. X shuddered suddenly and just as the blood began to well explosively through the sliced bone the slake-moth reached out with four of its arms, pulled him briefly closer and hurled him across the room.

He flew through the air trailing gore and bone-shards like a comet. He died before he landed.

Mr. X’s carcass slammed into Barbile’s back, sending her sprawling. He landed heavy and lifeless across the door. His eyes were open.

Lemuel, Isaac and Derkhan broke for the door.

They were shouting simultaneously in a cacophony of registers.

Lemuel leapt over Barbile, who lay supine and desperate, trying to kick free of Mr. X’s huge torso. She rolled onto her back and cried out for help. Isaac and Derkhan reached her simultaneously, and began to tug at her arms. Her eyes were tight closed.

But as they pushed Mr. X’s body free and Lemuel kicked it savagely out of the way of the door, a hard, rubbery tentacle snaked into their vision and wrapped with a whiplash motion around Barbile’s feet. She felt it and began to scream.

Derkhan and Isaac pulled hard. There was a moment of resistance, and then the slake-moth yanked at her with its tendril. Barbile was whisked out of Derkhan and Isaac’s grasp with humbling ease. She slid at breakneck speed along the floor, splinters tearing at her.

She began to scream.

Lemuel had forced the door open, and he raced out and away down the stairs without glancing back. Isaac and Derkhan stood quickly. They turned their heads simultaneously to look into the mirror.

Both gave a little cry of horror.

Barbile was squirming and screaming in the complex embrace of the slake-moth. Limbs and folds of flesh caressed her. She wriggled and her arms were held, she kicked out and her legs were pinioned.

The huge creature turned its head gently to one side, seemed to regard her with hunger and curiosity. It emitted tiny, obscene noises.

Its final pair of hands crept up and began to finger Barbile’s eyes. It touched them gently. It began trying to prise them open.

Barbile shrieked and wailed and begged for help, and Isaac and Derkhan stood paralysed, gazing into the mirror, transfixed.

With hands shaking violently, Derkhan reached into her jacket and brought out her pistol, primed and ready. Staring resolutely into the looking-glass, she pointed her gun behind her. Her hand wavered as she desperately sought to aim in this impossible fashion.

Isaac saw what she was doing, and reached quickly for his own gun. He was quicker to pull the trigger.

There was a sharp bang of igniting black powder. The ball burst from his muzzle and passed harmlessly over the slake-moth’s head. The creature did not even look up. Barbile screamed at the sound, and began to beg, eloquently and horrendously, for them to shoot her.

Derkhan set her mouth and tried to steady her arm.

She fired. The slake-moth whirled and its wings shook. It opened that cavernous maw and a foul, strangulated hissing emerged, a whispered shriek. Isaac saw a tiny hole in the papery tissue of the left wing.

Barbile cried out and waited a moment, then realized that she was still alive and began to scream again.

The slake-moth turned on Derkhan. Two of its whip arms flailed across the seven feet separating them and smacked petulantly across her back. There was an almighty cracking sound. Derkhan was thrown through the open door, her breath pushed violently through her lungs. She wailed as she fell.

“Don’t look round!” screamed Isaac. “Go! Go! I’m coming!”

He tried not to hear Barbile begging. He did not have time to reload.

As he made his way slowly for the door, praying that the creature would continue to ignore him, he watched what unfolded in the mirror.

He refused to process it. It was, for now, a mindless slick of images. Later he might consider it, if he left this house alive and found his way home, to his friends, if he survived to plan, he would think on what he was seeing.

But for now he carefully thought of nothing as he saw the slake-moth turn its attention back to the woman held fast in its arms. He thought of nothing as he saw it force open her eyes with slender simian fingers and thumbs, heard her scream until she vomited with fear and then stop all her noises very suddenly as she caught sight of the flexing patterns on the slake-moth’s wings. Saw those wings gently widen and stretch taut into a hypnotic canvas, saw Barbile’s entranced expression as her eyes widened to gaze on those morphing colours; saw her body relax and the slake-moth drool in vile anticipation, its unspeakable tongue unrolling again out of that gaping mouth and snaking its way up Barbile’s saliva-spattered shirt to her face, her eyes still glazed in idiot ecstasy at those wings. Saw the feathered tip of the tongue nuzzle gently against Barbile’s face, her nose, her ears and then shove suddenly, forcefully past her teeth into her mouth (and Isaac retched even as he tried to think of nothing), thrusting at indecent speed into her face, her eyes bulging as more and more of the tongue disappeared into her.

And then Isaac saw something flicker under the skin of her scalp, bulging and wriggling and rippling beneath her hair and flesh like an eel in mud, saw a movement that was not hers behind her eyes, and he watched mucus and tears and ichor pour from the orifices of her head as the tongue wriggled into her mind and just before he fled Isaac saw her eyes dim and go out and the slake-moth’s stomach distend as it drank her dry.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Lin was alone.

She sat in the attic, leaning back against a wall with her feet splayed like a doll’s. She watched the dust move. It was dark. The air was warm. It was sometime in the small hours, between two and four.

The night was interminable and unforgiving. Lin could hear-feel vibrations in the air, the tremulous cries and howls of disturbed sleep rocking the city all around her. Her own head felt heavy with portent and menace.

Lin rocked back a little and rubbed her headscarab wearily. She was afraid. She was not so stupid as to not know that something was wrong.

She had arrived at Motley’s some hours before, in the late afternoon of the previous day. As usual, she had been instructed to make her way to the attic. But when she had entered the long, desiccated room, she had been alone.

The sculpture loomed darkly at the far end of the room. After she had looked around, idiotically, as if Motley could be hiding unseen in the bare space, she had walked over to examine the piece. She had supposed, a little uneasily, that Motley would join her soon.

She had stroked the khepri-spit figure. It was half finished. Motley’s various legs had been rendered in curling shapes and hyperreal colours. It terminated about three feet from the floor in drooping, liquid undulations. It looked as if a life-size candle in Motley’s shape had been half burned.

Lin had waited. An hour had passed. She had tried to lift the trapdoor and open the door to the passageway, but both were locked. She had stamped on the one and thumped the other, loudly and repetitively, but there was no response.

There’s some mistake, she had told herself. Motley’s busy, he’ll be along shortly, he’s just tied up, but it was totally unconvincing. Motley was consummate. As a businessman, a thug, a philosopher and a performer.

This delay was no accident. This was deliberate.

Lin did not know why, but Motley wanted her to sit, and sweat, alone.

She sat for hours until her nervousness became fear became boredom became patience, and she drew designs in the dust and opened her case to count her colourberries, again and again. Night came, and still she was left.

Her patience became fear again.

Why is he doing this? she thought. What does he want? This was quite different from Motley’s usual playing, his teases, his dangerous loquacity. This was far more ominous.

And finally, at last, hours after her arrival, she heard a noise.

Motley was in the room, flanked by his cactacae lieutenant and a pair of hulking gladiator Remade. Lin did not know how they had entered. She had been alone seconds before.

She stood and waited. Her hands were clutching.

“Ms. Lin. Thank you for coming,” said Motley from a tumorous cluster of mouths.

She waited.

“Ms. Lin,” he continued. “I had the most interesting conversation with one Lucky Gazid the day before yesterday. I suspect you haven’t seen Mr. Gazid for a while. He’s been working for me incognito. Anyway, as you doubtless know, there’s something of a citywide drought of dreamshit at the moment. Burglary is up. As is mugging. People are desperate. Prices have gone quite mad. There simply isn’t any new dreamshit being released into the city. What all this means is that Mr. Gazid, for whom dreamshit is the current drug of choice, is in rather a state. He can’t afford the merchandise any more, even with an employee’s discount.

“So anyway, the other day I heard him swearing-he was in withdrawal and cursing anyone who’d come near, but this was a bit different. D’you know what he shouted as he gnawed himself? Fascinating. It was something along the lines of ‘I should never have given that ‘shit to Isaac!’ ”

The cactacae beside Mr. Motley unclasped his massive hands and rubbed his callused green fingers together. He reached up to his uncovered chest, and with a terrible deliberation, he pricked his finger on one of his own spikes, testing its point. His face was impassive.

“Isn’t that interesting, Ms. Lin?” continued Motley with a sickly jauntiness. He began to pace crabwise towards her on his innumerable legs.

What is this? What is this? thought Lin as he approached. There was nowhere for her to hide.

“Now, Ms. Lin. Some very valuable items have been stolen from me. A clutch of little factories, if you like. Hence the lack of dreamshit. And d’you know? I have to admit I’ve been stymied as to who might have done it. Really. I’ve had nothing to go on.” He paused and a tide of icy smiles crossed his multiple features. “Until I heard Gazid. Then it all…made…sense.” He spat each word.

At some silent signal his cactus vizier strode towards Lin, who cringed and tried to break away, but was too late, as he reached out with his enormous meaty fists and gripped her arms tightly, immobilizing her.

Lin’s headlegs spasmed and she emitted a piercing chymical screech at the pain. Cactacae were usually assiduous in pruning the thorns on the insides of their palms, to better manipulate objects, but this one had let his grow. Clutches of stubby fibrous quills spiked her arms mercilessly.

She was pinioned, and dragged effortlessly before Motley. He leered at her. When he spoke again his voice was thick with threat.

“Your bugfucking lover has tried to screw me, hasn’t he, Ms. Lin? Buying up great swathes of my dreamshit, keeping his own moths, so Gazid tells me, and then stealing mine!” He roared the last words, trembling.

Lin could hardly think over the pain in her arms but she desperately tried to sign from her hip: No no no it’s not like that it’s not like that…

Motley slapped her hands down.

“Don’t fucking try it, you bug-head bitch, you cross-whore, you slut. Your scum-sucking man’s been trying to squeeze me out of my own fucking market. Well, that’s a very, very dangerous game.” He backed away a little and regarded her as she writhed.

“We are going to bring Mr. der Grimnebulin in to account for his theft. D’you think he’ll come if we offer him you?”

Blood was stiffening the arms of Lin’s shirt. She tried again to sign.

“You’ll get a chance to explain yourself, Ms. Lin,” said Motley, calm again. “Maybe you’re a partner in crime, maybe you have no idea what I’m talking about. It’s bad luck for you, I must say. I will not be letting this go.” He watched her try desperately to tell him, to explain, to squirm her way free.

Her arms were seizing up. The cactus was rendering her dumb. As she felt her head dull with the constricting pain, she heard Mr. Motley’s whisper.

“I am not a forgiving man.”

Outside the University Science Faculty, the quad thronged with students. Many were wearing the regulation black gowns: a few rebellious souls slung them over their arms as they left the building. Among the tide of figures were two motionless men. They stood leaning against the tree, ignoring the sap that stuck to them. It was humid, and one man was dressed incongruously in a long coat and dark hat.

They stood without moving for a long time. One class ended, and then another. The men saw two cycles of students come and go. Occasionally one or other would rub his eyes, stretch his face a little. Always he would return his apparently casual attention to the main entrance.

Finally, as the afternoon shadows began to stretch out, the men moved. Their target appeared. Montague Vermishank stepped from the building and sniffed the air gingerly, as if he knew he should enjoy it. He began to remove his jacket, then stopped and pulled it back around him. He set off into Ludmead.

The men below the tree stepped out from under the leaves and sauntered after their prey.

It was a busy day. Vermishank headed north, looking around him for a cab. He wound up Tench Way, Ludmead’s most bohemian thoroughfare, where progressive academics held court in cafes and bookshops. The buildings of Ludmead were old and well preserved, their façades scrubbed and freshly painted. Vermishank ignored them. He had walked this way for years. He was oblivious to his surroundings, and to his pursuers.

A four-wheel cab appeared through the crowd, pulled by some uncomfortable shaggy biped from the northern tundra that paced its way through the rubbish on back-bent legs like a bird’s. Vermishank raised his arm. The cabdriver attempted to manoeuvre his vehicle towards him. Vermishank’s pursuers sped up.

“Monty,” boomed the larger man and slapped his shoulder. Vermishank turned in alarm.

“Isaac,” he faltered. His eyes darted around him, sought the cab, which was still approaching.

“How are you, old son?” yelled Isaac in his left ear, and underneath it, Vermishank heard another voice hissing in his right.

“The thing poking your stomach is a knife and I will gut you like a fucking fish if you even breathe in a way I don’t like.”

“So glad to bump into you,” howled Isaac jocularly, waving the cab over. The driver muttered and approached.

“Try to run and I will cut you and if you get out of my hands I will shoot a bullet into your brain,” the voice crooned with loathing.

“Come and have a drink at mine,” said Isaac. “Brock Marsh, please driver. Paddler Way, you know it? Handsome beast, by the way,” Isaac kept up a stream of loud nonsense as he swung into the closed carriage. Vermishank followed, shaking and stuttering, goaded by the sting of the blade. Lemuel Pigeon followed him in and slammed the door shut, then sat looking straight forward holding the knife at Vermishank’s side.

The driver pulled away from the kerb. The creaking and rattling and complaining bleats of the animal cocooned the three men in the cab.

Isaac turned to Vermishank with the exaggerated delight gone from his face.

“You have a lot of talking to do, you evil cunt,” he hissed menacingly.

His prisoner was visibly regaining his poise second by second.

“Isaac,” he murmured. “Hah. How can I help you?”

He started as Lemuel jabbed him.

“Shut your fucking mouth.”

“Shut my mouth and do a lot of talking, Isaac?” mused Vermishank smoothly, then yelped incredulously as Isaac struck him, hard and suddenly. He gazed at him astonished, gingerly stroking his stinging face.

“I tell you when to talk,” said Isaac.

They were silent the rest of the journey, swaying south past Lud Fallow Station and over the sluggish Canker at Danechi’s Bridge. Isaac paid the driver as Lemuel hustled Vermishank into the warehouse.

Inside, David glowered from his desk, half turning to watch the proceedings. His russet waistcoat was incongruously cheerful. Yagharek skulked in a corner, half visible. His feet were wrapped in rags and his head was hidden in a hood. He had discarded the wooden wings. He was not disguised as whole, but as a human.

Derkhan looked up from an armchair she had pulled into the middle of the back wall, below the window. She was crying fiercely and without a sound. She was clutching a handful of newspapers. Front pages were strewn around her. “Midsummer Nightmares Spread,” said one, and another asked “What Has Happened to Sleep?” Derkhan ignored these pages, cutting out another minor story from page five or seven or eleven in each paper. Isaac could read one from where he stood: “Eyespy Killer Claims Criminal Editor.”

The cleaning construct hissed and whirred and clanked its way around the room, clearing the rubbish, sweeping up the dust, collecting the old papers and fruit debris that littered the floor. Sincerity the badger meandered listlessly along the far wall.

Lemuel shoved Vermishank into the middle of three chairs by the door and sat a few feet from him. Ostentatiously he drew out his pistol and aimed it at Vermishank’s head.

Isaac locked the door.

“Right, Vermishank,” he said in a businesslike fashion. He sat and stared at his former boss. “Lemuel is a very good shot, in case you have adventurous ideas. He’s a bit of a villain, actually. Bit dangerous. And I am not in any kind of mood to defend you, so I recommend you tell us what we want to know.”

“What do you want to know, Isaac?” said Vermishank smoothly. Isaac was enraged, but impressed. The man was damn good at regaining and retaining his aplomb.

That, Isaac decided, would have to be dealt with.

Isaac stood and stalked over to Vermishank. The older man looked up at him idly, his eyes only widening in alarm too late as he realized that Isaac was going to hit him again.

Isaac punched Vermishank in the face twice, ignoring his old boss’s squawk of pain and astonishment. Isaac gripped Vermishank by the throat and lowered himself into a squat, bringing his face next to his terrified prisoner’s. Vermishank was bleeding from his nose, and scrabbling ineffectually at Isaac’s massive hands. His eyes were glazed with terror.

“I don’t think you understand the situation, old son,” whispered Isaac with loathing. “I have sound reason to believe that you’re responsible for my friend lying upstairs shitting himself and drooling. I am not in any mood for sodding around, playing games, going by rules. I don’t care if you live, Vermishank. D’you understand? Are you with me? So here’s the best way of doing this. I tell you what we know-don’t waste my time asking how we know it-and you fill in what we don’t. Every time you don’t answer or the consensus here is that you’re lying, either Lemuel or I will hurt you.”

“You can’t torture me, you bastard…” hissed Vermishank in a strangulated wheeze.

“Fuck you,” breathed Isaac. “You’re the Remaker. Now…answer the questions or die.”

“Possibly both,” added Lemuel coldly.

“See, you’re wrong, Monty,” continued Isaac. “We can torture you. That’s exactly what we can do. So best to co-operate. Answer quickly, and convince me you ain’t lying. Here’s what we know. Correct me if I’m wrong, by the way, won’t you?” He sneered at Vermishank.

There was a pause as Isaac ran through the facts in his head. Then he spoke them, ticking each item off on his fingers.

“You’re in charge of biohazardous stuff for the government. That means the slake-moth programme.” He looked up for a reaction, some surprise that the secret of the project was out. Vermishank was motionless. “The slake-moths have escaped-the slake-moths that you sold to some fucking criminal. They have something to do with dreamshit, and with the…with the nightmares that everyone’s having. Rudgutter thought they were something to do with Benjamin Flex-wrongly, incidentally.

“Now, what we need to know is the following. What are they? What’s the connection with the drug? How do we catch them?”

There was a pause as Vermishank sighed lengthily. His lips were trembling wetly, slick with blood and saliva, but he gave a little smile. Lemuel wagged the gun to chivvy him along.

“Hah. Slake-moths,” breathed Vermishank eventually. He swallowed and massaged his neck. “Well. Aren’t they fascinating? Amazing species.”

“What are they?” said Isaac.

“What do you mean? You’ve clearly found out that much. They are predators. Efficient, brilliant predators.”

“Where are they from?”

“Hah.” Vermishank pondered a moment. He glanced up as Lemuel lazily and ostentatiously began to aim his gun at Vermishank’s knee. Vermishank continued quickly. “We got the grubs from a merchant on one of the southernmost of the Shards-it must have been on their arrival that you stole one-but they aren’t native to there.” He looked up at Isaac with what looked like amusement. “If you really want to know, the current favourite theory is that they come from the Fractured Land.”

“Don’t fuck about…” shouted Isaac in rage, but Vermishank interrupted him.

“I am not, you fool. That is the favoured hypothesis. Fractured Land theory has been given a powerful boost in some circles by the discovery of the slake-moths.”

“How do they hypnotize people?”

“Wings-of unstable dimensions and shapes, beating as they do in various planes-stuffed with oneirochromatophores. Colour-cells like those in an octopus’s skin, sensitive to and affecting psychic resonances and subconscious patterns. They tap the frequencies of the dreams that are…ah…bubbling under the surface of the sentient mind. They focus them, draw them out into the surface. Hold them still.”

“How does a mirror protect you?”

“Good question, Isaac.” Vermishank’s manner was changing. He sounded more and more as if he was giving a seminar. Even in a situation like this, realized Isaac, the didactic instinct was strong in the old bureaucrat. “We simply don’t know. We’ve done all manner of experiments, with double-mirrors, treble-mirrors and so on. We don’t know why, but seeing them reflected negates the effect, even though it is formally an identical sight, as their wings are already mirrored in each other. But, and this is very interesting, reflect it again-look at them through two mirrors, I mean, like a periscope-and they can hypnotize you again. Isn’t that extraordinary?” He smiled.

Isaac paused. There was, he realized, something almost urgent about Vermishank’s manner. He seemed anxious to leave nothing out. It must have been Lemuel’s unwavering pistol.

“I’ve…seen one of these things feeding…” said Isaac. “I saw it…eat someone’s brain.”

“Hah.” Vermishank shook his head appreciatively. “Astonishing. You are lucky to be here. You did not see it eat anyone’s brain. Slake-moths don’t live entirely in our plane. Their…ah…nutritional needs are met by substances that we cannot measure. Don’t you see, Isaac?” Vermishank gazed at him intently, like a teacher trying to encourage the right answer from a petulant pupil. The urgency flashed again in his eyes. “I know biology’s not your strong point, but it’s such an…elegant mechanism, I thought you might see it. They draw the dreams out with their wings, flood the mind, break the dykes that hold back hidden thoughts, guilty thoughts, anxieties, delights, dreams…” He stopped. Sat back. Composed himself.

“And then,” he continued, “when the mind is nice and juicy…they suck it dry. The subconscious is their nectar, Isaac, don’t you see? That is why they only feed on the sentient. No cats or dogs for them. They drink the peculiar brew that results from self-reflexive thought, when the instincts and needs and desires and intuitions are folded in on themselves and we reflect on our thoughts and then reflect on the reflection, endlessly…” Vermishank’s voice was hushed. “Our thoughts ferment like the purest liquor. That is what the slake-moths drink, Isaac. Not the meat-calories slopping about in the brainpan, but the fine wine of sapience and sentience itself, the subconscious.

“Dreams.”

The room was silent. The idea was stunning. Everyone seemed to reel at the notion. Vermishank seemed almost to be revelling in the effect his revelations were having.

Everyone started at a clanging sound. It was just the construct, busy vacuuming the rubbish beside David’s desk. It had tried to empty the bin into its receptacle, had slightly missed and spilled the contents. It was busy trying to clear up the pieces of crumpled paper that surrounded it.

“And…Dammit, of course!” Isaac breathed. “That’s what the nightmares are! They…it’s like fertilizer! Like, I don’t know, rabbit-shit, that feeds the plants that feed the rabbits…It’s a little chain, a little ecosystem…”

“Hah. Quite,” said Vermishank. “You are thinking at last. You can’t see slake-moth faeces, or smell it, but you can sense it. In your dreams. It feeds them, makes them boil. And then the slake-moth feeds on them. A perfect loop.”

“How do you know all this, you swine?” breathed Derkhan. ‘How long have you been working on these monsters?”

“Slake-moths are very rare. And a state secret. That is why we were so excited about our little clutch of the things. We had one old, dying specimen, then received four new grubs. Isaac had one, of course. The original, that had fed our little caterpillars, died. We were debating whether to open the cocoon of another during its change, killing it but gleaning invaluable knowledge of its metamorphic state, but before we had decided, regrettably,” he sighed, “we had to sell all four. They were an excessive risk. The word came that our research was taking too long, that our failure to control the specimens was making the…ah…paymasters nervous. Funding was withdrawn, and our department had to pay its debts quickly, given the failure of our project.”

“Which was what?” hissed Isaac. “Weapons? Torture?”

“Oh, really, Isaac,” said Vermishank calmly. “Look at you, stiff with moral outrage. If you hadn’t stolen one of them in the first place, it would never have escaped, and it would never have freed its fellows-which is what must have happened, you realize-and think how many innocent people would have lived.”

Isaac stared at him aghast.

“Fuck you!” he screamed. He rose and would have leapt at Vermishank had Lemuel not spoken.

“Isaac,” he said curtly, and Isaac saw that Lemuel’s gun was trained on him. “Vermishank is being very co-operative and there’s more we need to know. Right?”

Isaac stared at him, nodded and sat.

“Why are you being so helpful, Vermishank?” asked Lemuel, returning his gaze to the older man.

Vermishank shrugged.

“I do not relish the idea of pain,” he said with a little simper. “In addition to which, although you will not like this…it will do you no good. You cannot catch them. You cannot evade the militia. Why would I hold back?” He gave a smug, loathsome grin.

And yet his eyes were nervous, his upper lip sweating. There was a forlorn note buried deep in his throat.

Godspit! thought Isaac with a sudden shock of realization. He sat up and stared at Vermishank. That is not all! He…he’s telling us because he’s afraid! He doesn’t think the government can catch them…and he’s afraid. He wants us to succeed!

Isaac wanted to taunt Vermishank with this, to wave the knowledge of his weakness at him, to punish him for all his crimes…but he would not risk it. If Isaac were to antagonize him too flagrantly, to confront him with an understanding of his fear that Isaac doubted Vermishank himself possessed, then the vile man might withdraw all his help out of spite.

If he needed to think he was crowing to beg for help, then Isaac would let him.

“What is dreamshit?” said Isaac.

“Dreamshit?” Vermishank smiled, and Isaac remembered the last time he had asked Vermishank that question and the man had affected disgust, had refused to sully his mouth with the foul word.

It came easy to him now.

“Hah. Dreamshit is baby food. It is what the moths feed their young. They exude it all the time, but in great quantities when they are parenting. They are not like other moths: they’re very caring. They nurture their eggs assiduously, by all accounts, and suckle the newborn caterpillars. Only in their adolescence, when they pupate, can they feed themselves.”

Derkhan interjected.

“Are you saying that dreamshit is slake-moth milk?”

“Exactly. The caterpillars cannot yet digest purely psychic food. It must be imbibed in quasi-physical form. The liquid the moths exude is thick with distilled dreams.”

“And that’s why some fucking druglord bought them? Who was it?” Derkhan’s mouth curled.

“I have no idea. I merely suggested the deal. Which of the bidders was successful is irrelevant to me. One has to husband the moths carefully, stud them regularly, milk them. Like cows. They can be manipulated-by someone who knows what they’re doing-fooled into exuding milk without having born grubs. And the milk has to be processed, of course. No human, or any other sentient race, could drink it neat. It would instantly explode their mind. The inelegantly named dreamshit has been rendered and…ah…cut with various substances…Which incidentally, Isaac, means that the caterpillar you raised-that I presume you fed on dreamshit-must have grown into a less than healthy moth. It is as if you fed a human baby milk laced with large quantities of sawdust and pondwater.”

“How do you know all this?” hissed Derkhan.

Vermishank looked at her blankly.

“How do you know how many mirrors it takes to make you safe, how do you know they turn the minds they…they eat into that…milk…? How many people have you fed to them?”

Vermishank pursed his lips, a little perturbed.

“I am a scientist,” he said. “I use the means at my disposal. On occasion, criminals are sentenced to death. The manner of their death is not specified…”

“You swine…” she hissed viciously. “What about all the people the dealers take to feed them, to make the drug…?” she continued, but Isaac cut her off.

“Vermishank,” he said softly, and stared at the other man. “How do we get their minds back? The ones who’ve been taken.”

“Back?” Vermishank seemed genuinely baffled. “Ah…” He shook his head and furrowed his eyes. “You cannot.”

“Don’t lie to me…” screamed Isaac, thinking of Lublamai.

“They have been drunk,” hissed Vermishank, and brought silence quickly to the room. He waited.

“They have been drunk” he said again. “Their thoughts have been taken, their dreams-their conscious and subconscious-have been burnt up in the moths’ stomachs, have trickled out again to feed the grubs. Have you taken dreamshit, Isaac? Any of you?” No one, least of all Isaac, would answer him. “If you have, you have dreamed them, the victims, the prey. You have had their metabolized minds slip into your stomach and you have dreamed them. There is nothing left to save. There is nothing to get back.”

Isaac felt absolute despair.

Take his body too, he thought, Jabber, don’t be cruel, don’t leave me with that fucking shell that I can’t let die, that means nothing…

“How do we kill the slake-moths?” he hissed.

Vermishank smiled, very slowly.

“You cannot,” he said.

“Don’t bullshit me,” hissed Isaac. “Everything that lives can die…”

“You misunderstand me. As an abstract proposition of course they can die. And therefore, theoretically, they can be killed. But you will not be able to kill them. They live in several planes, as I’ve said, and bullets, fire, and so forth injure only in one. You would have to hit them in many dimensions at once, or do the most extraordinary amount of damage in this one, and they will not give you the chance…Do you understand?”

“So let’s think laterally…” said Isaac. He batted his temples hard with the heels of his hands. “What about a biological control? Predators…”

“They have none. They are at the top of their food chain. We’re fairly sure that there are animals, in their native land, that are capable of killing them, but there are none within several thousand miles of here. And anyway, if we’re right, to unleash them would be to usher doom more quickly onto New Crobuzon.”

“Dear Jabber,” breathed Isaac. “Without predators or competitors, with a massive supply of food, fresh and constantly replenished…There’ll be no stopping them.”

“And that,” whispered Vermishank hesitantly, “is before we’ve even considered what’ll happen if they…They are still young, you understand. They are not fully mature. But soon, when the nights become hot…We have to consider what might happen when they breed…”

The room seemed to go still and cold. Again Vermishank tried to control his face, but again, Isaac saw the raw fear inside him. Vermishank was terrified. He knew what was at stake.

A little way away, the construct was rotating, hissing and clattering. It seemed to be leaking dust and dirt, and moving in random directions trailing a stiff litter-spike behind it. Broken again, thought Isaac, and turned his attention back on Vermishank.

“When will they breed?” he hissed.

Vermishank licked the sweat from his upper lip.

“They are hermaphrodites, I am told. We’ve never observed them mating or seen them lay eggs. We only know what we’ve been told. They come into heat in the back half of the summer. One designated egg-layer. Around about Sinn, Octuary. Usually. Usually, that is.”

“Come on! There must be something we can do!” shouted Isaac. “Don’t tell me Rudgutter’s got nothing in mind…”

“I’m not privy to that. I mean, of course I know they’ve plans. Why, yes. But what they are I simply can’t say. I have…” Vermishank hesitated.

“What?” yelled Isaac.

“I have heard that they approached daemons.” No one said a word. Vermishank swallowed and continued. “And were refused help. Even at the highest bribery.”

“Why?” hissed Derkhan.

“Because the daemons were afraid.” Vermishank licked his lips. The fear that he was trying to keep hidden became visible again. “Do you understand that? They were afraid. Because for all their power and their presence…they think as we do. They are sentient, sapient. And as far as the slake-moths are concerned…they are therefore prey.”

Everyone in the room was still. The pistol sagged in Lemuel’s hand, but Vermishank made no attempt to run, lost as he was in his own miserable reverie.

“What are we going to do?” said Isaac. His voice was not quite steady.

The grating sound of the construct grew stronger. The thing spun for a moment on its central wheel. Its cleaning arms were extended and clattered against the ground in staccato motion. Derkhan, then Isaac and David and the others looked up at it.

“I can’t think with that fucking thing in the room!” yelled Isaac, enraged. He strode over, ready to take out his impotence and his fear on the construct. As he approached it, it spun to face him with its glass iris and its two main arms extended suddenly, an errant piece of paper on the end of one. The construct looked disorientingly like a person with outstretched arms. Isaac blinked and continued towards it.

Its right arm stabbed down at the floor and the rubbish and dust it had strewn idiotically in its path. It jerked down again and again, violently tapping at the wooden boards. Its left limb, with its broom end, jerked out to block Isaac’s path, slowing him and wagging, he realized with utter astonishment, to hold his attention, and then its right, a litter-skewer, jerked down once more to point at the floor.

At the dust. In which was scrawled a message.

The point of the skewer had traced its way through the dirt and even scored the wood itself. The words it had scribbled in the rubbish were shaky and uncertain, but entirely legible.

You are betrayed.

Isaac gaped at the construct in complete consternation. It waved its litter-spike at him, the scrap of paper on the end whipping back and forth.

The others had not yet read what was written on the floor, but they could tell from Isaac’s face and the extraordinary behaviour of the construct that something strange was happening. They were standing, gazing curiously.

“What is it, Isaac?” said Derkhan.

“I…I don’t know…” he murmured. The construct seemed agitated, by turn tapping at the message on the floor and flailing the paper on its spike. Isaac reached out, his mouth wide with amazement, and the construct held its arm still. Gingerly, Isaac plucked the crumpled paper from it.

As he smoothed it out, David leapt up suddenly, horrified and aghast. He rushed across the room.

“Isaac,” he shouted. “Wait…” But Isaac had already opened the paper, his eyes had already widened in horror at what was written. His mouth grew slack at the enormity of it, but before he could emit a shout Vermishank moved.

Lemuel had been caught up with the bizarre drama of the construct, his eyes had left his quarry, and Vermishank had seen it. Everyone in the room was staring at Isaac as he fumbled with the rubbish the construct had handed him. Vermishank leapt up from the chair and bolted for the door.

He had forgotten it was locked. When he yanked at it and it would not open, he cried out in undignified panic. Behind him, David peeled away from Isaac and backed towards Vermishank and the door. Isaac spun on his heel towards them, still clutching the paper. He glared at David and Vermishank in lunatic hatred. Lemuel had seen his error, was bringing his pistol to bear on Vermishank when Isaac moved threateningly towards the prisoner, blocking Lemuel’s line of fire.

“Isaac,” shouted Lemuel, “move!”

Vermishank saw that Derkhan had leapt to her feet, that David was cringing away from Isaac, that the hooded man in the other corner was standing with legs spread and arms out in a weirdly predatory fashion. Lemuel was invisible to Vermishank, behind the looming threat of Isaac.

Isaac looked from Vermishank to David, his eyes oscillating back and forth. He waved the paper.

“Isaac,” Lemuel screamed again. “Get out of the fucking way!”

But Isaac could not hear or speak for rage. There was a cacophony. Everyone in the room was yelling, demanding to know what was on the paper, begging for a clear shot, growling in rage or keening like a great bird.

Isaac seemed to be debating which of David or Vermishank to grab. David was breaking down, begging Isaac to listen to him. With a last desperate pointless tug at the door, Vermishank turned and defended himself.

He was, after all, a highly trained bio-thaumaturge. He babbled an incantation and flexed the invisible, occult muscles he had developed in his arms. He hooked his hand at the arcane energy that made the veins of his forearm stand out like snakes beneath the skin, made his skin twitch and tighten.

Isaac’s shirt was half undone, and Vermishank plunged his right hand through the uncovered flesh below Isaac’s neck.

Isaac bellowed in rage and pain as his tissue gave like thick clay. It became malleable under Vermishank’s trained hands.

Vermishank dug inelegantly through the unwilling flesh. He gripped and ungripped his fingers to grab hold of a rib. Isaac grabbed hold of Vermishank’s wrist and held it. His face was set in a grimace. He was stronger, but pain was disabling him.

Vermishank was wailing as they wrestled. “Let me go!” he screamed. He had had no plan, had struck out in fear of his life and found himself committed to a murderous attack. It could not be undone. He could do nothing but scrabble for purchase inside Isaac’s chest.

Behind them, David fumbled for his key.

Isaac could not pull Vermishank’s fingers from his chest, and Vermishank could not push them any further in. They stood, swaying, tugging at each other. Behind them the confusion of voices continued. Lemuel had stood, had kicked away his chair and was feinting to find a vantage point for a clean shot. Derkhan ran over and pulled violently at Vermishank’s arms, but the terrified man curled his fingers around the bones of Isaac’s chest, and with every pull Isaac screamed in pain. Blood was spurting from Isaac’s skin, from the imperfect seals where Vermishank’s fingers punctured his flesh.

Vermishank and Isaac and Derkhan wrestled and howled, spraying blood across the floor, fouling Sincerity, who bolted away. Lemuel reached over Isaac’s shoulder to shoot, but Vermishank tugged Isaac around like some grotesque glove puppet, knocking the pistol out of Lemuel’s hand. It hit the floor some feet away, scattering its black powder. Lemuel swore and dug urgently for a powder-case.

Suddenly a shrouded figure stood by the clumsy fighting trio. Yagharek threw back his hood. Vermishank stared into his hard round eyes, opened his mouth at the garuda’s great predatory bird-face. But before he could speak, Yagharek had plunged his vicious curved beak into the flesh of Vermishank’s right arm.

He tore through the muscle and tendons with speed and vigour. Vermishank shrieked as his arm blossomed with ragged flesh and blood. He snapped his hand back, withdrawing it from Isaac’s flesh, which resealed imperfectly with a wet snap. Isaac growled with agony and stroked his chest. It was slick with blood, the surface misshapen, pocked and still bleeding from Vermishank’s hand.

Derkhan had her arms around Vermishank’s neck. As Vermishank clutched the bleeding ruins of his forearm, she hurled him away from her into the centre of the room. The construct rolled out of Vermishank’s way as he staggered and fell, fouling the boards with gore, screaming.

Lemuel had primed his pistol again. Vermishank caught sight of him aiming and opened his mouth to beg, to wail. He held his bloody arm up, trembling, supplicating.

Lemuel pulled the trigger. There was a cavernous cracking sound and an explosion of acrid gunpowder. Vermishank’s cry stopped instantly. The ball hit him right between the eyes, a textbook shot from close enough range to pass through him and take the back of his head off in an efflorescence of dark blood.

He fell back, his broken skull smacking dully on the old boards.

The particles of gunpowder spun and tumbled slowly. Vermishank’s carcass shuddered.

Isaac leant back against the wall and swore. He pressed his chest, seemed to smooth it down. He fumbled at it in an ineffectual attempt to repair the cosmetic damage Vermishank’s intrusive fingers had done.

He emitted livid barks of pain.

“Godsdamn!” he spat, and eyed Vermishank’s body with loathing.

Lemuel held his pistol idly. Derkhan was trembling. Yagharek had withdrawn, stood watching the proceedings, his features dim once more in the shadows of the hood.

No one spoke. The fact of Vermishank’s murder filled the room. There was unease and shock, but no recrimination. No one wished him alive again.

“Yag, old son,” croaked Isaac eventually. “I owe you.” The garuda did not acknowledge him.

“We have to…we have to get this out of here,” said Derkhan urgently, kicking Vermishank’s corpse. “They’ll be looking for him soon.”

“That’s the least of our worries,” said Isaac. He held out his right hand. He still held the paper he had taken from the construct, now bloodstained. “David’s gone,” he observed, pointing at the unlocked door. He looked around. “He’s taken Sincerity,” he said, his face curling. He threw the paper to Derkhan. As she unfolded it, Isaac stomped over towards the skittering construct.

Derkhan read the note. Her face hardened in disgust and outrage. She held it up so that Lemuel could read it. After a moment, Yagharek stalked over and read it over Lemuel’s shoulder, from inside his hood.

Serachin. Further to our meeting. Enclosed is payment and instructions. Der Grimnebulin and associates will be brought to justice on Chainday 8th Tathis. The militia will apprehend him at his residence at 9 o’clock in the evening. You are to ensure that der Grimnebulin and all working with him are present from 6 o’clock onwards. You will be present during the raid, to avoid suspicion falling upon you. Our agents have seen heliotypes of you, in addition to which you are to wear red. Our officers will do everything possible to avoid casualties, but this cannot be guaranteed, and your clear self-identification is crucial.

Sally.

Lemuel blinked, looked up.

“It’s today,” he said, and blinked again. “Chainday’s today. They’re coming.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

Isaac ignored Lemuel. He was standing directly in front of the construct, which moved almost uneasily before his intense gaze.

“How did you know, Isaac?” shouted Derkhan, and Isaac raised his finger and jerked it at the construct.

“I was tipped off. David betrayed us,” he whispered. “My mate. Been on a hundred damn benders with him, done drinking, done riots…the fuck sold me out. And I got tipped off by a damn construct.” He poked his face right into the construct’s lens. “You understand me?” he whispered incredulously. “You with me? You…wait, you’ve got audio inputs, haven’t you? Turn around…turn if you understand me…”

Lemuel and Derkhan glanced at each other.

“Isaac, mate,” said Lemuel witheringly, but his words petered out into astonished silence.

Slowly, deliberately, the construct was turning around.

“What the fuck is it doing?” hissed Derkhan.

Isaac turned to her.

“I’ve no idea,” he hissed. “I’ve heard of this, but I didn’t know it could actually happen. It’s had some virus, hasn’t it? CI…Constructed Intelligence…I can’t believe it’s real…”

He turned back and gazed at the construct. Derkhan and Lemuel approached it, as, after a moment’s hesitation, did Yagharek.

“It’s impossible,” said Isaac suddenly. “It doesn’t have an intricate enough engine for independent thought. It is impossible.”

The construct lowered its pointer and backed away to a nearby pile of dust. It dragged its spike through it, and spelt out clearly: It is.

At the sight, the three humans hissed and gasped.

“What the fuck…?” yelled Isaac. “You can read and write…you…” He shook his head, then looked up at the construct, hard and cold again in a moment. “How did you know?” he said. “And why did you warn me?”

It was quickly clear, however, that this was an explanation that would have to wait. As Isaac waited intently, Lemuel glanced up at the clock and started nervously. It was late.

It took a minute, but Lemuel and Derkhan convinced Isaac that they had better flee the workshop now with the construct. They had better act on the information they had been given, even if they didn’t understand where it had come from.

Isaac protested weakly, tugging at the construct. He denounced David to Hell, then marvelled at the construct’s intelligence. He screamed rage and cast an analytical eye on the transformed cleaning engine. He was confused. Derkhan’s and Lemuel’s urgent insistence that they must move infected him.

“Yes, David is a godsdamn shit. And yes, the construct is a godsdamn miracle, Isaac,” hissed Derkhan, “but it’s going to be a wasted one if we don’t leave now.”

And in an infuriating, tantalizing end to the matter, the construct spread the dust out again as Isaac watched, and carefully scrawled: Later.

Lemuel thought quickly.

“There’s a place I know up in Gidd where we can go,” he decided. “It’ll do for tonight, and then we can make plans.” Derkhan and he moved quickly around the room, gathering useful items into bags they pilfered from David’s cupboards. It was clear they would not be able to return.

Isaac stood numb by the wall. His mouth was slightly open. His eyes were glazed. He shook his head incredulously.

Lemuel glanced up and saw him.

“Isaac,” he yelled. “Go and sort your shit out. We’ve less than an hour. We are leaving. Get off your arse.”

Isaac looked up, nodded peremptorily and stomped up the stairs, to stop and stand still again at the top. His expression was of bemused and miserable disbelief.

After some seconds, Yagharek came silently after him. He stood behind Isaac and peeled back his hood.

“Grimnebulin,” he whispered as softly as his avian throat allowed. “You are thinking of your friend David.”

Isaac turned sharply.

“No fucking friend of mine,” he countered.

“And yet he was. You are thinking of the betrayal.”

Isaac said nothing for several moments. Then he nodded. The look of horrified astonishment returned.

“I know betrayal, Grimnebulin,” whistled Yagharek. “I know it well. I am…sorry for you.”

Isaac turned away and walked brusquely to his laboratory space, began shoving bits and pieces of wire and ceramic and glass seemingly at random into a huge carpet bag. He strapped it, bulky and clanking, to his back.

“When were you betrayed, Yag?” he demanded.

“I was not. I betrayed.” Isaac stopped and turned to him. “I know what David has done. And I am sorry.”

Isaac stared in bewilderment, in denial and misery.

The militia attacked. It was only twenty minutes past seven.

The door flew open with a massive sound. Three militia officers came hurtling through into the room, their battering ram flying out of their hands.

The door was still unlocked from when David had fled. The militia had not expected this, and had tried to break down a door which did not resist them. They fell, sprawling and idiotic.

There was a confused moment. The three militia scrabbled to stand. Outside, the squad of officers gaped stupidly into the building. On the ground floor, Derkhan and Lemuel stared back at them. Isaac looked down at the intruders.

Then everyone moved.

The militia outside in the street recovered their wits and rushed the door. Lemuel flipped David’s huge desk onto its side and hunkered down behind the makeshift shield, priming his two long pistols. Derkhan ran towards him, diving for cover. Yagharek hissed and stepped backwards from the rail of the walkway, out of sight of the militia.

In one slick movement, Isaac turned to his laboratory work-table and scooped up two huge glass flasks of discoloured liquid, still spinning on his heels, and hurled them over the rail at the invading officers like bombs.

The first three militia through the door had regained their feet, only to be caught in the shower of glass and chymical rain. One of the massive jars shattered on the helmet of one officer, who hit the floor again, motionless and bleeding. Vicious shards bounced off the others’ armour. The two militia caught by the deluge were still for a moment, then began to shriek suddenly as the chymicals seeped through their masks and began to attack the soft tissues of their faces.

There was still no gunfire.

Isaac turned again and began to grab more jars, taking a moment to pick strategically, so that the effects of the cascading chymicals were not entirely random. Why don’t they shoot? he thought giddily.

The wounded officers had been pulled out into the street. In their place, a phalanx of heavily armoured officers had entered, bearing iron shields with reinforced glass windows through which they stared. Behind them, Isaac saw two officers getting ready to attack with khepri stingboxes.

They must want us alive! he realized. The stingbox could kill, easily, but it could also not. If deaths were all that were desired, it would have been far easier for Rudgutter to send conventional troops, with flintlocks and crossbows, than such rare agents as humans trained in stingbox.

Isaac hurled a double salvo of trow-iron dust and sanguimorph distillate at the defensive huddle, but the guards were quick, and the jars were shattered with twitching shields. The militia danced to avoid the dangerous gobbets.

Each of the two officers behind the shield-bearers spun their jagged twin flails.

The stingboxes themselves-metaclockwork engines of intricate and extraordinary khepri design-were attached to the officers’ belts, each the size of a small bag. Attached to each side was a long cord, thick wires swathed in metal coils, then insulating rubber, extendible more than twenty feet. About two feet from the end of each cord was a polished wooden handle, one of which each officer held in each hand. They used these to whirl the ends of the cords at terrible speed. Something glimmered almost invisibly. At the tip of each tendril, Isaac knew, was a vicious little metal prong, a weighted clutch of barbs and spikes. These tips varied. Some were solid, the best-made expanded like cruel flowers on impact. All were designed to fly heavy and true, to puncture armour and flesh, to grip without mercy inside torn flesh.

Derkhan had reached the table and was huddling by Lemuel. Isaac turned to grab more ammunition. In the moment of silence, Derkhan raised herself quickly on one knee and peered over the tip of the table, taking aim with her great pistol.

She pulled the trigger. At the same instant, one of the officers let fly with his stingbox.

Derkhan was a decent shot. Her ball flew into the viewing window of one of the militia shields, which she had judged its weak point. But she had underestimated the militia’s defences. The porthole cracked violently and spectacularly, whitened completely with shards of glassdust and a crack-lattice, but its structure was interlaced with copper wire, and it held. The militiaman staggered, then stood solid.

The officer with the stingbox moved like an expert.

He swung up his arms at the same moment in sweeping curves, flicking the little switches in the wooden handles that allowed the cords to slide through them, releasing them. The momentum of the twirling blades took them flying through the air in a flash of metallic grey.

Cord unravelled almost without friction from inside the stingbox, through the air and the wooden handles, slowing the blades hardly at all. Their curving flight was absolutely true. The jagged weights flew in a long, elliptical motion through the air, the curve shallowing rapidly as the cables attaching them to the stingbox extended.

The buds of sharpened steel smacked simultaneously into each side of Derkhan’s chest. She screamed and staggered, her teeth gritting as the pistol fell from her spasming fingers.

Instantly, the officer pressed the catch on his stingbox to release the pent-up clockwork within.

There was a sputtering whirr. The hidden coils of the motor began to unwind, twirling like a dynamo and generating waves of weird current. Derkhan danced and spasmed, agonized yells spurting out from behind her teeth. Little bursts of blue light exploded like whiplashes from her hair and fingers.

The officer watched her intently, twiddling the dials on his stingbox that controlled the intensity and form of the power. There was a violent, cracking jolt and Derkhan flew backwards against the wall, collapsing to the floor.

The second officer sent his sharp bulbs over the edge of the table, hoping to catch Lemuel, but he was flattened hard against the wood and they flew harmlessly around him. The officer pressed a stud and the cords rapidly retracted back into a ready position.

Lemuel stared at the stricken Derkhan and hefted his pistols. Isaac bellowed in rage. He hurled another vast pot of unstable thaumaturgic compound at the militia. It fell short, but burst with such violence that it splashed onto and over the shields, mixing with the distillate and sending two officers screaming to the floor as their skin became parchment and their blood ink.

An amplified voice burst through the door. It was Mayor Rudgutter’s.

“Stop these attacks. Be sensible. You aren’t going to get out. Stop attacking us and we will show mercy.”

Rudgutter stood in the midst of his honour guard with Eliza Stem-Fulcher. It was highly unusual for him to accompany a militia raid, but this was no ordinary raid. He was stationed across the road and a little way along from Isaac’s workshop.

It was not yet completely dark. Alarmed and curious faces peered from windows up and down the street. Rudgutter ignored them. He took the funnel of iron away from his mouth and turned to Eliza Stem-Fulcher. His face was creased in irritation.

“This is an absolute bloody shambles,” he said. She nodded. “Well, however inefficient they are, the militia can’t lose. A few officers might be killed, regrettably, but there’s no way der Grimnebulin and his cohorts are getting out of there.” The faces peeking nervously from behind windows all around suddenly annoyed him.

He raised the loudhailer sharply and yelled into it: “Get back into your houses immediately!”

There was a gratifying flurry of curtains. Rudgutter stood back and watched as the warehouse shuddered.

Lemuel dispatched the other stingbox-wielder with one elegant and careful shot. Isaac hurled his table down the stairs taking two officers with it when they had tried to rush him, and now he continued with his chymical sniping. Yagharek was helping him, at his direction, showering the attackers with noxious mixtures.

But this was all, could not but be, doomed valiance. There were too many militia. It helped that they were not prepared to kill, because Isaac and Lemuel and Yagharek had no such constraints. Isaac estimated that four militia had fallen: one to a bullet; one to a crushed skull; and two to random chymico-thaumaturgic reactions. But it could not last. The militia advanced on Lemuel behind their shields.

Isaac saw the militia look up and confer for a minute. Then one of them raised a flintlock rifle carefully, aiming it at Yagharek.

“Down, Yag!” he yelled. “They’ll kill you!”

Yagharek dropped to the floor, out of sight of the assassin.

There was no sudden manifestation, no creeping flesh or vast stalking figure. All that happened was that the Weaver’s voice sounded in Rudgutter’s ear.

…I HAVE BOUNDED UNSEEN UP TANGLING WIRES OF SKYNESS AND SLIPPED MY LEGS SPLAYED WILLY-NILLY ON THE PSYCHIC DUNG OF THE WEB-REAVERS THEY ARE LOW CREATURES AND INELEGANT AND DRAB WHISPER WHAT HAPPENS MR. MAYOR THIS PLACE TREMBLES…

Rudgutter started. That’s all I need, he thought. He replied with a firm voice.

“Weaver,” he said. Stem-Fulcher turned to him with a sharp, curious gaze. “How nice to have you with us.”

It’s too damned unpredictable, Rudgutter thought furiously. Not now, not bloody now! Go and chase the moths, go hunting…what are you doing here? The Weaver was infuriating and dangerous, and Rudgutter had taken a calculated risk in engaging its aid. A loose cannon was still a lethal weapon.

Rudgutter had thought that the great spider and he had something of an arrangement. As much, at least, as it was possible to maintain with a Weaver. Kapnellior had helped him. Textorology was a tentative field, but it had borne some fruit. There were proven methods of communication, and Rudgutter had been using them to interact with the Weaver. Messages carved into the blades of scissors and melted. Apparently random sculptures, lit from below, whose shadows wrote messages across the ceiling. The Weaver’s responses were prompt and delivered even more bizarrely.

Rudgutter had politely bade the Weaver busy itself chasing the moths. Rudgutter could not order, of course, could only suggest. But the Weaver had responded positively, and Rudgutter realized that stupidly, absurdly, he had begun to think of it as his agent.

No more of that.

Rudgutter cleared his throat. “Might I ask why you have joined us, Weaver?”

The voice came again, resonating in his ear, bouncing on the bones inside his head.

…INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE FIBRES ARE SPLIT AND BURST AND A TRAIL IS TORN ACROSS THE WARP OF THE WORLDWEB WHERE COLOURS ARE BLED AND WAN I HAVE SLID ACROSS THE SKY BELOW THE SURFACE AND DANCED ALONG THE RENT WITH TEARS OF MISERY AT THE UGLY RUIN WHICH STEMS AND SPREADS AND BEGINS IN THIS PLACE…

Rudgutter nodded slowly as the sense of the words emerged. “It started from here,” he agreed. “This is the centre. This is the source. Unfortunately…” He spoke very carefully. “Unfortunately, this is a somewhat inopportune moment. Might I prevail on you to investigate this-which is indeed the birthplace of the problem-in a little while?”

Stem-Fulcher was watching him. Her face was fraught. She listened intently to his responses.

For a strange moment, all the sounds around them ceased. The shots and yells from the warehouse momentarily died. There were no creaks or clanks from the militia’s arms. Stem-Fulcher’s mouth was open, as she hovered ready to speak, but she said nothing. The Weaver was silent.

Then there was a whispering sound inside Rudgutter’s skull. He gasped in consternation, then opened his mouth in outright dismay. He did not know how he knew, but he was listening to the uncanny sound of the Weaver picking its way across various dimensions towards the warehouse.

The officers bore down on Lemuel with a remorseless precision. They tramped across Vermishank’s corpse. They held their shields triumphantly before them.

Above, Isaac and Yagharek had run out of chymicals. Isaac was bellowing, hurling chairs and slats of wood and rubbish at the militia. They deflected them with ease.

Derkhan was as motionless as Lublamai, who lay still on a cot in the corner of Isaac’s living space.

Lemuel let out a desperate yell of rage and swung his powder-horn at his attackers, spraying them with acrid gunpowder. He fumbled for his tinderbox, but they were on him, truncheons swinging. The officer with the stingbox approached, twirling his blades.

The air in the centre of the warehouse vibrated uncannily.

Two militiamen were approaching this unstable patch, and they paused in puzzlement. Isaac and Yagharek each carried one end of an enormous bench, ready to hurl it at the officers below. Each caught sight of the phenomenon. They stopped moving and watched.

Like some eldritch flower, a patch of organic darkness bloomed from nothing in the centre of the room. It expanded into physical reality with the animal ease of a stretching cat. It opened itself, and it stood to fill the room, a colossal segmented thing, a massive spider-presence that hummed with power and sucked the light out of the air.

The Weaver.

Yagharek and Isaac dropped the bench simultaneously.

The militia stopped pummelling Lemuel and turned, alerted by the changing nature of the aether.

Everyone stopped and stared, utterly aghast.

The Weaver had manifested standing directly over two trembling officers. They let out little cries of terror. One dropped his sword as his fingers numbed. The other, more bravely but no less ineffectually, raised a pistol in his violently shaking hand.

The Weaver looked down at the two men. It raised its pair of human hands. As they cringed, it brought one hand down on each of their heads, patting them like dogs.

It raised its hand and pointed up at the walkway, where Isaac and Yagharek stood dumbfounded and afraid. Its unearthly singsong voice resonated in the suddenly quiet room.

…OVER AND UP IN THE LITTLE PASSAGE IT WAS IT WAS BORN THE CRINGING THUMB THE TWISTED RUNT THAT FREED ITS SIBLINGS IT CRACKED THE SEAL ON ITS SWADDLING AND BURST OUT I SMELL THE REMNANTS OF ITS BREAKFAST STILL LOLLING OH I LIKE THIS I ENJOY THIS WEB THE WEFT IS INTRICATE AND FINE THOUGH TORN WHO HERE CAN SPIN WITH SUCH ROBUST AND NAIVE EXPERTISE…

The Weaver’s head moved with alien smoothness from one to the other side. It took in the room in its multiple and glinting eyes. Still no humans moved.

From outside came Rudgutter’s voice. It was tense. Angry.

“Weaver!” he shouted. “I have a gift and a message for you!” There was a moment of silence, and then a pair of pearl-handled scissors came skittering through the door of the warehouse. The Weaver clasped its hands in a very human motion of delight. From outside came the distinctive sound of scissors being opened and closed.

…LOVELY LOVELY, moaned the Weaver, THE SNIPSNAP OF SUPPLICATION AND YET THOUGH THEY SMOOTH EDGES AND ROUGH FIBRES WITH COLD NOISE AN EXPLOSION IN REVERSE A FUNNELLING IN A FOCUS I MUST TURN MAKE PATTERNS HERE WITH AMATEURS UNKNOWING ARTISTS TO UNPICK THE CATASTROPHIC TEARING THERE IS BRUTE ASYMMETRY IN THE BLUE VISAGES THAT WILL NOT DO IT CANNOT BE THAT THE RIPPED UP WEB IS DARNED WITHOUT PATTERNS AND IN THE MINDS OF THESE DESPERATE AND GUILTY AND BEREFT ARE EXQUISITE TAPESTRIES OF DESIRE THE DAPPLED GANG PLAIT YEARNINGS FOR FRIENDS FEATHERS SCIENCE JUSTICE GOLD…

The Weaver’s voice shivered in some crooning delight. Its legs moved suddenly at terrifying speed, picking its intricate way through the room, rippling through the space.

The militia crouching over Lemuel dropped their staffs and scrabbled to get out of its way. Lemuel looked up at its arachnid bulk through swollen eyes. He raised his hands and tried to cry out in fear.

The Weaver hovered for a moment before him, then looked up at the platform above. It stepped up lightly and was instantly, incomprehensibly, on the walkway, a few feet from Isaac and Yagharek. They stared in terror at the vast and monstrous form. Those pointed spike-feet pranced towards them. They were immobilized. Yagharek tried to move backwards but the Weaver was too quick…SAVAGE AND IMPENETRABLE…it sang, and scooped Yagharek up with a sudden motion, sweeping him under its humanlike arm where he twisted and cried out like a terrified baby.

…BLACK AND RUSSET…sang the Weaver. It tottered elegantly like a dancer on her toes, moved sideways through twisted dimensions and was once more by Lemuel’s cowering form. It grabbed him and bundled him dangling beside Yagharek.

The militia stood back, dumbfounded and terrified. Mayor Rudgutter’s voice sounded from outside again, but no one listened.

The Weaver stepped up and was once again on Isaac’s raised living space. It skittered up to Isaac and grabbed him under its free arm…EXTRAVAGANT SECULAR SWARMING…it chanted as it took hold of him.

Isaac could not resist. The Weaver’s touch was cool and unchanging, quite unreal. Its skin was as smooth as polished glass. He felt himself lifted with breathtaking ease and enfolded, cosseted under that bony arm.

…DIAMETRICAL NEGLIGENT FEROCIOUS…Isaac heard the Weaver say as it retraced its impossible steps and was twenty feet away, standing by Derkhan’s motionless body. The militia around her moved away in concerted fear. The Weaver fumbled for her unconscious form and tucked her up next to Isaac, who felt her warmth through his clothes.

Isaac’s head was spinning. The Weaver moved sideways again and was across the room, beside the construct. For a few minutes, Isaac had forgotten it even existed. It had returned to its customary resting place in the corner of the room, from where it had watched the militia attacks. It turned the one feature on its smooth head, its glass lens, towards the Weaver. The ineluctable spider-presence flicked the construct up onto its dagger-limbs and tossed it nimbly up. The Weaver caught the ungainly man-sized machine on its curving chitinous back. The construct balanced precariously, but did not fall no matter how the Weaver moved.

Isaac felt a sudden, murderous pain in his head. He cried out in agony, felt hot blood pumping across his face. He heard Lemuel scream a moment later, echoing him.

Through eyes bleary with confusion and blood, Isaac saw the room flicker around him as the Weaver paced through interlocking planes. It appeared beside all the militiamen in turn and moved one of its bladed arms too fast to see. As it touched them, each of the men screamed, so that a weird virus of agonized sound seemed to pass around the room at whiplash speed.

The Weaver stopped in the centre of the warehouse. Its elbows were pinioned, so that its captives could not move. With its forearms it dropped red-stained things across the floor. Isaac raised his head and looked around the room, trying to see through the burning pain below his temple. Everyone in the room was crying out, cringing, clapping their hands to the sides of their faces, trying without success to staunch gouts of blood with their fingers. Isaac looked down again.

The Weaver was scattering a handful of bloody ears onto the ground.

Below its gently moving hand, blood spilt across the dust in slicks of dirty gore. The gobbets of freshly sliced flesh fell, tracing the perfect shape of a pair of scissors.

The Weaver looked up, impossibly laden with struggling figures, moving as if unencumbered.

…FERVENT AND LOVABLE…it whispered, and disappeared.

What was an experience becomes a dream and then a memory. I cannot see the edges between the three.

The Weaver, the great spider, came among us.

In the Cymek we call it furiach-yajh-hett: the dancing mad god. I never thought to see one. It came out of a funnel in the world to stand between us and the lawgivers. Their pistols were silent. Words died in throats like flies in a web.

The dancing mad god moved through the room with a savage and alien step. It gathered us to it-we renegades, we criminals. We refugees. Constructs that tell tales; earthbound garuda; reporters who make the news; criminal scientists and scientific criminals. The dancing mad god collected us all like errant worshippers, chiding us for going astray.

Its knife-hands flashed. The humans’ ears fell in flesh-rain to the dust. I was spared. My feather-hidden ears hold no delight for this mad power. Through the ululations and the despairing wails of pain the furiach-yajh-hett ran in circles of delight.

And then it tired and stepped through the twists of matter out of the warehouse.

Into another space.

I shut my eyes.

I moved in a direction I had never known existed. I felt the scuttling slide of that great multitude of legs as the dancing mad god moved along powerful threads of force. It scampered at obscure angles to reality, with all of us bobbing beneath it. My stomach pitched. I felt myself catch and snag on the fabric of the world. My skin prickled in the alien plane.

For a moment the god’s madness infected me. For a moment, the greed for knowledge forgot its place and demanded to be quenched. For a sliver of time, I opened my eyes.

For a terrible eternal breath I glimpsed the reality through which the dancing mad god was treading.

My eyes itched and watered, they felt as if they would burst, as if a thousand sandstorms afflicted them. They could not assimilate what was before them. My poor eyes struggled to see the unseeable. I beheld nothing but a fraction, the edge of an aspect.

I saw, or thought I saw, or have convinced myself I saw a vastness that dwarfed any desert sky. A yawning gap of Leviathan proportions. I whined and heard others whine around me. Spread across the emptiness, streaming away from us with cavernous perspective in all directions and dimensions, encompassing lifetimes and hugenesses with each intricate knot of metaphysical substance, was a web.

Its substance was known to me.

The crawling infinity of colours, the chaos of textures that went into each strand of that eternally complex tapestry…each one resonated under the step of the dancing mad god, vibrating and sending little echoes of bravery, or hunger, or architecture, or argument, or cabbage or murder or concrete across the aether. The weft of starlings’ motivations connected to the thick, sticky strand of a young thief’s laugh. The fibres stretched taut and glued themselves solidly to a third line, its silk made from the angles of seven flying buttresses to a cathedral roof. The plait disappeared into the enormity of possible spaces.

Every intention, interaction, motivation, every colour, every body, every action and reaction, every piece of physical reality and the thoughts that it engendered, every connection made, every nuanced moment of history and potentiality, every toothache and flagstone, every emotion and birth and banknote, every possible thing ever is woven into that limitless, sprawling web.

It is without beginning or end. It is complex to a degree that humbles the mind. It is a work of such beauty that my soul wept.

It crawled with life. There were others like our bearer, more of the dancing mad gods, glimpsed across an infinity of webwork.

There were other creatures, too, terrible intricate shapes I will not recall.

The web is not without flaw. In innumerable places the silk is torn and the colours ruined. Here and there the patterns are strained and unstable. As we passed these wounds, I felt the dancing mad god pause and flex its spinneret, repairing and restaining.

A little way off was the tight silk of the Cymek. I swear I caught its oscillations as the worldweb flexed under the weight of time.

Around me was a little localized tangle of metareal gossamer…New Crobuzon. And there rending the woven strands in the centre was an ugly tear. It spread out and split the fabric of the city-web, taking the multitude of colours and bleeding them dry. They were left a drab and lifeless white. A pointless emptiness, a pallid shade a thousand times more soulless even than the eye of some sightless cave-born fish.

As I watched, my pained eyes wide with insight, I saw that the rip was widening.

I was so afraid of the spreading rent. And I was dwarfed by the enormity of it all, of the whole of the web. I shut my eyes tight.

I could not close down my mind. It scrambled, unbidden, to remember what it had seen. But it could not contain it. I was left only with a sense of it all. I remember it now as a description. The weight of its immensity is no longer present in my head.

That is the etiolated memory that captivates me now.

I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.